Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

20 Post author: ciphergoth 18 July 2012 05:24PM

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

(This is the fourth incarnation of the welcome thread, the first three of which which now have too many comments. The text is by orthonormal from an original by MBlume.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

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EXTRA FEATURES:
There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.
LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.
LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.
SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.

A few notes about the community

If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.
If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new article" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)
If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome!  I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma- honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)
If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have  meetups  in various parts of the world. Check the wiki page for places with regular meetups, or the upcoming (irregular) meetups page.
There's also a Facebook group.  If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it.

If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address. 
Normal_Anomaly 
Randaly 
shokwave 
Barry Cotter

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

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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

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

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

Comments (843)

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 18 July 2012 06:32:01PM 7 points [-]

Please add a few words about "Open Thread". Something like -- If you want to write just a simple question or one paragraph or text, don't create a new article, just add it as a comment to the latest discussion article called "Open Thread".

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 03:44:17AM 0 points [-]

In the same line of thought, it may be worth revising the following.

If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation;

Comment author: wsean 18 July 2012 07:22:02PM 17 points [-]

Hi! Long-time lurker, first-time... joiner?

I was inspired to finally register by this post being at the top of Main. Not sure yet how much I'll actually post, but the removal of the passive barrier of, you know, not actually being registered is gone, so we'll see.

Anyway. I'm a dude, live in the Bay Area, work in finance though I secretly think I'm actually a writer. I studied cog sci in college, and that angle is what I tend to find most interesting on Less Wrong.

I originally came across LW via HPMoR back in 2010. Since then, I've read the Sequences, been to a few meetups, and attended the June minicamp (which, P.S., was awesome).

I'm still struggling a bit with actually applying rationality tools in my life, but it's great to have that toolbox ready and waiting. Sometimes... I hear it calling out to me. "Sean! This is an obvious place to apply Bayes! Seaaaaaaan!"

Comment author: Nisan 18 July 2012 08:01:00PM 5 points [-]

Welcome!

Comment author: Dahlen 18 July 2012 09:10:02PM *  21 points [-]

'Twas about time that I decided to officially join. I discovered LessWrong in the autumn of 2010, and so far I felt reluctant to actually contribute -- most people here have far more illustrious backgrounds. But I figured that there are sufficiently few ways in which I could show myself as a total ignoramus in an intro post, right?

I don't consider my gender, age and nationality to be a relevant part of my identity, so instead I'd start by saying I'm INTP. Extreme I (to the point of schizoid personality disorder), extreme T. Usually I have this big internal conflict going on between the part of me that wishes to appear as a wholly rational genius and the other part, who has read enough psychology and LW (you guys definitely deserve credit for this) to know I'm bullshitting myself big time.

My educational background so far is modest, a fact for which procrastination is the main culprit. I'm currently working on catching up with high school level math... so far I've only reviewed trigonometry, so I'm afraid I won't be able to participate in more technical discussions around here. Aside from a few Khan Academy videos, I'm still ignorant about probability; I did try to solve that cancer probability problem though, and when put like that into a word problem, I used Bayes' theorem intuitively. (Funny thing is, I still don't understand the magic behind it, even if I can apply it.) I know no programming beyond really elementary C++ algorithms; I have a pretty good grasp of high school physics, minus relativity and QM. I am seeking to do everything in my power to correct these shortcomings, and when/if I achieve results, I'll be happy to post my findings about motivation & procrastination on LW, if anyone is interested.

That which I have in common with the rest of this community is a love for rational, intelligent and productive discussions. I'm hugely disappointed with the overwhelming majority of internet and RL debates. Many times I've found myself trying to be the voice of reason and pointing out flaws in people's reasoning, even when I agreed with the core idea, only to have them tell me that I'm being too analytical and that I should... what... close off my mind and stop noticing mistakes, right? So I come here seeking discussions with people who would listen to reason and facilitate intellectually fruitful debates.

I'm very eager to help spread the knowledge about cognitive biases and educate people in the art of good reasoning.

I'm also interested (although not necessarily well-versed, as mentioned above) in most topics people here are interested in -- everything concerning mathematics and science, as well as philosophy and the mind (which are, by comparison, my two strongest points).

There are quite a few ways in which I don't fit the typical LW mold, though, and I'm mentioning this so that I find out whether any of these are going to be problematic in our interaction.

  • For one, I'm not particularly interested in AI and transhumanism. Not opposed to, just indifferent. The only related topic which interests me is life extension research. In the eventuality that some people might try to change my mind about this from the get-go, as I've seen some do with other newbies, I know you probably have some very good arguments for your position, but hopefully nobody's going to mind one less potential AI enthusiast. My interests are spread thin enough as they are.
  • I seem to be significantly more left-leaning than the majority of folks here. I'm decidedly not dogmatic about it, though, and on occasion I speak out against heavily ideological discourse even when it has a central message that I agree with.
  • Kind of clueless and mathematically illiterate at this moment.

This has to be getting rather long, so I'll stop here, hoping that I've said everything that I believed to be relevant to an intro post.

Comment author: Davidmanheim 20 July 2012 01:46:57AM 1 point [-]

The best way for me to get good at some particular type of math, or programming, or skill, in my experience, is to put yourself in a position where you need to do it for something. Find a job that requires you to do a bit of programming, or pick a task that requires it. Spend time on it, and you'll learn a bit. Then go back and realize you missed some basics, and pick them up. Oh, and read a ton.

You're interested in a lot of things, and trying to catch up with what you feel you should know, which is wonderful. What do you do with your time? Are you working? College?

Comment author: Dahlen 21 July 2012 04:00:13PM 3 points [-]

I prefer the practice-based approach too, but from my position theoretical approaches are cheaper and much more available, if slower and rather tedious. In school they taught us that the only way to get better in an area is to do extra homework, and frankly my methods haven't improved much since. My usual way is to take an exercise book and solve everything in it, if that counts for practice; other than that, I only have the internet and a very limited budget.

You're interested in a lot of things, and trying to catch up with what you feel you should know, which is wonderful. What do you do with your time? Are you working? College?

Senior year in high school. Right now I have 49 vacation days left, after which school will start, studying will get replaced with busywork and my learning rates will have no choice but to fall dramatically. So now I'm trying to maximize studying time while I still can... It's all kind of backwards, isn't it?

Comment author: Davidmanheim 22 July 2012 01:39:47PM 1 point [-]

Where you go to college and the amount of any scholarships you get are a bigger deal for your long term personal growth than any of the specific subjects you will learn right now.

In the spirit of long term decision making, figure out where you want to go to college, or what your options are, and spend the summer maximizing the odds of getting in to your first choice schools. I cannot imagine that it won't be a better investment of your time than any one subject you are studying (unless you are preparing for SAT or some such test.) So I guess you should spend the summer on Khan, and learning and practicing vocabulary to get better at taking the tests that will get you into a great college, where your opportunities to learn are greatly expanded.

Comment author: Dahlen 22 July 2012 06:49:42PM 3 points [-]

I'm afraid all of this is not really applicable to me... My country isn't Western enough for such a wide range of opportunities. Here, institutes for higher education range from almost acceptable (state universities) to degree factories (basically all private colleges). Studying abroad in a Western country costs, per semester, somewhere between half and thrice my parents' yearly income. On top of everything, my grades would have to be impeccable and my performances worthy of national recognition for a foreign college to want me as a student so much as to step over the money issue and cover my whole tuition. (They're not, not by a long shot.)

Thanks for the support, in any case...

Comment author: Swimmer963 20 July 2012 02:03:12AM 2 points [-]

Welcome!

Many times I've found myself trying to be the voice of reason and pointing out flaws in people's reasoning, even when I agreed with the core idea, only to have them tell me that I'm being too analytical and that I should... what... close off my mind and stop noticing mistakes, right?

That's interesting... I don't think I've ever had someone respond to my pointing out flaws in this way. I've had people argue back plenty of times, but never tell me that we shouldn't be arguing about it. Can you give some examples of topics where this has happened? I would be curious what kind of topics engender this reaction in people.

Comment author: Davidmanheim 20 July 2012 02:06:32PM 2 points [-]

This happens frequently in places where reasoning is suspect, or not valued. Kids in poor areas with few scholastic or academic opportunities find more validation in pursuits that are non-academic, and they tend to deride logic. It's parodied well by Colbert, but it's not uncommon.

I just avoid those people, now know few of them. Most of the crowd here, I suspect, is in a similar position.

Comment author: Swimmer963 20 July 2012 06:13:00PM 0 points [-]

I just avoid those people, now know few of them. Most of the crowd here, I suspect, is in a similar position.

I may be in a similar position of never having known anyone who was like this. Also, I'm very conflict averse myself (but like discussing), so any discussion I start is less likely to have any component of raised voices or emotional involvement that could make it sound like an argument.

Comment author: juliawise 20 July 2012 04:00:12PM *  10 points [-]

I've seen this happen where one person enjoys debate/arguing and another does not. To one person it's an interesting discussion, and to the other it feels like a personal attack. Or, more commonly, I've seen onlookers get upset watching such a discussion, even if they don't personally feel targeted. Specifically, I'm remembering three men loudly debating about physics while several of their wives left the room in protest because it felt too argumentative to them.

Body language and voice dynamics can affect this a lot, I think - some people get loud and frowny when they're excited/thinking hard, and others may misread that as angry.

Comment author: Nornagest 20 July 2012 06:27:15PM *  5 points [-]

I ended up having to include a disclaimer in the FAQ for an older project of mine, saying that the senior staff tends to get very intense when discussing the project and that this doesn't indicate drama on our part but is actually friendly behavior. That was a text channel, though, so body dynamics and voice wouldn't have had anything to do with it. I think a lot of people just read any intense discussion as hostile, and quality of argument doesn't really enter into it -- probably because they're used to an arguments-as-soldiers perspective.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 July 2012 06:49:51PM 6 points [-]

We used to say of two friends of mine that "They don't so much toss ideas back and forth as hurl sharp jagged ideas directly at one another's heads."

Comment author: gwern 21 July 2012 02:28:12AM 5 points [-]

"Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course."

--Steven Erikson, House of Chains (2002)

Comment author: Dahlen 21 July 2012 02:37:59PM 5 points [-]

Oh, it's not a topic-specific behavior. Every time I go too far down a chain of reasoning ("too far" meaning as few as three causal relationships), sometimes people start complaining that I'm giving too much thought to it, and imply they are unable to follow the arguments. I'm just not surrounded by a lot of people that like long and intricate discussions.

(Funnily, both my parents are the type that get tired listening to complex reasoning, and I turned out the complete opposite.)

Comment author: Swimmer963 22 July 2012 03:02:34AM 6 points [-]

I'm just not surrounded by a lot of people that like long and intricate discussions.

That is...intensely frustrating. I've had people tell me that "well, I find all the points you're trying to make really complicated, and it's easier for me to just have faith in God" or that kind of thing, but I've never actually been rebuked for applying an analytical mindset to discussions. Props on having acquired those habits anyway, in spite of what sounds like an unfruitful starting environment!

Comment author: Dahlen 22 July 2012 06:58:46PM 1 point [-]

Thanks! Anyway, there's the internet to compensate for that. The wide range of online forums built around ideas of varied intellectual depth means you even get to choose your difficulty level...

Comment author: dac69 18 July 2012 11:00:22PM 20 points [-]

Hello, everyone!

I'd been religious (Christian) my whole life, but was always plagued with the question, "How would I know this is the correct religion, if I'd grown up with a different cultural norm?" I concluded, after many years of passive reflection, that, no, I probably wouldn't have become Christian at all, given that there are so many good people who do not. From there, I discovered that I was severely biased toward Christianity, and in an attempt to overcome that bias, I became atheist before I realized it.

I know that last part is a common idiom that's usually hyperpole, but I really did become atheist well before I consciously knew I was. I remember reading HPMOR, looking up lesswrong.com, reading the post on "Belief in Belief", and realizing that I was doing exactly that: explaining an unsupported theory by patching the holes, instead of reevaluating and updating, given the evidence.

It's been more than religion, too, but that's the area where I really felt it first. Next projects are to apply the principles to my social and professional life.

Comment author: jacoblyles 18 July 2012 11:43:10PM *  0 points [-]

Welcome!

The least attractive thing about the rationalist life-style is nihilism. It's there, it's real, and it's hard to handle. Eliezer's solution is to be happy and the nihilism will leave you alone. But if you have a hard life, you need a way to spontaneously generate joy. That's why so many people turn to religion as a comfort when they are in bad situations.

The problem that I find is that all ways to spontaneously generate joy have some degree of mysticism. I'm looking into Tai Chi as a replacement for going to church. But that's still eastern mumbo-jumbo as opposed to western mumbo-jumbo. Stoicism might be the most rational joy machine I can find.

Let me know if you ever un-convert.

Comment author: Nornagest 19 July 2012 12:43:18AM *  9 points [-]

I suspect that a tendency towards mysticism just sort of spontaneously accretes onto anything sufficiently esoteric; you can see this happening over the last few decades with quantum mechanics, and to a lesser degree with results like Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Martial arts is another good place to see this in action: most of those legendary death touch techniques you hear about, for example, originated in strikes that damaged vulnerable nerve clusters or lymph nodes, leading to abscesses and eventually a good chance of death without antibiotics. All very explicable. But layer the field's native traditional-Chinese-medicine metaphor over that and run it through several generations of easily impressed students, partial information, and novelists without any particular incentive to be realistic, and suddenly you've got the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.

So I don't think the mumbo-jumbo is likely to be strictly necessary to most eudaemonic approaches, Eastern or Western. I expect it'd be difficult to extract from a lot of them, though.

Comment author: Oligopsony 19 July 2012 12:47:44AM 1 point [-]

So I suspect it's unlikely that the mumbo-jumbo is strictly necessary to most eudaemonic approaches, Eastern or Western. I expect it'd be difficult to extract from a lot of them, though.

It would be difficult to do it on your own, but it's not very hard to find e.g. guides to meditation that have been bowlderized of all the mysterious magical stuff.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 19 July 2012 10:42:22AM 13 points [-]

The problem that I find is that all ways to spontaneously generate joy have some degree of mysticism.

What? What about all the usual happiness inducing things? Listening to music that you like; playing games; watching your favourite TV show; being with friends? Maybe you've ruled these out as not being spontaneous? But going to church isn't less effort than a lot of things on that list.

Comment author: fowlertm 19 July 2012 12:15:46AM *  11 points [-]

Hello,

My name is Trent Fowler. I started leaning toward scientific and rational thinking while still a child, thanks in part to a variety of aphorisms my father was fond of saying. Things like "think for yourself" and "question your own beliefs" are too general to be very useful in particular circumstances, but were instrumental in fostering in me a skepticism and respect for good argument that has persisted all my life (I'm 23 as of this writing). These tools are what allowed me to abandon the religion I was brought up in as a child, and to eventually begin salvaging the bits of it that are worth salvaging. Like many atheists, when I first dropped religion I dropped every last thing associated with it. I've since grown to appreciate practices like meditation, ritual, and even outright mysticism as techniques which are valuable and pursuable in a secular context.

What I've just described is basically the rationality equivalent of lifting weights twice a week and going for a brisk walk in the mornings. It's great for a beginner, but anyone who sticks with it long enough will start to get a glimpse of what's achievable by systematizing training and ramping up the intensity. World-class martial artists, olympic powerlifters, and ultramarathoners may seem like demi-gods to the weekend warriors, but a huge amount of what they've accomplished is attributable to hard work and dedication (with a dash of luck and genetics, of course).

The Bruce Lees of the mind, however, are more than just role models. They're the people who will look extinction risk square in the face and start figuring out how to actually <i<solve</i> the problems. They're the people who will build transhuman AIs, extinguish death, probe the bedrock of reality, and fling human civilization into deep-space. As the dojo is to the apprentice, so is Less Wrong to the aspiring rationalist.

Sadly, when I was gripped rather suddenly by a fascination with math and physics as a child, there was not enough in the way of books, support, and instruction to get the prodigy-fires burning. To this day deep math and physics remain and interesting but largely inscrutable realm of human knowledge. But I'm still young enough that with hard work and dedication I could be a Bostrom or a Yudkowsky, especially if I manage to scramble onto their shoulders.

So here I am, ready to sharpen the blade of my thinking, that it may more effectively be turned to both pondering metaphysical quandaries and solving problems that threaten our collective future. I am excited by the prospects, and hope I am up to the challenge.

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:03:44AM *  8 points [-]

Poll: how old are you?

Newcomers only, please.

How polls work: the comments to this post are the possible answers. Upvote the one that describes your age. Then downvote the "Karma sink" comment (if you don't see it, it is the collapsed one), so that I don't get undeserved karma. Do not make comments to this post, as it would make the poll options hard to find; use the "Discussion" comment instead.

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:04:13AM 0 points [-]

Discussion

Comment author: VNKKET 20 July 2012 02:18:24AM 2 points [-]

Upvoted for explaining how polls work.

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:04:34AM 3 points [-]

<18

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:04:48AM *  14 points [-]

18-23

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:04:57AM *  18 points [-]

24-29

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:05:16AM *  5 points [-]

30-44

Comment author: AllanGering 19 July 2012 04:05:23AM *  1 point [-]

45 or older

Comment author: EmuSam 19 July 2012 04:49:37AM 7 points [-]

Hello.

I was raised by a rationalist economist. At some point I got the idea that I wanted to be a statistical outlier, and also that irrationality was the outlier. After starting to pay attention to current events and polls, I'm now pretty sure that the second premise is incorrect.

I still have many thought patterns from that period that I find difficult to overcome. I try to counter them in the more important decisions by assigning WAG numerical values and working through equations to find a weighted output. I read more non-fiction than fiction now, and I am working with a mental health professional to overcome some of those patterns. I suppose I consider myself to have a good rationalist grounding while being used to completely ignoring it in my everyday life.

I found Less Wrong through FreethoughtBlogs and "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalism." I added it to my feed reader and have been forcing my economist to help me work though some of the more science-of-choice oriented posts.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 July 2012 11:53:10AM 1 point [-]

WAG

???

The only expansion of that I can find with Google (Wifes And Girlfriends [of footballers]) doesn't seem too relevant.

Comment author: Morendil 19 July 2012 12:13:26PM 7 points [-]

Wild Ass Guess.

Comment author: DaFranker 19 July 2012 02:05:53PM *  3 points [-]

Was that just meta, or did you already know it? In what fields would the saying be more common, out of curiosity?

Comment author: evand 19 July 2012 05:24:51PM 5 points [-]

It's reasonably common among engineers in my experience. Along with SWAG -- scientific wild-assed guessed, intended to denote something that has minimal support -- an estimation that is the output of combining WAGs and actual data, for example.

Comment author: Davidmanheim 19 July 2012 11:44:24PM 2 points [-]

He may not have known it, but it's used. I worked in Catastrophe Risk modeling, and it was a term that applied to what our clients and competitors did; not ourselves, we had rigorous methodologies that were not discussed because they were "trade secrets," or as I came to understand, what is referred to below as SWAG.

I have heard engineers use it as well..

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 07:01:10AM *  50 points [-]

Hello!

  • Age: Years since 1995
  • Gender: Female
  • Occupation: Student

I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn't emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren't Less Wrong's fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn't want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn't fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I'm more confident that I won't just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)

Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I'm stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)

The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it's one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that "our" way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.

One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn't the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn't done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.

I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?

It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.

Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can't get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)

I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 19 July 2012 08:14:50AM 1 point [-]

Welcome to Less Wrong! I would say something about a rabbit hole but it would be pointless, since you already seem to be descending at quite a high rate of speed.

Comment author: Swimmer963 19 July 2012 09:03:36AM 16 points [-]

Welcome to Less Wrong, and I for one am glad to have you here (again)! You sound like someone who thinks very interesting thoughts.

I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.

I can't say that this is something that has ever really bothered me. Your IQ is what it is. Whether or not there's an overall gender-based trend in one direction or another isn't going to change anything for you, although it might change how people see you. (If anything, I found that I got more attention as a "girl who was good at/interested in science"...which, if anything, was irritating and made me want to rebel and go into a "traditionally female" field just because I could.

Basically, if you want to accomplish greatness, it's about you as an individual. Unless you care about the greatness of others, and feel more pride or solidarity with females than with males who accomplish greatness (which I don't), the statistical tendency doesn't matter.

I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.

I think that more than idealism, what I wouldn't want to lose is a sense of humour. Idealism, in the sense of "believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc", can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 19 July 2012 09:39:43AM *  5 points [-]

Idealism, in the sense of "believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc", can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.

Arguably, if it was "broken" this way it would be a mistake (specifically, of generalizing from too small a sample size). I have a job where I am constantly confronted with suffering and death, but at the end of the day, I can still laugh just like everyone else, because I know my experience is a biased sample and that there is still lots of good going on in the world.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 04:58:33PM *  8 points [-]

I know that it's not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It's one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It's helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don't.

ETA: I characterize "idealism" as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.

Comment author: ViEtArmis 19 July 2012 05:37:55PM 6 points [-]

It is particularly not rational to ignore the effect of your unconscious in your relationships. That fight is a losing battle (right now), so if having happy relationships is a goal, the pursuit of that requires you pay attention.

There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well. Greater chromosomal genetic variations in men lead to stupidity as often as intelligence.

Really, this gender disparity only matters at far extremes. Men may pad out the top and bottom 1% (or something like that) in IQ, but applied mathematicians aren't all top 1% (or even 10%, in my experience). It is easy to mistake finally being around people who think like you do (as in high IQ) with being less intelligent than them, but this is a trick!

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 07:17:45PM *  5 points [-]

There is almost no average IQ differential, since men pad out the bottom as well.

Sorry, you're right, I did know that. (And it's exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying "women are stupid" or "most women are stupid" because they happen to be high-IQ. There's an obvious selection bias - intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances - because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.)

I was thinking about "IQ differentials" in the very broad sense, as in "it sucks that anyone is screwed over before they even start." I also suffer from selection bias, because I seek out people in general for intelligence, so I see the men to the right of the bell curve, while I just sort of abstractly "know" there are more men than women to the left, too.

Comment author: philh 19 July 2012 10:22:00PM 9 points [-]

And it's exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying "women are stupid" or "most women are stupid" because they happen to be high-IQ. There's an obvious selection bias - intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances - because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.

Another possible explanation comes to mind: people with high IQs consider the "stupid" borderline to be significantly above 100 IQ. Then if they associate equally with men and women, the women will more often be stupid; and if they associate preferentially with clever people, there will be fewer women.

(This doesn't contradict selection bias. Both effects could be at play.)

Comment author: ViEtArmis 20 July 2012 02:37:58PM 6 points [-]

You'd have to raise the bar really far before any actual gender-based differences showed up. It seems far more likely that the cause is a cultural bias against intellectualism in women (women will under-report IQ by 5ish points and men over-report by a similar margin, women are poorly represented in "smart" jobs, etc.). That makes women present themselves as less intelligent and makes everyone perceive them as less intelligent.

Comment author: juliawise 20 July 2012 03:46:57PM *  4 points [-]

Does anyone know of a good graph that shows this? I've seen several (none citing sources) that draw the crossover in quite different places. So I'm not sure what the gender ratio is at, say, IQ 130.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 July 2012 04:26:33PM 2 points [-]

La Griffe Du Lion has good work on this, but it's limited to math ability, where the male mean is higher than the female mean as well as the male variance being higher than the female variance.

The formulas from the first link work for whatever mean and variance you want to use, and so can be updated with more applicable IQ figures, and you can see how an additional 10 point 'reporting gap' affects things.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 01:38:51AM 2 points [-]

Unfortunately, intelligence in areas other than math seem to be an "I know it when I see it" kind of thing. It's much harder to design a good test for some of the "softer" disciplines, like "interpersonal intelligence" or even language skills, and it's much easier to pick a fight with results you don't like.

It could be that because intelligence tests are biased toward easy measurement, they focus too much on math, so they under-predict women's actual performance at most jobs not directly related to abstract math skills.

Comment author: ViEtArmis 20 July 2012 05:02:11PM 0 points [-]

Of course, if you use IQ testing, it is specifically calibrated to remove/minimize gender bias (so is the SAT and ACT), and intelligence testing is horribly fraught with infighting and moving targets.

I can't find any research that doesn't at least mention that social factors likely poison any experimental result. It doesn't help any that "intelligence" is poorly defined and thus difficult to quantify.

Considering that men are more susceptible to critical genetic failure, maybe the mean is higher for men on some tests because the low outliers had defects that made them impossible to test (such as being stillborn)?

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 01:40:38AM 0 points [-]

The SAT doesn't seem to be calibrated to make sure average scores are the same for math, at least. At least as late as 2006, there's still a significant gender gap.

Comment author: Desrtopa 22 July 2012 02:23:41PM 0 points [-]

Not a rigorously conducted study, but this (third poll) suggests a rather greater tendency to at least overestimate if not willfully over-report IQ, with both men and women overestimating, but men overestimating more.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 01:53:41AM 2 points [-]

You're right; my explanation was drawn from many PUA-types who had said similar things, but this effect is perfectly possible in non-sexual contexts, too.

There's actually little use in using words like "stupid", anyway. What's the context? How intelligent does this individual need to be do what they want to do? Calling people "stupid" says "reaching for an easy insult," not "making an objective/instrumentally useful observation."

Sure, there will be some who say they'll use the words they want to use and rail against "censorship", but connotation and denotation are not so separate. That's why I didn't find the various "let's say controversial, unspeakable things because we're brave nonconformists!" threads on this site to be all that helpful. Some comments certainly were both brave and insightful, but I felt on the whole a little bit of insight was brought at the price of a whole lot of useless nastiness.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 19 July 2012 09:11:20PM *  32 points [-]

Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both.

As long as you know your own skills, there is no need to use your gender as a predictor. We use the worse information only in the absence of better information; because the worse information can be still better than nothing. We don't need to predict the information we already have.

When we already know that e.g. "this woman has IQ 150", or "this woman has won a mathematical olympiad" there is no need to mix general male and female IQ or math curves into the equation. (That's only what you do when you see a random woman and you have no other information.)

If there are hundred green balls in the basket and one red ball, it makes sense to predict that a randomly picked ball will be almost surely green. But once you have randomly picked a ball and it happened to be red... then it no longer makes sense to worry that this specific ball might still be green somehow. It's not; end of story.

If you had no experience with math yet, then I'd say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small. But that's not the situation; you already had some math experience. So make your guesses based on that experience. Your gender is already included in the probability of you having that specific experience. Don't count it twice!

Comment author: Bugmaster 26 July 2012 10:49:54PM 5 points [-]

If you had no experience with math yet, then I'd say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small.

To be perfectly accurate, any person's chances of being a math genius are going to be small anyway, regardless of that person's gender. There are very few geniuses in the world.

Comment author: Rubix 30 July 2012 05:47:14PM *  -1 points [-]
Comment author: Rubix 30 July 2012 05:45:26PM 1 point [-]

I like this post more than I like most things; you've helped me, for one, with a significant amount of distress.

Comment author: hankx7787 19 July 2012 10:55:05AM *  1 point [-]

I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?

It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.

I've been through this kind of thing before, and Less Wrong did nothing for me in this respect (although Less Wrong is awesome for many other reasons). Reading Ayn Rand on the other hand made all the difference in the world in this respect, and changed my life.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 05:01:22PM 3 points [-]

I haven't read Ayn Rand, but those who do seem to talk almost exclusively about the politics, and I just can't work up the energy to get too excited about something I have such little chance of affecting. Would you mind telling me where/how Ayn Rand discussed evolutionary psychology or modular minds? I'm curious now. :)

Comment author: OrphanWilde 19 July 2012 05:32:22PM 3 points [-]

She doesn't, is the short answer.

She does discuss, however, the integration of personal values into one's philosophical system. I was struggling with a possibly similar issue; I had previously regarded rationalism as an end in itself. Emotions were just baggage that had to be overcome in order to achieve a truly enlightened state. If this sounds familiar to you, her works may help.

The short version: You're a human being. An ethical system that demands you be anything else is fatally flawed; there is no universal ethical system, what is ethical for a rabbit is not ethical for a wolf. It's necessary for you to live, not as a rabbit, not as a rock, not as a utility or paperclip maximizer, but as a human being. Pain, for example, isn't to be denied - for to do so is as sensible as denying a rock - but experienced as a part of your existence. (That you shouldn't deny pain is not the same as that you should seek it; it is simply a statement that it's a part of what you are.)

Objectivism, the philosophy she founded, is named on the claim that ethics are objective; not subjective, which is to say, whatever you want it to be; not universal, which is to say, there's a single ethics system in the whole universe that applies equally to rocks, rabbits, mice, and people; but objective, which is to say, it exists as a definable property for a given subject, given certain preconditions (ethical axioms; she chose "Life" as her ethical axiom).

Comment author: hankx7787 19 July 2012 07:39:06PM *  0 points [-]

Surprisingly, this isn't a bad short explanation of her ethics.

I've been reading a lot of Aristotle lately (I highly recommend Aristotle by Randall, for anyone who is in to that kind of thing), and Rand mostly just brought Aristotle's philosophy into the 20th century - of course note now that it's the 21st century, so she is a little dated at this point. Take for example, Rand was offered by various people to get fully paid-for cryonics when she was close to death, but for unknown reasons she declined, very sadly (if you're looking for someone to take her philosophy into the 21st century, you will need to talk to, well... ahem... me).

It's important to mention that politics is only one dimension of her philosophy and of her writing (although, naturally, it's the subject that all the pundits and mind-killed partisans obsess over) - and really it is the least important, since it is the most derivative of all of her other more fundamental philosophical ideas on metaphysics, epistemology, man's nature, and ethics.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 19 July 2012 07:57:28PM 1 point [-]

I'll willingly confess to not being interested in Aristotle in the least. Philosophy coursework cured me of interest in Greek philosophy. Give me another twenty years and I might recover from that.

Have you read TVTropes' assessment of Objectivism? It's actually the best summary I've ever read, as far as the core of the philosophy goes.

Comment author: hankx7787 19 July 2012 08:16:11PM *  0 points [-]

No I haven't! That was quite good, thanks.

By the way, I fully share yours (and Eliezer's) sentiment in regard to academic philosophy. I took a "philosophy of mind" course in college, thinking that would be extremely interesting, and I ended up dropping the class in short order. It was only after a long study of Rand that I ever became interested in philosophy again, once I realized I had a sane basis on which to proceed.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 07:45:38PM 4 points [-]

I don't know that I would call that "objective." I mean, the laws of physics are objective because they're the same for rabbits and rocks and humans alike.

I honestly don't trust myself to go much more meta than my own moral intuitions. I just try not to harm people without their permission or deceive/manipulate them. Yes, this can and will break down in extreme hypothetical scenarios, but I don't want to insist on an ironclad philosophical system that would cause me to jump to any conclusions on, say, Torture vs. Dust Specks just yet. I suspect that my abstract reasoning will just be nuts.

My understanding of morality is basically that we're humans, and humans need each other, so we worked out ways to help one another out. Our minds were shaped by the same evolutionary processes, so we can agree for the most part. We've always seemed to treat those in our in-group the same way; it's just that those we included in the in-group changed. Slowly, women were added, and people of different races/religions, etc.

Comment author: hankx7787 19 July 2012 08:25:32PM *  1 point [-]

See this comment regarding this common confusion about 'objective'...

Comment author: thomblake 19 July 2012 08:33:08PM 1 point [-]

I don't know that I would call that "objective."

It's a sticky business, and different ethicists will frame the words different ways. On one view, objective includes "It's true even if you disagree" and subjective includes "You can make up whatever you want". On another, objective includes "It's the same for everybody" and subjective includes "It's different for different people". The first distinction better matches the usual meaning of 'objective', and the second distinction better matches the usual meaning of 'subjective', so I think the terms were just poorly-chosen as different sides of a distinction.

Because of this, my intuition these days is to say that ethics is both subjective and objective, or "subjectively objective" as Eliezer has said about probability. Though I'd like it if we switched to using "subject-sensitive" rather than "subjective", as is now commonly used in Epistemology.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 19 July 2012 08:53:45PM 1 point [-]

So, this isn't the first time I've seen this distinction made here, and I have to admit I don't get it.

Suppose I'm studying ballistics in a vacuum, and I'm trying to come up with some rules that describe how projectiles travel, and I discover that the trajectory of a projectile depends on its mass.

I suppose I could conclude that ballistics is "subjectively objective" or "subject-sensitive," since after all the trajectory is different for different projectiles. But this is not at all a normal way of speaking or thinking about ballistics. What we normally say is that ballistics is "objective" and it just so happens that the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter. Trajectory is, in part, a function of mass.

When we say that ethics is "subject-sensitive" -- that is, that what I ought to do depends on various properties of me -- are we saying it's different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven't yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among individuals?

Similarly, while we acknowledge that the same projectile will follow a different trajectory in different environments, and that different projectiles of the same mass will follow different trajectories in different environments, we nevertheless say that ballistics is "universal", because the equations that predict a trajectory can take additional properties of the environment and the projectile as parameters. Trajectory is, in part, a function of environment.

When we say that ethics is not universal, are we saying it's different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven't yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among environments?

Comment author: hankx7787 20 July 2012 01:46:19AM *  0 points [-]

"the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter"

I think the best analogy here is to say something like, the proper formulation of decision theory takes terminal values as a parameter. Decision theory defines a "universal" optimum (that is, universal "for all minds"... presumably anyway), but each person is individually running a decision theory process as a function of their own terminal values - there is no "universal" terminal value, for example if I could build an AI then I could theoretically put in any utility function I wanted. Ethics is "universal" in the sense of optimal decision theory, but "person dependent" in the sense of plugging in one's own particular terminal values - but terminal values and ethics are not necessarily "mind-dependent", as explained here.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 July 2012 05:11:09PM *  0 points [-]

I would certainly agree that there is no terminal value shared by all minds (come to that, I'm not convinced there are any terminal values shared by all of any given mind).

Also, I would agree that when figuring out how I should best apply a value-neutral decision theory to my environment I have to "plug in" some subset of information about my own values and about my environment.

I would also say that a sufficiently powerful value-neutral decision theory instructs me on how to optimize any environment towards any value, given sufficiently comprehensive data about the environment and the value. Which seems like another way of saying that decision theory is objective and universal, in the same sense that ballistics is.

How that relates to statements about ethics being universal,objective, person-dependent, and/or mind-dependent is not clear to me, though, even after following your link.

Comment author: drethelin 22 July 2012 08:44:59AM 0 points [-]

I think it's an artifact of how we think about ethics. It doesn't FEEL like a bullet should fly the same exact way as an arrow or as a rock, but when you feel your moral intuitions they seem like they should obviously apply to everyone. Maybe because we learn about throwing things and motion through infinitely iterated trial and error, but we learn about morality from simple commands from our parents/teachers, we think about them in different ways.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 22 July 2012 04:50:54PM 1 point [-]

So, I'm not quite sure I understood you, but you seem to be explaining how someone might come to believe that ethics are universal/objective in the sense of right action not depending on the actor or the situation at all, even at relatively low levels of specification like "eat more vegetables" or whatever.

Did I get that right?

If so... sure, I can see where someone whose moral intuitions primarily derive from obeying the commands of others might end up with ethics that work like that.

Comment author: ViEtArmis 19 July 2012 08:28:44PM 1 point [-]

Specifically, her non-fiction work (if you find that sort of thing palatable) provides a lot more concrete discussion of her philosophy.

Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is little too... abrasive... for many people who don't agree entirely with her. She has a lot of resonant points that get rejected because of all the other stuff she presents along with it.

Comment author: GLaDOS 19 July 2012 01:05:34PM *  5 points [-]

Great to see you here and great to hear you took the time to read up on the relevant material before jumping in. I'm confident that you will find many people who comment quite a bit don't have such prudence, so don't be surprised if you outmatch a long time commenter. (^_^)

For the first time, I got the sense that "our" way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.

Yesss! This is exactly how I felt when I found this community.

Comment author: shminux 19 July 2012 05:12:46PM 7 points [-]

I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.

Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 07:14:04PM 6 points [-]

PG is awesome, but his ideas do basically fall into the category of "easier said than done." This doesn't mean "not worth doing," of course, but practical techniques would be way more helpful. It's easier to replace one group with another (arguably better?) group than to hold yourself above groupthink in general.

Comment author: shminux 19 July 2012 07:43:33PM *  5 points [-]

easier said than done

My approach is to notice when I want to say/write "we", as opposed to "I", and examine why. That's why I don't personally identify as a "LWer" (only as a neutral and factual "forum regular"), despite the potential for warm fuzzies resulting from such an identification.

There is an occasional worthy reason to identify with a specific group, but gender/country/language/race/occupation/sports team are probably not good criteria for such a group.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 19 July 2012 09:15:26PM 1 point [-]

Thank you! I'll look for that.

Comment author: shminux 20 July 2012 12:04:34AM 2 points [-]

Here is a typical LW comment that raises the "excessive group identification" red flag for me.

Comment author: ViEtArmis 19 July 2012 08:55:53PM 2 points [-]

I always think of that in the context of conflict resolution, and refer to it as "telling someone that what they did was idiotic, not that they are an idiot." Self-identifying is powerful, and people are pretty bad at it because of a confluence of biases.

Comment author: RobertLumley 19 July 2012 09:45:50PM 0 points [-]

I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart.

Did you see Brave? I thought it was great.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 01:32:38AM *  0 points [-]

I did. :) I was so happy to see a mother-daughter movie with no romantic angle (other than the happily married king and queen).

Comment author: RobertLumley 21 July 2012 01:57:11AM 0 points [-]

I thought she was going to have to end up married at the end and I was so. angry. Brave ranked up there with Mulan in terms of kids movies that I think actually teach kids good lessons, which is a pretty high honor in my book.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 July 2012 02:50:54AM *  8 points [-]

Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It's cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it's awfully burdensome to have one's life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there's no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.

Merida wants to live a life where she's free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she'd be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn't leave her with the time, her family wouldn't own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn't be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she'd be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she'd be similarly out of luck if her parents were merchants, or craftsmen, or practically anyone else. Like most Rebellious Princesses, she has modern expectations of entitlement in a society where those expectations don't make sense.

It sucks to be told you can't do something you love because of societal preconceptions; "You shouldn't try to be a mathematician, you're a girl," "'You're a black ghetto kid, what are you doing aiming to be a businessman?" etc. But Rebellious Princesses are in a situation more analogous to "You might want not to have to go to school and be able to spend your time partying with friends and maybe make a living drawing pictures of cartoons you like, but there's no social structure to support you if you try to do that."

By the end of the movie, Merida and her mother birepbzr gurve cevqr naq zhghny zvfhaqrefgnaqvat, naq Zrevqn'f zbgure yrneaf gb frr gur vffhr sebz ure Zrevqn'f cbvag bs ivrj naq abg sbepr ure vagb n fhqqra zneevntr sbe cbyvgvpny rkcrqvrapl, juvyr Zrevqn yrneaf... gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne? Fhccbfvat gur bgure gevorf jrera'g cercnerq gb pnyy bss gur zneevntr, naq fur jnf fghpx pubbfvat orgjrra n cebonoyl haunccl zneevntr naq crnpr, be ab zneevntr naq jne, jbhyq fur unir pubfra nal qvssreragyl guna fur qvq ng gur fgneg bs gur zbivr?

This probably all sounds like I disapproved of the movie a lot more than I really did, but I definitely wouldn't rank it alongside Mulan terms of positive social message. Mulan wanted to bring her family honor and keep her father safe, so she went and performed a service for her society which demanded great perseverance and courage, which her society neither expected nor encouraged her to perform. Merida wasn't happy with the expectations and duties her society placed on her, so she tried to duck out of them, nearly caused a disaster, and ultimately got what she wanted without having to make a hard choice between personal satisfaction and doing her part for her society.

Comment author: RobertLumley 21 July 2012 03:19:01AM *  1 point [-]

That's a very fair critique. A few things though:

First, you might want to put that in ROT13 or add a <SPOILER> tag or something.

Zrevqn yrneaf... gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne?

Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn't seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.

Merida wants to live a life where she's free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she'd be screwed if she were a peasant etc.

Well yeah, but the answer to "society sucks and how can I fix it" isn't "oh it sucks for everyone and even more for others, I'll just sit down and shut up". (Not that you argue it is.)

From TV Tropes:

If she's not the hero, quite often she's the hero's love interest. This will sometimes invoke Marry for Love not only as another way for her to rebel, but to also get out of an Arranged Marriage

This is exactly why I thought Brave was good - it moved away from this trope. It wasn't "I don't love this person, I love this other person!", it was "I don't have to love/marry someone to be a competent and awesome person". She was the hero of her own story, and didn't need anyone else to complete her. That doesn't have to be true for everyone, but the counterpoint needs to be more present in society.

And I said it ranked up there. Not that it passed Mulan. :) And it gets that honor by being literally one of the two movies I can think of that has a positive message in this respect. Although I will concede that I'm not very familiar with a particularly high number of kids movies.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 July 2012 04:09:10AM 4 points [-]

I edited my comment to rot13 the ending spoilers; I left in the stuff that's more or less advertised as the premise of the movie. You might want to edit your reply so that it doesn't quote the uncyphered text.

Meridia learned to value her relationship with her mother, which I think a lot of kids need to hear going into adolescence. When you put it this way it doesn't seem nearly as trite as your phrasing makes it sound.

I think that's a valuable lesson, but I felt like Brave's presentation of it suffered for the fact that Merida and her mother really only reconcile after Merida essentially gets her way about everything. Teenagers who feel aggrieved in their relationships with their parents and think that they're subject to pointless unfairness are likely to come away with the lesson "I could get along so much better with my parents if they'd stop being pointlessly unfair to me!" rather than "Maybe I should be more open to the idea that my parents have legitimate reasons for not being accommodating of all my wishes, and be prepared to cut them some slack."

A more well rounded version of the movie's approximate message might have been something like "Some burdensome social expectations and life restrictions have good reasons behind them and others don't, learn to distinguish between them so you can focus your effort on solving the right ones." But instead, it came off more like "Kids, you should love and appreciate your parents, at least when you work past their inclination to arbitrarily oppress you."

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 22 July 2012 01:22:15AM 1 point [-]

Now that I think about it, very few movies or TV shows actually teach that lesson. There are plenty of works of fiction that portray the whiney teenager in a negative light, and there are plenty that portray the unreasonable parent in a negative light, but nothing seems to change. It all plays out with the boring inevitability of a Greek tragedy.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 03:39:08AM *  1 point [-]

I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner - but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost - it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, "Wow, these guys really do break convention."

Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 July 2012 05:07:09AM *  2 points [-]

I agree that it was a sweet movie, and overall I enjoyed watching it. The above critique is a lot harsher than my overall impression. But when I heard that Pixar was making their first movie with a female lead, I expected a lot out of them and thought they were going to try for something really exceptional in both character and message, and it ended up undershooting my expectations on those counts.

I can sympathize with the extent to which simply having competent important female characters with relatable goals is a huge step forward for a lot of works. Ironically, I don't think I really grasped how frustrating the lack of them must be until I started encountering works which are supposed to be some sort of wish fulfillment for guys. There are numerous anime and manga, particularly harem series, which are full of female characters graced with various flavors of awesomeness, without any significant male protagonists other than the lead who's a total loser, and I find it infuriating when the closest thing I have to a proxy in the story is such a lousy and overshadowed character. It wasn't until I started encountering works like those that it hit me how painful it must be to be hard pressed to find stories that aren't like that on some level.

Comment author: Nornagest 21 July 2012 05:26:00AM *  1 point [-]

I don't think "This Loser Is You" is the right trope for that. Actually, I don't think TV Tropes has the right trope for that; as best I can tell, harem protagonists are the way they are not because they're supposed to stand for the audience in a representative sort of way but because they're designed as a receptacle for the audience to pour their various insecurities into. They can display negative traits, because that's assumed to make them more sympathetic to viewers that share them. But they can't display negative traits strong enough to be grounds for actual condemnation, or to define their characters unambiguously; you'll never see Homer Simpson as a harem lead. And they can't show positive traits except for a vague agreeableness and whatever supernatural powers the plot requires, because that breaks the pathos. Yes, Tenchi Muyo, that's you I'm looking at.

More succinctly, we're all familiar with sex objects, right? Harem anime protagonists are sympathy objects.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 July 2012 05:42:49AM 0 points [-]

I agree that This Loser Is You isn't quite the right trope. There's a more recent launch, Loser Protagonist, which doesn't quite describe it either, but uses the same name as I did when I tried to put the trope which I thought accurately described it through the YKTTW ages ago.

If I understand what you mean by "sympathy objects," I think we have the same idea in mind. I tend to think of them as Lowest Common Denominator Protagonists, because they lack any sort of virtue or achievement that would alienate them from the most insecure or insipid audience members.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 22 July 2012 01:00:20AM 3 points [-]

One thing that disappointed me about this whole story was that it was the one and only Pixar movie that was set in the past. Pixar has always been about sci fi, not fantasy, and its works have been set in contemporary America (with Magic Realism), alternate universes, or the future. Did "female protagonist" pattern-match so strongly with "rebellious medieval princess" that even Pixar didn't do anything really unusual with it?

Even though I was happy Merida wasn't rebelling because of love, it seems like they stuck with the standard old-fashioned feminist story of resisting an arranged marriage, when they could have avoided all of that in a work set in the present or the future, when a woman would have more scope to really be brave.

All in all, it seems like their father-son movie was a lot stronger than their mother-daughter movie.

Comment author: Vaniver 21 July 2012 06:05:25AM 3 points [-]

Upvoted. My thoughts on Brave are over here, but basically Merida is actually a really dark character, and it's sort of sickening that she gets away with everything she does.

Interesting enough to repeat is my suggestion for a better setting:

Consider another movie they could have made, Paisley, about a Scottish girl on the cusp of womanhood who gets a job in one of the first textile mills and is able to support herself and live independently through hard work. This story has the supreme virtue of having actually happened: arranged marriage was not done away with because a preteen girl complained that she wasn't ready, it was done away with because people got richer and could afford something better.

Of course, it's difficult to make a movie glorifying sweatshop labor, whereas princesses are distant enough to be a tame example.

Comment author: Bugmaster 26 July 2012 11:18:23PM *  3 points [-]

I thought that Brave was actually a somewhat subversive movie -- perhaps inadvertently so. The movie is structured and presented in a way that makes it look like the standard Rebellious Princess story, with the standard feminist message. The protagonist appears to be a girl who overcomes the Patriarchy by transgressing gender norms, etc. etc. This is true to a certain extent, but it's not the main focus of the movie.

Instead, the movie is, at its core, a very personal story of a child's relationship with her parent, the conflict between love and pride, and the difference between having good intentions and being able to implement them into practice. By the end of the movie, both Merida and her mother undergo a significant amount of character development. Their relationship changes not because the social order was reformed, or because gender norms were defeated -- but because they have both grown as individuals.

Thus, Brave ends up being a more complex (and IMO more interesting) movie than the standard "Rebellious Princess" cliche would allow. In Brave, there are no clear villains; neither Merida nor her mother are wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong. Contrast this with something like Disney's Rapunzel, where the mother is basically a glorified plot device, as opposed to a full-fledged character.

Comment author: wedrifid 27 July 2012 12:28:07AM 0 points [-]

In Brave, there are no clear villains; neither Merida nor her mother are wholly in the right, or wholly in the wrong.

How boring. Was there at least some monsters to fight or an overtly evil usurper to slay? What on earth remains as motivation to watch this movie?

Comment author: Alicorn 27 July 2012 12:53:33AM 1 point [-]

The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage. Vg vf fynva.

Comment author: wedrifid 27 July 2012 02:01:20AM 0 points [-]

The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage. Vg vf fynva.

Cute rot13. I never would have predicted that in a Pixar animation!

Comment author: Bugmaster 27 July 2012 02:05:18AM 1 point [-]

As per my post above, I'd argue that the "rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage" is less of a primary antagonist, and more of a bumbling comic relief character.

Comment author: wedrifid 27 July 2012 02:37:07AM *  2 points [-]

The antagonist is the rapey cultural artifact of forced marriage.

There should be a word for forcing other people to have sex (with each other, not yourself). The connotations of calling a forced arranged marriage 'rapey' should be offensive to the victims. It is grossly unfair to imply that the wife is a 'rapist' just because her husband's father forced his son to marry her for his family's political gain. (Or vice-versa.)

Comment author: Alicorn 27 July 2012 08:05:21AM 1 point [-]

I wasn't specifying who was being rapey. Just that the entire setup was rapey.

Comment author: Desrtopa 27 July 2012 02:59:32AM 0 points [-]

There is an evil monster to fight, of a more literal sort, but it would be a bit of a stretch to call it the primary antagonist.

Comment author: iceman 19 July 2012 10:46:18PM 1 point [-]

I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart.

Have you seen the new My Little Pony show? It's really good. It's sweet without being twee.

Comment author: MBlume 19 July 2012 11:15:45PM 0 points [-]

We seem to have a lot of Airbender fans here at LW -- Alicorn was the one who started me watching it, and I know SarahC and rubix are fans.

Welcome =)

Comment author: Xachariah 20 July 2012 12:53:10AM *  4 points [-]

I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism.

I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar

I'm not sure about Disney, but the you should still be able to enjoy Avatar. Avatar (TLA and Korra) is in many ways a deconstruction of magical worlds. They take the basic premise of kung-fu magic and then let that propagate to it's logical conclusions. The TLA war was enabled by rapid industrialization when one nation realized they could harness their breaking the laws of thermodynamics for energy. The premise of S1 Korra is exploring social inequality in the presence of randomly distributed magical powers.

In these ways, Avatar is less Harry Potter and more HPMoR.

Comment author: Alicorn 20 July 2012 01:06:56AM 0 points [-]

randomly distributed magical powers

They run strongly in families (although it's not clear exactly how, since neither of Katara's parents appears to have been a waterbender). It's not really random.

Comment author: Xachariah 20 July 2012 03:28:32AM 1 point [-]

You are correct. I wouldn't consider it much different from personality. It's part heritable, part environmental and upbringing, and part randomness.

Now you've got me wondering if philosophers in the Avatar universe have debates on whether your element/bending is nature vs nurture.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 20 July 2012 06:47:07PM 0 points [-]

Now I want an ATLA fanfic infused with Star Trek-style pensive philosophizing. :D

I would argue that it has even more potential than HP for a rationalist makeover. Aang stays in the iceberg and Sokka saves the planet?

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 20 July 2012 05:54:45PM *  0 points [-]

Honestly, I was disappointed with the ending of Season 1 Korra: (rot13)

Nnat zntvpnyyl tvirf Xbeen ure oraqvat onpx nsgre Nzba gbbx vg njnl, naq gurer ner ab creznarag pbafrdhraprf gb nalguvat.

I'm not necessarily idealistic enough to be happy with a world that has no consequences or really difficult choices; I'm just not cynical enough to find misanthropy and defeatism cool. That's why children's entertainment appeals to me - while it can be overly sugary-sweet, adult entertainment often seems to be both narrow and shallow, and at the same time cynical. Outside of science fiction, there doesn't seem to be much adult entertainment that's about things I care about - saving the world, doing something big and important and good.

ETA: What Zach Weiner makes fun of here - that's what I'm sick of. Not just misanthropy and undiscriminating cynicism, but glorifying it as the height of intelligence. LessWrong seemed very pleasantly different in that sense.

Comment author: Nornagest 20 July 2012 06:32:39PM *  0 points [-]

Are you sure that's rot13? It's generating gibberish in two different decoders for me, although I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about anyway.

ETA: Yeah, looks like a shift of three characters right.

ETA AGAIN: Fixed now, thanks.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 01:21:26AM 0 points [-]

Sorry, I dumped it into Briangle and forgot to change the setting.

Comment author: Xachariah 20 July 2012 10:32:27PM -1 points [-]

Nnat zntvpnyyl tvirf Xbeen ure oraqvat onpx nsgre Nzba gbbx vg njnl, naq gurer ner ab creznarag pbafrdhraprf gb nalguvat.

V gubhtug vg jnf irel rssrpgvir. Gubhtu irvyrq fb xvqf jba'g pngpu vg, univat gur qnevat gb fubj n znva punenpgre pbagrzcyngvat naq nyzbfg nggrzcgvat fhvpvqr jnf n terng jnl gb pybfr gur nep. Gurer'f nyernql rabhtu 'npgvba' pbafrdhraprf qhr gb gur eribyhgvba, fb vg'f avpr onynapvat bhg univat gur irel raq or gur erfhygvat punatrf gb Xbeen'f punenpgre. Jura fur erwrpgf fhvpvqr nf na bcgvba, fur ernyvmrf gung fur ubyqf vagevafvp inyhr nf n uhzna orvat engure guna nf na Ningne. Cyhf nf bar bs gur ener srznyr yrnqf va puvyqera'f gryrivfvba, gur qenzngvp pyvznk bs gur fgbel orvat gur qr-bowrpgvsvpngvba bs gur srznyr yrnq vf uhtr. Nyfb gur nagv-fhvpvqr zrffntr orvat gung onq thlf pbzzvg zheqre/fhvpvqr naq gur tbbq thlf qba'g vf tbbq gb svavfu jvgu. V'z irel fngvfsvrq jvgu gurz raqvat vg gung jnl.

Znal fubjf raq jvgu jvgu ovt onq orvat orngra. Fubjf gung cergraq gb or zngher unir cebgntbavfgf qvr ng gur raq. Ohg Xbeen'f raqvat vf bar bs gur bayl gung fgevxrf zr nf npghnyyl zngher, orpnhfr vg'f qverpgyl n zbeny/cuvybfbcuvpny ceboyrz ng gur raq.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 21 July 2012 01:30:17AM 0 points [-]

Gung'f na vagrerfgvat jnl gb chg vg, naq V guvax V'z unccvre jvgu gur raqvat orpnhfr bs gung. Ubjrire, V jnf rkcrpgvat Frnfba Gjb gb or Xbeen'f wbhearl gbjneq erpbirel (rvgure culfvpny be zragny be obgu) nsgre Nzba gbbx njnl ure oraqvat. Vg'f abg gung V qba'g jnag ure gb or jubyr naq unccl; vg'f whfg gung vg frrzrq gbb rnfl. V gubhtug Nzba/Abngnx naq Gneybpx'f fgbel nep jnf zhpu zber cbjreshy. Va snpg, gurve zheqre/fhvpvqr frrzrq gb unir fb zhpu svanyvgl gung V svtherq vg zhfg or gur raq bs gur rcvfbqr hagvy V ernyvmrq gurer jrer fvk zvahgrf yrsg.

Va bgure jbeqf, vg'f terng gung gur fgbel yraqf vgfrys gb gur vagrecergngvba gung vg jnf nobhg vagevafvp jbegu nf n uhzna orvat qvfgvapg sebz bar'f cbjref, ohg gurl unq n jubyr frnfba yrsg gb npghnyyl rkcyvpvgyl rkcyber gung. Nnat'f wbhearl jnf nobhg yrneavat gb fgbc ehaavat njnl naq npprcg gur snpg gung ur vf va snpg gur Ningne, naq ur pna'g whfg or nal bgure xvq naq sbetrg nobhg uvf cbjre naq erfcbafvovyvgl. Xbeen'f wbhearl jnf gb or nobhg npprcgvat gung whfg orpnhfr fur vf gur Ningne, naq fur ybirf vg naq qrevirf zrnavat sebz vg, qbrfa'g zrna fur'f abguvat zber guna n ebyr gb shysvyy. Vg sryg phg fubeg. Nnat tnir vg gb Xbeen; fur qvqa'g svaq vg sbe urefrys.

Comment author: Desrtopa 21 July 2012 01:51:46AM 0 points [-]

V funerq BaGurBgureUnaqyr'f qvfnccbvagzrag jvgu gur raqvat, naq V jnfa'g irel vzcerffrq jvgu Xbeen'f rzbgvbany erfbyhgvba ng gur raq. Fur uvgf n anqve bs qrcerffvba, frrzvatyl pbagrzcyngrf fhvpvqr, naq gura... rirelguvat fhqqrayl erfbyirf vgfrys. Fur trgf ure oraqvat onpx, jvgubhg nal rssbeg be cynaavat, naq jvgu ab zber fvtavsvpnag punenpgre qrirybczrag guna univat orra erqhprq gb qrfcrengvba. Gur Ovt Onq vf xvyyrq ol fbzrbar ryfr juvyr gur cebgntbavfgf' nggragvba vf ryfrjurer, naq Xbeen tnvaf gur novyvgl gb haqb nyy gur qnzntr ur pnhfrq va gur svefg cynpr. Gur fbpvrgny vffhrf sebz juvpu ur ohvyg uvf onfr bs fhccbeg jrer yrsg hanqqerffrq, ohg jvgubhg n pyrne nirahr gb erfbyir gurz nf n pbagvahngvba bs gur qenzngvp pbasyvpg.

Vs Xbeen unq orra qevira gb qrfcrengvba, naq nf n erfhyg, frnepurq uneqre sbe fbyhgvbaf naq sbhaq bar, V jbhyq unir sbhaq gung n ybg zber fngvfslvat. Gung'f bar bs gur ernfbaf V engr gur raqvat bs Ningne: Gur Ynfg Nveoraqre uvture guna gung bs gur svefg frnfba bs Xbeen. Vg znl unir orra vanqrdhngryl sberfunqbjrq naq orra fbzrguvat bs n Qrhf Rk Znpuvan, ohg ng yrnfg Nnat qrnyg jvgu n fvghngvba jurer ur jnf snprq jvgu bayl hanpprcgnoyr pubvprf ol frrxvat bgure nygreangvirf, svaqvat, naq vzcyrzragvat bar. Ohg Xbeen'f ceboyrzf jrer fbyirq, abg ol frrxvat fbyhgvbaf, ohg ol pbzvat va gbhpu jvgu ure fcvevghny fvqr ol ernpuvat ure rzbgvbany ybj cbvag.

Jung Fcvevg!Nnat fnvq unf erny jbeyq gehgu gb vg. Crbcyr qb graq gb or zber fcvevghny va gurve ybjrfg naq zbfg qrfcrengr pvephzfgnaprf. Ohg engure guna orvat fbzrguvat gb ynhq, V guvax guvf ercerfragf n sbez bs tvivat hc, jurer crbcyr ghea gb gur fhcreangheny sbe fbynpr be ubcr orpnhfr gurl qba'g oryvrir gurl pna fbyir gurve ceboyrzf gurzfryirf. Fb nf erfbyhgvbaf bs punenpgre nepf tb, V gubhtug gung jnf n cerggl onq bar.

Nyy va nyy V jnf n sna bs gur frevrf, ohg gur raqvat haqrefubg zl rkcrpgngvbaf.

Comment author: Bugmaster 26 July 2012 10:17:17PM 1 point [-]

I agree; I found the ending very disappointing, as well.

The authors throw one of the characters into a very powerful personal conflict, making it impossible for the character to deny the need for a total accounting and re-evaluation of the character's entire life and identity. The authors resolve this personal conflict about 30 seconds later with a Deus Ex Machina. Bleh.

Comment author: Solvent 28 July 2012 01:20:30AM 1 point [-]

I wonder why it is that so many people get here from TV Tropes.

Also, you're not the only one to give up on their first LW account.

Comment author: shokwave 28 July 2012 06:50:07PM 4 points [-]

I wonder why it is that so many people get here from TV Tropes.

Possibly: TV Tropes approaches fiction the way LessWrong approaches reality.

Comment author: Solvent 29 July 2012 01:18:07AM 0 points [-]

How do you mean?

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 29 July 2012 03:32:32AM *  0 points [-]

At a guess, I would say: looking for recurring patterns in fiction, and extrapolating principles/tropes. It's a very bottom-up approach to literature, taking special note of subversions, inversions, aversions, etc, as opposed to the more top-down academic study of literature that loves to wax poetic about "universal truths" while ignoring large swaths of stories (such as Sci Fi and Fantasy) that don't fit into their grand model. Quite frankly, from my perspective, it seems they tend to force a lot of stories into their preferred mold, falling prey to True Art tropes.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 July 2012 12:22:02PM 2 points [-]

I wonder why it is that so many people get here from TV Tropes.

Because it uses as many examples from HP:MoR as it possibly could?

Comment author: Gaviteros 19 July 2012 07:03:39AM 10 points [-]

Hellow Lesswrong! (I posted this in the other July2012 welcome thread aswell. :P Though apparently it has too many comments at this point or something to that effect.)

My name is Ryan and I am a 22 year old technical artist in the Video Game industry. I recently graduated with honors from the Visual Effects program at Savannah College of Art and Design. For those who don't know much about the industry I am in, my skill set is somewhere between a software programmer, a 3D artist, and a video editor. I write code to create tools to speed up workflows for the 3D things I or others need to do to make a game, or cinematic.

Now I found lesswrong.com through the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality podcast. Up unto that point I had never heard of Rationalism as a current state of being... so far I greatly resonate with the goals and lessons that have come up in the podcast, and what I have seen about rationalism. I am excited to learn more.

I wouldn't go so far to claim the label for myself as of yet, as I don't know enough and I don't particularly like labels for the most part. I also know that I have several biases, I feel like I know the reasons and causes for most, but I have not removed them from my determinative process.

Furthermore I am not an atheist, nor am I a theist. I have chosen to let others figure out and solve the questions of sentient creators through science, and I am no more qualified to disprove a religious belief than I would be to perform surgery... on anything. I just try to leave religion out of most of my determinations.

Anyway! I'm looking forward to reading and discussing more with all of you!

Current soapbox: Educational System of de-emphasizing critical thinking skills.

If you are interested you can check out my artwork and tools at www.ryandowlingsoka.com

Comment author: Emile 19 July 2012 01:18:44PM 2 points [-]

Welcome to LessWrong!

There are a few of us here in the Game Industry, and a few more that like making games in their free time. I also played around with Houdini, though never produced anything worth showing.

Comment author: Gaviteros 20 July 2012 06:35:48AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the welcome!

Houdini can be a lot of fun- but without a real goal it is almost too open for anything of value to be easily made. Messing around in Houdini is a time sink without a plan. :) That said, I absolutely love it as a program.

Comment author: Grognor 25 July 2012 04:58:26AM *  2 points [-]

I am no more qualified to disprove a religious belief than I would be to perform surgery... on anything.

I disagree with this claim. If you are capable of understanding concepts like the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle, you are more than capable of recognizing that there is no god and that that hypothesis wouldn't even be noticeable for a bounded intelligence unless a bunch of other people had already privileged it thanks to anthropomorphism.

Also, please don't call what we do here, "rationalism". Call it "rationality".

Comment author: ViEtArmis 19 July 2012 04:41:25PM *  12 points [-]

Hello! I'm David.

I'm 26 (at the time of writing), male, and an IT professional. I have three (soon to be four) children, three (but not four) of which have a different dad.

My immediate links here were through the Singularity Institute and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which drove me here when I realized the connection (I came to those things entirely separately!). When I came across this site, I had read through the Wikipedia list of biases several times over the course of years, come to many conscious conclusions about the fragility of my own cognition, and had innumerable arguments with friends and family that changed minds, but I never really considered that there would be a large community of people that got together on those grounds.

I'm going to do the short version of my origin story here, since writing it all out seems both daunting and pretentious. I was raised rich and lucky by an entrepreneur/university professor/doctor father and a mother who always had to be learning something or go crazy (she did some of both). I dropped out of a physics major in college and got my degree in gunsmithing instead, but only after I worked a few years. Along the way, I've politically and morally moved around, but I'm worried that the settling of my moral and political beliefs is a symptom of my brain settling rather than because of all of my rationalizations.

There are a few reasons that I haven't commented on here yet (mostly because I despise any sort of hard work), and this is an attempt to break some of those inhibitions and maybe even get to know some people well enough (i.e. at all) to actively desire discourse.

Ok, David Fun Facts time:

  • I know enough Norwegian, Chinese, Latin, Lojban, and Spanish to do...something useful maybe?

  • I almost never think of what I'm saying before I say it (as in black-box), and I let it continue because it works.

  • Corollary: I curse a lot when I'm comfortable with people.

  • Corollary: My voice is low and loud, so it carries quite far.

  • I play a lot of video games, board games, and thought experiment games.

Comment author: maia 19 July 2012 05:35:41PM *  13 points [-]

I've been commenting for a few months now, but never introduced myself in the prior Welcome threads. Here goes: Student, electrical engineering / physics (might switch to math this fall), female, DC area.

I encountered LW when I was first linked to Methods a couple years ago, but found the Sequences annoying and unilluminating (after having taken basic psych and stats courses). After meeting a couple of LWers in real life, including my now-boyfriend Roger (LessWrong is almost certainly a significant part of the reason we are dating, incidentally), I was motivated to go back and take a look, and found some things I'd missed: mostly, reductionism and the implications of having an Occam prior. This was surprising to me; after being brought up as an anti-religious nut, then becoming a meta-contrarian in order to rebel against my parents, I thought I had it all figured out, and was surprised to discover that I still had attachments to mysticism and agnosticism that didn't really make any sense.

My biggest instrumental rationality challenge these days seems to be figuring out what I really want out of life. Also, dealing with an out-of-control status obsession.

To cover some typical LW clusters: I am not signed up for cryonics, and am not entirely convinced it is worth it. And I am interested in studying AI, but mostly because I think it is interesting and not out of Singularity-related concern. (I get the feeling that people who don't share the prominent belief patterns about AI/cryonics hereabouts think they are much more of a minority than they actually are.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 19 July 2012 05:47:48PM *  1 point [-]

I'm not quite sure what you're referring to by "the prominent belief patterns," but neither low confidence that signing up for cryonics results in life extension, nor low confidence that AI research increases existential risk, are especially uncommon here. That said, high confidence in those things is far more common here than elsewhere.

Comment author: maia 19 July 2012 07:04:24PM 1 point [-]

That is more or less what I am trying to say. It's just that I've noticed several people on Welcome threads saying things like, "Unlike many LessWrongers, I don't think cryonics is a good idea / am not concerned about AI risk."

Comment author: AliceKingsley 19 July 2012 05:57:17PM 19 points [-]

Hi! I got here from reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I think I found on TV Tropes. Once I ran out of story to catch up on, I figured I'd start investigating the source material.

I've read a couple of sequences, but I'll hold off on commenting much until I've gotten through more material. (Especially since the quality of discussions in the comment sections is so high.) Thanks for an awesome site!

Comment author: [deleted] 19 July 2012 10:45:01PM 20 points [-]

Hello everyone! I've been a lurker on here for awhile, but this is my first post. I've held out on posting anything because I've never felt like I knew enough to actually contribute to the conversation. Some things about me:

I'm currently 22, female, and a recent graduate of college with a degree in computer science. I'm currently employed as a software engineer at a health insurance company, though I am looking into getting into research some day. I mainly enjoy science, playing video games, and drawing.

I found this site through a link on the Skeptics Stack Exchange page. The post was about cryonics, which is how I got over here. I've been reading the site for about six months now and I have found it extremely helpful. It has also been depressing, though, because I've since realized many of the "problems" in the world were caused by the ineptitude of the species and aren't easily fixed. I've had some problems with existential nihilism since then and if anyone has any advice on the matter, I'd love to hear it.

My journey to rationality probably started with atheism and a real understanding of the scientific method and human psychology. I grew up Mormon, which has since given me some interesting perspectives into groupthink and the general problem of humanity. Leaving Mormonism is what prompted me into understanding why and how so many people could be so systematically insane.

In some ways, I've also found this very isolating because I now have a hard time relating to a lot of people. Just sitting back and watching the ways people destroy themselves and others is very frustrating. It's made worse by my knowledge that I must also be doing this to myself, albeit on a smaller level.

Anyway, I enjoy meeting you all and I will try to comment more on the site! I really enjoy this site and everyone on it seems to have very good comments.

Comment author: fiddlemath 29 July 2012 02:11:25PM 0 points [-]

It has also been depressing, though, because I've since realized many of the "problems" in the world were caused by the ineptitude of the species and aren't easily fixed. I've had some problems with existential nihilism since then and if anyone has any advice on the matter, I'd love to hear it.

You describe "problems with existential nihilism." Are these bouts of disturbed, energy-sucking worry about the sheer uselessness of your actions, each lasting between a few hours and a few days? Moreover, did you have similar bouts of worry about other important seeming questions before getting into LW?

Comment author: iceman 19 July 2012 11:05:25PM 20 points [-]

I've commented infrequently, but never did one of these "Welcome!" posts.

Way back in the Overcoming Bias days, my roomate raved constantly about the blog and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular. I pattern matched his behaviour to being in a cult, and moved on with my life. About two years later (?), a common friend of ours recommended Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I then read, which brought me to Lesswrong, reading the Sequences, etc. About a year later, I signed up for cryonics with Alcor, and I now give more than my former roomate to the Singularity Institute. (He is very amused by this.)

I spend quite a bit of time working on my semi-rationalist fanfic, My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal, which I'll hopefully release on a timeframe of a few months. (I previously targeted releasing this damn thing for April, but...planning fallacy. I've whittled my issue list down to three action items, though, and it's been through it's first bout of prereading.)

Comment author: Alicorn 19 July 2012 11:19:00PM 15 points [-]

My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal

Want.

Comment author: maia 26 July 2012 12:39:06AM 2 points [-]

Could I convince you to perhaps post on the weekly rationality diaries about progress, or otherwise commit yourself, or otherwise increase the probability that you'll put this fic up soon? :D

Comment author: Davidmanheim 20 July 2012 12:11:04AM *  14 points [-]

Hi all,

Not quire recently joined, but when I first joined, I read some, then got busy and didn't participate after that.

Age: Not yet 30. Former Occupation: Catastrophe Risk Modeling New Occupation: Graduate Student, Public Policy, RAND Corporation.

Theist Status: Orthodox Jew, happy with the fact that there are those who correctly claim that I cannot prove that god exists, and very aware of the confirmation bias and lack of skepticism in most religious circles. It's one reason I'm here, actually. And I'll be glad to discuss it in the future, elsewhere.

I was initially guided here, about a year ago, by a link to The Best Textbooks on Every Subject . I was a bit busy working at the time, building biased mathematical models of reality. (Don't worry, they weren't MY biases, they were those of the senior people and those of the insurance industry. And they were normalized to historical experience, so as long as history is a good predictor of the future...) So I decided that I wanted to do something different, possibly something with more positive externalities, less short term thinking about how the world could be more profitable for my employer, and more long-term thinking about how it could be better for everyone.

Skip forward; I'm going to be going to graduate school for Policy Analysis at RAND, and they asked us to read Thinking Fast and Slow, by Kahneman - and I'm a big fan of his. While reading and thinking about it, I wanted to reference something I read on here, but couldn't remember the name of the site. I ended up Googling my way to a link to HP:MOR, which I read in about a day, (yesterday, actually) and a link back here. So now LR is in my RSS reader, and I'm here to improve myself and my mind, and become a bit less wrong.

Comment author: Despard 20 July 2012 01:13:23AM *  18 points [-]

Hello everyone,

Thought it was about time to do one of these since I've made a couple of comments!

My name's Carl. I've been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.

I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the universe does. I started to study motor control and after my PhD and a couple of postdocs I know way more about how humans move their arms than any sane person probably should. I've worked in behavioural, clinical and computational realms, giving me a wide array of tools to use when analysing problems.

My current postdoc is coming to an end and a couple of months ago I was undergoing somewhat of a crisis. What was I doing, almost 31 and with no plan for my life? I realised that motor control had started to bore me but I had no real idea what to do about it. Stay in science, or abandon it and get a real job? That hurts after almost a decade of high-level research. And then I discovered, on Facebook, a link to HPMOR. And then I read it all, in about a week. And then I found LW, and a job application for curriculum design for a new rationality institute, and I wrote an email, and then flew to San Francisco to participate in the June minicamp...

And now I'm in the midst of writing some fellowship applications to come to Berkeley and study rationality - specifically how the brain is Bayesian in some ways but not in others, and how that can inform the teaching of rationality. (Or something. It's still in the planning stages!) I'm also volunteering for CFAR at the moment by helping to find useful papers on rationality and cognitive science, though that's on somewhat of a back burner since these fellowships are due very soon. Next month, in fact.

I've started a new blog: it's called 'Joy in the Merely Real', and at the moment I'm exploring a few ideas about the Twelve Virtues of Rationality and what I think about them. You can find it at:

themerelyreal.blogspot.com

Looking forward to doing more with this community in the coming months and years. :)

Comment author: tmosley 21 July 2012 02:01:12AM 6 points [-]

So I recently found LessWrong after seeing a link to the Harry Patter fanfiction, and I have been enthralled with the concept of rationalism since. The concepts are not foreign to me as I am a chemist by training, but the systematization and focus on psychology keep me interested. I am working my way through the sequences now.

As for my biography, I am a 29 year old laboratory manager trained as a chemist. My lab develops and tests antimicrobial materials and drugs based on selenium's oxygen radical producing catalysis. It is rewarding work if you can get it, which you can't, because our group is the only one doing it ;)

Besides my primary field of work, I am generally interested in science, technology, economics, and history.

I am looking at retirement from the 9-5 life in the next year or so, and am interested in learning the methods of rationality, which I feel would allow me to excel in other endeavors in the future. I already find myself linking to articles from here to explain and predict human behavior.

This place is overwhelming with its content. I don't think I have ever seen a website with a comment section so worth reading. I fear that I could spend the remainder of my life reading and never have the time to DO anything.

In the realm of politics, I would be considered an anarcho-capitalist, though I value any and all types of values between there and where the USA's politics currently lay. I am an atheist to the extent that I don't believe in an anthropomorphic god, though reading the "an alien god" (not quite sure how to post links here yet) sequence certainly made me realize that certain pervasive and extremely powerful processes do exist, so I am reexamining some of my long-held assumptions in that arena.

I spend quite a lot of my time in the online "Fight Club" that is Zerohedge's comment section, so apologies in advance if I come off as sharp in some of my remarks. I prefer appeals to logic and reason as a rule, but sometimes I resort to pathos and personal attack, especially when I feel that I am being personally attacked. This impulse has been greatly curbed by what I have read here, however, and I find that I am able to pierce through inflammatory arguments much more cool-ly, which I count as a positive result for all involved.

In any event, I generally try not to comment when I feel ill-informed on a subject, but when I think I have something to contribute, I will. I am really enjoying the site so far.

Now, back to reading. So much to read, so little time.

Comment author: kirpi 21 July 2012 08:18:09AM *  11 points [-]

Hello. I am from Istanbul, Turkey (A Turkish Citizen born and raised). I came across LessWrong on a popular Turkish website called EkşiSözlük. Since then, this is the place I checked to see what's new when there's nothing worth reading on Google Reader and I have time. (So long posts you have!)

I am 31 years old and I have a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Computational Sciences (Research on Bioinformatics). But then, like most of the people in my country does, I've landed upon a job where I can't utilize any of these information. Information Security :)

Why did I complain about my job? Here is why:

I've been long since looking for "the best way to have lived a life". What I mean by this is, I have to say, at the moment of death "I lived my life the best way I could, and I can die blissfully". This may come off a bit cliché but bear in mind that I'm relatively new to this rationality thing.

While I was learning Computer Science for the first time, I saw there was great opportunity in relating computational sciences to social sciences so as to understand inner workings of human beings. This I realised when the Law&Ethics instructor asked us to write an essay on what would be "the best way to live your life" and I was then learning "Greedy Algorithms" Granted there would be many gaps in my arguments but my case was like this: "You can't predict how long you will live. So the best way to search for the (sub)optimal life was to utilize a greedy algorithm. That is, at every decision point, you have to select the best alternative that maximizes your utility at that time." You soon come to learn that this is easier said than done. (No long term goals, no relationships.. etc) And greedy algorithms may generate a sub-optimal solution, rather than the optimal solution (because you have at one point chosen the wrong path since you didn't consider leaving this far)

I currently suspect that Bayesian (Or Laplacian maybe? ) methods may have the best luck to increase the possibility that I live a good life. I wrote all over the place, but one last thing I want to add.

I do not believe an afterlife or a soul for that matter. This has happened very recently relative to most of you. So, I was constantly looking for a "rational" justification for continuing living a good life . I am on the verge of giving up looking, since there seems to be nothing to find, and just living. Which is a little sad actually, since I still have the feeling that I could probably do something great with my life. But then constant questioning seems to also lead to a sub-optimal life. (May be with an even lower utility than greedy algorithm) I guess, what I am trying to say is I am on the verge of becoming a hedonist..

I'd love to learn your ideas or reading recommendations on how best to live a life. I'd also love to organize meetups of rationalists in Turkey.

P.S. If you haven't seen yet, there's a book called "The theory that would not die", which is an excellent source on many (and I mean it when I say many) things Bayesian.

Comment author: cjb230 21 July 2012 04:41:13PM 10 points [-]

Hi! Given how much time I've spent reading this site and its relatives, this post is overdue.

I'm 35, male, British and London-based, with a professional background in IT. I was raised Catholic, but when I was about 12, I had a de-conversion experience while in church. I remember leaving the pew during mass to go to the toilet, then walking back down the aisle during the eucharist, watching the priest moving stuff around the altar. It suddenly struck me as weird that so many people had gathered to watch a man in a funny dress pour stuff from one cup to another. So I identified as atheist or humanist for a long time. I can't remember any incident that made me start to identify as a rationalist, but I've been increasingly interested in evidence, biases and knowledge for over ten years now.

I've been lucky, I think, to have some breadth in my education: I studied Physics & Philosophy as an undergrad, Computer Science as a postgrad, and more recently rounded that off with an MBA. This gives me a handy toolset for approaching new problems, I think. I definitely want to learn more statistics though - it feels like there's a big gap in the arsenal.

There are a few stand-out things I have picked out from LW and OB so far. "Noticing that I am confused", and running toward that feeling rather than away from it, has helped at work. "Dissolving the question" has helped me to clarify some problems, and I'd like to be better at it. The material on how words can mislead has helped me to pay more attention to what people mean in discussion.

Non-rationality stuff: my lust to learn new things runs ahead of my ability to follow through, so I have far too many books! Like many people here, I have akrasia issues. I am interested in what can be done to improve quantity and quality of life, as well as productivity, including fitness and mindfulness meditation. Lastly, I'm taking a long trip to LA, flying on August 1, and I'd like to meet up with the LW community there.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 July 2012 05:18:06PM 0 points [-]

Hello...sorry, but I was hoping someone could msg me the location for the NYC meetup real quick, which is in two hours.

Comment author: marcusmorgan 25 July 2012 03:45:45AM 1 point [-]

I am a new member and have been looking at Blogs for the first time over the past few weeks. I have written a book, finished last month, which deals with many of the issues about reasoning discussed at this site, but I attempt to cut through them somewhat, as there is so much potential in the facts out there to be ordered that I don't spend a lot of time considering the theory relating to my reasoning in providing some order to it in my book. I discuss reasoning, and many of the principles raised in posts here, but my interest is in reasonably framing the conditions of my hypotheses and making them clear, whatever they may be. For example, immediately before 2 particles collides we can fairly accurately predict what will happen because our conditions are very closed, but nature has broad universal sweeps of properties in four forces and how they more generally structure matter (including biology and humans in particular) and hypotheses relating to those explanations are more broad.

My book tries to cover the entire sweep on nature, based upon the use of the four forces in physics, and extends to an explanation of the emergence of biology on planetary surfaces. You are all most welcome to read it, its a free download at http://home.iprimus.com.au/marcus60/1.pdf and well worth a quick flip to see if the coverage interests you. My website in www.thehumandesign.net (a non-spiritual Design) for additional information including a Blog in future. It is entirely novel, and without any input from scientists or philosophers. I am a lawyer of long standing, and do my research by checking facts at the library (and internet now) and I simply constructed a view over a period of several decades. A bit like ongoing Sunday contemplations accumulated into a theory. I hope you enjoy it, and my posts at this site if I get an opportunity to contribute further.

Comment author: thomblake 25 July 2012 02:02:02PM 1 point [-]

Folks, a reminder that downvotes against introduction posts on the "Welcome" thread are frowned upon. There's nothing in the parent comment that should be sufficient to override that norm.

Comment author: DaFranker 25 July 2012 03:29:14PM *  3 points [-]

I have suspicions that this introduction was downvoted because, on first reading, it feels like an advertising post filled with Applause Lights and other gimmicks (the feeling is particularly strong for me as I just finished reading the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence, though I had already read the majority of the individual posts in jumbled order).

A second reading sufficed to dismiss the feeling for me, and upon randomly selecting five sentences that felt like gimmicks and estimating their intended meaning, it turns out that it wasn't so gimmicky at all. Even the word "emergence", given as a prime example of modern Mysterious Answer in many contexts, seems to have been used properly here.

The oddity of the initial feeling of advertising and gimmickyness and how easily dispersed it was is enough to pique my curiosity, and I think I'll take some time to actually read that book now. Ironically, the only reason I even became aware of this post was seeing the reminder that downvoting was frowned upon in the recent comments. Heh.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 July 2012 10:53:16PM 4 points [-]

Folks, a reminder that downvotes against introduction posts on the "Welcome" thread are frowned upon. There's nothing in the parent comment that should be sufficient to override that norm.

Yes there is---the rest of the comments that also advertise the book while attempting to shame Vladimir out of downvoting him for allegedly sinister emotional reasons. Making that sort of status challenge can be a useful way to establish oneself (or so the prison myth goes) but also often backfires and also waives the 'be gentle with the new guy' privileges.

People should consider themselves free to ignore thomblake's frowns and vote however they please in this instance. There is no remaining obligation to grant marcusmorgan immunity to downvotes.

Comment author: thomblake 26 July 2012 02:05:48PM 0 points [-]

I see two comments other than the above that "advertise" the book - actually link to it in a seemingly relevant context - and it's a free book even. The other comments aren't nearly as bad as you're making them out to be, and they were downvoted appropriately.

Did I miss comments that were deleted / edited, or what? What was even a 'status challenge' in marcusmorgan's comments?

Comment author: wedrifid 26 July 2012 02:18:55PM -1 points [-]

and they were downvoted appropriately.

Exactly.

Comment author: Haladdin 25 July 2012 06:49:20AM *  6 points [-]

Hi, LessWrong,

I used to entertain myself by reading psychology, and philosophy articles on Wikipedia and following the subsequent links. When I was really interested in a topic though, I used google to further find websites would provide me more information on said topics. Around late 2010, I found that some of my search results led to this very website. Less Wrong proved to be a little too dense for me to enjoy; I needed to fully utilize my cognitive capabilities to even begin to comprehend some of the articles posted here.

Since I was looking for entertainment, I decided to ignore all links to LW for quite a while, but the frequency of LW result coming up in my queries became more and more frequent with time. I finally decided to read some of the posts, and some of the articles (determinism, cryonics, and death related ones) described conclusions I've derived independently. It was quite shocking as I thought of myself as a rather unique thinker. Thinking more about this, I came to a conclusion. Instead of having a "eureka" moment every couple of months to come at the same conclusion people arrived at centuries ago, I decided to optimize my time - compressing the learning/awakening period by reading the sequences instead of attempting to figure out everything myself.

Funnily enough, I detest reading the same articles that I enjoyed reading before now that I've given myself the goal of reading them. I'm sure that the explanation and the solution to this conundrum can be found on this website as well.

Lastly, a note to ciphergoth - I do not identify myself as a rationalist, as the second sentence of this post implies. I found out that labeling myself limits my words, my actions, and more importantly, my thoughts, so I refuse to label myself by my political ideologies, gender, nationality, etc. I even go by a few different names so I can become more detached to my name itself as I found people to be irrationally attached to names as it is nothing but an identifying label. I will use rationalist techniques and tools, and I may even grow to adopt your ideologies, but I will not identify myself as a rationalist. At least until the benefits of applying labels to myself becomes more concrete.

Nice to meet all of you.

Comment author: Rukifellth 25 July 2012 11:54:59PM *  9 points [-]

I got into a community of intelligent, creative free-thinkers by reading fan fiction of all things.

You know the one.

Anyway, my knowledge of what is collectively referred to as Rationality is slim. I read the first 6 pages of The Sequences, felt like I was cheating on a test, and stopped. I'll try to make up for it with some of the most unnecessarily theatrical and hammy writing I can get away with.

I love word play, and over the course of a year I offered (as a way of apology) to owe my friend a quarter for every time I improvised a pun or awful joke mid-conversation, by the end of which I could have bought a dinner for him at Pizza Delight- I didn't. It's on my to-do list to compile all the wises that Carlos Ramon ever cracked on The Magic School Bus and put it on you tube, because no one else has and it needs to be done, damn it. As you can tell, I sometimes write for it's own sake, sort of a literary hedonist if you will. But all good things must come to an end...

My greatest principle is that a person's course in life is governed by their reaction to their circumstance, and that nothing at all is of certainty. The nature of the human mind is a process which our current metaphors and models can only approximate, a physical system adjusting itself, which words like "I", "our" and "qualia" can only activate whatever concept we have to answer the question of "What". Because of this, I have a great sympathy towards Eastern spirituality and some Christian mysticism, because they have the spirit of what we're all trying to accomplish here; to answer a question.

Sometimes I end up in the psychological equivalence of a fractal zoom where philosophy has this impossible to divide property, of all things linking to others without there being any elementary axioms or parts, probably because of that whole "brain made of neurons" racket. I concluded that emotions are just another form of sense; love, curiosity and understanding being reactions and sensory input much like taste and touch. Happily any cognitive dissonance or emptiness can be discarded the same way, and the logical contradiction a property of the purely physical (rather than comforting "conceptual") nature of our very thought, meaning that I'll simultaneously accept the objective truth of this, but reject any emotional significance, as emotional significance is itself deconstructed as a concept.

Of course the empathy gap and the nature of attention span (or at least my attention span) means that I'm normally not like this unless triggered. To me, regular life is the reaction of our psyche, broken up occasionally by the temporary delusion that a fractal zoom of philosophy can answer my questions. I call this a "delusion" because the concept of a question to be answered is an extraneous layer added to by an entity which just wants to avoid suffering.

The human mind; a non-linear physical system which tries to evaluate itself with a linear processing system that's not suited to that sort of thing at all. Sometimes I wonder if who we are is just the sum of five or six different personalities, each with about a fifth of sixth of our functioning, plus a heavy specialization in one type of behaviour, the sum of which is an idea of what is right and wrong with a sense of identity. Given the existence of neural pathways in our spinal column, I wouldn't be surprised. Sometimes I feel like I can feel the shape of our brains based on this, but that's probably just me connecting concepts to high school biology.

I went off the rails a bit there, but looking back, I figure this should be a more honest introduction from me than any structured post. Even so, I doubt I can really convey that kind of leg twisting logical insanity without the meaning being hallowed by interpretation and pattern recognition.

Ugh, I feel like there wasn't a speck of relate-ability there at all. Well, I'm eighteen years old and male. I followed the My Little Pony following out of a combination of boredom, fascination and a love of the bizarre. The show never struck a chord with me at all, really, but the fandom was something else. There was a period of about a month where I read crossover fan fictions, but I couldn't be bothered after that point, because the fandom's growth wound down and the novelty was gone. Even so, Nine Knackered Souls is the funniest fan fiction I've ever read, a Red vs Blue crossover. Fallout Equestria is the longest and most "so-okay-it's average" fan fiction, despite the fact that I was drawn in enough to overlook the Mary sue aspects and read the whole thing in like four days in one sitting...

I'm going into Computer Science at Dalhousie University, and CSci being what it is, I'm going to make up my path as I go along. I really don't know enough about robotics, AI or informatics to make the choice between them right now anyway.

Comment author: Rukifellth 26 July 2012 12:03:23AM 0 points [-]

Also, I enjoy playing Superman 64's ring levels.

Comment author: candyfromastranger 26 July 2012 04:13:11AM 12 points [-]

I highly doubt that I'll be posting articles or even joining discussions anytime soon, since right now, I'm just getting started on reading the sequences and exploring other parts of the site, and don't feel prepared yet to get involved in discussions. However, I'll probably comment on things now and then, so because of that (and, honestly, just because I'm a very social person), I figured I might as well post an introduction here.

I appreciate the way that discussions are described as ending on here, because I've noticed in other debates that "tapping out" is seen as running away, and the main trait that gives me problems in my quest for rationality is that I'm inherently a competitive person, and get more caught up in the idea of "winning" than of improving my thinking. I'm working on this, but if I do get involved in discussions, the fact that they aren't seen as much as competitions here compared to other places should be helpful to me.

Anyway, I guess I'll introduce myself. I'm Alexandra, and I'm a seventeen year old high-school student in the United States (I applied to the camp in August, but I never received any news about it, so I assume that I wasn't accepted). Like many people here, I found out about this website through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I've been interested in improving my rational thinking since I was young. I grew up in a secular and intellectual home, so seeing the world and myself realistically have always been major goals for myself, and I've always naturally tried to apply logical thinking and the scientific method to my problems, but I've never really formally studied rationality (though I did take statistics last year).

I'm pretty smart, but as a high school student (especially one who, due to various bad experiences with the school system, only really found motivation and purpose in school-work less than a year ago), I don't have too much technical knowledge, which I hope to change. I'm more experienced in aggressive self-awareness than I am in more technical ideas (such as the contrast between Bella from Luminosity and Harry in HPMOR). I'm not really interested in a future in rationality work (and, while I'm interested in transhumanism, I don't really see myself being pulled in that direction for a career), I just want to improve my own thinking in order to better use my mind as a tool to achieve my goals.

While I might come across it on here, I actually don't act very intellectual in my usual social interactions (especially compared to my younger brother, who's very openly and almost aggressively rational). I usually keep my rationality to myself except for certain situations, and use it internally to figure out the best way to approach situations, but I usually come across as much more flippant and frivolous than I actually am (especially since I'm very much an extrovert). I'm too misanthropic to expect rationality from others, so I prefer to use my inner logical side to figure out how to interact with people on their respective levels in a way that works best for me. I can understand the desire to appear as rational and intelligent as you truly are, I just am a very utilitarian person and have found that placing less emphasis on that side of myself works best for me.

I'm used to most people that I debate with being irrational and easily upset. It never used to bother me, because I consider my intelligence to be a mental tool of mine rather than a personality trait, and because my naturally competitive personality meant that I still enjoyed debates that fell into petty conflict, but recently (maybe because I'm maturing, maybe because I'm busier these days), I've found myself getting bored with that sort of thing. So I'm definitely interested in intellectual discussions on here, though I might not involve myself in them until I'm better prepared.

One thing that I've noticed about myself is that, in discussions, I tend to insist on responding to every single point made by others rather than just selecting some to focus on (before I realized that's what people were doing, it used to bother me that others wouldn't respond to every individual point I made). I'm not sure whether that's something shared by other members of this website or just a personal quirk.

This is getting rambly because I'm a long-winded person, but I'll add a bit more (mostly non-rationality-related) information. I'm not a theist or a spiritual person, but atheism seems obvious enough to me that I don't see much point in discussing it anymore (unless the more "New Age"-y members of my family get a little too pushy with me). I'm interested in physics, math, foreign languages, literature, singing, exploring urban areas, climbing things, transhumanism (especially life-extension, because I want to live forever) and throwing parties. I have a strong appreciation for the arts, but I don't personally do anything artistic (other than singing, which is just a hobby), and I'm easily entertained by the small pleasures in life (good food, pretty views, attractive people of either gender, and fluffy blankets). I really like cats and books and the nighttime, and I'm more interested in clothes and makeup than might be expected from an eccentric, science-loving rationalist with quite a few geeky interests, but people are complex. I tend to be a bit surreal when I'm not purposefully trying to be serious.

Comment author: Bugmaster 26 July 2012 06:06:29AM 2 points [-]

I applied to the camp in August, but I never received any news about it, so I assume that I wasn't accepted

I'm not affiliated with SIAI or the summer camps in any way, but IMO this sounds like a breakdown somewhere in the organization's communication protocols. If I were you, I wouldn't just assume that I wasn't accepted, I would ask for an explanation.

Comment author: candyfromastranger 26 July 2012 06:23:13AM 1 point [-]

I'll contact them, then. I wasn't expecting to be accepted, but on the off chance that I was, it's hopefully not too late.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 28 July 2012 06:51:25PM *  9 points [-]

Hello everyone, Like many people, I come to this site via an interest in transhumanism, although it seems unlikely to me that FAI implementing CEV can actually be designed before the singularity (I can explain why, and possibly even what could be done instead, but it suddenly occurred to me that it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma...).

Oddly enough, I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it. But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive (unless they are talking to other rationalists). I think I am borderline asperger's (again, like many people here) and optimizing social skills probably takes precedence over most other things.

I am currently doing a PhD in "absurdly simplistic computational modeling of the blatantly obvious" which better damn well have some signaling value. In my spare time, to stop my brain turning to mush, among other things I am writing a story which is sort of rationalist, in that some of the characters keep using science effectively even when the world is going crazy and the laws of physics seem to change dependent upon whether you believe in them. On the other hand, some of the characters are (a) heroes/heroines (b) awesomely successful (c) hippies on acid who do not believe in objective reality (not that I am implying that all hippies/people who use lsd are irrational). Maybe the point of the story is that you need more than just rationality? Or that some people are powerful because of rationality, while others have imagination, and that friendship combines their powers in a my little pony like fashion? Or maybe its all just an excuse for pretentious philosophy and psychic battles?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 28 July 2012 07:03:21PM 1 point [-]

Welcome!

I can explain why, and possibly even what could be done instead, but it suddenly occurred to me that it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma...

IMO you should definitely do it. Even if LW karma is good an indicator of good ideas, more information rarely hurts, especially on a topic as important as this.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 31 July 2012 01:20:12PM *  7 points [-]

Ok - although maybe I should stick it in its own thread?

I realize much of this has been said before.

Part 1 : AGI will come before FAI, because:

Complexity of algorithm design:

Intuitively, FAI seems orders of magnitude more complex than AGI. If I decided to start trying to program an AGI tomorrow, I would have ideas on how to start, and maybe even make a minuscule amount of progress. Ben Goertzel even has a (somewhat optimistic) roadmap for AGI in a decade. Meanwhile, afaik FAI is still stuck at the stage of lob’s theorem.
The fact that EY seems to be focusing on promoting rationality and writing (admittedly awesome) harry potter fanfiction seems to indicate that he doesn’t currently know how to write FAI (and nor does anyone else) otherwise he would be focusing on that now, and instead is planning for the long term.

Computational complexity CEV requires modelling (and extrapolating) every human mind on the planet, while avoiding the creation of sentient entities. While modelling might be cheaper than ~10^17 flops per human due to short cuts, I doubt it’s going to come cheap. Randomly sampling a subset of humanity to extrapolate from, at least initially, could make this problem less severe. Furthermore, this can be partially circumvented by saying that the AI follows a specific utility function while bootstrapping to enough computing power to implement CEV, but then you have the problem of allowing it to bootstrap safely. Having to prove friendliness of each step in self-improvement strikes me as something that could also be costly. Finally, I get the impression that people are considering using Solomonoff induction. It’s uncomputable, and while I realize that there exist approximations, I would imagine that these would be extremely expensive to calculate anything non-trivial. Is there any reason for using SI for FAI more than AGI, e.g. something todo with provability about the programs actions?

Infeasibility of relinquishment. If you can’t convince Ben Goertzel that FAI is needed, even though he is familiar with the arguments and is an advisor to SIAI, you’re not going to get anywhere near a universal consensus on the matter. Furthermore, AI is increasingly being used in financial and possibly soon military applications, and so there are strong incentives to speed the development of AI. While these uses are unlikely to be full AGI, they could provide building blocks – I can imagine a plausible situation where an advanced AI that predict the stock exchange could easily be modified to be a universal predictor.
The most powerful incentive to speed up AI development is the sheer number of people who die every day, and the amount of negentropy lost in the case that the 2nd law of thermodynamics cannot be circumvented. Even if there could be a worldwide ban on non-provably safe AGI, work would still probably continue in secret by people who thought the benefits of an earlier singularity outweighed the risks, and/or were worried about ideologically opposed groups getting their first.

Financial bootstrapping If you are ok with running a non-provably friendly AGI, then even in the early stages when, for example, your AI can write simple code or make reasonably accurate predictions but not speak English or make plans, you can use these to earn money, and buy more hardware/programmers. This seems to be part of the approach Ben is taking.

Coming in Part II: is there any alternative (and doing nothing is not an alternative! even if FAI is unlikely to work its better than giving up!)

Comment author: shminux 31 July 2012 09:33:38PM 1 point [-]

Definitely worth its own Discussion post, once you have min karma, which should not take long.

Comment author: beoShaffer 31 July 2012 09:52:32PM 0 points [-]

They already have it.

Comment author: robertskmiles 28 July 2012 08:23:15PM 6 points [-]

I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it.

But remember that it's not just your own rationality that benefits you.

it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma

Presume away. Karma doesn't win arguments, arguments win karma.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 29 July 2012 08:21:02PM 0 points [-]

But remember that it's not just your own rationality that benefits you.

Are you saying that improving epistemic rationality is important because it benefits others as well as myself? This is true, but there are many other forms of self-improvement that would also have knock-on effects that benefit others.

I have actually read most of the relevant sequences, epistemic rationality really isn't low-hanging fruit anymore for me, although I wish I had known about cognitive biases years ago.

Comment author: robertskmiles 30 July 2012 11:18:04AM *  1 point [-]

Are you saying that improving epistemic rationality is important because it benefits others as well as myself?

No, I'm saying that improving the epistemic rationality of others benefits everyone, including yourself. It's not just about improving our own rationality as individuals, it's about trying to improve the rationality of people-in-general - 'raising the sanity waterline'.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 31 July 2012 01:17:06PM 1 point [-]

Ok, I see what you mean now. Yes, this is often true, but again, I am trying to be less preachy (at least IRL) about rationality - if someone believes in astrology, or faith healing, or reincarnation then: (a) their beliefs probably bring them comfort (b) Trying to persuade them is often like banging my head against a brick wall (c) even the notion that there can be such a thing as a correct fact, independent of subjective mental states is very threatening to some people and I don't want to start pointless arguments

So unless they are acting irrationally in a way which harms other people, or they seem capable of having a sensible discussion, or I am drunk, I tend to leave them be.

Comment author: Swimmer963 28 July 2012 10:05:09PM *  0 points [-]

Welcome!

But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive.

Made me think of this article. Yes, you may be able, in the short run, to win friends and influence people by tricking yourself into being overconfident. But that belief is only in your head and doesn't affect the universe–thus doesn't affect the probability of Event X happening. Which means that if, realistically, X is 65% likely to happen, then you with your overconfidence, claiming that X is bound to happen, will eventually look like a fool 35% of the time, and will make it hard for yourself to leave a line of retreat.

Conclusion: in the long run, it's very good to be honest with yourself about your predictions of the future, and probably preferable to be honest with others, too, if you want to recruit their support.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 28 July 2012 11:58:47PM 3 points [-]

Hm.

So, call -C1 the social cost of reporting a .9 confidence of something that turns out false, and -C2 the social cost of reporting a .65 confidence of something that turns out false. Call C3 the benefit of reporting .9 confidence of something true, and C4 the benefit of .65 confidence.

How confident are you that that (.65C3 -.35C1) < (.65C4-.35C2)?

Comment author: Swimmer963 29 July 2012 03:42:19AM 1 point [-]

I would say I'm about 75% confident that (.65C3 -.35C1) < (.65C4-.35C2)... But one of the reasons I don't even want to play that game is that I feel I am completely unqualified to estimate probabilities about that, and most other things. I would have no idea how to go about estimating the probability of, for example, the Singularity occurring before 2050...much less how to compensate for biases in my estimate.

I think I also have somewhat of an ick reaction towards the concept of "tricking" people to get what you want, even if in a very subtle form. I just...like...being honest, and it's hard for me to tell if my arguments about honesty being better are rationalizations because I don't want being dishonest to be justifiable.

Comment author: Mass_Driver 29 July 2012 05:20:16AM 2 points [-]

The way to bridge that gap is to only volunteer predictions when you're quite confident, and otherwise stay quiet, change the subject, or murmur a polite assent. You're absolutely right that explicitly declaring a 65% confidence estimate will make you look indecisive -- but people aren't likely to notice that you make predictions less often than other people -- they'll be too focused on how when you do make predictions, you have an uncanny tendency to be correct...and also that you're pleasantly modest and demure, too.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 July 2012 07:43:04AM 0 points [-]

(nods) That makes sense.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 29 July 2012 07:46:25PM *  1 point [-]

In certain situations, such as sporting events which do not involve betting, my confidence that (.65C3 -.35C1) < (.65C4-.35C2) is at most 10%. In these situations confidence is valued far more that epistemic rationality.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 29 July 2012 07:43:10PM 3 points [-]

Excellent points, and of course it is situation dependent - if one makes erroneous predictions on archived forms of communication, e.g. these posts, then yes these predictions can come back to haunt you, but often, especially in non-archived communications, people will remember the correct predictions and forget the false ones. It should go without saying that I do not intend to be overconfident on LW - if I was going to be, then the last thing I would do is announce this intention! In a strange way, I seem to want to hold three different beliefs: 1) An accurate assessment of what will happen, for planning my own actions. 2) A confidant, stopping just short of arrogant, belief in my predictions for impressing non-rationalists. 3) An unshakeable belief in my own invincibility, so that psychosomatic effects keep me healthy.

Unfortunately, this kinda sounds like "I want to have multiple personality disorder".

Comment author: Strange7 01 August 2012 02:22:06AM 2 points [-]

If you're going to go that route, at least research it first. For example:

http://healthymultiplicity.com/

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 01 August 2012 11:34:08AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the advice, but I don't actually want to have multiple personality disorder - I was just drawing an analogy.

Comment author: wedrifid 29 July 2012 02:03:03AM 2 points [-]

Hello everyone, Like many people, I come to this site via an interest in transhumanism, although it seems unlikely to me that FAI implementing CEV can actually be designed before the singularity

Many here would agree with you. (And, for instance, consider a ~10% chance of success better than near certain extinction.)

Comment author: [deleted] 29 July 2012 02:15:37AM 0 points [-]

Many here would agree with you. (And, for instance, consider a ~10% chance of success better than near certain extinction.)

Would you say that many people here (and yourself?) believe that the probable end of our species is within the next century or two?

Comment author: Nornagest 29 July 2012 03:01:21AM 1 point [-]

The last survey reported that Less Wrongers on average believe that humanity has about a 68% chance of surviving the century without a disaster killing >90% of the species. (Median 80%, though, which might be a better measure of the community feeling than the mean in this case.) That's a lower bar than actual extinction, but also a shorter timescale, so I expect the answer to your question would be in the same ballpark.

Comment author: wedrifid 29 July 2012 03:07:12AM *  0 points [-]

Would you say that many people here (and yourself?) believe that the probable end of our species is within the next century or two?

For myself: Yes! p(extinct within 200 years) > 0.5

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 29 July 2012 07:24:38PM 0 points [-]

I agree that 10% chance of success is better than near zero, and furthermore I agree that expected utility maximization means that putting in a great deal of effort to achieve a positive outcome is wiser than saying "oh well, we're doomed anyway, might as well party hard and make the most of the time we have left". However, the question is whether, if FAI has a low probability of success, are other possibilities, e.g. tool AI a better option to pursue?

Comment author: Delta 01 August 2012 11:44:16AM 4 points [-]

Hi Guys,

I found out about this place from Methods of Rationality and have been reading the sequences for a few months now. I don't have a background in science or mathematics (just finished reading law at university) so I've yet to get to the details of Bayes but I've been very intrigued by all the sequences on cognitive bias, and this site was the trigger for me becoming interested in the mind-blowing realities of evolution and prompted me finally pulling my finger out and shifting from non-thinking agnosticm to atheism.

I'm still adjusting but I feel this site has already helped start to clean up my thinking, so thanks to everyone for making coming here such a life-changing experience.

David

Comment author: mattwise 02 August 2012 12:48:57AM 6 points [-]

Hi,

I was introduced to LW by a friend of mine but I will admit I dismissed it fairly quickly as internet philosophy. I came out to a meetup on a recent trip to visit him and I really enjoyed the caliber of people I met there. It has given me reason to come back and be impressed by this community.

I studied Math and a little bit of Philosophy in undergrad. I'm here mostly to learn, and hopefully to meet some interesting people. I enjoy a good discussion and I especially enjoy having someone change my mind but I lose interest quickly when I realize that the other party has too much ego involved to even consider changing his or her mind.

I look forward to learning from you all!

Matt

Comment author: sakranut 03 August 2012 12:49:54AM 5 points [-]

Hi everyone!

I'm 19 years old and a rising sophomore at an American university. I first came across Less Wrong five months ago, when one of my friends posted the "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" on facebook. I thought little of it, but soon afterward, when reading Leah Libresco's blog on atheism (she's since converted to catholicism), I saw a reference to Less Wrong, and figured I would check it out. I've been reading the Sequences sporadically for a few months, and just got up to date on HPMOR, so I thought I would join the community and perhaps begin posting.

Although I have little background in mathematics, cognitive science, or computer programming, I have had a long-standing, deep interest in ethics and happiness, both of which inevitably lead to an interest in epistemology. Since I began hanging around Less Wrong, my interest in logic and cognitive biases has definitely been piqued as well. Some of my other, less relevant, interests include intellectual history, music, Western classic literature, literary theory, aesthetics, economics, and political philosophy. I also enjoy the New York Giants and playing the piano.

I love debating others, but mostly debating myself - I do so constantly, but too often inconclusively. The main advantage I've found of debating others is that they help disabuse me of my own self-deceptions. Reading good literature usually serves this purpose as well.

A strong part of my identity is that I am a religious Jew. I am not a theist, but I keep a large portion of Jewish law, mostly because I am satisfied that doing so is a good use of my time. I can't remember a case when Jewish law has collided with my ethics, perhaps because so many of my ethical intuitions come from the Jewish tradition.

It amuses me that the Less Wrong community refers to itself as "rationalist," given that at one point in intellectual history, "rationalists" were those who did not believe in empiricism. Aside from that, I'm extremely excited to learn from all of you.

Comment author: Zaine 03 August 2012 01:21:21AM *  1 point [-]

It amuses me that the Less Wrong community refers to itself as "rationalist," given that at one point in intellectual history, "rationalists" were those who did not believe in empiricism.

Are you referring to Humean rationalists? Before Hume used empiricism to show how by mere empiricism one can never certainly identify the cause of an effect, empirical thought was lauded by Cartesian rationalists. Hume's objection to an overreliance on empiricism also (partially) helped galvanize the Romantic movement, bringing an end to the Enlightenment. Future individuals throughout history who considered themselves rationalists were of the Cartesian tradition, not 'all is uncertain' Humean rationalism (see Albert from Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther for one example). Those who embraced Hume's insight, though it should be mentioned that Hume himself thought that fully embracing same would be quite foolish, did not call themselves rationalists, but were divers members of myriad movements across history.

Hume's point remained an open problem until it was later considered solved by Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Welcome, by the way.

Comment author: sakranut 03 August 2012 02:14:20AM 1 point [-]

I was referring to the dispute in the 17th and 18th centuries with Hume, Berkeley, and Locke on the empiricist side, and Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza, on the rationalist Side, as described in this paper.

Out of curiosity, what is the connection between atoms and causality?

Comment author: Zaine 03 August 2012 02:32:16AM *  0 points [-]

Enlightening! Thank you for the paper.

Sorry, it was Einstein's theory of special relativity that resolved Hume's insight, not atomic theory. Basically, Hume argued that if you see a ball X hit a ball Y, and subsequently ball Y begins rolling at the same speed of ball X, all one has really experienced is the perception of ball X moving next to ball Y and the subsequent spontaneous acceleration of ball Y. Infinity out of infinity times you may experience the exact same perception whenever ball X bumps into ball Y, but in Hume's time there was no empirical way to prove that the collision of ball X into ball Y caused the effect of the latter's acceleration. With this, you can. I'm afraid I can't answer in any more depth than that, as I myself don't understand the mathematics behind it. Anyone else?

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 07:26:16AM 3 points [-]

Hume's point remained an open problem until it was later considered solved by Einstein's theory of special relativity.

What?

Comment author: Zaine 03 August 2012 11:32:18AM *  0 points [-]

I may be misremembering, but if I recall correctly with Einstein's theory of special relativity it was at the time considered finally possible to accurately and precisely predict the movements of bodies in our universe. While Newton proved what laws the universe is bound by, he never figured out how these rules operated beyond what was plainly observable. When Einstein's theory of special relativity became accepted, that ball X caused the effect of ball Y's movement became mathematically provable at such a level of precision that Hume's insight - what causes the effect of ball Y's movement is not empirically discernible - became sound no longer.

I admit the above is a bit vague, and perhaps dangerously so. If it doesn't clear up your question let me know, and I'll check over my notes when I get the chance.

Comment author: Vaniver 03 August 2012 02:49:52PM *  1 point [-]

I may be misremembering, but if I recall correctly with Einstein's theory of special relativity it finally became possible to accurately and precisely predict the movements of bodies in our universe.

This is incorrect. MHD is correct about the right response to "all is uncertain," which is "right, but there are shades of uncertainty from 0 to 1, and we can measure them."

Comment author: Zaine 03 August 2012 03:11:44PM *  0 points [-]

Thank you, both of you. I changed the text to reflect only STR's historical significance in regard to Hume's insight.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 05:44:47PM 0 points [-]

(I think it was general relativity, not special relativity.) I can see where whoever said that is coming from, but I'm not sure I 100% agree. (I will elaborate on this when I have more time.)

Comment author: Zaine 03 August 2012 06:17:02PM *  0 points [-]

(I think it was general relativity, not special relativity.)

Special relativity was formalised around ten years earlier than general relativity (around 1905), which better fits in with my mental timeline of the fin de siecle.

I can see where whoever said that is coming from[...]

Whoever asserted that Einstein's theory had resolved Hume's insight? or whoever said that, at the time, the educated generally considered Einstein's theory to have resolved Hume's insight? If the former, I think it was more a widespread idea that the majority of the educated shared, rather than one person's assertion.

Regardless of to whom you were referring, I look forward to your elaboration!

Comment author: shminux 03 August 2012 06:40:28PM 0 points [-]

I'm not an expert in philosophy, but if we are talking physics, relativity, special or general, did not do anything of the sort you claim: "Einstein's theory of special relativity it was at the time considered finally possible to accurately and precisely predict the movements of bodies in our universe." If anything, the Newtonian mechanics had a better claim at determinism, at least until 19th century, when it became clear than electromagnetism comes with a host of paradoxes, not cleared up until both SR and QM were developed. Of course, this immediately caused more trouble than it solved, and I recall no serious physicist who claimed that it was " finally possible to accurately and precisely predict the movements of bodies", given that QM is inherently non-deterministic, SR showing that Newtonian gravity is incomplete. and GR was not shown to be well-posed until much later.

Comment author: Zaine 03 August 2012 08:09:43PM 0 points [-]

Thank you for your input. I also do not know of any serious physicist who asserted that causality had been finally and definitively solved by SR; from what I was taught, it was as I said more a widespread idea that the majority of the educated shared, rather than one person's assertion.

Indeed, Hume's insight is more of a philosophical problem than a mathematical one. Hume showed that empiricism alone could never determine causality. Einstein's STR showed that causality can be determined empirically when aided by maths, a tool of the empiricist. It can be argued that STR does not definitively prove causality itself (perhaps very rightly so - again, I am not aware), however the salient point is that STR gave rise to the conception that Hume's insight had finally been resolved. To be clear, in order to resolve Hume's insight one only needed to demonstrate that through empiricism it is possible to establish causality.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 10:49:13PM *  1 point [-]

Special relativity was formalised around ten years earlier than general relativity (around 1905), which better fits in with my mental timeline of the fin de siecle.

I can't see what special relativity would have to do with Hume. It just extended the principle of relativity, which was already introduced by Galileo, to the propagation of light at a finite speed, though with all kinds of counter-intuitive results such as the relativity of simultaneity. By itself, it still doesn't predict (say) gravitation. (It does predict conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum if you assume space-time is homogeneous and isotropic and use Noether's theorem, but so does Galilean relativity for that matter.)

On the other hand, general relativity, from a small number of very simple assumptions, predicts quite a lot of things (pretty much any non-quantum phenomenon which had observed back then except electromagnetism). Indeed Einstein said he was completely certain his theory would prove to be true before it was even tested. EDIT: you actually need more data than I remembered to get to GR: see http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/757x

(Wow, now that I'm trying to explain that, I realize that the difference between SR and GR in these respects are nowhere near as important as I was thinking.)

Anyway, there's still no logical reason why those very simple assumptions have to be true; you still need experience to tell you they are.

The comments to http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/ go into more detail about this.

If the former, I think it was more a widespread idea that the majority of the educated shared, rather than one person's assertion.

Can you give me some pointers? I can't recall ever hearing about that before.

Comment author: Zaine 04 August 2012 12:19:29AM *  0 points [-]

Thank you for the review! It makes a lot in the two wikipedia articles on special and general relativity easier to digest.

Can you give me some pointers? I can't recall ever hearing about that before.

I intend on thoroughly going over my notes this weekend so I can separate historical fact from interpretation, which are currently grouped together in my memory. I'll be able to do your response justice then.

Comment author: iDante 03 August 2012 06:46:12PM 0 points [-]

Newton's theory of gravitation is a very close approximation to Einstein's general relativity, but it is measurably different in some cases (precession of Mercury, gravitational lensing, and more). Einstein showed that gravity can be neatly explained by the curvature of spacetime, that mass distorts the "fabric" of space (I use quotes because that's not the mathematical term for it, but it conjures a nice image that isn't too far off of reality). Objects move in straight lines along curved spacetime, but to us it looks like they go in loops around stars and such.

Special relativity has to do with the relation of space and time for objects sufficiently far away from each other that gravity doesn't affect them. Causality is enforced by this theory since nothing can go faster than light, and so all spacetime intervals we run into are time-like (That's just a fancy way of saying we only see wot's in our light cone).

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 02:41:19PM 3 points [-]

The notion of Cause and Effect was captured mathematically, statistically and succinctly by Judea Pearl, empiricism is defined by Bayes Theorem.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 01:30:14PM 7 points [-]

Hi everyone,

I'm Leisha. I originally came across this site quite a while ago when I read the Explain/Worship/Ignore analogy here. I was looking for insight into my own cognitive processes; to skip the unimportant details, I ended up reading a whole lot about the concept of infinity once I realized that contemplating the idea gave me the same feeling of Worship that religion used to. It still does, to some extent, but at least I'm better-informed and can Explain the sheer scale of what I'm thinking of a little better.

I didn't return here until yesterday, when I was researching the concept of rational thought (by way of cognitive processing, Ayn Rand, and Vulcans!) For background, I'm a Myers-Briggs F-type (INFJ) who has come to realize that while emotion has its value, it's certainly not to be relied upon for making sound judgements. What I'm looking to do, essentially, is to repair the faulty processes within my own mind. I've spent a lot of time reaching invalid conclusions because the premises I have been working from were wrong; the original input I was given (before I was of an age to think critically) was incorrect. I'm tracing back the origin of a lot of the aliefs I have, only to find that they're based on values I no longer hold to be important. My value-sets need tweaking.

Unlike with a computer, though, with a mind you can't just delete what you need to and start over. Those detrimental thought-processes need to be overwritten with something that works better. That's why I'm here, essentially, as a complement to my inner work. I'm here to read about a more rational way of thinking, to try out ideas, to compare and to analyze. I intend to work through the Sequences, a little at a time.

I expect to read much more than I comment. If I assess myself honestly and fairly, then I'm not an unintelligent person, but I am (particularly by comparison with the subset represented at this website!) uneducated, and so a great deal of the math and science will likely be beyond my comprehension at this point. However, I thought I'd post here to introduce myself anyway, and to say what a valuable resource this site looks to be. I look forward to reading more.

Other trivia: I'm female, which I know puts me in the minority here. I enjoy science fiction and am working on some original pieces of my own. I'm interested in psychology, anthropology and the "weirder" parts of physics. I like to think about the very large and very small ends of the scale, and contemplate the big questions about who we are, how we got here and where we're going. I'm a libertarian and a feminist, and I drink tea.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 August 2012 02:33:29PM 1 point [-]

Hmm... Explain/worship/ignore is one of the first articles I remember reading too.

I wish you the warmest welcome.

Make sure to at least read the Core Sequences (Map and Territory, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, Reductionism), as there is a tendency in discussion on this site to be rash against debaters who have not familiarized themselves with the basics.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 August 2012 06:01:57AM 0 points [-]

It's a good article!

Thank you for the kind welcome and for the advice. I don't intend to jump into discussion without having done the relevant reading (and acquired at least a small understanding of community norms) so hopefully I'll avoid too many mistakes. I'm working through Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions now, and what strikes me is how much of it I knew, in a sense, already, but never could have put forward in such a coherent and cohesive way.

So far, what I've read confirms my worldview. Being wary of confirmation bias and other such fun things, I'll be curious to see how I react when I read an article here that challenges it, as I'm near-certain will happen in due course. (And even typing that makes me wonder what exactly I mean by I there in each case, but that's off-topic for this thread)

Comment author: aaronsw 04 August 2012 09:56:50AM *  31 points [-]

I'm Aaron Swartz. I used to work in software (including as a cofounder of Reddit, whose software that powers this site) and now I work in politics. I'm interested in maximizing positive impact, so I follow GiveWell carefully. I've always enjoyed the rationality improvement stuff here, but I tend to find the lukeprog-style self-improvement stuff much more valuable. I've been following Eliezer's writing since before even the OvercomingBias days, I believe, but have recently started following LW much more carefully after a couple friends mentioned it to me in close succession.

I found myself wanting to post but don't have any karma, so I thought I'd start by introducing myself.

I've been thinking on-and-off about starting a LessWrong spinoff around the self-improvement stuff (current name proposal: LessWeak). Is anyone else interested in that sort of thing? It'd be a bit like the Akrasia Tactics Review, but applied to more topics.

Comment author: Emile 04 August 2012 01:23:27PM 2 points [-]

Welcome to LessWrong!

Apparently I used to comment on your blog back in 2004 - my, how time flies!

Comment author: ata 04 August 2012 11:21:09PM 3 points [-]

Yay, it is you!

(I've followed your blog and your various other deeds on-and-off since 2002-2003ish and have always been a fan; good to have you here.)