If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.
Conscientiousness is fairly rigid; it is, however, about as hereditable as IQ or less, from the 2 studies I have on hand:
I have kept an eye out for Conscientiousness interventions for the past 2 or 3 years, searched on occasion, and have seen nothing ever suggested except possibly stimulants like amphetamines. Possible instances like military experience generally turn out to be selection effects. As well, the Duckworth paper linked in the sibling comment, extensively discusses the numerous correlates and versions of Conscientiousness before adulthood stretching all the way back to early infancy.
So, as much as I'd like there to be some easy environmental intervention to boost my own Conscientiousness, I haven't found any.
I was leafing through a copy of Marc Hauser's Moral Minds off a friend's bookshelf at the weekend, and it made me realise why I'd gone off reading books lately: the original content is too hard to find amongst the material I'm already familiar with.
I don't want to read another introduction to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. I don't need another primer on ev-psych. I'm not interested in having the Trolley Problem explained to me again. What I would like is a concise breakdown of the core arguments, linking to other sources to explain things I might not already be familiar with.
This would end up looking a little like a Wikipedia article, or more to the point, a Less Wrong post. We have our fair share of book reviews, but they tend to select for books in which there's value in reading the whole thing, rather than those which have some novel content amongst mostly familiar territory, (what I took away from the recent chapter-by-chapter review of Causality was that I should totally read the book).
Is anyone else in this boat? Could it be worth organising some sort of book review/summarisation group?
Aye. I'd be keen to join some sort of book club for smart people, where you could see others' bookshelves a la LibraryThing, but on top of that also have very short reviews letting you know what to expect from each book.
Most books tend to fall into two broad categories: things you already mostly know, and things you care little about. The rare high-value book is one that has just enough connection to what you already know, and makes you care about a whole new domain. (An exceptional book, like GEB, will make you care about many new domains at once.)
One recently read book that was very high value because it covered ground that was totally new to me: Abbott's System of Professions. Typically books in the sociology of professions had focused on the "trappings", professional societies, regulation and so on. Abbott pointed out that professions were the emergent result of a complex system of jurisdictional disputes, and the only way you can understand a profession is by looking at the others that compete with it for dominion over its topics. Abbot's analysis is so wide-ranging that it connects in several places with topics I care about; for instance when he analyzes "the construction of the 'personal problems' jurisdiction", a tug-of-war between the clergy, the (early) "neurologists", and psychiatry; or when he sketches the early history of the information professions - I hadn't realized that librarians were among the first such.
It recently occurred to me that there is a near-example of (hostile) acausal interaction in popular culture. In the second Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie, he and Professor Moriarty have an entire "conversation" without speaking aloud, each simulating the other so they can decide what to do in their fight. It's rendered in a very comprehensible way, too, considering how weird a concept acausal interaction is. (It's not a perfect example since they do interact, but the conversation itself happens entirely in simulation.)
How do a lot of you guys read so many things so quickly and retain all the knowledge? This seems like perhaps THE MOST VALUABLE skill I could learn, and I can't find ANY good resources on it!
Via Reddit: Morality shifting in the context of intergroup violence.
In gist, if your ingroup does things that harm others, you are likely to subsequently shift your moral attitudes away from principles that tell you that harming others is wrong, and towards principles that value loyalty and obedience.
A quote from near the end:
Although we conceive of morality shifting as motivated by the need to protect one’s identity, and thus as a beneficial mechanism to the individual, we expect it to have much more negative consequences for intergroup relations and for society at large. It can give more leeway in the mistreatment of outgroup members, or lead to their exclusion from the scope of justice (Opotow, 1990), reducing the chance of seeing such mistreatment as violating principles of harm and fairness. Morality shifting can thus be seen as a mechanism that allows people to make a virtue of evil (see Reicher, Haslam, & Rath, 2008). Once the shift occurs, further actions are even more likely to be interpreted from a loyalty/authority perspective rather than from a harm/fairness perspective.
This seems like it may be part of the cult attractor; and is also a good reason to keep your i...
Mencius Moldbug: How to Reboot the US Government
New short talk by Moldbug! :D
Is your government infected with viruses, worms, malware and spyware? Do you keep calling tech support but end up playing phone tag? Did your brother-in-law who's supposedly this big expert come over last year to fix it, but only make it worse? Do you feel frustrated, confused, apathetic and annoyed? Does your stomach cramp up every time you hear the word "change"?
Neighbor, we have just the red pill for you. Don't ask what's in it. You don't want to know. Here's a glass of water - don't think, just swallow.
The fact that government isn't as good as it says it is, or that progressive ideas aren't fully consistent doesn't mean that either are fully dispensable, nor is it particularly clear that people who want to eliminate government have to stop any minor involvement they have (like voting) in order to achieve that goal.
He's reminding me of Michael Vassar's observation that geeks want explicit language in a way that most people don't. The fact that what government is and does isn't a good match for the way government is usually described isn't a good reason for eliminating government.
His point that people generally don't know anything about governing is salient, but does he have any experience running something more challenging than a solo blog?
To my mind, democracy still has the advantage that it makes it clear to politicians that there's a limit to how badly they can get away with treating the public.
He cheats a little on the the communists vs. Nazis numbers-- 6 million is just the Jews murdered by Nazis. Another five or six million Roma, homosexuals, criminals, etc. were killed in the death camps, and some 25 million (very rough estimate) were killed as a result of the Nazi side o...
What do people think about Jaynes' (the other one) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ?
I just read it, and while I enjoyed the book, I'm rather sceptical about the book's main point -- that consciousness (in the way the book describes) only arrived ~ 1000 BCE. The evidence provided by the Jaynes Society doesn't really convince me either.
Jaynes is not a crackpot in the Von Däniken/Hancock school, but I found his evidence lacking for his extraordinary claim. What do you think?
I'm having a pretty intense reaction to reading certain articles and could use some support or a solution:
Here's what I read and my reactions:
Feynman's Cargo Cult Science (Which is about how a lot of scientific studies are done badly, often due to researchers not being allowed to do the research correctly.)
The PLOS Medicine article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
An article about how psychologists aren't usually using the treatments most supported by science which links to a document that contains a horrifying account:
...&q
Probabilistic Voting
4chan apparently faked bieber having cancer and got some fans to cut their hair off.
On 4chan, I just saw someone say "We rolled to see which celebrity's fans we'd troll into thinking said celebrity had cancer. One thing lead to another."
That got me thinking about the whole "rolling" thing. If you're not familiar, on 4chan every post has a sequence number. The /b/ board is fast enough that you can't really predict the numbers. Having an authoritative common-knowledge source of randomness available for literally zero e...
Related to: Denying the Cat: A Wonderful Chesterton Quote
I attribute [god becaming BFF rather than The Law] to the material comfort of modern existence, it encourages metaphysical optimism that wasn't tenable when everyone was regularly confronted with extreme suffering
Seems plausible. We still do have extreme suffering thought, we just don't see it in our day to day lives. Aguably we are worse people from a virtue ethics perspective.
I don't think we have good reasons for metaphysical optimism regardless of that issue however. My argument against it is...
Steven_Bukal writes:
I launched a project this week to replace [physical books] with digital versions which is moving at a decent rate of ten shelves a day.
Some questions, for anyone who uses digital books a lot: what readers -- both hardware and software -- do you recommend, and why? What determines whether you obtain a book on paper or as bits? Do you find the usability problems I list below?
I don't have an e-reader, although I do have computers and the Mac Kindle application. But I've never bought an e-book, because the convenience of a book that tak...
A question came up in response to EY's recent sequence posts that I'd like someone to take a shot at: EY seems to me at least to be saying that the universe is a 'fabric of causal relations' or is 'made of cause and effect' or something like that.
He's also said that probability (and so causal relations, given how he understands them) are 'subjectively objective'.
The first claim implies that casual relations are fundamental to the universe, the second implies that they're ways in which limited observers and agents deal with what is fundamental. As such, the two claims seem to be inconsistent. What's going on here?
Three Words: Little Mermaid Fanfiction.
Featuring Rationalist!Feminist!Determinator!Ariel, fighting against both the machinations of an Ursula with a massively increased power level (think Cthulhu's little sister) and her violent and patriarchal father, and the society that he defends.
I would like to write this, but I'm not confident that I've got the skills or knowledge to do so (specifically I need to read a lot more on feminism, also I've never written fanfiction before). Please PM me any ideas about anything that you think might improve the story, wheth...
99 clever tips to make your life easier
I'm hoping that these will not just be useful in themselves, but also inspire a more ingenious attitude.
Is there a word for a person, or an agent, that self-modifies to find something more painful, in order to change someone else's incentives, as described here? Obviously there are some choice phrases we might like to use about such a person, but most of them - eg "moral blackmail" - seem insufficiently precise. Is there a term that captures specifically this, and not other behaviour we don't like? If not, what might be a good, specific term?
Winter tips for ignorant southerners? I've moved north (Wisconsin), and I think about the imminent winter every so often, with little real knowledge of what to do other than the perennial advice of dressing in layers, getting all-weather tires, and driving slowly.
Please, let me know winter life hacks/survival tips/things a Texan would not know about cold weather.
Do I need snow shoes? Spikes?
Can I expect to safely walk on the sidewalk in the winter without slipping and hurting my everything?
Do I need more/better coats than what I have now? (A duster...
Can anyone recommend a short explanation of the idea of Hegelian dialectic that doesn't make me want to self-immolate?
More generally, what, if anything is worth studying/salvaging from Hegel?
One of the snarky comments on Edward Feser's blog put words to my general feeling about him:
There was never any pretense that it was about "nothingness" in the sense Feser would like it have been. So why does he pretend that it was? He's on a divine mission to uncover straw men.
(Naturally the locals call this commenter an atheist troll and ask him to "do the reading" -- no doubt "read the Sequences" in the local dialect -- but he retorts, "It makes no difference to you whether I do the reading or not. You complain eit...
I've noticed that reading old texts with alien mindsets is an instant idea generator for fantasy settings. (Seriously, I don't get I've never heard anyone suggest the notion of "fantasy writers should read old texts" before. They're just filled with peculiar ideas about the world that one can import directly to a fantasy setting.) Would you happen to have any recommendations on texts that would be particularly suitable for this?
hello, all. first post around here =^.^= I've been working my way through the core sequences, slowly but surely, and I ran into a question I couldn't solve on my own. please note that this question is probably the stupidest in the universe.
what is the difference between the Bayesian and Frequentist points of view?
let me clarify: in Eli Yudkowsky's explanation of Bayes' theorem, he presented an iconic problem:
..."1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammogra
The bayesian/frequentist distinction can cover three different things that may occasionally be mixed up:
The core philosophical disagreement (the "proper" one) about whether probabilities an agent's knowledge / uncertainty about the world, or whether they represent frequencies of some event. For example, a frequentist in this sense might say that it's meaningless to talk about the probability that the millionth binary digit of pi is even or odd. I think frequentist epistemology is mostly discredited, but that it used to be dominant.
There are a bunch of hodge-podge statistical methods and tests (like p-values); and later on attempts to unify everything in terms of bayesian methods. People used to the "old" methods may not particularly call themselves "frequentists" or care that much about such labels; those pushing for the new (better) methods are the ones stressing the distinction (hunting down the sin of frequentism), sometimes to the annoyance of the rest.
Thinking in probabilities versus thinking in frequencies (80 women out of a hundred); the human brain works better when a problem is presented in terms of frequencies
Decision theory and selfish donating
Suppose an author I like says she'll write a new work if she gets enough donations. Under CDT, it's clear to me that it can't make sense for me to donate - my donation can't increase the probability of me reading the book enough to pay for the cost, and there are much more efficient ways for me to give altruistically. What do other decision theories have to say about this?
Does anyone have any good brief ways of describing LW to outsiders that have been effective? This comes up quite a bit for me with friends and family.
I'm planning on doing a presentation on cognitive biases and/or behavioral economics (Kahneman et al) in front of a group of university students (20-30 people). I want to start with a short experiment / demonstration (or two) that will demonstrate to the students that they are, in fact, subject to some bias or failure in decision making. I'm looking for suggestion on what experiment I can perform within 30 minutes (can be longer if it's an interesting and engaging task, e.g. a game), the important thing is that the thing being demonstrated has to be releva...
Not too long ago I wanted to write a poem to express a poem to express a certain emotion, defiance toward death, but it only occurred to me recently that it might be LW appropriate. I took a somewhat different path than "do not go gentle..." but you can judge yourselves how it went. Posted in the open thread as I feel it is relatively open to random stuff like this. (Formatting screwy because I'm not used to the format here yet)
Defiance
I am afraid
All about me the lights blink out
Seeing their fate I’m filled with fear
I just finished the CMU OLI Probability & Statistics course, which I started... somewhere back in March or June. I think, overall, it's a pretty good statistics course. What I like best about it is that it is heavy about quizzes and exercises with real-world datasets, so I learned a bit more about R as well as learning the basics.
It covers from a fairly practical standpoint: data graphing, stuff like means or medians or distributions, the rules of probability, conditional probability, probability trees, Bayes's theorem, binomials and the normal distri...
Equality and natalism
Recently read an article by Steve Sailer:
...If intellectuals could afford to have a lot of children, we might live in a world where they could sell enough heavyweight books to afford to have a lot of children. But we don’t.
So what should policy be?
In a recent article in the Boston Review, Heckman began, “The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today,” then went on to endorse the usual expensive “interventions” in poor families. Should we perhaps instead strive for a country with fewer accidental births?
All
Does anybody have ideas for potential applications of lucid dreaming? It's been discussed a bit here and here before.
Aside from seemingly being a very good source of fun, I'm trying to think of other ways to use lucid dreaming.
For instance, mental visualization/rehearsal has been shown to be effective at improving ability in various skills, so it seems likely that rehearsal during lucid dreams should have similar (and possibly greater) benefits, though I don't know of any studies looking into this.
Even if you've never lucid dreamed yourself, I'd appreciate...
Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance
Gotta get working on those pressurized oxygen filled buildings
I was recently reading an outraged discussion of the warnings New York City had gotten about the risk of flooding, and I asked what less currently obvious infrastructure threats were being ignored. I didn't get much discussion there, so I'm asking here.
If you've got some spare time to blow, there's always yet another interpretation of quantum mechanics up on the arXiv.
Or perhaps you'd rather something more classical? How about a correspondence theorem between QM and thermodynamics?
Cute description of magnetic fields &c. I did not previously know what the hell a field was, and now I might.
My [uninformed] interpretation of mathematics is that it is an abstraction which does exist in this world, which we have observed like we might observe gravity. We then go on to infer things about these abstract concepts using proofs.
So we would observe numbers in many places in nature, from which we would make a model of numbers (which would be an abstract model of all the things which we have observed following the rules of numbers), and from our model of numbers we could infer properties of numbers (much like we can infer things about a falling ball fro...
Another year another talented academic having to defend themselves for doing science. Read the article, then read the blog and follow the links. I wasn't thrilled by what professor HoSang was trying to do to professor Hsu but then this paragraph in particular got me upset:
Then Assistant Professor HoSang once publicly stated (during a social science seminar at Oregon I attended) that he would "do everything in his power" to oppose another (Sociology) faculty member's effort to explain recent genetic results to the broader field. I found this stat...
Ah another year another talented academic having to defend themselves for doing science. Read the article, then read the blog and follow the links. I wasn't thrilled by what professor HoSang was trying to do to professor Hsu but then this paragraph in particular got me upset:
Then Assistant Professor HoSang once publicly stated (during a social science seminar at Oregon I attended) that he would "do everything in his power" to oppose another (Sociology) faculty member's effort to explain recent genetic results to the broader field. I found this s...
How to comment when I arrive late at a post with many comments?
I usually only read LW every day or two. I'm also in the GMT+2 timezone, so US people mostly comment while I'm asleep. So when I reach an interesting post, like this one just now, it already has many comments. I really want to reply to some of them and to the post itself, but first I need to read all of the comments and internalize everything that has been said already, or I risk repeating what others have already pointed out. For a post with hundreds of comments, this is a lot of work.
I would welcome any tips for being better, or more efficient, at this.
(I'm testing a possible bug with this comment. Please don't reply, so that I'll be able to remove it afterwards.)
(I'm testing a possible bug with this comment. Please don't reply, so that I'll be able to remove it afterwards.)
Has someone been karmassinating me? I'm pretty sure the karma scores of almost all comments of mine from 22 October 2012 09:15:59AM to 24 October 2012 04:54:24PM are lower than they used to be. (What is the proper thing to do when one notices something like this, BTW? I'm not sure it's posting in the open thread, but I can't think of anything else.)
I've come up with a litany that would be to instrumental rationality what the Litany of Tarski is to epistemic rationality, expressing the sentiment in "Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality":
If I would be better off taking both boxes,
I desire to choose to take both boxes;
If I would be better off taking only box B,
I desire to choose to take only box B;
Let me not become attached to decision I may not want.
Big hypothetical question. Context: I'm in an Internet argument with someone who won't take my word for the physics; he challenged me to find someone else who would say the same thing.
http://www.panacearesearch.com/about/
Personalized medicine is back again. I can't tell whether the number of incarnations is a bad sign or if Jaan Tallinn being in on it is a powerful good sign.
https://sites.google.com/site/medicineispersonal2/our-company/our-staff
Does anyone know of an online resource (or book) that goes through typical mental illnesses or neurological patterns that lead people to believe they've been possessed by demons? Google is swamped with religious blogs, and my google-fu is failing to cut through. Context: Somebody said (paraphrase) here's a youtube video of a guy acting kinda demonic, then everybody prays and he gets better. What is the "atheist" explanation? So I went around looking and didn't have much luck, and now I am really curious. I'm assuming that even if some are "fake," some people actually believe they are possessed. Also, yes, I know trying to convince a believer is probably a lost cause, but I'm curious for my own sake now.
In the new sequence Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners EY has made use of exercise questions / statements intended to be pondered prior to continuing. He has labeled these "koans" but is open to suggestions for a better word, as a koan means something a bit more specific than that to Zen people. Any ideas? Here are the "koans" from this sequence in order of appearance:
...If the above is true, aren't the postmodernists right? Isn't all this talk of 'truth' just an attempt to assert the privilege of your
Does the LessWrong community have a consensus on the subject of moral accountability, to the same extent that it has a consensus on things like free will and reductionism? If so, what is that consensus?
My opinion on the subject is, essentially: it's irrational to think people are morally culpable for their actions because their behavior is completely contingent upon their neurochemistry, which they have no control over. You can't blame a psychopath for having the specific cognitive makeup that made him a psychopath. Also, things outside of his control such...
In a more general effort to improve my health, or at least slowing its deterioration, I am thinking about constructing a hybrid standing desk. Now I do not have enough money to afford an actual convertible standing desk and I would very much like the convertible part. So I am thinking about a wall mount for my monitor or maybe even better some similar kind of adjustable mount that allows the necessary range of height to switch between sitting and standing. The problem then is still the keyboard. I already have a wireless keyboard, so switching it would not be a problem, but on what would I put it?
Any ideas and opinions?
An amusing thought occurred to me while reading HPMOR. Harry Potter may already be able to rule the world in chapter 6 by doing the following:
If you were married, would you rather: [pollid:118]
It would be great if you'd share your reasoning in the comments.
If you were married, would you rather:
Is all else equal? In particular, do I have to do any more work to earn the $80k than the $40k?
I'm having a pretty intense reaction to reading certain articles and could use some support or a solution:
Here's what I read and my reactions:
Feynman's Cargo Cult Science (Which is about how a lot of scientific studies are done badly, often due to researchers not being allowed to do the research correctly.)
The PLOS Medicine article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
An article about how psychologists aren't usually using the treatments most supported by science which links to a document that contains a horrifying account:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/inpress/baker.pdf
I'm having a variety of reactions:
What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance... or any number of other professions) if we can't even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge? How do you find meaning, LessWrong?
Thank goodness I found this place. I am in love with the glimmers of sanity I see here. Before I found LessWrong I was just kind of... "WTF humanity is a mess." Now it's more like "WTF humanity is a mess but at least there's a group of people trying not to be." If anyone is up to describing this wonderful and horrible feeling in their own words, I could really use to feel related to about this.
Do you know of a website where one can look up a piece of research to see what flaws it has? Is one planned? I need this because it would take a very long time for me to read enough on each relevant topic to discover whether a piece of research I want to use is flawed or not. For instance, Feynman explained about how lots of studies have been done with mazes and rats, but people didn't seem to realize that the rats were using methods to find the food that were unexpected and all sorts of stuff has to be controlled for ranging from the scent of food to the type of flooring in the maze. If you don't know that all of these things need to be controlled for, you won't know that the vast majority of studies done on putting rats into mazes are useless. It's simply not realistic to expect ourselves to be able to single handedly give every single study we read a thorough enough review to detect all the flaws. I love research, but I now feel that it's futile. Does anyone know a solution? I know that peer reviewed journals are supposed to address this type of problem, but I don't see the online studies that I find being rated or marked as flawed in an obvious way.
http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7514/433
("Most published research findings are false... including this one.") ("I heard you like publication bias")