(This is the fifth incarnation of the welcome thread; once a post gets over 500 comments, it stops showing them all by default, so we make a new one. Besides, a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves.)
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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.)
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* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.
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Comments (1750)
Hello, Less Wrong world. (Hi, ibidem.)
I'm pretty new here. I heard about this site a few months ago and now I've read a few sequences, many posts, and all of HP:MoR.
About a week ago I created an account and introduced myself on the Open Thread along with a difficult question. Some people answered my question helpfully and honestly, but most of them mostly just wanted to argue. The discussion, which now includes over two hundred comments, was very interesting, but at the end it appeared we just disagreed about a lot of things.
It began to be clear that I don't fully accept some important tenets of the thinking on this site—I warned I might fundamentally disagree—but a few community members became upset and decided to make me feel unwelcome on the site. My Karma dropped from 6 (+13, -7) to -25 in just a couple hours, and someone actually came out and told me I'd better leave the site for good. (Don't let this person's status influence your opinion of the appropriateness of such a comment, in either direction.)
Don't worry, I'm not offended. I knew there might be a bit of backlash (though one can always hope not, because there doesn't have to be) and I'm certainly not going to be scared away by one openly hostile user.
Now, before everyone reads the comments and takes sides because of the nature of the issue, I'd like to think about how and why this all happened. I have several different ways of thinking about it ("hypotheses"):
The easy justification for those opposing me is to blame my discourse: my opinions are not a problem as long as I present them reasonably. However, I have consistently been "incoherent" etc. and that's why I got downvoted. Never mind that I managed to keep up hundreds of comments' worth of intelligent discussion in the meantime.
The "contrarian" hypothesis: I am a troll. I never had anything helpful or constructive to say, and in fact everyone who participated in my discussion (e.g. shminux, TheOtherDave, Qiaochu_Yuan) ought to be downvoted for engaging with me.
The "enforcer" hypothesis: I came in here as a newbie, unaware that actually substantive disagreement is highly discouraged. The experienced community members were just trying to tell me that, and decided that being militant and aggressive would be the best way to do so.
The "militant atheist" hypothesis: my opinions are mostly fine, but I managed to really touch a nerve with a few people, who started unnecessarily attacking me (calling me irrational) and making the entire LW community look unreasonable and intolerant.
The "martyr" hypothesis: The LW community as a whole is not open to alternate ways of thinking, and can't even say so honestly. They should have been nicer to me.
What do you think? Which of these are most accurate? Other explanations?
Here is a link to my original comment.
These are the most honest and helpful responses I received,
and this is the most hostile one.
My generally impression has been—trying not to offend anyone—that the thinking here is sometimes pretty rigid.
I have found that there is a general consensus here that belief in God (and even a possibility that there could be a God) is fundamentally incompatible with fully rational thinking. (Though people have been reluctant to admit it because I personally think it's unhealthy and reflects poorly on the site.)
But in any case, I've enjoyed the discussion and I'd guess that some other people have too. I'm definitely not going to leave as some have tried to coerce me to do; I like the way of thinking on this site, and it's the best place I know of to find smart people who are willing to talk about things like this. I'll keep reading at the very least.
I'm still undecided as to what I think generally of the people here.
Yours truly,
ibid.
(Oh, and I'm a Mormon. And intend to remain that way in the near future.)
The site culture treats serious adherence to supernatural beliefs associated with a religion as a disease. First it will try to cure you. If that doesn't seem to be working, it will start quarantining you.
I think it's a rather uncharitable assessment of the situation, though it's possible some people do feel that way.
Being wrong is not the same thing as being a disease.
I started responding to you, but then I decided I wanted you to remain religious. For the benefit of others, here's why. (Also note that this guy is Mormon, and as far as I can tell, Mormonism is pretty great as religions go.)
When your comments get downvoted, respond by refraining from making similar comments in the future and/or abandoning the topic (this is a simple heuristics whose implementation doesn't require figuring out the reasons for downvoting). Given the current trend, if that doesn't happen, in a while your future comments will start getting banned. (You are currently at minus 128, 17% positive. This reflects the judgment of many users.)
Excuse me, but I watched my Karma drop a hundred points in three minutes. Look me in the eye and tell me that's the coincidental result of "the judgment of many users." Even if I were a brilliant, manipulative troll, I doubt I could get to -128 without someone deliberately and systematically doing so.
You essentially accused the community of being ashamed of being atheist when you said:
We aren't ashamed. As Jack said to you in a parallel comment, we generally think the question is a solved problem. We aren't interested in having the same basic conversation over and over again.
Accusing us of being ashamed of the position because we don't throw our atheism in your face makes it hard to interpret the rest of your comments as saying anything beyond repeating the basic apologetics. And we've heard the basic apologetics a million times.
Once the lurkers think you aren't interesting, they'll downvote - and there are WAY more lurkers than commenters. Given that, your karma loss isn't all that surprising.
Possible, but given that all your comments are on only a small number of threads and arguing for the same basic points, it is also plausible that someone just went through those threads an downvoted most of your comments while upvoting others. I for example got about +20 karma from what as far as I can tell is primarily upvotes on my replies to you.
Someone has probably just discovered your work and found it systematically wanting. By "many users" I mean that many of the more recent comments are at minus 2-3 and there are only a few upvotes, so other people don't generally disagree.
FWIW, I neither upvoted nor downvoted your posts; I think they are typical for a newcomer to the community. However, I must admit that your closing line comes across as being very poorly thought out:
This makes it sound like your Mormonism is a foregone conclusion, and that you're going to disregard whatever evidence or argumentation comes along, unless it is compatible with Mormonism. That is not a very rational way of thinking. Then again, that's just what your closing statement sounds like, IMO; you probably did not mean it that way.
Just as I've been told repeatedly that your atheism is a foregone conclusion.
If you want to raise my openness to the possibility of a god-level power, then provide me with evidence of consistent, accurate, specific prophecies made hundreds of years in advance of the events. Or provide me of evidence of multiple strong rationalists who are also religious and claim that their religion is based on assessment of the evidence/available arguments.
My atheism isn't a foregone conclusion. It's simply that no-one's ever seriously challenged it and at this point I've heard so many bad arguments that people need to come up with evidence before I'm prepared to take them seriously. But you could totally change my mind, if you had the right things.
I suspect what people mean when they say their atheism is a settled question or whatever is that they don't have time to listen to yet another bad argument for theism. That you need some evidence before they're prepared to take you seriously. Which seems quite reasonable.
Can you point to where you've been told that?
What I think most of us would agree on, and what it seems to me that people here have told you, is that they consider atheism to be a settled question, which is not at all the same thing.
Of course, that's to be expected for a community that defines itself as rationalist. There are ways of thinking that are more accurate than others, that, to put it inexactly, produce truth. It's not just a "Think however you like and it will produce truth," kind of game.
The obsession that some people have with being open minded and considering all ways of thinking and associated ideas equally is, I suspect, unsustainable for anyone who has even the barest sliver of intellectual honesty. I don't consider it laudable at all. That's not to say they have to be a total arse about it, but I think at best you can hope that they ignore you or lie to you.
I agree with Jack here, but I'm going to add the piece of advice that used to be very common for newcomers here, although it's dropped off over time as people called attention to the magnitude of the endeavor, and suggest that you finish reading the sequences before trying to engage in further religious debate here.
Eliezer wrote them in order to bring potential members of this community up to speed so that when we discuss matters, we could do it with a common background, so that everyone is on the same page and we can work out interesting disagreements without rehashing the same points over and over again. We don't all agree with all the contents of every article in the sequences, but they do contain a lot of core ideas that you have to understand to make sense of the things we think here. Reading them should help give you some idea, not just what we believe, but why we think that it makes more sense to believe those things than the alternatives.
The "rigidity" which you detect is not a product of particular closedmindedness, but rather a deliberate discarding of certain things we believe we have good reason not to put stock in, and reading the sequences should give you a much better idea of why. On the other hand, if you don't stick so closely to the topic of religion, I think you'll find that we're also open to a lot of ideas that most people aren't open to.
If we're to liken rationality to a martial art, then it would be one after the pattern of Jeet Kune Do; "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless." A person trained in a style or school which lacked grounding in real life effectiveness might say "At my school, we learned techniques to knock guys out with 720 degree spinning kicks and stab people with knives launched from our toes, and they were awesome, but you guys just reject them out of hand. Your style seems really rigid and closed-minded to me." And the Jeet Kune Do practitioner might respond "Fancy spinning kicks and launching knives from your toes might be awesome, but they're awesome for things like displaying your gymnastic ability and finesse, not for defending yourself or defeating an opponent. If we want to learn to do those things, we'll take up gymnastics or toe-knife-throwing as hobbies, but when it comes to martial arts techniques, we want to stick to ones which are awesome at the things martial arts techniques are supposed to be for. And when it comes to those, we're not picky at all. "
Oh, and since I currently have negative karma, I'm unable to directly respond to your other comments.
In response to this one:
It's a very important question and one I need to think about more. In the next few days I'll write a Discussion post addressing my beliefs, including why I'm planning not to lose my faith at the moment.
And this one:
Perhaps it's not fair of me to ask for your evidence without providing any of my own. However I really don't want to just become the irrational believer hopelessly trying to convince everyone else.
I didn't come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
Yes, I definitely am. In an intellectual debate I could probably defend atheism better than belief; I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.
Sorry, I can't tell you what I don't know. All the arguments for theism that I've ever heard were either chock-full of logical fallacies, or purely instrumental, of the form "I don't care if any of this stuff is true or not, but I'm going to pretend that it is because doing so helps me in some way". I personally believe that there's a large performance penalty associated with believing false things, and thus arguments of the second sort are entirely unconvincing for me.
I am looking forward to your discussion post, however. Hopefully, I'll finally get to see some solid arguments for theism in there !
How does this response mean that we're rigid?
I've read most of the sequences. If you believe there are core ideas I'm missing, tell me which ones and I'd be happy to research them. But chances are I've read that sequence already, especially if you mention ones about religion.
It's an important point. If you demand that a user read every word Dear Leader has ever written, you're not going to get many new voices willing to contribute, which as we all know is bad for the intellectual diversity of the group.
See, the problem here is a difference in the perception of what is "useful." If you only learn martial arts because you want to defeat opponents, then sure, it's fine to reject 720 degree spinning kicks. But self-defense is not in fact the only point of martial arts. There is often an element of theater or even ritual that is lost when you reject what Jeet Kune Do thinks is "useless."
Says who? That's the sort of thing that a lot of people tend to disagree about, and there is absolute right answer to such a question. In fact, I'll quote Wikipedia's lead sentence: "The martial arts are codified systems and traditions of combat practices, which are practiced for a variety of reasons: self-defense, competition, physical health and fitness, entertainment, as well as mental, physical, and spiritual development."
I think probably none of those hypotheses are correct. I think you mean well and I think your comments have been stylistically fine. I also obviously don't think people here are are opposed to substantive disagreement, close-minded or intolerant (or else I wouldn't have stuck around this long). What you've encountered is a galaxy sized chasm of inferential distance. I'm sure you've had a conversation before with someone who seemed to think you knew much less about the subject than you actually did. You disagree with him and try to demonstrate you familiarity with the issue but he is so behind he doesn't even realize that you know more than he does.
I realize it is impossible for this not to sound smug and arrogant to you: but that is how you come off to us. Really, your model of us, that we have not heard good, non-strawman arguments for the existence of God is very far off. There may be users who wouldn't be familiar with your best argument but the people here most familiar with the existence of God debate absolutely would. And they could almost certainly fix whatever argument you provided and rebut that (which is approximately what I did in my previous reply to you).
To the extent that theism is ever taken under consideration here it is only in the context of the rationalist and materialist paradigm that is dominant here. E.g. We might talk about the possibility of our universe being a simulation created by an evolved superintelligence and the extent to which that possibility mirrors theism in it's implications. Or (as I take it shminux believes) about how atheism is, like religion, just a special case of privileging the hypothesis. But you don't appear to have spent enough time here to have added these concepts to your tool box and outside that framework the theism debate is old-hat to nearly all of us. It's not that we're close minded: it's that we think the question is about as settled as it can be.
Moreover, while this is a place that discusses many things, we don't enjoy retreading the basics constantly. So while a number of us politely responded to answer your question, an extended conversation about theism or our ability to consider theism is not really welcome. This isn't because we are unwilling to consider it: it's because we have considered it and now want to discuss newer ideas.
You don't have to agree with this perspective. Maybe you feel like you have evidence and concepts that we're totally unfamiliar with. But bracket those issues for now. It is nothing that will be resolvable until you've gotten to know us better and figured out how you might translate those concepts to us. So if you want to stick around here you're welcome to. Learn more about our perspective, become familiar with the concepts we spend time on and feel free to discuss narrower topics that come up. But people here aren't generally interested in extended debates about God with newcomers. That's why you've been down voted. Not because we're against dissent, just because we're not here to do that. There are lots of places on the internet dedicated to debating theism.
Don't mind wedrifid's tone. That's the way he is with everyone. But take his actual point seriously. Don't preach your way of thinking until you've become a lot more familiar with our way of thinking. And a new handle at some point wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Well put. I agree with all of this, except maybe for the need for a new nick, as people who appear to learn from their experience ("update on evidence", in the awkward local parlance) are likely to be upvoted more generously.
I am a celibate pedophile. That means I feel a sexual and romantic attraction to young girls (3-12) but have never acted on that attraction and never will. In some forums, this revelation causes strong negative reactions and a movement to have me banned. I hope that's not true here.
From a brief search, I see that someone raised the topic of non-celibate pedophilia, and it was accepted for discussion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/67h/the_phobia_or_the_trauma_the_probem_of_the_chcken/ Hopefully celibate pedophilia is less controversial.
I have developed views on the subject, though I like to think that I can be persuaded to change them, and one thing I hope to get here on LessWrong is reason-based challenges. Hopefully others will find the topics informative as well. In the absence of advice on a better way to proceed, I plan to make posts in Discussion now and then on various aspects of the topic.
I'm in my 50s and am impressed with the LessWrong approach in general and have done my best to follow some of its precepts for years. I have read most of the core sequences.
Reason based challenges? There doesn't seem to be much to say. You have some attraction, you choose not to act on it for altruistic and/or pragmatic reasons. Nothing much to challenge.
Perhaps an aspect that could provoke discussion would be the decision of whether to self-modify to not have those desires if the technological capability to do so easily were available. I believe there is a Sci. Fi. short story out there that explores this premise. My take is that given an inclusive preference to not have sex with children I'd be perfectly content to self modify to remove the urge which I would never endorse acting on. I would consider this to be a practical choice that allowed me to experience more pleasure and less frustration without sacrificing my values. I would not consider it a moral obligation for people to do so.
A variant situation would be when that same technology is available, along with the technology to detect both preferences and decision making traits in people. Consider a case where it is detected that someone with a desire to do a forbidden thing and who is committed to not doing that thing and yet who has also identifiable deficits in willpower or decision making that make it likely that they will act on the desires anyway. In that case it seems practical to enforce a choice of either self-modifying or submitting to restrictions of behaviour and access.
A further scenario would be one in which for technological or evolutionary reasons there are 12 year old girls who would not be physically or psychologically harmed by sexual liaisons with adults and who have been confirmed (by brain scan and superintelligent extrapolation) to prefer outcomes where they engage in such practice than those in which they don't. That would tend to make any residual moral objection to pedophilia to be not about altruistic consideration of consequenes and all about prudishness. (I of course declare vehemently that I would still oppose pedophilia regardless of consequences. Rah Blues!)
For some real controversy I suppose you could do an analysis of the research on just how much physical and psychological damage is done to children in loving-but-sexual relationships with adults versus how much damage is done by other adults who wish to signal their opposition to the crime by the way they treat the victims. Mind you, that is something that if it were ever to be discussed would perhaps best be discussed by people who are not celibate pedophiles. It would be offensive enough to many people to even see it considered a valid avenue of enquiry by an individual with zero sexual interest in children. Protection of victims from 'righteous' authorities is something best done by those with no interest in committing the crime.
Hi, I'm reposting my introduction here from 2 days ago, as it was moved for some reason, perhaps accidentally. Anyway, hello, my name is Zoltan Istvan. I'm a transhumanist, futurist, journalist, and the author of the philosophical novel "The Transhumanist Wager." I've been checking out this site for some time, but decided to create an account a few days ago to become closer to the community. I thought I'd start by posting an essay I recently wrote, which sums up some of my ideas. Feel free to share it if you like, and I look forward to interacting here. Cheers.
"When Does Hindering Life Extension Science Become a Crime—or even Genocide?"
Every human being has both a minimum and a maximum amount of life hours left to live. If you add together the possible maximum life hours of every living person on the planet, you arrive at a special number: the optimum amount of time for our species to evolve, find happiness, and become the most that it can be. Many reasonable people feel we should attempt to achieve this maximum number of life hours for humankind. After all, very few people actually wish to prematurely die or wish for their fellow humans' premature deaths.
In a free and functioning democratic society, it's the duty of our leaders and government to implement laws and social strategies to maximize these life hours that we want to safeguard. Regardless of ideological, political, religious, or cultural beliefs, we expect our leaders and government to protect our lives and ensure the maximum length of our lifespans. Any other behavior cuts short the time human beings have left to live. Anything else becomes a crime of prematurely ending human lives. Anything else fits the common legal term we have for that type of reprehensible behavior: criminal manslaughter.
In 2001, former President George W. Bush restricted federal funding for stem cell research, one of the most promising fields of medicine in the 21st Century. Stem cells can be used to help fight disease and, therefore, can lengthen lives. Bush restricted the funding because his conservative religious beliefs—some stem cells came from aborted fetuses—conflicted with his fiduciary duty of helping millions of ailing, disease-stricken human beings. Much medical research in the United States relies heavily on government funding and the legal right to do the research. Ultimately, when a disapproving President limits public resources for a specific field of science, the research in that field slows down dramatically—even if that research would obviously lengthen and improve the lives of millions.
It's not just politicians that are prematurely ending our lives with what can be called "pro-death" policies and ideologies. In 2009, on a trip to Africa, Pope Benedict XVI told journalists that the epidemic of AIDS would be worsened by encouraging people to use condoms. More than 25 million people have died from AIDS since the first cases began being reported in the news in the early 1980s. In numerous studies, condoms have been shown to help stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This makes condoms one of the simplest and most affordable life extension tools on the planet. Unfathomably, the billion-person strong Catholic Church actively supports the idea that condom usage is sinful, despite the fact that such a malicious policy has helped sicken and kill a staggering amount of innocent people.
Regrettably, in 2014, America continues to be permeated with an anti-life extension culture. Genetic engineering experiments in humans often have to pass numerous red-tape-laden government regulatory bodies in order to conduct any tests at all, especially at publically funded universities and research centers. Additionally, many states still ban human reproductive cloning, which could one day play a critical part in extending human life. The current US administration is also culpable. The White House is simply not doing enough to extend American lifespans. The US Government spends just 2% of the national budget on science and medical research, while their defense budget is over 20%, according to a 2011 US Office of Management Budget chart. Does President Obama not care about this fact, or is he unaware that not actively funding and supporting life extension research indeed shortens lives?
In my philosophical novel The Transhumanist Wager, there is a scene which takes place outside of a California courthouse where transhumanist activists are holding up a banner. The words inscribed on the banner sum up some eye-opening data: "By not actively funding life extension research, the amount of life hours the United States Government is stealing from its citizens is thousands of times more than all the American life hours lost in the Twin Towers tragedy, the AIDS epidemic, and the Vietnam War combined. Demand that your government federally fund transhuman research, nullify anti-science laws, and promote a life extension culture. The average human body can be made to live healthily and productively beyond age 150."
Some longevity experts think that with a small amount of funding—$50 billion dollars—targeted specifically towards life extension research and ending human mortality, average human lifespans could be increased by 25-50 years in about a decade's time. The world's net worth is over $200 trillion dollars, so the species can easily spare a fraction of its wealth to gain some of the most valuable commodities humans have: health and time.
Unfortunately, our species has already lost a massive amount of life hours; billions of lives have been unnecessarily cut short in the last 50 years because of widespread anti-science attitudes and policies. Even in the modern 21st Century, our evolutionary development continues to be significantly hampered by world leaders and governments who believe in non-empirical, faith-driven religious doctrines—most of which require the worship of deities whose teachings totally negate the need for radical life extension science. Virtually every major leader on the planet believes their "God" will give them an afterlife in a heavenly paradise, so living longer on planet Earth is just not that important.
Back in the real world, 150,000 people died yesterday. Another 150,000 will cease to exist today, and the same amount will disappear tomorrow. A good way to reverse this widespread deathist attitude should start with investigative government and non-government commissions examining whether public fiduciary duty requires acting in the best interest of people's health and longevity. Furthermore, investigative commissions should be set up to examine whether former and current top politicians and religious leaders are guilty of shortening people's lives for their own selfish beliefs and ideologies. Organizations and other global leaders that have done the same should be scrutinized and investigated too. And if fault or crimes against humanity are found, justice should be administered. After all, it's possible that the Catholic Church's stance on condoms will be responsible for more deaths in Africa than the Holocaust was responsible for in Europe. Over one million AIDS victims died in Africa last year alone. Catholicism is growing quickly in Africa, and there will soon be nearly 200 million Catholics on the continent. Obviously, the definition of genocide needs to be reconsidered by the public.
As a civilization of advanced beings who desire to live longer, better, and more successfully, it is our responsibility to put government, religious institutions, big business, and other entities that endorse pro-death policies on notice. Society should stand ready to prosecute anyone that deliberately promotes agendas and actions that prematurely end people's useful lives. Stifling or hindering life extension science, education, and practices needs to be recognized as a legitimate crime.
Welcome "onboard", good to have you! You've led an interesting life, though it did take you long enough to sail to our shores.
Hi Less Wrong,
My name is Sean Welsh. I am a graduate student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch NZ. I was most recently a Solution Architect working on software development projects for telcos. I have decided to take a year off to do a Master's. My topic is Ethical Algorithms: Modelling Moral Decisions in Software. I am particularly interested in questions of machine ethics & robot ethics (obviously).
I would say at the outset that I think 'the hard problem of ethics' remains unsolved. Until it is solved, the prospects for any benign or friendly AI seem remote.
I can't honestly say that I identify as a rationalist. I think the Academy puts for too much faith in their technological marvel of 'Reason.' However, I have a healthy and robustly expressed disregard for all forms of bullshit - be they theist or atheist.
As Confucius said: Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge? If you know a thing, to know that you know it. And if you do not know, to know that you do not know. THAT is the meaning of knowledge.
Apart from working in software development, I have also been an English teacher, a taxi driver, a tourism industry operator, online travel agent and a media adviser to a Federal politician (i.e. a spin doctor).
I don't mind a bit of biff - but generally regard it as unproductive.
My name is Morgan. I was brought here by my brother and have been lurking for awhile. I've have read most of the sequences which have cleared up some of my confused thinking. There were things that I didn't think about because I didn't have an answer for them. Free will and morality used to confuse me and so I never thought much about them since I didn't have a guarantee that they were answerable.
Lesswrong has helped me get back into programming. It has helped me learn to think about things with precision. And to understand how an Cognitive algorithm feels from the inside to dissolve questions.
I am going to join this community and improve my skills. Tsuyoku Naritai.
Student of economics. Not going to write any more than that about myself at this point.
"To post to the Discussion area you must have at least 2 points." - I'd like to post something I've written, but I need two karma to do so.
People generally get more than 2 karma for giving a full introduction, so you could try that. Alternately, you could look around and reply to something - doesn't matter if it's old, people'll probably see it in the recent comments.
Hello LW users, I use the alias Citizen 9-100 (nine one-hundred) but you may call me Nozz. This account will be shared between my sister and I, but we will sign it with the name of whoever is speaking. I would write more but I wrote a lot already but it didn't post due to a laptop error, so all I'll say for now is anything you'd like to know, feel free to ask, just make sure you clarify who your asking. BTW, for those interested, you may call my sister, any of the following, Sam, Sammy, Samantha, or any version of that :)
Regardless of how good an idea sharing accounts is (not very, I'm guessing, for the record) who on earth downvotes an introduction? Upvoted back to neutral.
So: Here goes. I'm dipping my toe into this gigantic and somewhat scary pool/lake(/ocean?).
Here's the deal: I'm a recovering irrationalic. Not an irrationalist; I've never believed in anything but rationalism (in the sense it's used here, but that's another discussion), formally. But my behaviors and attitudes have been stuck in an irrational quagmire for years. Perhaps decades, depending on exactly how you're measuring. So I use "irrationalic" in the sense of "alcoholic"; someone who self-identifies as "alcoholic" is very unlikely to extol the virtues of alcohol, but nonetheless has a hard time staying away from the stuff.
And, like many alcoholics, I have a gut feeling that going "cold turkey" is a very bad idea. Not, in this case, in the sense that I want to continue being specifically irrational to some degree or another, but in that I am extremely wary of diving into the list of readings and immersing myself in rationalist literature and ideology (if that is the correct word) at this point. I have a feeling that I need to work some things out slowly, and I have learned from long and painful experience that my gut is always right on this particular kind of issue.
This does not mean that linking to suggested resources is in any way not okay, just that I'm going to take my time about reading them, and I suppose I'm making a weak (in a technical sense) request to be gentle at first. Yes, in principle, all of my premises are questionable; that's what rationalism means (in part). But...think about it as if you had a new, half-developed idea. If you tell it to people who tear it apart, that can kill it. That's kind of how I feel now. I'm feeling out this new(ish) way of being, and I don't feel like being pushed just yet (which people who know me might find quite rich; I'm a champion arguer).
Yes, this is personal, more personal than I am at all comfortable being in public. But if this community is anything like I imagine it to be (not that I don't have experience with foiled expectations!), I figure I'll probably end up divulging a lot more personal stuff anyway.
I honestly feel as if I'm walking into church for the first time in decades.
So why am I here then? Well, I was updating my long-dormant blog by fixing dead links &c, and in doing so, discovered to my joy that Memepool was no longer dead. There, I found a link to HPMOR. Reading this over the next several days contributed to my reawakening, along with other, more personal happenings. This is a journey of recovery I've been on for, depending on how you count, three to six years, but HPMOR certainly gave a significant boost to the process, and today (also for personal reasons) I feel that I've crossed a threshold, and feel comfortable "walking into church" again.
Alright, I'll anticipate the first question: "What are you talking about? Irrationality is an extremely broad label." Well, I'm not going to go into to too terribly much detail just now, but let's say that the revelation or step forward that occurred today was realizing that the extremely common belief that other people can make you morally wrong by their judgement is unequivocally false. This (that this premise is false) is what I strongly believed growing up, but...well, perhaps "strongly" is the wrong word. I had been raised in an environment that very much held that the opposite was true, that other people's opinion of you was crucial to your rightness, morality and worth as a human being. Nobody ever said it that way, of course, and would probably deny it if put that way, but that is nonetheless how most people believe. However, in my case it was so blatant that it was fairly easy to see how ridiculous it was. Nonetheless, as reasonable as my rational constructions seemed to me, there was really no way I could be certain that I was right and others were wrong, so I held a back-of-my-head belief, borne of the experience of being repeatedly mistaken that every inquisitive child experiences, that I would someday mature and come to realize I had been wrong all along.
Well, that happened. Sort of. Events in my life picked at that point of uncertainty, and I gave up my visceral devotion to rationality and personal responsibility, which led slowly down into an awful abyss that I'm not going to describe at just this moment, that I have (hopefully) at last managed to climb out of, and am now standing at the edge, blinking at the sunlight, trying to figure out precisely where to go from here, but wary of being blinded by the newfound brilliance and wishing to take my time to figure out the next step.
So again, then, why am I here? If I don't want to be bombarded with advice on how to think more rationally, why did I walk in here? I'm not sure. It seemed time, time to connect with people who, perhaps, could support me in this journey, and possibly shorten it somewhat.
I also notice that this thread has gone waaay beyond 500 comments; perhaps someone with more Karma than I can make a new Welcome thread?
So since I wrote this five minutes ago, I've gotten some insights (through looking at one of the links on the welcome page above) into why I'm so wary of being bombarded with arguments explaining how to be rational. Hopefully commenting on my own comment won't discourage others from doing so.
I'm not wary because I'm afraid my newfound insight is going to be damaged somehow; quite the contrary. I'm wary because I strongly fear that all these rationalist arguments will be very seductive. However, I've tried very hard my whole life (with varying degrees of success) to make sure my thoughts and ideas were my own, and, having so recently stepped back into the light, I fear I might be very susceptible to rationalist arguments. "But that's a good thing," you might say, "because it's rationalism!" (or rather, some more complicated and convincing formulation). Well, sure, but that doesn't make any specific rationalist argument certain to be right, and I'm not sure I feel competent to evaluate the truth of claims that sound very good and I really want to believe right now.
Hey Lesswrong.
This is a sockpuppet account I made for the purpose of making a post to Discussion and possibly Main, while obscuring my identity, which is important due to some NDAs I've signed with regards to the content of the post.
I am explicitly asking for +2 karma so that I can make the post.
Hi...I'm Will -- I learned about less wrong through a very intelligent childhood friend. I am quite nearly his opposite - so maybe I shouldn't say anything...ever...and just stick to reading and learning. But It recommended leaving an introduction post. I also like this as a method of learning. I skimmed a few of the articles in the about page and enjoyed them...they provided a good deal of information that I believe I am much better at processing and understanding as opposed to creating. Therefore, I'm excited to see what I get out of this. I'm also curious to attend a Less Wrong meeting. I haven't looked for one yet, but I will be.
Part of the problem I have is that I prefer doing things that provide tiny levels of fun with little to no levels of self-growth. For example, I would prefer playing a game of League of Legends over reading...anything. This is an annoying habit for obvious reasons. So I guess if there were suggestions of where I should start that might help me subconsciously (and eventually consciously) in favor of more meaningful activities. Not to abolish random bouts of pointless fun, but rather to refine my efficiency with time devoted to ALL of my daily activities.
Hey! My name is Vinney, I'm 28 years old and live in New York City.
To be exceedingly brief: I've been working through the sequences (quite slowly and sporadically) for the past year and a half. I've loved everything I've seen on LW so far and I expect to continue. I hope to ramp up my study this year and finally get through the rest of the sequences.
I'd like to become more active in discussions but feel like I should finish the sequences first so I don't wind up making some silly error in reasoning and committing it to a comment. Perhaps that isn't an ideal approach to the community discussions, but I suspect it may be common..
Welcome!
Do finish the sequences, but you won't be done then; you'll still make stupid mistakes. Best to start making them now, I think.
Thanks, I'll get started making stupid mistakes as quickly as I can! I'm sorry I wasn't able to make any here.
Discovered while researching the global effects of a Pak-Indo nuclear exchange. Once here I began to dig further and found it appealing. I am a simple soldier pushing myself into a Masters in biology. Am I rationalist? I am not sure to be honest. If I am I know the exact date and time when I started to become one. Nov 2004 I was part of the battle of Fallujah, during an exchange of gunfire a child was injured. I will never know if it was one my rounds that caused her head injury but my lips worked to bring her life again. It was a futile attempt, she passed and while clouded with this damn experience I myself was wounded. At that very moment I lost my faith in any loving deity. My endless pursuit of knowledge, to include academics provided by a brick and mortar school has helped me recover from the loss of a limb. I still have the leg however it does not function well. I like to think and philosophy fascinates me, and this site fascinates me. :) Political ideology- Fiscally Conservative Religion-possibilian Rather progressive on issues like gay marriage and abortion. Abortion actually the act I despise but as a man I feel somehow that I haven't the organs to complain. To sum me up I suppose I am a crippled, tobacco chewing, gun toting member of the Sierra Club with a future as a freshwater biologist with memories I would like to replace with Bayes. LoL Well I just spilled that mess out, might as well hit post. Please feel free to ask anything you like, I am not sensitive. Open honesty to those that are curious is good medicine.
Alright. Hi. I'm a senior in high school and thinking about majoring in Computer Science. Unlike most other people my age, this is probably my first post on any chat forum/ wiki/ blog. I also don't normaly type things without a spell checker and would like to get better. Any coments about my spelling or anything else would be appriciated.
My brother showed me this site a while back and also HP:MoR. Spicificly, I saw the Sequences. And they were long. Some of them were some-what interesting but mostly they were just long. In addition to that, I had just been introduced to the Methods of Rationality which, dispite being long, was realy interisting (actualy my favorite story that I have ever read), and there was some other things, so yeah . . . I still haven't read them. But anyway, that was about a year ago and at this point I have read through MoR at least three times. I feel that I am starting to think sort of rationaly and would like to improve on that.
In addition to that, I have this friend that I talk to at lunch. Normaly we talk about things that we probably don't have any ideas about that actualy reflect reality, like the origins of the universe, time travel, artificial intelligence (I did actualy read a bit about that by Eliezer. didn't understand as much as I would have liked, but still) those sorts of things. And about half the time I am almost entirly sure that whatever thought process he's using just doesn't work. So another reason I'm here is to make sure that what ever thought process I'm using is actualy the right way to be looking at things and that I am acting as an intelligent thinker rather than a condecending jerk.
So, I'm going to go get reading those sequences now.
Hey, my name is Roman. You can read my detailed bio here, as well as some research papers I published on the topics of AI and security. I decided to attend a local LW meet up and it made sense to at least register on the site. My short term goal is to find some people in my geographic area (Louisville, KY, USA) to befriend.
Nice to see more AI experts here.
Hi Roman. Would you mind answering a few more questions that I have after reading your interview with Luke? Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom have a paper coming out arguing that embryo selection can eventually (or maybe even quickly) lead to IQ gains of 100 points or more. Do you think Friendly AI will still be an unsolvable problem for IQ 250 humans? More generally, do you see any viable path to a future better than technological stagnation short of autonomous AGI? What about, for example, mind uploading followed by careful recursive upgrading of intelligence?
I wonder how they propose to avoid the standard single-trait selective breeding issues, like accumulation of undesirable traits. For example, those geniuses might end up being sickly and psychotic.
Hey Wei, great question! Agents (augmented humans) with IQ of 250 would be superintelligent with respect to our current position on the intelligence curve and would be just as dangerous to us, unaugment humans, as any sort of artificial superintelligence. They would not be guaranteed to be Friendly by design and would be as foreign to us in their desires as most of us are from severely mentally retarded persons. For most of us (sadly?) such people are something to try and fix via science not something for whom we want to fulfill their wishes. In other words, I don’t think you can rely on unverified (for safety) agent (event with higher intelligence) to make sure that other agents with higher intelligence are designed to be human-safe. All the examples you give start by replacing humanity with something not-human (uploads, augments) and proceed to ask the question of how to safe humanity. At that point you already lost humanity by definition. I am not saying that is not going to happen, it probably will. Most likely we will see something predicted by Kurzweil (merger of machines and people).
Technicality: there is no such thing as IQ of 250, since IQ is a score on a test, and there is no test calibrated for 1 in 10^22 humans. What you probably mean is the mysterious hypothetical g-factor, partly responsible for the IQ scores, or maybe some other intelligence marker.
If you understand the point there's no reason to make a comment like this except as an attempt to show off. Changing "250 IQ" to "+10 sd out from the mean intelligence" only serves to make the original point less accessible to people not steeped in psychometry.
You don't have to be steeped in psychometry to understand what a standard deviation is.
And if we're going to talk about intelligence at all, it is often helpful to keep in mind the difference between IQ and intelligence.
I think if I became an upload (assuming it's a high fidelity emulation) I'd still want roughly the same things that I want now. Someone who is currently altruistic towards humanity should probably still be altruistic towards humanity after becoming an upload. I don't understand why you say "At that point you already lost humanity by definition".
We can talk about what high fidelity emulation includes. Will it be just your mind? Or will it be Mind + Body + Environment? In the most common case (with an absent body) most typically human feelings (hungry, thirsty, tired, etc.) will not be preserved creating a new type of an agent. People are mostly defined by their physiological needs (think of Maslow’s pyramid). An entity with no such needs (or with such needs satisfied by virtual/simulated abandoned resources) will not be human and will not want the same things as a human. Someone who is no longer subject to human weaknesses or relatively limited intelligence may lose all allegiances to humanity since they would no longer be a part of it. So I guess I define “humanity” as comprised on standard/unaltered humans. Anything superior is no longer a human to me, just like we are not first and foremost Neanderthals and only after homo sapiens.
Insofar as Maslow's pyramid accurately models human psychology (a point of which I have my doubts), I don't think the majority of people you're likely to be speaking to on the Internet are defined in terms of their low-level physiological needs. Food, shelter, physical security -- you might have fears of being deprived of these, or even might have experienced temporary deprivation of one or more (say, if you've experienced domestic violence, or fought in a war) but in the long run they're not likely to dominate your goals in the way they might for, say, a Clovis-era Alaskan hunter. We treat cases where they do as abnormal, and put a lot of money into therapy for them.
If we treat a modern, first-world, middle-class college student with no history of domestic or environmental violence as psychologically human, then, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't extend the same courtesy to an otherwise humanlike emulation whose simulated physiological needs are satisfied as a function of the emulation process.
I don’t know you, but for me only a few hours a day is devoted to thinking or other non-physiological pursuits, the rest goes to sleeping, eating, drinking, Drinking, sex, physical exercise, etc. My goals are dominated by the need to acquire resources to support physiological needs of me and my family. You can extend any courtesy you want to anyone you want but you (human body) and a computer program (software) don’t have much in common as far as being from the same group is concerned. Software is not humanity; at best it is a partial simulation of one aspect of one person.
It seems to me that there are a couple of things going on here. I spend a reasonable amount of time (probably a couple of hours of conscious effort each day; I'm not sure how significant I want to call sleep) meeting immediate physical needs, but those don't factor much into my self-image or my long-term goals; I might spend an hour each day making and eating meals, but ensuring this isn't a matter of long-term planning nor a cherished marker of personhood for me. Looked at another way, there are people that can't eat or excrete normally because of one medical condition or another, but I don't see them as proportionally less human.
I do spend a lot of time gaining access to abstract resources that ultimately secure my physiological satisfaction, on the other hand, and that is tied closely into my self-image, but it's so far removed from its ultimate goal that I don't feel that cutting out, say, apartment rental and replacing it with a proportional bill for Amazon AWS cycles would have much effect on my thoughts or actions further up the chain, assuming my mental and emotional machinery remains otherwise constant. I simply don't think about the low-level logistics that much; it's not my job. And I'm a financially independent adult; I'd expect the college student in the grandparent to be thinking about them in the most abstract possible way, if at all.
Wei, the question here is would rather than should, no? It's quite possible that the altruism that I endorse as a part of me is related to my brain's empathy module, much of which might be broken if I see cannot relate to other humans. There are of course good fictional examples of this, e.g. Ted Chiang's "Understand" - http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm and, ahem, Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan.
+1 for linking to Understand ; I remembered reading the story long ago, but I forgot the link. Thanks for reminding me !
Logical fallacy: Generalization from fictional evidence.
A high-fidelity upload who was previously altruistic toward humanity would still be altruistic during the first minute after awakening; their environment would not cause this to change unless the same sensory experiences would have caused their previous self to change.
If you start doing code modification, of course, some but not all bets are off.
Perhaps the idea is that the sensory experience of no longer falling into the category of "human" would cause the brain to behave in unexpected ways?
I don't find that especially likely, mind, although I suppose long-term there might arise a self-serving "em supremacy" meme.
I don't see why this is necessarily true, unless you treat "altruism toward humanity" as a terminal goal.
When I was a very young child, I greatly valued my brightly colored alphabet blocks; but today, I pretty much ignore them. My mind had developed to the point where I can fully visualize all the interesting permutations of the blocks in my head, should I need to do so for some reason.
Well, yes. I think that's the point. I certainly don't only value other humans for the way that they interest me - If that were so, I probably wouldn't care about most of them at all. Humanity is a terminall value to me - or, more generally, the existence and experiences of happy, engaged, thinking sentient beings. Humans qualify, regardless of whether or not uploads exist (and, of course, also qualify.
Well, I did put a disclaimer by using the standard terminology :) Fiction is good for suggesting possibilities, you cannot derive evidence from it of course.
I agree on the first-minute point, but do not see why it's relevant, because there is the 999999th minute by which value drift will take over (if altruism is strongly related to empathy). I guess upon waking up I'd make value preservation my first order of business, but since an upload is still evolution's spaghetti code it might be a race against time.
Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of hanging out with really boring people; say, at a party ? The kind of people whose conversations are so vapid and repetitive that you can practically predict them verbatim in your head ? Were you ever tempted to make your excuses and duck out early ?
Now imagine that it's not a party, but the entire world; and you can't leave, because it's everywhere. Would you still "feel altruistic toward humanity" at that point ?
It's easy to conflate uploads and augments, here, so let me try to be specific (though I am not Wei Dai and do not in any way speak for them).
I experience myself as preferring that people not suffer, for example, even if they are really boring people or otherwise not my cup of tea to socialize with. I can't see why that experience would change upon a substrate change, such as uploading. Basically the same thing goes for the other values/preferences I experience.
OTOH, I don't expect the values/preferences I experience to remain constant under intelligence augmentation, whatever the mechanism. But that's kind of true across the board. If you did some coherently specifiable thing that approximates the colloquial meaning of "doubled my intelligence" overnight, I suspect that within a few hours I would find myself experiencing a radically different (from my current perspective) set of values/preferences.
If instead of "doubling" you "multiplied by 10" I expect that within a few hours I would find myself experiencing an incomprehensible (from my current perspective) set of values/preferences.
Wait, why shouldn't they be conflated ? Granted, an upload does not necessarily have to possess augmented intelligence, but IMO most if not all of them would obtain it in practice.
Agreed, though see above.
I agree completely; that was my point as well.
Edited to add:
I believe that, however incomprehensible one's new values might be after augmentation, I am reasonably certain that they would not include "an altruistic attitude toward humanity" (as per our current understanding of the term). By analogy, I personally neither love nor hate individual insects; they are too far beneath me.
Mostly, I prefer not to conflate them because our shared understanding of upload is likely much better-specified than our shared understanding of augment.
Except that, as you say later, you have confidence about what those supposedly incomprehensible values would or wouldn't contain.
Turning that analogy around.... I suspect that if I remembered having been an insect and then later becoming a human being, and I believed that was a reliably repeatable process, both my emotional stance with respect to the intrinsic value of insect lives and my pragmatic stance with respect to their instrumental value would be radically different than they are now and far more strongly weighted in the insects' favor.
With respect to altruism and vast intelligence gulfs more generally... I dunno. Five-day-old infants are much stupider than I am, but I generally prefer that they not suffer. OTOH, it's only a mild preference; I don't really seem to care all that much about them in the abstract. OTGH, when made to think about them as specific individuals I end up caring a lot more than I can readily justify over a collection. OT4H, I see no reason to expect any of that to survive what we're calling "intelligence augmentation", as I don't actually think my cognitive design allows my values and my intelligence (ie my optimize-environment-for-my-values) to be separated cleanly. OT5H, there are things we might call "intelligence augmentation", like short-term-memory buffer-size increases, that might well be modular in this way.
I've heard repeatedly that the correlation between IQ and achievement after about 120 (z = 1.33) is pretty weak, possibly even with diminishing returns up at the very top. Is moving to 250 (z = 10) passing a sort of threshold of intelligence at some point where this trend reverses? Or is the idea that IQ stops strongly predicting achievement above 120 wrong?
This is something I've been curious about for a while, so I would really appreciate your help clearing the issue up a bit.
Is this what you intended to say? "Diminishing returns" seems to apply at the bottom the scale you mention. You've already selected the part where returns have started diminishing. Sometimes it is claimed that that at the extreme top the returns are negative. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, that's just me trying to do everything in one draft. Editing really is the better part of clear writing.
I meant something along the lines of "I've heard it has diminishing returns and potentially [, probably due to how it affects metabolic needs and rate of maturation] even negative returns at the high end."
First, IQ tests don't go to 250 :-) Generally speaking standard IQ tests have poor resolution in the tails -- they cannot reliably identify whether you have the IQ of, say, 170 or 190. At some point all you can say is something along the lines of "this person is in the top 0.1% of people we have tested" and leave it at that.
Second, "achievement" is a very fuzzy word. People mean very different things by it. And other than by money it's hard to measure.
In agreement with Vaniver's comment, there is evidence that differences in IQ well above 120 are predictive of success, especially in science. For example:
IQs of a sample of eminent scientists were much higher than the average for science PhDs (~160 vs ~130)
Among those who take the SAT at age 13, scorers in the top .1% end up outperforming the top 1% in terms of patents and scientific publications produced as adults
I don't think I have good information on whether these returns are diminishing, but we can at least say that they are not vanishing. There doesn't seem to be any point beyond which the correlation disappears.
I just read the "IQ's of eminent scientists" and realized I really need to get my IQ tested.
I've been relying on my younger brother's test (with the knowledge that older brothers tend to do slightly better but usually within an sd) to guesstimate my own IQ but a) it was probably a capped score like Feynman's since he took it in middle school and b) I have to know if there's a 95% chance of failure going into my field. I'd like to think I'm smart enough to be prominent, but it's irrational not to check first.
Thanks for the information; you might have just saved me a lot of trouble down the line, one way or the other.
I'd be very careful generalizing from that study to the practice of science today. Science in the 1950s was VERY different, the length of time to the phd was shorter, postdocs were very rare, and almost everyone stepped into a research faculty position almost immediately.
In today's world, staying in science is much harder- there are lots of grad students competing for many postdocs competing for few permanent science positions. In today's world, things like conscientiousness, organization skills,etc (grant writing is now a huge part of the job) play a much larger role in eventually landing a job in the past, and luck is a much bigger driver (whether a given avenue of exploration pays off requires a lot of luck. Selecting people whose experiments ALWAYS work is just grabbing people who have been both good AND lucky). It would surprise me if the worsening science career hasn't changed the make up of an 'eminent scientist'.
At the same time, all of those points except the luck one could be presented as evidence that the IQ required to be eminent has increased rather than the converse. Grant writing and schmoozing are at least partially a function of verbal IQ, IQ in general strongly predicts academic success in grad school, and competition tends to winnow out the poor performers a lot more than the strong.
Not that I really disagree, I just don't see it as particularly persuasive.
That's just one of the unavoidable frustrations of human nature though; an experiment which dis-confirms it's hypothesis worked perfectly, it just isn't human nature to notice negatives.
I disagree for several reasons. Mostly, conscientiousness, conformity,etc are personality traits that aren't strongly correlated with IQ (conscientiousness may even be slightly negatively correlated).
Would it surprise you to know that the most highly regarded grad students in my physics program all left physics? They had a great deal of success before and in grad school (I went to a top 5 program) , but left because they didn't want to deal with the administrative/grant stuff, and because they didn't want to spend years at low pay.
I'd argue that successful career in science is selecting for some threshhold IQ and then much more strongly for a personality type.
Are you American? If you've taken the SAT, you can get a pretty good estimate of your IQ here.
Mensa apparently doesn't consider the SAT to have a high-enough g loading to be useful as an intelligence test after 1994. Although the website's figure are certainly encouraging, it's probably best to take them with a bit of salt.
True, but note that, in contrast with Mensa, the Triple Nine Society continued to accept scores on tests taken up through 2005, though with a higher cutoff (of 1520) than on pre-1995 tests (1450).
Also, SAT scores in 2004 were found to have a correlation of about .8 with a battery of IQ tests, which I believe is on par with the correlations IQ tests have with each other. So the SAT really does seem to be an IQ test (and an extremely well-normed one at that if you consider their sample size, though perhaps not as highly g-loaded as the best, like Raven's).
But yeah, if you want to have high confidence in a score, probably taking additional tests would be the best bet. Here's a list of high-ceiling tests, though I don't know if any of them are particularly well-normed or validated.
Most IQ tests are not very well calibrated above 120ish, because the number of people in the reference sample that scored much higher is rather low. It's also the case that achievement is a function of several different factors, which will probably become the limiting factor for most people at IQs higher than 120. That said, it does seem that in physics, first-tier physicists score better on cognitive tests than second-tier physicists, which suggests that additional IQ is still useful for achievement in the most cognitively demanding fields. It seems likely that augmented humans who do several times better than current humans on cognitive tests will also be able to achieve several times as much in cognitively demanding fields.
Note also that Roman co-authored 3 of the papers on MIRI's publications page.
His paper http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/LeakproofingtheSingularity.pdf seriously discusses ways to confine a potentially hostile superintelligence, a feat MIRI seems to consider hopeless. Did you guys have a good chat about it?
I think most everyone at MIRI and FHI thinks boxing is a good thing, even if many would say not enough on its own. I don't think you will find many who think that open internet connections are a matter of indifference for AI developers working with powerful AGI.
High-grade common sense (the sort you'd get by asking any specialist in computer security) says that you should design an AI which you would trust with an open Internet connection, then put it in the box you would use on an untrusted AI during development. (No, the AI will not be angered by this lack of trust and resent you. Thank you for asking.) I think it's safe to say that for basically everything in FAI strategy (I can't think of an exception right now) you can identify at least two things supporting any key point, such that either alone was designed to be sufficient independently of the other's failing, including things like "indirect normativity works" (you try to build in at least some human checks around this which would shut down any scary AI independently of your theory of indirect normativity being remotely correct, while also not trusting the humans to steer the AI because then the humans are your single point of failure).
I'm a male senior in high school. I found this site in November or so, and started reading the sequences voraciously.
I feel like I might be a somewhat atypical LessWrong reader. For one, I'm on the young side. Also, if you saw me and talked to me, you would probably not guess that I was a "rationalist" from the way I act/dress but, I don't know, perhaps you might. When I first found this website, I was pretty sure I wanted to be an art major, now I'm pretty sure I want to be an art/comp sci double major and go into indie game development (correlation may or may not imply causation). I also love rap music (and not the "good" kind like Talib Kweli) and I read most of the sequences while listening to Lil Wayne, Lil B, Gucci Mane, Future, Young Jeezy, etc. I occasionally record my own terrible rap songs with my friends in my friend's basement. Before finding this site, the word "rational" had powerful negative affect around it. Science was far and away my least favorite subject in school. I have absolutely no interest at the moment in learning any science or anything about science, except for maybe neuroscience, and maybe metaphysics. I've always found the humanities more interesting, although I do enjoy some abstract math stuff. I'm somewhat of an emotional Luddite - whenever a new technology like Google Glass or something comes out I groan and I think about all the ways it's going to further detach people from reality. Transhumanism was disgusting to me before I found this site, while reading the sequences I started to buy into the philosophy, now a few months after reading the sequences for the first time I rationally know it is a very very good thing but still emotionally find it a little unappealing.
After finding this site, I have gone from having a vaguely confused worldview to completely "buying into" most of the philosophy espoused here and on on other sites in the rationalist-sphere such as Overcoming Bias, blogs of top contributors, etc. (I'm not a racist yet though), and constantly thinking throughout my day about things like utility functions, sunken cost fallacies, mind projection fallacy, etc. I feel like finding this website has immeasurably improved my life, which I know might be a weird thing to say, but I do think this is true. First of all, my thinking is so much clearer, and moral/philosophical/political questions that seemed like a paradox before now seem to have obvious solutions. More importantly, after being inspired by stuff like The Science of Winning at Life, I now spend several hours a day on self-improvement projects, which I never would have thought to do without first becoming a rationalist. This community also lead me to vipassana meditation, the practice of which I think has improved my life so far. I feel like this new focus on rational thinking and self improvement will only continue to pay dividends in the future, as it's only been a few months since I developed this new attitude towards life. It may be overly optimistic, but I really do see finding this site and becoming a rationalist as a major turning point in my life and I'm very grateful to Eliezer and co. for revealing to me the secrets of the universe.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Interesting. If I may; what is it about technology/futurism you find so unappealing?
Also, I have to ask: why the username?
lulz. You have my attention.
You sound like quite an intelligent and awesome person. (bad rap, art, rationality. only an interesting person could have such a nonstandard combination of interests. Boring people come prepackaged...)
Glad to have you around.
It's only a matter of time ;)
I remember that feeling. I'm more skeptical now, but I can't help but notice more awesomeness in my life due to LW. It really is quite cool isn't it?
This is the part that's been elusive to me. What kind of things are you doing? How do you knwo you are actually getting benefits and not just producing that "this is awesome" feeling which unfortunately often gets detached from realty?
keep your identity small.
Where do you live? Do you attend meetups?
Hello! I call myself Atomliner. I'm a 23 year old male Political Science major at Utah Valley University.
From 2009 to 2011, I was a missionary for the Mormon Church in northeastern Brazil. In the last month I was there, I was living with another missionary who I discovered to be a closet atheist. In trying to help him rediscover his faith, he had me read The God Delusion, which obliterated my own. I can't say that book was the only thing that enabled me to leave behind my irrational worldview, as I've always been very intellectually curious and resistant to authority. My mind had already been a powder keg long before Richard Dawkins arrived with the spark to light it.
Needless to say, I quickly embraced atheism and began to read everything I could about living without belief in God. I'm playing catch-up, trying to expand my mind as fast as I can to make up for the lost years I spent blinded by religious dogma. Just two years ago, for example, I believed homosexuality was an evil that threatened to destroy civilization, that humans came from another planet, and that the Lost Ten Tribes were living somewhere underground beneath the Arctic. Needless to say, my re-education process has been exhausting.
One ex-Mormon friend of mine introduced me to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I read only a few chapters of, but I was intrigued by the concept of Bayes Theorem and followed a link here. Since then I've read From Skepticism to Technical Rationality and many of the Sequences. I'm hooked! I'm really liking what I find here. While I may not be a rationalist now, I would really like to be.
And that's my short story! I look forward to learning more from all of you and, hopefully, contributing in the future. :)
Be careful. There's a noted tendency to fill the void left by god with very god-like artificial intelligences, owners of the simulation we might be living in, and the like.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Good for you! You might want to watch out for assuming that everyone had a similar experience with religion; many theists will fin this very annoying and this seems to be a common mistake among people with your background-type.
Huh. I must say, I found the GD pretty terrible (despite reading it multiple times to be sure,) although I suppose that powder-keg aspect probably accounts for most of your conversion (deconversion?)
I'm curious, could you expand on what you found so convincing in The God Delusion?
I think we can all say that :)
What kind of theist are you, personal or more of the general theism (which includes deism) variety? Any holy textstring you believe has been divinely inspired?
About as Deist as you can be while still being technically Christian. I'd be inclined to say there's something in all major religions, simply for selection reasons, but the only thing I'd endorse as "divinely inspired" as such would be the New Testament? I guess? Even that is filtered by cultural context and such, obviously,.
I am Mormon so I am curious where you got the beliefs that Homosexuality would destroy civilization, that humans came from another planet, that the Ten Tribes live underground beneath the Arctic? Those are not standard beliefs of Mormons (see for instance the LDS churches Mormonsandgays.org) and only one of those have I ever even encountered before (Ten Tribes beneath the Arctic) but I couldn't figure out where that belief comes from or why anyone would feel the need to believe it.
I also have to ask, the same as MugaSofer, could you explain how The God Delusion obliterated your faith? It seemed largely irrelevent to me.
I have visited mormonsandgays.org. That came out very recently. It seems that the LDS Church is now backing off of their crusade against homosexuality and same-sex marriage. In the middle of the last decade, though, I can assure you what I was taught in church and in my family was that civilizations owed their stability to the prevalence of traditional marriages. I was told that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because homosexuality was not being penalized and because of the same crime the Roman Empire collapsed. It is possible that these teachings, while not official doctrine, were inspired by the last two paragraphs of the LDS Church's 1995 proclamation The Family. In the second to last paragraph it says:
I have a strong feeling my interpretation of this doctrine is also held by most active believing American Mormons, having lived among them my entire life.
I don't think that most Mormons believe that mankind came from another planet, but I started believing this after I read something from the Journal of Discourses, in which Brigham Young stated:
This doctrine has for good reason been de-emphasized by the LDS Church, but never repudiated. I read this and other statements made by Brigham Young and believed it. I did believe he was a prophet of God, after all.
I began to believe that the Ten Tribes were living underneath the Arctic after reading The Final Countdown by Clay McConkie which details the signs that will precede the Second Coming. In the survey he apparently conducted of active Latter-day Saints, around 15% believed the Ten Tribes were living somewhere underground in the north. This belief is apparently drawn from an interpretation of Doctrine & Covenants 133:26-27, which states:
I liked the interpretation that this meant there was a subterranean civilization of Israelites and believed it was true.
I apologize that I gave examples of these extraordinary former beliefs right after I wrote "I'm playing catch-up, trying to expand my mind as fast as I can to make up for the lost years I spent blinded by religious dogma." That definitely implies that these former beliefs were actual official doctrine of the Mormon Church. I did not intend that.
I am going to make a prediction that you likely grew up in a smaller community in Utah or Eastern Idaho.
In regards to the Journal of Discourse quote, the actual doctrine that Brigham Young is talking about it is very much emphasized and is found in the D&C, the Book of Abraham, and explicitly in the Temple. A dead giveaway is his reference to philosophers, he isn't talking about us being aliens but that our spirits always existed and come from where God is rather then being created at birth as thought in the rest of Christianity. Given this and your explanation of The God Delusion I take it you aren't that familiar with non-LDS Christian philosophy and the vast differences between us and them.
The church has not changed at all its position on same-sex marriage and just filed an amicus brief on the subject. I can see how your conclusion on the subject was drawn though.
Wrong. I moved to Utah already an atheist. I didn't grow up in any one area, my family moved several times when I was younger. For example, I lived in Arizona, California, Georgia, and North Carolina before moving to Utah. The state I feel most confident in calling my home is California, since I lived there from 2004 to 2009.
I highly disagree that this is what Brigham Young actually intended to teach. For example, in another part of the Journal of Discourses he says:
It does not seem at all that he is talking about the creation of their spirits, but the creation of their bodies.
I have to admit I didn't regard myself as extremely familiar with Christian philosophy before my de-conversion, but I've learned a great deal since coming home from my mission. However, I don't think this was a very fair assessment of my knowledge on your part. There is nothing I've written that gives strong evidence for me being ignorant of Christian and Mormon theology. It seems to me you want to de-legitimize what I have to say by painting me as unintelligent and inexperienced with my own religion. Now, do you really think a person who has studied the Journal of Discourses wouldn't also most likely be a person who has spent a lot of time and energy investigating the rest of Mormon theology? I mean, a scholar I am not but I definitely know my way around Mormonism, more than most Mormons I know at the very least.
There is a big difference between an "official position" and what is taught in the chapel and at the dinner table.
Since it appears that you grew up in a pluralistic society then I have no idea why you considered everyone different then you to not be a good person and feel you were never exposed to the idea that they possibly could be a good person. Considering that Jesus (Matthew 25:40), Paul (Romans 2), Nephi, Benjamin, Alma, and Moroni all say that it is action more then belief that defines who is saved, who has faith, and who is good, happy and healthy then I don't know how it was a shocking revelation that those who do not have the law but that act by nature according to law are just as much blessed as those that have the law.
I fail to see how blood atonement, Adam-God, racist theology, and polygamist theology gave you the slightest impression that the Journal of Discourses was a good source of doctrine. It is my personal experience that generally those that spend the most time reading it are those least familiar with the gospel, on either end of the spectrum. The biggest fans of the Journal of Discourses seem to be those that are trying to prove the church wrong and those that are seeking "deep" doctrine while ignoring the weightier parts of the gospel, by which I mean those that try to square Adam-God statements or that speculate on the location of the ten tribes or Kolob.
For instance nearly everyone that has taken the time to figure out what Christians say of God in their arguments for God and what the D&C says on the subject quickly realize that the two are wholly incompatible. That those beliefs on God and the arguments in favor of those beliefs are mixing Greek philosophy with scripture to synthesis a new belief. Not that members of the church are not also guilty of mingling the philosophies of men with scripture, that is a very common occurrence as you note with "what is taught in the chapel and the dinner table", me, I tend to focus on the current authorized messengers from God and the Holy Spirit as I feel that is what I have been instructed to do.
Hey, people make mistakes. That it's fairly easy to come to erroneous conclusions on these topics should be evident from the JoD itself.
Who authorizes messengers from God? It's not like He has a public key, after all...
God obviously.
There are actually quite a few rules given to determine if a messenger is from God. Jesus for instance said "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself", then there is the qualification in Deuteronomy, the requirement in John, the experiment in Alma, the promise in Moroni, and some details in the D&C. It is somewhat of a bootstrapping problem as one must already trust one of those sources, or the person presenting those sources, enough to move forward in trying to verify the source and messenger.
Hello, Less Wrong; I'm Laplante. I found this site through a TV Tropes link to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about this time last year. After I'd read through that as far as it had been updated (chapter 77?), I followed Yudkowsky's advice to check out the real science behind the story and ended up here. I mucked about for a few days before finding a link to yudkowsky.net, where I spent about a week trying learn what exactly Bayes was all about. I'm currently working my way through the sequences, just getting into the quantum physics sequence now.
I'm currently in the dangerous position of having withdrawn from college, and my productive time is spent between a part-time job and this site. I have no real desire to return to school, but I realize that entry into any sort of psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science field without a Bachelor's degree - preferably more - is near impossible.
I'm aware that Yudkowsky is doing quite well without a formal education, but I'd rather not use that as a general excuse to leave my studies behind entirely.
My goals for the future are to make my way through MIRI's recommended course list, and the dream is to do my own research in a related field. We'll see how it all pans out.
My standard advice to all newcomers is to skip the quantum sequence, at least on the first reading. Or at least stop where the many worlds musings start. The whole thing is way too verbose and controversial for the number of useful points it makes. Your time is much better spent reading about cognitive biases. If you want epistemology, try the new sequence.
Bad advice for technical readers. Mihaly Barasz (IMO gold medalist) got here via HPMOR but only became seriously interested in working for MIRI after reading the QM sequence.
Given those particular circumstances, can I ask that you stop with that particular bit of helpful advice?
As others noted, you seem to be falling prey to the selection bias. Do you have an estimate of how many "IMO gold medalists" gave up on MIRI because its founder, in defiance of everything he wrote before, confidently picks one untestable from a bunch and proclaims it to be the truth (with 100% certainty, no less, Bayes be damned), despite (or maybe due to) not even being an expert in the subject matter?
EDIT: My initial inclination was to simply comply with your request, probably because I grew up being taught deference to and respect for authority. Then it struck me as one of the most cultish things one could do.
Note that the original text was "gold," not "good".
I assume IMO is the International Mathematical Olympiad(1). Not that this in any way addresses or mitigates your point; just figured I'd point it out.
(1) If I've understood the wiki article, ~35 IMO gold medals are awarded every year.
Huh. I'd assumed it was short for "In My Opinion".
Thanks, I fixed the typo.
Is this an April Fool's joke? He says nothing of the kind. The post which comes closest to this explicitly says that it could be wrong, but "the rational probability is pretty damned small." And counting the discovery of time-turners, he's named at least two conceivable pieces of evidence that could change that number.
What do you mean when you say you "just don't put nearly as much confidence in it as you do"?
Maybe it's a reference to the a priori nature of his arguments for MW? Or something? It's a strange claim to make, TBH.
QM Sequence is two parts:
(1) QM for beginners
(2) Philosophy-of-science on believing things when evidence is equipoise (or absent) - pick the simpler hypothesis.
I got part (1) from reading Dancing Wu-Li Masters, but I can clearly see the value to readers without that background. But teaching foundational science is separate from teaching Bayesian rationalism.
The philosophy of the second part is incredibly controversial. Much more than you acknowledge in the essays, or acknowledge now. Treating the other side of any unresolved philosophical controversy as if it is stupid, not merely wrong, is excessive and unjustified.
In short, the QM sequence would seriously benefit from the sort of philosophical background stuff that is included in your more recent essays. Including some more technical discussion of the opposing position.
Do you have a solid idea of how many technical readers get here via HPMOR but become disinterested in working for MIRI after reading the QM sequence? If not, isn't this potentially just the selection effect?
EY can rationally prefer the certain evidence of some Mihaly-Barasz-caliber researchers joining when exposed to the QM sequence
over
speculations whether the loss of Mihaly Barasz (had he not read the QM sequence) would be outweighed by even more / better technical readers becoming interested in joining MIRI, taking into account the selection effect.
Personally, I'd go with what has been proven/demonstrated to work as a high-quality attractor.
Yep. I also tend to ignore nontechnical folks along the lines of RationalWiki getting offended by my thinking that I know something they don't about MWI. Carl often hears about, anonymizes, and warns me when technical folks outside the community are offended by something I do. I can't recall hearing any warnings from Carl about the QM sequence offending technical people.
Bluntly, if shminux can't grasp the technical argument for MWI then I wouldn't expect him to understand what really high-class technical people might think of the QM sequence. Mihaly said the rest of the Sequences seemed interesting but lacked sufficient visible I-wouldn't-have-thought-of-that nature. This is very plausible to me - after all, the Sequences do indeed seem to me like the sort of thing somebody might just think up. I'm just kind of surprised the QM part worked, and it's possible that might be due to Mihaly having already taken standard QM so that he could clearly see the contrast between the explanation he got in college and the explanation on LW. It's a pity I'll probably never have time to write up TDT.
That sounds like reasonable evidence against the selection effect.
I strongly recommend against both the "advises newcomers to skip the QM sequence -> can't grasp technical argument for MWI" and "disagrees with MWI argument -> poor technical skill" inferences.
That inference isn't made. Eliezer has other information from which to reach that conclusion. In particular, he has several years worth of ranting and sniping from Shminux about his particular pet peeve. Even if you disagree with Eliezer's conclusion it is not correct to claim that Eliezer is making this particular inference.
Again, Eliezer has a large body of comments from which to reach the conclusion that Shminux has poor technical skill in the areas necessary for reasoning on that subject. The specific nature of the disagreement would be relevant, for example.
Shminux's and Eliezer?
That very well could be, in which case my recommendation about that inference does not apply to Eliezer.
I will note that this comment suggests that Eliezer's model of shminux may be underdeveloped, and that caution in ascribing motives or beliefs to others is often wise.
It really doesn't. At best it suggests Eliezer could have been more careful in word selection regarding Shminux's particular agenda. 'About' rather than 'with' would be sufficient.
I have a phd in physics (so I have at least some technical skill in this area) and find the QM sequence's argument for many worlds unconvincing. You lead the reader toward a false dichotomy (Copenhagen or many worlds) in order to suggest that the low probability of copenhagen implies many worlds. This ignores a vast array of other interpretations.
Its also the sort of argument that seems very likely to sway someone with an intro class in college (one or two semesters of a Copenhagen based shut-up-and-calculate approach), precisely because having seen Copenhagen and nothing else they 'know just enough to be dangerous', as it were.
For me personally, the quantum sequence threw me into some doubt about the previous sequences I had read. If I have issues with the area I know the most about, how much should I trust the rest? Other's mileage may vary.
I defected from physics during my Master's, but this is basically the impression I had of the QM sequence as well.
Actually, attempting to steelman the QM Sequence made me realize that the objective collapse models are almost certainly wrong, due to the way they deal with the EPR correlations. So the sequence has been quite useful to me.
On the other hand, it also made me realize that the naive MWI is also almost certainly wrong, as it requires uncountable worlds created in any finite instance of time (unless I totally misunderstand the MWI version of radioactive decay, or any emission process for that matter). It has other issues, as well. Hence my current leanings toward some version of RQM, which EY seems to dislike almost as much as his straw Copenhagen, though for different reasons.
Right, I've had a similar experience, and I heard it voiced by others.
As a result of re-examining EY's take on epistemology of truth, I ended up drifting from the realist position (map vs territory) to an instrumentalist position (models vs inputs&outputs), but this is a topic for another thread. I am quite happy with the sequences related to cognitive science, where, admittedly, I have zero formal expertise. But they seem to match what the actual experts in the field say.
I am on the fence with the free-will "dissolution", precisely because I know that I am not qualified to spot an error and there is little else out there in terms of confirming evidence or testable predictions.
I am quite skeptical about the dangers of AGI x-risk, mainly because it seems to extrapolate too far beyond what is known into the fog of the unknown future, though do I appreciate quite a few points made in the relevant sequences. Again, I am not qualified to judge their validity.
Is there actually any physicists that find QM sequence to be making such a strongly compelling case for MWI as EY says it does?
I know Mitchell Porter is likewise a physicist and he's not convinced at all either.
Mitchell Porter also advocates Quantum Monadology and various things about fundamental qualia. The difference in assumptions about how physics (and rational thought) works between Eliezer (and most of Eliezer's target audience) and Mitchell Porter is probably insurmountable.
Hi Everyone! I'm AABoyles (that's true most places on the internet besides LW).
I first found LW when a colleague mentioned That Alien Message over lunch. I said something to the effect of "That sounds like an Arthur C. Clarke short story. Who is the author?" "Eliezer Yudkowsky," He said, and sent me the link. I read it, and promptly forgot about it. Fast forward a year, and another friend posts the link to HPMOR on Facebook. The author's name sounded very familiar. I read it voraciously. I subscribed to the Main RSS feed and lurked for a year.
I joined the community last month because I wanted to respond to a specific discussion, but I've been having a lot of fun since I got here. I'm interested in finding ways to achieve the greatest good (read: reducing the number of lost Disability Adjusted Life Years), including Effective Altruism and Global Catastrophic Risk Reduction.
Hello community.
I've been aware of LW for a while, reading individual posts linked in programmer/engineering hangouts now and then, and I independently came across HPMOR in search of good fanfiction. But the decision to un-lurk myself came after I attended a CFAR workshop (a major positive life change) and realized that I want to keep being engaged with the community.
I'm very interested in anti-aging research (both from the effective altruism point of view, and because I find the topic really exciting and fascinating) and want to learn about it in as much depth as time permits. So far I would come across science articles about single related discoveries in specialized fields (molecular biology, brain science, ... ) but I haven't found a good resource (book, coursera course, whatever) where I can learn the necessary medicine/biology background and how it all comes together in the current state of the art (I'm thinking of something similar to all the remarkable physics books we have on the market). Any pointers are appreciated.
Hi I'm N. Currently a systems engineer. Lurked for sometime and finally decided to create an account. I am interested in mathematics and computer science and typography. Fonts can give me happiness or drive me crazy.
I am currently in SoCal.
This account is used by a VA to post events for the Melbourne Meetup group. Comment is to accrue 2 karma to allow posting.
I chose more_wrong as a name because I'm in disagreement with a lot of the lesswrong posters about what constitutes a reasonable model of the world. Presumably my opinions are more wrong than opinions that are lesswrong, hence the name :)
My rationalist origin story would have a series of watershed events but as far as I can tell, I never had any core beliefs to discard to become rational, because I never had any core beliefs at all. Do not have a use for them, never picked them up.
As far as identifying myself as an aspiring rationalist, the main events that come to mind would be: 1. Devouring as a child anything by Isaac Asimov that I could get my hands on. In case you are not familiar with the bulk of his work, most of it is scientific and historical exposition, not his more famous science fiction; see especially his essays for rationalist material.
Working on questions in physics like "Why do we call two regions of spacetime close to each other?", that is, delving into foundational physics.
Learning about epistemology and historiography from my parents, a mathematician and a historian.
Thinking about the thinking process itself. Note: Being afflicted with neurological and psychological conditions that shut down various parts of my mentality, notably severe intermittent aphasia, has given me a different perspective on the thinking process.
Making some effort to learn about historical perspectives on what constitutes reason or rationality, and not assuming that the latest perspectives are necessarily the best.
I could go on but that might be enough for an intro.
My hope is to both learn how to reason more effectively and, if fortunate, make a contribution to the discussion group that helps us to learn the same as a community. mw
Hello there! I really enjoyed HPMOR, because it expanded on some of my thoughts and made me feel less alone. I joined now to post a realization about Harry's (and my) personality. See my 1st post.
Hi! I read some articles here a few years ago, decided they were good, and moved on. I think I am a pretty practical person, and I have some ways of deciding things that are utility based (and some that are not).
I would like to ask the community for some help with a couple of reading recommendations:
Thanks very much, and I hope to be optimizing more things soon. It's nice to meet you!
Hi, My name is Zoltan Istvan. I'm a transhumanist, futurist, journalist, and the author of the philosophical novel "The Transhumanist Wager." I've been checking out this site for some time, but decided to create an account today to become closer to the community. I thought I'd start by posting an essay I recently wrote, which sums up some of my ideas. Feel free to share it if you like, and I hope you find it moving. Cheers.
"When Does Hindering Life Extension Science Become a Crime—or even Genocide?"
Every human being has both a minimum and a maximum amount of life hours left to live. If you add together the possible maximum life hours of every living person on the planet, you arrive at a special number: the optimum amount of time for our species to evolve, find happiness, and become the most that it can be. Many reasonable people feel we should attempt to achieve this maximum number of life hours for humankind. After all, very few people actually wish to prematurely die or wish for their fellow humans' premature deaths.
In a free and functioning democratic society, it's the duty of our leaders and government to implement laws and social strategies to maximize these life hours that we want to safeguard. Regardless of ideological, political, religious, or cultural beliefs, we expect our leaders and government to protect our lives and ensure the maximum length of our lifespans. Any other behavior cuts short the time human beings have left to live. Anything else becomes a crime of prematurely ending human lives. Anything else fits the common legal term we have for that type of reprehensible behavior: criminal manslaughter.
In 2001, former President George W. Bush restricted federal funding for stem cell research, one of the most promising fields of medicine in the 21st Century. Stem cells can be used to help fight disease and, therefore, can lengthen lives. Bush restricted the funding because his conservative religious beliefs—some stem cells came from aborted fetuses—conflicted with his fiduciary duty of helping millions of ailing, disease-stricken human beings. Much medical research in the United States relies heavily on government funding and the legal right to do the research. Ultimately, when a disapproving President limits public resources for a specific field of science, the research in that field slows down dramatically—even if that research would obviously lengthen and improve the lives of millions.
It's not just politicians that are prematurely ending our lives with what can be called "pro-death" policies and ideologies. In 2009, on a trip to Africa, Pope Benedict XVI told journalists that the epidemic of AIDS would be worsened by encouraging people to use condoms. More than 25 million people have died from AIDS since the first cases began being reported in the news in the early 1980s. In numerous studies, condoms have been shown to help stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This makes condoms one of the simplest and most affordable life extension tools on the planet. Unfathomably, the billion-person strong Catholic Church actively supports the idea that condom usage is sinful, despite the fact that such a malicious policy has helped sicken and kill a staggering amount of innocent people.
Regrettably, in 2014, America continues to be permeated with an anti-life extension culture. Genetic engineering experiments in humans often have to pass numerous red-tape-laden government regulatory bodies in order to conduct any tests at all, especially at publically funded universities and research centers. Additionally, many states still ban human reproductive cloning, which could one day play a critical part in extending human life. The current US administration is also culpable. The White House is simply not doing enough to extend American lifespans. The US Government spends just 2% of the national budget on science and medical research, while their defense budget is over 20%, according to a 2011 US Office of Management Budget chart. Does President Obama not care about this fact, or is he unaware that not actively funding and supporting life extension research indeed shortens lives?
In my philosophical novel The Transhumanist Wager, there is a scene which takes place outside of a California courthouse where transhumanist activists are holding up a banner. The words inscribed on the banner sum up some eye-opening data: "By not actively funding life extension research, the amount of life hours the United States Government is stealing from its citizens is thousands of times more than all the American life hours lost in the Twin Towers tragedy, the AIDS epidemic, and the Vietnam War combined. Demand that your government federally fund transhuman research, nullify anti-science laws, and promote a life extension culture. The average human body can be made to live healthily and productively beyond age 150."
Some longevity experts think that with a small amount of funding—$50 billion dollars—targeted specifically towards life extension research and ending human mortality, average human lifespans could be increased by 25-50 years in about a decade's time. The world's net worth is over $200 trillion dollars, so the species can easily spare a fraction of its wealth to gain some of the most valuable commodities humans have: health and time.
Unfortunately, our species has already lost a massive amount of life hours; billions of lives have been unnecessarily cut short in the last 50 years because of widespread anti-science attitudes and policies. Even in the modern 21st Century, our evolutionary development continues to be significantly hampered by world leaders and governments who believe in non-empirical, faith-driven religious doctrines—most of which require the worship of deities whose teachings totally negate the need for radical life extension science. Virtually every major leader on the planet believes their "God" will give them an afterlife in a heavenly paradise, so living longer on planet Earth is just not that important.
Back in the real world, 150,000 people died yesterday. Another 150,000 will cease to exist today, and the same amount will disappear tomorrow. A good way to reverse this widespread deathist attitude should start with investigative government and non-government commissions examining whether public fiduciary duty requires acting in the best interest of people's health and longevity. Furthermore, investigative commissions should be set up to examine whether former and current top politicians and religious leaders are guilty of shortening people's lives for their own selfish beliefs and ideologies. Organizations and other global leaders that have done the same should be scrutinized and investigated too. And if fault or crimes against humanity are found, justice should be administered. After all, it's possible that the Catholic Church's stance on condoms will be responsible for more deaths in Africa than the Holocaust was responsible for in Europe. Over one million AIDS victims died in Africa last year alone. Catholicism is growing quickly in Africa, and there will soon be nearly 200 million Catholics on the continent. Obviously, the definition of genocide needs to be reconsidered by the public.
As a civilization of advanced beings who desire to live longer, better, and more successfully, it is our responsibility to put government, religious institutions, big business, and other entities that endorse pro-death policies on notice. Society should stand ready to prosecute anyone that deliberately promotes agendas and actions that prematurely end people's useful lives. Stifling or hindering life extension science, education, and practices needs to be recognized as a legitimate crime.
Do you apply this stirring declaration to the beginning of a life as well as to the end of one?
First, let me just say that the essay is designed to provoke and challenge, while also aiming to move the idea forward in hopes life extension can be taken more seriously. I realize the incredible difficulties and violations of freedom, as the ideas in the essay would require. But to answer your question, I tend to concentrate on "useful" lives, so the declaration would not apply to the beginning of life, but rather to those lives that are already well under way.
A tiny minority group such as transhumanists should not make threats against the powers that be.
He's making it himself, not as a spokesperson of the movement. However, as a transhumanist myself, I can't say I disagree with him. Morally speaking, when does not only actively hindering, but choosing to not vehemently pursue, life extension research constitute a threat on our lives?
Maybe it is time (or if not, it will be very soon) for transhumanism and transhumanists to enter the public sphere, to become more visible and vocal.
We have the capacity, for the first time in human history, to potentially end death, and not for our progeny but for ourselves, now. Yet we are disorganized, spread thin, essentially invisible in terms of public consciousness. People are having freakouts about something as mundane as Google Glass: We are talking about the cyberization or gross genetic manipulation of our bodies, increasing life spans to quickly approach "indefinite", etc., and not in some distant future, but in the next twenty or thirty years.
We are being held back by lack of funding, poor cohesion, and a general failure of imagination, and that is largely our own fault for being content to be quiet, to remain a fringe element, optimistically debating and self-congratulating in nooks and niches of various online communities, bothering and being bothered by few if any.
I believe it is our moral imperative to, now that is is possible, pursue life extension with every cent and scrap of resources we have available to us. To do otherwise is reprehensible.
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
Let Mr. Istvan make his threats, as long as it gets people talking about us.
This means taking a consequentialist public relations strategy. Imagine that group X advocates Y, and you know little about X and based on superficial analysis Y seems somewhat silly. How would your opinion of group X change if you find members of this group want to "prosecute anyone" who stands in the way of Y?
Hi, Thanks for the response. I should be clear; transhumanists are not making the threat. I'm making it myself. And I'm doing it as publicly and openly as possible so there can be no misunderstanding:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-transhumanist-philosopher/201401/when-does-hindering-life-extension-science-become-crime
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/istvan20140131
The problem is that lives are on the line. So I feel someone needs to openly state what seems to be quite obvious. Thanks for considering my thoughts.
Greetings!
I'm Brian. I'm a full-time police dispatcher and part-time graduate student in the marriage and family therapy/counseling master's degree program at the University of Akron (in northeast Ohio). Before I began studies in my master's program, I earned a bachelor's degree in emergency management. I am an atheist and skeptic. I think I can trace my earliest interest in rationality back to my high school days, when I began critically examining theism (generally) and Catholicism (in particular) while taking an elective religion class called "Questions About God." It turned out the class raised more questions than answers, for me.
I found LessWrong by way of browsing CFAR's website and wishing that I had the money to attend one of their workshops. With that being said, I haven't been lurking around LW proper for very long. Thus, I anticipate it will take some time for me to become acquainted with norms of this platform. However, after briefly browsing around, I get the sense that this is a thoughtful community of people that value rationality. That's exciting to me! I hope to get more involved, as time permits, and to eventually become a valuable contributor.
Hello,
I'm a 34 yo programmer/entrepreneur in Romania, with a long time interest in rationality - long before I called it by that name. I think the earliest name I had for it was "wisdom", and a desire to find a consistent, repeatable way to obtain it. Must admit at that time I didn't imagine it was going to be so complicated.
Spent some of my 20s believing I already know everything, and then I made a decision that in retrospect was the best I ever made: never to look at the price when I buy a book, but only at the likelihood of finishing it. Which is something I strongly recommend even (or especially) to cash-starved students. The first one happened to be Nassim Taleb's Black Swan, which was another huge stroke of luck. Not only it exposed me to some pretty revolutionary concepts and destroyed my illusions of omniscience, but he's a frequent name dropper and provided a lot of leads for future reading material. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Introduction aside, I'm a long time lurker and I actually came here with a request for comments. There is an often mentioned thought experiment in the sequences that compares a lot of harm done to a person (like torture) with minimum harm done to a lot of people, like a mote in the eye of a billion people. I've always found it a bit disturbing, but couldn't escape the conclusion that harm is additive and comparable. Except I now think it's not.
I've recently read Anti-fragile and found the concept of "hormesis", i.e. small harm done to a complex system generates an over-compensatory response, resulting in overall improvement. Simple examples: cold showers or lifting weights. So small harm done to a lot of people is possible to overall have net positive effects.
Two holes I see in this argument: some harms like going to the gym create hormesis, while motes in the eye don't. Also, you could just up the harm: use a big enough mote that the overall effect is a net negative, like maybe cause some permanent damage. But both holes are plugged by the fact that complex systems will always find ways to compensate. Small cornea damage gets compensated at processing level, muscle damage turns into new muscle, neuron damage means rerouting etc. There are tipping points and limits, but they're still counter-intuitive. Killing the n-th neuron will put somebody in a wheelchair, but their happiness level still bounces back. There is harm, but it's very non-linear in respect to the original damage. So I can't help but conclude that harm is simply non-additive and non-comparable, at least not easily.
Hello,
I'd like to get some opinions about my future goals.
I'm 21 and I'm a second-year student of engineering in Prague, Czech Republic, focusing mainly on math and then physics.
My background is not stunning - I was born in 93, visiting sporting primary school and then general high school. Until I was in second year of high school, I behaved as an idiot with below-average results in almost everything, paradoxically except extraordinary "general study presupposes" (whatever it means). My not so bad IQ - according to IQ test I took when I was 15 - is about 130 points. When I was 17, I realized that there is something about the world that needs to be done with. I started to study, mainly math and physics. I was horrible at it - I had very big disadvantage because I missed basics and wasn't able to recognize it. Anyway, I tried (but, unfortunately, not as much as I had to) and reached so-so level and I got on the technical university. Here I tried really hard and I achieved relatively good results and got into the best maths-focused student group. I'm below-average in this group (about 30 students) and my results are satisfactory. I'm quite popular thanks to collaborating on some non-study events for my schoolmates. I also created a presentation for high school students about engineering and I distributed it among faculty workers and students, who are connected to propagation.
About 10 years I obtained ECDL and it started my curiosity about informatics. But nothing special - I was autodidact in HTML and "computer administration" for regular usage. I was also very interested in economy, as my father is working in this area. I actively did cross-country skiing and play on piano and trombone.
I have high charisma, authority and ability to organize people and some bigger events, which I was usually asked to prepare (the graduate prom, matriculation etc.). I have good reasoning skills and ability to negotiate even under heavy pressure and stress. People usually enjoy time with me and appreciates me for my honesty, empathy and "cold-think" reasoning solutions, which in most time shows there were the best possible. I'm in healthy relationship for two years. My family is good background for my activities and support me. They also support me financially. My expense per month is not more than 300 USD including accommodation with in an apartment (university students, two of them from my university and domain), food and social activities.
Currently, apart from my school activities, I'm also attending some kind of philosophy group every week, where we usually discuss some topic about epistemology, relationships, culture, religions etc., we read some philosophic works (Platon), deal with art (classical music or paintings) or we write some kind of voluntary essays. I'm really interested in discussions about these topics and I try to develop my reasoning skills as often I can. For example, now I contacted a priest from local temple with whom I want to discuss some religion based questions. I autodidact psychology (last book I've read was Kahneman: Think fast and slow), rationality (started to read LW sequences), and programming. I enjoy using open source software on my Archlinux laptop and now I dived into Python as a scripting language. I also develop some web for my mother using Django and I also signed for a statistical research task about datamining in Python (pandas, numpy, scikit-learn...) or R. In school I have courses of C++ also. I'm not the most talented or generally best mathematician or programmer, but I have quite good learning (and also teaching) skills.
I've chosen my "path" - I'd like to do what's right and true and seek for the truth whenever it is possible. I feel that I'm not getting everything (e.g. from my school) I need for changing the world to a better place. I could do more. I can't decide where to focus and how to divide my attention and possibilities. Should I do aggressive autodidact of sequences? Should I focus on maths and algorithms or biases? Should I try to develop my social skills?
And the second question is simple:" Are there any Czechs who are interested in meetups in PRAGUE?"
Thank you
Hi,
I'm a philosopher (postdoc) at the London School of Economics who recently discovered Less Wrong. I am now reading through lots of old posts, especially Yudkowsky's and lukeprog's philosophy-related material, which I find very interesting.
I think lukeprog is right when he points out that the general thrust of Yudkowsky's philosophy belongs to a naturalistic tradition often associated with Quine's name. In general, I think it would be useful to situate Yudkowsky's ideas visavi the philosophical tradition. I hope to be able to contributre something here at some point (though I should point out that I'm not an expert in the history of philosophy).
lukeprog argues for these ideas in two excellent articles:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4vr/less_wrong_rationality_and_mainstream_philosophy/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/4zs/philosophy_a_diseased_discipline/
I agree with most of what is said there, and am myself very critical of mainstream analytical philosophy. It also seems to me that the overall program advocated here - to let psychological knowledge permeate all philosophical arguments in a very radical way - is very promising. Though there are philosophers who make use of psychology, do experiments, etc., few let it influence their thinking as radically as it is done here.
The site seems very interesting in other respects as well. I am presently reading up on cognitive science (I found this site after googling on Stanovichs Rationality and the Reflective Mind, which I now have read) and am grateful for the info on this subject gathered on Less Wrong.
Greetings.
I'm a long-time singularitarian and (intermediate) rationalist looking be a part of the conversation again. By day I am an English teacher in a suburban American high school. My students have been known to Google me. Rather than self-censor I am using a pseudonym so that I will feel free to share my (anonymized) experiences as a rationalist high school teacher.
I internet-know a number of you in this community from early years of the Singularity Institute. I fleetingly met at a few in person once, perhaps. I used to write on singularity-related issues, and was a proud "sniper" of the SL4 mailing list for a time. For the last 6-7 years I've mostly dropped off the radar by letting "life" issues consume me, though I have continued to follow the work of the key actors from afar with interest. I allow myself some pride for any small positive impact I might have once had during a time of great leverage for donors and activists, while recognizing that far too much remains undone. (If you would like to confirm your suspicions of my identity, I would love to hear from you with a PM. I just don't want Google searches of my real name pulling up my LW activity.)
High school teaching has been a taxing path, along with parenting, and it has been all too easy to use these as excuses to neglect my more challenging (yet rewarding) interests. I let my inaction and guilt reinforce each other until I woke up one day, read HPMoR, and realized I had long-ago regressed into an NPC.
Screw that.
Other background tidbits: I'm one of those atheist ex-mormons that seem so plentiful on this page (since 2000ish). I'm a self-taught "hedge coder" who has successfully used inelegant-but-effective programming in the service of my career. I feel effective in public education, which is not without its rewards. But on some important levels teaching at an American public high school is also a bit like working security at Azkaban, and I'm not sure how many more years I'll be able to keep my patronus going.
I've been using GTD methodologies for the last eight years or so, which has been great for letting me keep my mind clear to work on important tasks at hand; however, my dearest personal goals (which involve writing, both fiction and non) live among some powerful Ugh Fields. If I had been reading LW more closely, I probably would've discovered the Pomodoro method a lot sooner. This is helping.
My thanks to all who share their insights and experiences on this forum.
Hi everybody,
My name is Eric, and I'm currently finishing up my last semester of undergraduate study and applying to Ph.D. programs in cognitive psychology/cognitive neuroscience. I recently became interested in the predictive power offered by formal rational models of behavior after working in Paul Glimcher's lab this past summer at NYU, where I conducted research on matching behavior is rhesus monkeys. I stumbled upon Less Wrong while browsing the internet for behavioral economics blogs. After reading a couple of posts, I decided to join.
Some sample topics that I like reading about and discussing include intertemporal choice, risk preferences, strategic behavior in the context of games, reinforcement learning, and the evolution of cooperation. I look forward to chatting with some of you!
Hello, LW,
One of my names is holist. I am 45. Self-employed family man, 6 kids, 2 dogs, 1 cat. Originally a philosopher (BA+MA from Sussex, UK), but I've been a translator for 19 years now... it is wearing thin. Music and art are also important parts of my life (have sold music, musically directed a small circus, have exhibited pictures), and recently, with dictatorship being established here in Hungary, politics seems increasingly urgent, too. I dabble in psychotherapy and call myself a Discordian. Recently, I started thinking about doing a PhD somewhere. My topic is very general: what has caused the increasingly hostile relationship between individual and culture, and what are the remedies available? My window of opportunity is a few years away: I am intermittently thinking about possible supervisors. I have a blog at holist.hu, some of it is in English and it has a lot of pictures. The discordians at PD kicked me out, I found the Secular Café to be indescribably boring, I am a keen MeFite, but I'd like something a little more discussioney. A friend pointed me at LW. I hope it works out.
For pointers, here's a slightly random list of some books that are very important to me: Fiction: Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses by James Joyce, Karnevál by Béla Hamvas, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Diamong Age by Neal Stephenson. Non-fiction: The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, The Facts of Life by R. D. Laing, Children of the Future by Wilhelm Reich, The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Story of B by Daniel Quinn, Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich
I guess I'll start by lurking, but you never know :)
Hello, my name is Luke. I'm an urban planning graduate student at Cleveland State University, having completed an undergrad in philosophy at the University of New Hampshire a year ago. It was the coursework I did at that school which lead me to be interested in the nebulous and translucent topic of rationality, and I'm happy to see so many people involved and interested in the same conversations I'd spend hours having with classmates. Heck, the very question I was asking myself in something of an ontological sense--am I missing the trees for the forest--is what led me here, specifically to Eliezer's article on the fallacies of compression, which was somewhat helpful. Suffice to say, I tend to think I'm not missing the trees for the forest, and that in fact the original form of the idiom remains true for most other people, though thankfully, not many here.
I'm deeply interested in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and metaethics, all of which I attempt to approach in systemic ways. As for what led me to consider myself a rationalist in these endeavors...I'm not sure I do. In fact, I'm not sure anyone can or should think of themselves a rationalist, considering that basic beliefs, other than solipsism, are inductive and inferential, and thus fallible. We could argue in circles forever (as others have) what constitutes knowledge, but any definition seems, in my view, to be arbitrary and thus non-universal and therefore, again, fallible--even mathematical knowledge and formal logic.
Granted, I don't sit in a corner rocking back and forth sucking my thumb, driven mad by the uncertainty of it all, but I also operate with the knowledge that whatever I deem rational behavior and thought processes only seem rational because I've pre-decided what constitutes rational behavior (i.e., circularity, or coherentism at best...feeling like I'm writing a duplicate of a different post). Of course, all that seems like too easy an exit from a number of hard problems, so I keep reading to make sure that, in fact, I oughtn't be rocking back and forth in a corner sucking my thumb for the utility of it, turning into a kind of utility monster. An absurdist I remain, but one with a pretty strong intuitive consequentialist metaethical framework which allows me to find great joy in the topics covered on LW.
Hi, I have a site tech question. (Sorry if this is the wrong place to post that!—I couldn't find any other.)
I can't find a way to get email notifications of comment replies (i.e. when my inbox icon goes red). If there is one, how do I turn it on?
If there isn't one, is that a deliberate design feature, or a limitation of the software, or...?
Thanks (and thanks especially to whoever does the system maintenance here—it must be a big job.)
There's no way I know of to get email notifications, and I've looked enough that I'm pretty confident one doesn't exist.
No idea if it's a deliberate choice or a software limitation.
G'day
As you can probably guess, I'm Alex. I'm a high school student from Australia and have been disappointed with the education system here from quite some time.
I came to LW via HPMoR which was linked to me by a fellow member of the Aus IMO team. (I seriously doubt I'm the only (ex-)Olympian around here - seems just the sort of place that would attract them). I've spent the past few weeks reading the sequences by EY, as well as miscellaneous other stuff. Made a few (inconsequential) posts too.
I have very little in the way of controversial opinions to offer (relative to the demographics of this site) as just about all the unusual positions it takes I already agreed with (e.g. athiesm) or seemed pretty obvious to me after some thought (e.g. transhumanism). Maybe it's just hindsight bias.
I'm slightly disappointed with the ban on political discussion. I do agree that it should not be mentioned when not relevant but it seems a shame to waste this much rationality in one place by forbidding them to use it where it's most needed. A possible compromise would be to create a politics dicussion page to discuss pros and cons to particular ideologies. (If one already exists point me to it). A reason cited is that there are other sites to discuss politics - if any do so rationally I'd like to see them.
It is a relief to be somewhere where I don't have to constantly take into account inferential distance, and I shall try to make the most of this. I only resolve to write just that which has not been written.
Welcome!
There have been previous political threads, like here, here, or here. If you search "politics," you'll find quite a bit. Here was my response to the proposal that we have political discussion threads; basically, I think politics is a suboptimal way to spend your time. It might feel useful, but that doesn't mean it is useful. Here's Raemon's comment on the norm against discussing politics. Explicitly political discussion can be found on MoreRight, founded by posters active on LessWrong, as well as on other blogs. (MoreRight is part of 'neoreaction', which Yvain has recently criticized here, for example.)
I don't see what you mean by the 'pros and cons' of holding a particular ideology. Ideologies are, generally, value systems- they define what is a pro and what is a con.
I must add that not all political discussion is a mud-flinging match between the Cyans and the Magentas.
For example, the Public Choice theory is a bona fide intellectual topic, but it's also clearly political.
I would also argue that knowing things like the scope of NSA surveillance is actually useful.
I'm curious why you'd divert from the historically compelling example of the Blues and the Greens.
It's about politics, but the methodology is not political. The part of politics that's generally fun for people is putting forth an impassioned defense of some idea or policy. That's generally not useful on LessWrong unless it's about a site policy- and even then, the passion probably doesn't help.
Sure.
I strongly associate the Greens with, well, the Greens -- a set of political parties in Europe and the whole environmentalist movement.
Blue is a politically-associated color in the US as well.
True, but LW is VERY unrepresentative sample :-) and maybe we could do a bit better. You're right in that discussing the "pros and cons" of ideological positions is not a good idea, but putting "Warning: mindkill" signs around a huge area of reality and saying "we just don't go there" doesn't look appealing either.
Hello everyone,
My name is Mathias. I've been thinking about coming here for quite some while and I finally made the jump. I've been introduced to this website/community through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and I've been quite active on it's subreddit (under the alias of Yxoque).
For a while now, I've been self-identifying as "aspiring rationalist" and I want to level up even further. One way I learn quickly is through conversation, so that's why I finally decided to come here. Also because I wanted to attend a meet-up, but if felt wrong to join one of a community I'm not a member of.
As for info on myself, I'm not sure how interesting that is. I've recently graduated as a Bachelor in Criminology at the University of Brussels and I'm currently looking for a suitable job. I still need to figure out my comparative advantage.
I'm also reading through a pdf of all the blog posts, currently I'm on the Meta-ethics sequence. In my free time I'm (slowly) working on annotating HPMOR and convincing people to write Rational!Animorphs fanfiction.
Hi there, I am Andrew, living in Hungary and studying to be an IT physicist some day in an utmost lazy way. I've just recently discovered this site and so far I can't really believe what I'm seeing. I have been thinking myself before about a website whose main purpose is basically making its users wiser and/or more rational. - about which my main question later will be put that if u could answer would be great; also, excuse my English, it's not my native language.
I believe rationality can be expressed as the set of "right" algorithms in a given context. The rightfulness of algorithms in this case is dependent on the goal which the context defines.
My question is that are the majority of people here generally conscious of the significance of finding the "fancy word for global, important and unique" goal, or as I shall put "pure wisdom" OR do they - or you - here just feel the necessity to lay down the healthy plain soil for building the "tower of wisdom" and care less about the actual adventure of building it.
My main point is that even tough our best tool to gain wisdom is through rational thinking - and a little extra - , how we react and how far we go on this road as rational beings is the function of each one of our unique perspective of life. Are there individuals here whose (main) point in life is to possess the right perspective of life?
For example if we accepted all sciences and set aside our big hopes like the one for afterlife, we may come to the conclusion that any kind of necessity other than our primal ones that have evolved in our ancestors over the millions of years are flawed or delusional. Not taking the alternative of nihilism -its reflection to humans- or physicalism as its sort of parallel philosophy into account is neither irrational nor rational, but unwise I believe even though the philosophy itself doesn't bring or promise much materialistic profit.
Here, my goals in the first place would - I mean: will - be to observe, learn and then adjust my knowledge and beliefs since inevitably I'm gonna bump into other people's belief systems which are built on a rational, in its broadest sense, and healthy ground. Looking forward to it. And looking forward getting to know other people's struggles achieving similar goals and their personalities, have a nice day :)
There are individuals here whose main point in life is to ensure that the first superhuman artificial intelligence possesses the right perspective of life. Is that close enough? :-)
One thing that distinguishes LW rationalism from other historic rationalist movements is a strong interest in transhumanism and the singularity. Historically, wisdom has usually been about accepting the limited and disappointing nature of life, whether your attitude is stoic, epicurean, or bodhisattvic. But the cultural DNA of LW includes nanotechnology, space travel, physical immortality, mind uploading, and computer-brains the size of whole solar systems. There is a strong tendency to think that rationality consists of remaking nature in the image of your goals, rather than vice versa, and that the struggle is to determine which values will shape the universe. This is a level of Promethean ambition more common in apocalyptic movements than in rationalist movements.
This aspect of LW comes and goes in prominence.
Hello!
I'm Jennifer; I'm currently a graduate student in medieval literature and a working actor. Thanks to homeschooling, though, I do have a solid background and abiding interest in quantum physics/pure mathematics/statistics/etc., and 'aspiring rationalist' is probably the best description I can provide! I found the site through HPMoR.
Current personal projects: learning German and Mandarin, since I already have French/Latin/Spanish/Old English/Old Norse taken care of, and much as I personally enjoy studying historical linguistics and old dead languages, knowing Mandarin would be much more practical (in terms of being able to communicate with the greatest number of people when travelling, doing business, reading articles, etc.)
Hey, another homeschooled person! There seem to be a lot of us here. How was your experience? Mine was the crazy religious type, but I still consider it to have been an overall good thing for my development relative to other feasible options.
Me three-- I thought I was the only one, where are we all hiding? :)
My experience was, overall, excellent - although my parents are definitely highly religious. (To be more precise, my father is a pastor, so biology class certainly contained some outdated ideas!) However, I'm in complete agreement - relative to any other possible options, I don't think I could have gotten a better education (or preparation for postsecondary/graduate studies) any other way.
Yeah, I got taught young earth creationism instead of evolution. But despite this, i think I was better prepared academically than most of my peers.
Impressive! How do you plan to learn Mandarin? Immersion? Rosetta Stone?
Combination of methods based on what has worked for me in the past with other languages! I've used Rosetta Stone before, for French & Spanish, and while it's definitely got advantages, I (personally - I also know people who love it!) also found it very time-consuming for very little actual learning, and it's also expensive for what it is.
Basically:
a) I have enough friends who are either native or fluent speakers of Mandarin that once I'm a little more confident with the basics, I will draft them to help me practice conversation skills :)
b) My university offers inexpensive part-time courses to current students.
c) Lots of reading, textbook exercises, watching films, listening to music, translating/reading newspapers, etc. in the language.
d) I'm planning to go to China to teach English in the not-too-distant future, so while I'd like to have basic communication skills down before I go, immersion will definitely help!
Salutations!
My name is Aaron. I'm a college junior on the tail end of the cycle of Bar Mitzvah to New Atheist to info-omnivorous psychology geek to attempted systems thinker. Prospective Psychology/Cognitive Science major at Yale, very interested in meeting other rationalists in the New Haven area. I'm on the board of the Yale Humanist Community, I'm a research assistant in a neuroscience lab, and I do a lot of writing.
Big problems I've been thinking a lot about: Why are most people wildly irrational in the amount of time they're willing to devote to information search (that is, reducing uncertainty around uncertain decisions)? How can humanists and rationalists build a compelling community that serves adults of all ages as well as children? What sorts of media tend to encourage the "shift" from bad thinking to good thinking, and/or passive to active thinking (NPC vs. hero mindset, sort of--this one is complicated), and how can we get that media in the hands of more people?
I read HPMoR without really noticing Less Wrong, but have been linked to a few posts over the years. Last spring, I found "Privileging the Question", which rang so true that I went on to read the Sequences and much of the rest. I was never very certain in my philosophy before finding the site, but now I'm pretty sure I at least know how to think about philosophy, which is nice.
The next few years hopefully involve me getting a job out of college that will allow me to build savings while donating plenty, while aligning me to take a position in some high-upside sector of tech or in the rationalist arena, but a lot of people say that, and I'm very unsure about what will actually happen if I flunk my case interviews. Still, the future will be better than the past regardless, and that thought keeps me going (as does knowing how many people are out there working to avoid future-is-worse-than-past scenarios).
Hi, I am Olga, female, 40, programmer, mother of two. Got here from HPMoR. Can not as yet define myself as a rationalist, but I am working on it. Some rationality questions, used in real life conversations, have helped me to tackle some personal and even family issues. It felt great. In my "grown-up" role I am deeply concerned to bring up my kids with their thoughts process as undamaged as I possibly can and maybe even to balance some system-taught stupidity. I am at the start of my reading list on the matter, including LW sequences.
Welcome!
Many people here call themselves aspiring rationalists.
Hi, I always like to be less wrong and try to verify and falsify my own take on philosophical Modernism, which I have developed since my student days. (FYI, I am twice that age now.) I believe we should all have opinions about everything and look for independent confirmation, rational or emotional, both for the give and for the take, when earned, to find truth. When it doesn't happen, I try to improve on my theory. I have done so online for years at http://crpa.co. I would like you to try and find any or all flaws and make a case out of it. Thanks in advance. I will be critical too of your work if you would like me to. Best regards ~Ron dW.
I've been trying very hard to read the paper at that link for a while now, but honestly I can't figure it out. I can't even find anything content-wise to criticize because I don't understand what you're trying to claim in the first place. Something about the distinction between map and territory? But what the heck does that have to do with ethics and economics? And why the (seeming?) presumption of Christianity? And what does any of that have to do with this graph-making software you're trying to sell?
It would really help me if you could do the following:
His pile of CRPA reads like autogenerated entries from http://snarxiv.org/.
Thanks for your reply DSimon. I like Yudkowsky's story. Truth as I understand it, is simply that which can be detected by independent confirmation, if we look for it. It is the same methodology as being used in science, justice, journalism and other realms.
Hi! Everyone below are superbly impressive! I'm a physicist, in my second year of teaching English and that's as much rationality as I can provide at the moment. Looking to relocate to China in an effort to be superhuman. Would really appreciate a few pointers on teaching institutions to avoid/ embrace.
Excellent reading here, thanks! Nas
Hi. I've been a distant LW lurker for a while now; I first encountered the Sequences sometime around 2009, and have been an avid HP:MOR fan since mid-2011.
I work in computer security with a fair bit of software verification as flavoring, so the AI confinement problem is of interest to me, particularly in light of recent stunts like arbitrary computation in zero CPU instructions via creative abuse of the MMU trap handler. I'm also interested in applying instrumental rationality to improve the quality and utility of my research in general. I flirt with some other topics as well, including capability security, societal iterated game theory, trust (e.g., PKI), and machine learning; a meta-goal is to figure out how to organize my time so that I can do more applied work in these areas.
Apart from that, lately I've become disillusioned with my usual social media circles, in part due to a perceived* uptick in terrible epistemology and in part due to facing the fact that I use them as procrastination tools. I struggle with akrasia, and am experiencing less of it since quitting my previous haunts cold turkey, but things could still be better and I hope to improve them by seeking out positive influences here.
*I haven't measured this. It's entirely possible I've become more sensitive to bad epistemology, or some other influence is lowering my tolerance to bad epistemology.