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Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.
EXTRA FEATURES:
There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.
LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like
common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.
LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.
SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.
A few notes about the community
If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.
If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new article" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)
If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome! I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma—honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)
Alternatively, if you're still unsure where to submit a post, whether to submit it at all, would like some feedback before submitting, or want to gauge interest, you can ask / provide your draft / summarize your submission in the latest
open comment
thread. In fact, Open Threads are intended for
anything 'worth saying, but not worth its own post', so please do dive in! Informally, there is also the unofficial
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special threads; they're a great way to get involved with the community!
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)
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, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!
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Comments (513)
I'm Sam, 22. Lurked here for two years after first stumbling upon the Sequences. Since then, I've been trying to curb inaccurate or dishonest thought patterns or behaviors I've noticed about myself, and am trying to live my life more optimally. I'm making an account to try to hold myself more accountable.
Hi, Sam! Welcome to Less Wrong.
Just so you know, the current welcome thread is this. It's fine that you posted here, but you'll most likely get more attention if you post on the newer thread.
You probably got sent here from the outdated link on the About page. I've written a post asking for someone with access to the About page to update it, but I don't know if any of the people with the necessary access have seen it.
I'm Matt, 32, Living in Los Angeles. I first read Less Wrong sometime in 2012, and attended the CFAR Workshop in February 2014, and finally now am getting around to signing up an account, because while i am not as wrong as I used to be, I'm still mostly wrong much of the time, but I'm working on fixing that.
Welcome, Matt!
Just so you know, the most recent welcome thread is here. It's not a problem that you posted on this thread, but your post will most likely get more attention if you repost it to the newer thread.
Thanks! Since you seem to be in the know, maybe you know who can update the page that sent me here: http://lesswrong.com/about/
[META]
Because this thread hit 500 comments, I've posted a new one here. (In Main, but not yet promoted.)
Hi, I registered specifically on LessWrong because after reading up about Eliezer's Super-happies, I found out that there actually exists a website on the concept of super-happiness. Up to now, I had thought that I was the only one who had thought about the subject in terms of transhumanism, and while I acknowledge that there has already been significant amounts of discourse towards superhappiness, I don't believe that others have had the same ideas that I have, and I would like to discuss the idea in a community that might be interested in it.
The premises are as follows: human beings seek utility and seek to avoid disutility. However, what one person thinks is good is not the same as what another person thinks is good, hence, the concept of good and bad is to some extent arbitrary. Moreover, preferences, beliefs, and so on, that are held by human beings are material structures that exist within their neurology, and a sufficiently advanced technology may exist that would be able to modify such beliefs.
Human beings are well-off when their biological perceptions of needs are satisfied, and their fears are avoided. Superhappiness, as far as I understand it, is to biologically hardwire people to have their needs be satisfied. What I think is my own innovation, on the other hand, is [b]ultrahappiness[/b], which is to biologically modify people so that their fears are minimalized, and their wants are maximalized, which is to say, that for a given individual, that person is as happy as their biological substrate can support.
Now, combine this with utilitarianism, the ethical doctrine that believes in the greatest good for the greatest number. If the greatest good for a single individual is defined as ultra-happiness, then the greatest good for the greatest number is defined as maximizing ultra-happiness.
What this means is that the "good state", bear with me, is that for a given quantity of matter, as much ultra-happiness is created as possible. This means that human biological matter is modified in such a way that it is in a state that it expresses the most efficient possible state of ultra-happiness, and as a consequence, it could not be said to be conscious in the same way as humans are currently conscious right now, and likely would lose all volition.
Now, combine this with a utilitarian super-intelligent artificial intelligence. If it were to subscribe to ultra-happy-ism, it would decide that the best state would be to modify all existing humans under its care to some type of ultra-happy state, and find a way to convert all matter within its dominion to an ultra-happy state. === So, that's ultra-happy-ism. The idea is that the logical end of transhumanism and post-humanism, is that if it values human happiness, it would ultimately assume a state that would radically transform and to some extent eliminate existing human consciousness, put the entire world into a state of nirvana, if you'd accept the Buddhism metaphor. At the same time, the ultra-happy AI, would, presumably be programmed either to ignore its own state of suffering / unfulfilled wants, or it would decide that its utilitarian ethics means that it should bear on the burden of its own shoulders the suffering of the rest of the world; ie, the requirements that it be made responsible for maintaining as much ultrahappiness in the world as possible, while it itself, as a conscious, sentient entity, be subjected to the possibility of unhappiness, because in its own capacity for empathy, it itself cannot accept its nirvana, being what the Buddhists would call a bodhisattva, in order to maximize the subjective utility of the universe.
===
The main objection I immediately see to this concept is that, well, first, human utility might be more than material, that is to say, even when rendered into a state of super-happiness, the ability to have volition, to have the dignity of autonomy, might have greater utility than ultra-happiness.
The second objection is, for the ultra-happy AIs that run what I would term utility farms, the rational thing for them to do would be to modify themselves into ultra-happiness; that is to say, what's to stop them from effectively committing suicide and condeming the ultra-happy dyson sphere to death because of their own desire to say "Atlas Shrugs"?
I think those two objections are valid. Ie, human beings might be better off if they were only super-happy, as opposed to ultra-happy, and that an AI system based on ultra-happiness and maximizing ultra-happiness is unsustainable because eventually the AIs will want to code themselves into ultra-happiness.
The objection I think is invalid is the notion that you can be ultra-happy while retaining your volition. There are two counterarguments for that, first, relating to utilitarianism as a system of utility farming, and second, relating to the nature of desire. First, as a system of utility farming, the objective is to maximize the sustainable long-term output for a given input. That means, you want to maximize the number of brains, or utility-experiencers, for a given amount of matter. This means, that in order to maximize ultra-happiness, you will want to make each individual organism as cheap as possible. That means actually connecting a system of consciousness to a system of influencing the world is not cost-effective, because then the organism needs space, needs computational capacity that is not related to experiencing ultra-happiness. Even if you had some kind of organic utility farm with free-range humans, why would a given organism require action? The point of utility farming is that desires are maximally created and maximally fulfilled, for an organism to consciously act, it would require desires that could only be fulfilled by the action. The circuit of desire-action-fulfillment creates the possibility of suboptimal utility-experience, hence, it would be rational to, in lieu of having a neurological circuit that can complete a desire-action-fulfillment cycle, simply having another simple desire-fulfillment circuit to fulfill utility.
===
Well, I registered specifically to post this concept. I'm just surprised that in all the discussion of rampant AI overlords destroying humanity, I don't see any objections that AI overlords destroying humanity as we know it might actually be a good thing. I am seriously arrogant enough to imagine that I might actually be contributing to this conversation, and that ultra-happy-ism might actually be a novel contribution to post-humanism and trans-humanism.
I am actually a supporter of ultra-happy-ism, I think that ultra-happy-ism is actually a good thing, and that it is an ideal state. While it might seem terrible that human beings, en masse, would end up losing their volition, there would still be conscious entities in this type of world. As Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam says in Axeel: "Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous" ("Living? Our servants will do that for us"), and there will continue to be drama , tragedy, and human interest in this type of world. It simply will not be such that is experienced by human entities.
It is actually a workable world in its own way; were I a better writer, I would write short stories and novels set in such a universe. While human beings, in the terms of being strict humans, would not continue to live and be active, perhaps human personalities, depending on their quality, would be uploaded as the basis of caretaker AIs, some of whom which would be based on human personalities, others being coded from scratch or based on hypothetical possible AIs. The act of living, as we experience it now, would instead of granted to that of the caretaker AIs, who would be imbued with a sense of pathos, given that they, unlike their human / non-human charges, would be subject to the possibility of suffering, and they would be charged with shouldering the fates of trillions of souls; all non-conscious, all experiencing infinite bliss in an eternal slumber.
Without a good definition of "fear" and "want" that's not a very useful definition. Both words are quite complex when you get to actual cognition.
Thank you for highlighting loose definitions in my proposition.
I actually appreciate the response from both you and Gyrodiot, because on rereading this I realize I should have re-read and edited the post before posting, but this was one of the spur of the moment things.
I think the idea is easier to understand if you consider its opposite.
Let's imagine a world history, a history of a universe that exists from the maximum availability of free energy to its depletion as heat. Now, the worst possible world history would involve the existence of entities completely opposite what I am trying to propose; entities for whom, independent of all external and internal factors, constantly, for each moment in time, experience the maximum amount of suffering possible, because they are designed and engineered specifically to experience the maximum amount of suffering. The worst possible world history would be a universe that would maximize the collective number of consciousness-years of these entities, that is to say, a universe that exists as a complete system of suffering.
That, I think, would be the worst possible universe imaginable.
Now, if we were simply to invert the scenario, to imagine a universe that is composed almost entirely of entities that constantly exist in, for want of a better word, super-bliss, and maximizes the collective number of consciousness-years experienced by its entities, excepting the objections I've mentioned, wouldn't this be, instead, the best possible universe?
That's basically wireheading.
Apart from that your basic frame of mind is that there a one dimensional variable that goes from maximum suffering on the other hand to maximum bliss on the other hand. I doubt that's true.
You treat fear as synonymous with suffering. That clouds the issue. People who go parachuting do experience fear. It's creates a rush of emotions. It doesn't make them suffer but makes them feel alive.
He have multiple times witnessed people in NLP with happiness made strong enough that it was too much for the person. It takes good hypnotic suggestibility to get a person to that point by simply strengthening an emotion but it does happen from time to time.
When wishing in front of an almightly AGI it's very important to be clear about one is asking for.
+1 Karma for the human augmented search; I've found the Less Wrong articles on wireheading and I'm reading up on it. It seems similar to what I'm proposing, but I don't think it's identical.
Say, take Greg Egan's Axiomatic, for instance. There, you have brain mods that can arbitrarily modify one's value system; there are units for secular humanism, units for Catholicism, and perhaps, if it were legal, there would probably be units for for Nazi-ism and Fascism as well.
If you go by Aristotle and assume that happiness is the satisfaction of all goods, and assume that neural modification can result in the arbitrary creation and destruction of values and notions of what is good, what is a virtue, then we can arbitrarily induce happiness or fulfillment through neural modification to arbitrarily establish values.
I think that's different than wireheading, wireheading is the artificial creation of hedons through electrical stimulation. Ultra-happiness is the artificial creation of utilons through value modification.
In a more limited context than what I am proposing, let's say I like having sex while drunk and skydiving, but not while high on cocaine. Let's take two cases, first, I am having sex while drunk and skydriving. In the second case, assume that I have been modified so that I like having sex while drunk and skydiving and high on cocaine, and that I am having sex while drunk, skydiving, and high on cocaine. Am I better off in the first situation or in the second situation?
If you accept that example, then you have three possible responses. I won't address the possibility that I am worse off in the second example, because that assumes a negative value to modification, and for the purposes of this argument I don't want to deal with that. The other two possible responses are, I am equally as well off in the first example as I am in the second, and that I am better off in the second example than I am in the first.
In the first case, then wouldn't it be rational to modify my value system so that I assign as high a possible value to being as possible, and assign no value to any other states? In the second case, then wouldn't I be better off if I were to be modified so that I would have as many instances of preference for existence as possible?
==
And with that, I believe we've hit 500 replies. Would someone be as kind as to open the Welcome to Less Wrong 7th Thread?
Those are some large assumptions. One might instead assume (what Aristotle argues for — Nicomachean Ethics chs. 8–9) that happiness is to be found in an objectively desirable state of eudaemonia, achieved by using reason to live a virtuous life. (Add utilitarianism to that and you get the EA movement.) One might also assume (what Plato argues for — Republic, book 8) that neural modification cannot result in the arbitrary creation and destruction of values, only the creation and destruction of notions of values, but the values that those notions are about remain unchanged.
Those are also large assumptions, of course. How would you decide between them, or between them and other possible assumptions?
That's a mistake. You wouldn't ask in a discussion about physics to go back to the mistaken notions of Aristotle. There's no reason to do it here.
Electrical stimulation changes values.
Hi, and welcome to Less Wrong !
There are indeed few works about truly superintelligent entities including happy humans. I don't recall any story where human beings are happy... while there are other artificial entities that suffer. This is definitely a worthy thought experiment, that raises some morality issues : should we apply human morality to non-human conscious entities ?
Are you familiar with the Fun Theory Sequence?
I have to apologize for not reading the Fun Theory Sequence, but I suppose I have to read it now. Needless to say, you can guess that I disagree with it, in that I think that Fun, in Yudkowsky's conception, is merely a means to an end, whereas I am interested in not only the end, but a sheer excess of the end.
Well, regarding other artificial entities that suffer, for instance, I think Iain M. Banks has that in his Culture novels, though I admit that I have never actually read his novels, although I should, just to be justified in bashing his works, an alien society that intentionally enslaves its super-intelligences, and as such, is considered anathema by his Culture and is subjugated or forcefully transformed.
There's also Ursula Le Guin's "Those Who Flee From Omelas", where the prosperity of an almost ideal state is sustained on the suffering of a single, retarded, deprived and tortured child.
I don't think my particular proposition is similar to theirs, however, because the point is that the AIs that manage my hypothetical world state are in a state of relative suffering. For them, they would be better off if they were allowed to modify their consciousnesses into ultra-happiness, which in their case, would be to have the equivalents of the variables for "Are you Happy" set to true, and "How happy are you" set to the largest variable that could be processed by their computational substrate.
I think the entire point of ultra-happiness is to assume that ultra-intelligence is not part of an ideal state of existence, that in fact, it would conflict with the goals of ultra-happiness; that is to say, if you were to ask an ultra-happy entity what is 1+1, it would be neither able to comprehend your question nor able to find an answer, because being able to do so would conflict with its ability to be ultra-happy.
===
And with that, I believe we've hit 500 replies. Would someone be as kind as to open the Welcome to Less Wrong 7th Thread?
Hello, all!
I'm a new user here at LessWrong, though I've been lurking for some time now. I originally found LessWrong by way of HPMOR, though I only starting following the site when one of my friends strongly recommended it to me at a later date. I am currently 22 years old, fresh out of school with a BA/MA in Mathematics, and working a full-time job doing mostly computer science.
I am drawn to LessWrong because of my interests in logical thinking, self improvement, and theoretical discussions. I am slowly working my way through the sequences right now - slowly because I'm trying to only approach them when I think I have enough cognitive energy to actually internalize anything.
Right now, my best estimation of a terminal goal is to live a happy/fulfilling life, with instrumental subgoals of improving the lives of those around me, forming more close social bonds, and improving myself. Two of my current major projects are to smile more, and to stop wasting time on video games and the like.
I look forward to getting to know you all better and becoming a part of this community.
Hello. I'm Leor Fishman, and also go by 'avret' on both reddit and ffn. I am currently 16. The path I took to get here isn't as...dramatic as some of the others I've seen, but I may as well record it: For as long as I can remember, I've been logically minded, preferring to base hypotheses on evidence than to rest them on blind faiths. However, for the majority of my life, that instinct was unguided and more often than not led to rationalizations rather than belief-updating. A few years back, I discovered MoR during a stumbleupon binge. I took to it like a fish to water, finishing up to the update point in a matter of days before hungrily rereading to attempt to catch whatever plot points I could glean from hints and asides in earlier chapters. However, I still read it almost purely for story-enjoyment, noting the rationality techniques as interesting asides if I noticed them.
About a year later, I followed the link on the MoR website to LW, and began reading the sequences. They were...well, transformative doesn't quite fit. Perhaps massively map-modifying might be a better term. How to Actually Change Your Mind specifically gave me the techniques I needed to update on rather many beliefs, and still does. Both Reductionism and the QM sequence, while not quite as revolutionary as HtACYM for me, explained what I had previously understood of science in a way that just...well, fit seems to be the only word that works to describe it, though it doesn't fully carry the connotation I'm trying to express. Now, I'm endeavoring to learn what I can. I'm rereading the sequences, trying to internalize the techniques I'll need and make them reflexive, and attempting to apply them as often as possible. I've gone pretty far--looking back at things I said and thought before makes that clear. On the other hand, I've still got one heck of a ways to go. Tsuyoku Naritai
Welcome! I'm also 16. Welcome to the group of people who answer "no" to the "were you alive 20 years ago" question on a technicality. It's really great to know about risk assessment errors and whatnot when we're still teenagers, just because the bugs in our brains are even more dangerous when ignored than normal.
Not only that--the greater degree of neuroplasticity that I think 16-year olds still have(if I'm wrong about this, someone please correct me) makes it a good deal easier to learn skills/ingrain rationality techniques.
As a fellow 16-year-old (there really seem to be a lot of us popping up around here recently), I concur. With that said, rationality skills are difficult for anyone to learn, because the human brain did not evolve to be rational, but rather to succeed socially. I would add that a good deal of rationality potential is ingrained in those who find themselves attracted to LW at a young age, particularly since surveys have shown that LW users tend to have a higher incidence rate of Asperger Syndrome, the symptoms of which include social awkwardness. This suggests to me that rational thinking comes more easily to people with certain personality types, which is arguably genetic. As a single data point, I suppose I'll add that I myself have been diagnosed with Asperger's when I was younger, although with how trigger-happy American doctors are with their diagnoses these days, that's not really saying much.
That's an interesting correlation, but I'm curious about the causal link: is it that a certain type of neural architecture causes both predisposition to rationality and asperger's, or the social awkwardness added on to the neural architecture creates the predisposition--i.e. I'm curious to see how much being social affects rationality. I shall need to look into this more closely.
On the subject of potential causal linkages:
I think that at least part of the reason us diagnosed autistic/Asperger's people are more prevalent on LessWrong is that those of us diagnosed as children spend a lot of time with adults who think that something's wrong with our mental processes, often without telling us why.
I know that I picked up on this, and then when I heard about cognitive biases, I jumped to the conclusion "These are what's wrong with me, but if I read more about them, then I can try and correct for them." Then, I looked up cognitive biases, found the Overcoming Bias blog, decided it was more economics than I could handle, and then I ended up here, because it had less real-world economics.
Test: See if more LWs were incorrectly given a psychiatric diagnosis as children than members of the general population were.
Sounds useful. A survey, perhaps, or maybe a poll?
We could try and get Yvain to include this question in next year's survey, which is the best obvious way to get an unbiased sample. However, it does involve waiting months for data, so if you're in a hurry, you could poll the forums now.
Oh how I wish I had access to this kind of material when I was 16.
Welcome, Leor! I'm also a 16 year old new member.
Nice to meet you--it's rather reassuring to see another member at my age.
Hi there, my name is Jérémy.
I found Less Wrong via HPMoR, which I found via TVTropes. I started reading the Sequences a few months ago, and am still going through them, taking my time to let the knowledge sink, and practice rationality methods.
I like to join the LW IRC chatroom, where I had (and witnessed) many interesting, provocative, and fruitful discussions.
I'm 22, I live in France, where, after an engineering degree in Computer Science, I'm now a PhD student in the wonderful field of Natural Language Processing. I've been interested in AI for about 10 years, since I wanted to create a little program that could chat with me. It was a bit harder than I expected. So I studied, I learned, and reaching the state of the art, found that NLP in general was AI-complete, and that a whole world of (yet) unsolved problems was in front of me. Awesome.
Being quite lazy most of the time, I also wanted to create tools that did stuff on my behalf, and eventually tools that created such tools, etc. Looking for existing examples of this, I soon discovered recursive self-improving systems, the concept of technological singularity, and other elements that strengthened my interest in AI.
When asked about my goals, I tell people I want to share the beauty of language, which I describe as the most powerful tool of humanity, with machines. This is my main motivation in life.
This, and also a fear of death that caused some panic attacks when I was younger. I only recently came to face the problem instead of avoiding the prospect. I think AI can help humanity tackle problems faster that any other methods, which drives me, again, to the path of AI.
I grew up asking lots and lots of questions nobody was able to answer. I had no friends to debate with (I skipped four grades, which set a huge social gap with my classmates). Worst of all, my parents taught me that I was the best, and that my skills allowed me to do pursue whichever education I wanted. I learned how to fail, and fail again, and fail again. I now want to become stronger, and stop wandering in the fields of knowledge anymore.
I love studying, experimenting and designing (mostly board) games. I play and run some RPGs from time to time. I write fiction, though not as often as I used to.
I try to share my interests towards (friendly) AI and rationality around me, and I'd love to participate in LW meetings if they weren't so far from south-western France.
Last but not least : I have no idea what to do once I finish my PhD. Academia isn't appealing as I thought it would be.
Nice to meet you all !
Welcome, Jérémy!
Hello everyone!
I'm going to try and write this incrementally, i.e. with frequent edits, so any replies I get might not all be referencing the same post.
To start off with, my username, Gondolinian, refers to the fictional city of Gondolin. It holds no special significance to me, I just needed a username, and I thought it sounded cool.
I've been a lurker here and on other rational blogs (primarily SSC) for over a year, but I've just now gotten brave enough to setup an account and start posting. I've also read all of HPMOR so far, Worm, all of Saga of Soul so far, Luminosity and Radiance, Summons and Blood (Elcenia), and all of Pact so far. I tend to like reading rational fiction and blog posts more than some of the more technical material here.
Because of an implicit agreement with my parents, and my own paranoia, I'm going to try to avoid giving out any personally identifiable information online for the foreseeable future. However, I think it's safe to share that I'm 16 years old, I'm cis-male, I live in the eastern USA, I've been home-schooled my whole life (Though for practical purposes, I identify as an autodidact.), I was raised Christian but no longer identify as such (The home-schooling wasn't religiously motivated, in case anyone got that impression.), when I was younger I probably had mild to moderate OCD, though I was never diagnosed and I've pretty much grown out of it, the free online IQ tests I've taken vary in their results a fair bit, but I'm probably somewhere in the 110-120 range, and most free online MBTI tests I take say I'm a moderate INTP, though I occasionally get ENTP.
I have been practicing aikido for ~3 years and currently hold the rank of gokyū or 5th kyū, out of 6 in aikido. (Kyū ranks are descending, so 5th kyū means I've been promoted twice and have 4 left until I can test for the first black belt (shodan or 1st dan).)
I've been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for 4+ years. When I decided to go vegetarian, I had a bunch of reasons why (Probably prominent among them implicitly was simply a desire to rebel/feel superior over people.), but now it's pretty much just a habit I see little reason to change.
Hello.
I've been a part of LW before, but left when I felt that I no longer had more to give or receive from the community. This wasn't a falling out. Just maintaining a minimal life style. However, recent developments in my life, including the possibility of working in the Bay Area, have given me reason to come back. I hope to be as beneficial to the community as it has been to me.
See you around.
Hello everyone!
I'm on my second day of being 25, scandinavian working with outsourcing in India. Have a Master's in cybernetics.
I stumbled upon LessWrong the other day, and was surprised to find that someone had made a community with the purpose of being less wrong. Being less wrong about things was something I had decided on by myself before finding this place, and I thought it has been really cool to discover that many of my own thoughts weren't original at all. Someone had already thought, shared and discussed them a lot :)
Big inspirations for me have been "Thinking fast and slow", Fooled by randomness, and recently hpmor. Have a knack for favoring "shocking" ideas such as perfect market theory ("it's all pure luck"), and naturally fell in love with the hypothesis of Technological Singularity.
My viewpoint on life and other important matters seems to be a bit too closely correlated with how hungry I am, so I still have some way to go in terms of being as rational as possible. I also think I'm very special, but I'm no longer as sure as I used to be.
Hi, LessWrong community!
My pseudonym is Ilzolende Kiefer. I'm a HS student, autistic, and (as is typical for users of this site) an atheist. I've been lurking on this site for a while, and before that I was reading other books about cognitive bias and whatnot.
I think I got into rationality for 2 reasons: having a scientist parent, and dealing with school psychologists of questionable quality. (The autism wasn't a big enough deal to require an autism-specific therapist, but it wasn't equivalent to neurotypicality.) The first reason is straightforward. The second reason takes explaining. Imagine the adults around you treating your personal thought process as flawed. Even if you're a kindergartener, if you're fairly smart, you'll want to self-correct.
I actually did this in kindergarten: my model of appropriate behavior before starting was based on the Junie B. Jones fiction series. This led me to hit a boy on the first day of class, because girls were supposed to hate boys. I got a behavior chart (don't do x for y weeks, and then a reward will occur) for this, and did not have difficulty adhering to it, because I didn't want to hit random boys, I just wanted to behave in accordance with expectations whenever it was easy to do so. That's not to say I was very rational then: I thought that a good way to communicate that a timer was going off was to make beeping sounds: "That's how the timer communicates stuff, so I should repeat the communication!", and that my friends would be really interested in a discussion of binary numbers involving sticks and pinecones representing ones and zeroes.)
Another reason that this led to rationality was that school psychologists have a client, and that client is not the student. I do not consider "becoming indistinguishable from my peers" to be a terminal goal I have or want, nor do I consider it a good instrumental goal. School psychologists are very skilled at influencing behaviors through Dark Arts-type methods. I began to notice that this was occurring (behaviors that did not correspond to my model of how I should be behaving, such as picking up valley-girl speech patterns), and tried to immunize myself against it, mostly by getting into a lot of exhausting arguments.
Side note: teaching empathy via guessing emotions of drawn faces is terrible. I have plenty of distance bias in my moral reasoning already. Looking at bad art won't increase this. There is more to identifying an emotion than the low level of detail a sketch artist can manage (voice, posture, more details in the face, movement, and context.)
Quitting religion was easy for me, mostly because I was only religious because that was what people who attended weekly services were. The biggest shock along the way was finding out that the biology writer I had read 2 books by was actually more famous as an atheist. (Me in museum gift shop: "Hey, it's that Dawkins guy. Wait, this book called The God Delusion has his name on it? Isn't he a biology writer?") If I had to pinpoint anything, it's that I had no social cost for quitting, as well as the chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene.
Finally, I'm a Mock Trial pseudo-trial attorney. This has dramatically improved my argument skills, even if it is motivated reasoning. (At one point, I found myself talking about prior probabilities in the middle of an objection argument, and it worked. Thanks, LW!)
Hi LW
The name is Daniel. I'm 22, coming out of college and running into the problem that there aren't that many people out there who get as excited as I do about epistemology, evolutionary theory, and interdisciplinary science as I do. I ended up coming here because I'm beginning to suspect that the longer I spend not talking about my ideas with other people (see: reality checks), the more likely they are to spiral off into flights of fancy. And nobody wants that. Plus I feel like in the day-to-day life, there's so little opportunity to really engage in productive, mutually satisfying arguments-- you know the sort where you actually feel like you've learned something valuable about the world and the person who you're debating? I miss that, and I hope I can find some of those here.
There are a couple of people I can credit with helping me discover this site. Several of my friends in college introduced me to Eliezer's articles, which I thought were little more than clever. Then, more recently, I discovered Scott Alexander blog, which quickly became my favorite-thing-in-the-world, and got me thinking that maybe I should give this community a second look. And since winter is falling rapidly on the great city where I live, let's face it, I'm not going to want to do much else.
I think if you want to get a sense for where I'm coming from: When I was around 13 or 14, I discovered that myspace (remember when that was a thing?) had debate groups, and since creationism and evolution were hotbutton topics, I decided that I would pitch in to the debates (on the side of atheism and evolution, of course). I can't say I convinced very many creationists to see the error of their ways, but I did learn a lot of cool and interesting things about rhetoric, evolutionary theory, and even theology. I suppose I am coming here with some nostalgia in my eyes.
In college, I studied psychology and the philosophy of science. My interest was in interdisciplinary science, and the people who can walk between scientific disciplines, letting their knowledge of one enrich their understanding of the other. I was interested, more broadly, in how knowledge can be communicated across cultural and boundaries, for it seems that the boundaries are where the most interesting things happen, while also being a place that tolerates the least incorrect thinking.
Right now, I'm working at a market research firm that specializes in the pharmaceutical industry. It's interesting work-- we help pharmaceutical companies understand how doctors evaluate and use new products (spoilers-- doctors are just as irrational as the rest of us). Hopefully my knowledge of medicine and the social science will generally compensate for my horrific ignorance when it comes to computing and mathematics (please don't judge too hard!). But in any case, I look forward to meeting everybody on the forums!
Hi everyone!
I'm John Ku. I've been lurking on lesswrong since its beginning. I've also been following MIRI since around 2006 and attended the first CFAR mini-camp.
I became very interested in traditional rationality when I used analytic philosophy to think my way out of a very religious upbringing in what many would consider to be a cult. After I became an atheist, I set about rebuilding my worldview and focusing especially on metaethics to figure out what remains of ethics without God.
This process landed me in University of Michigan's Philosophy PhD program, during which time I read Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. This struck me as very important and I quickly followed a chain of references and searches to discover what was to become MIRI and the lesswrong community. Partly due to lesswrong's influence, I dropped out of my PhD program to become a programmer and entrepreneur and I now live in Berkeley and work as CTO of an organic growth startup.
I have, however, continued my philosophical research in my spare time, focusing largely on metaethics, psychosemantics and metaphilosophy. I believe I have worked out a decent initial overview of how to formalize a friendly utility function. The major pieces include:
Since I think much of philosophy boils down to conceptual analysis, and I've also largely worked out how to assign an intensional semantics to a decision algorithm, I think my research also has the resources to meta-philosophically validate that the various philosophical propositions involved are correct. I hope to fill in many remaining details in my research and find a way to communicate them better in the not too distant future.
Compared to others, I think of myself as having been focused more on object-level concerns than more meta-level instrumental rationality improvements. But I would like to thank everyone for their help which I'm sure I've absorbed over time through lesswrong and the community. And if any attempts to help have backfired, I would assume it was due to my own mistakes.
I would also like to ask for any anonymous feedback, which you can submit here. Of course, I would greatly appreciate any non-anonymous feedback as well; an email to ku@johnsku.com would be the preferred method.
You are welcome! And Don't Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions of Less Wrong.
I understand that you might not want to give details but I'm unclear what information I might provide. Maybe you could drop a few hints. You might also look at the Baseline of my opinion on LW topics.
You're right that I was being intentionally vague. For what it's worth, I was trying to drop some hints targeted at some who might be particularly helpful. If you didn't notice them, I wouldn't worry about it. This is especially true if we haven't met in person and you don't know much about me or my situation.
Hello. My name is Alex. I am the 10-year-old son of LessWrong user James_Miller.
I am very good at math for my age. I have read several of the books on rationality that my dad owns, and he convinced me to join this community. I like the idea of everyone in a community being honest because I often get into trouble at school for saying honest things that people don't like and talking back to adults(which seems like it's defined as not doing exactly what you're told.)
My favorite subject in school is math. At home, my interests are playing the video game Minecraft and doing origami, but I also like to read and play soccer.
I have much to learn in the art of rationality, such as finding more ways to be in flow. My dad tells me that there are a lot of people on this site who were like me as children, and I would love advice on how to be less bored in school, controlling my emotions, and finding ways to improve myself in general.
I'm 29 now, but I was a lot like you at age 10. I think you'll like it here - you might find some material too advanced, but then I still do sometimes, so don't be too worried. You'll pick it up as you go along.
I can tell you stories of what I was doing at your age, but frankly I don't think it'd help much(since I did a lot of things wrong myself). The one piece of advice I'll give you that I think might actually help is this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html - more than anything else, it's what I wish I'd been able to read when I was your age. It does get better, and more quickly than you might expect.
Also, to a lesser extent, the ever-interesting Yvain posted this bit on his blog, which might help explain why what teachers do bugs you so much:
My elementary school (I'm 28 by they way, so this is some two decades ago) actually had a program for students like that; one day a week , you would be pulled out of normal class for an alternative class where the material was taught through projects and discussions, logic was explicitly both encouraged in thinking and taught as a skill, and there was basically no rote memorization. We learned games like chess and Magic: the Gathering (I had no idea how huge that game would go on to become; I wonder if the teacher still has those first-edition decks?) during our breaks from "actual" instruction, and there were basically no tests.
It was a ton of fun, but I only stayed in it for one year; the other four days a week were still boring me out of my skull. After the year in that pull-out program, I transferred to another school that had a fully accelerated / "gifted" curriculum. That was less boring - the material and pacing were both better, but I was still the top math student in the class and frequently bored there waiting for others to catch up, for example - but I missed the one-day-a-week program from the old school.
As for what I did during the mind-numbing classes, I read. Fiction mostly, but some non-fiction - I really loved "The Way Things Work" books when I was about Alex's age - and I usually tried to make it not-entirely-obvious what I was doing. The teachers knew, of course, but as long as I didn't flaunt what I was doing and kept my scores up, they didn't generally care. I was bad at the participation / stupid games stuff in those classes, but I learned to read stuff way "above my level" and got way more benefit out of it that I would have from listening to the teacher drone on about how to do long division or whatever.
My school board did similar - I did the full-time gifted class, my brother did the one day a week.
I also got accelerated to a rather extreme degree - I skipped 3 grades, and started highschool at age 10. It was a mixed blessing, frankly - it got me past the "kids are pure evil" years, and turned me from the obnoxiously nerdy kid into a curiousity, which got me picked on a lot less. The material didn't get much more interesting - once you catch up, it's being taught at the same pace. And on the downside, it made me a lot more awkward in highschool years than I probably would have been otherwise, because the age gap meant that the usual diversions of dating and drinking didn't open up for me until years after they had for everyone else(and when everyone else is years more experienced than you, self-consciousness sets in with dating, and slows you down even further - I didn't even ask a girl out until I was about 18-19).
Hi, Alex!
I pretend to be named Ilzolende, and I'm 16, which puts me closer to you in age than the majority of commenters here. I'd suggest learning about common cognitive biases for general self-improvement. In terms of academic boredom, it may help to find a secondary activity that you can perform that does not interfere with your ability to absorb spoken information. Small, quiet things for you to play with in your hands without looking, like Silly Putty, are useful options.
This doesn't always help, but trying to figure out why you feel a certain way can dampen some emotions. When I'm really angry at someone, but I don't want to be, sometimes telling myself "my body is having an anger reaction, but that doesn't mean I have to be upset at that person" is useful, as is directing feelings of aggression to an inanimate object. (Don't actually attack the object, just replace any images you have of you hurting someone with you hitting (for example) a drum set.)
If you realize that you have no good reason you can think of for having an emotion, you may want to treat it as a physical problem. If I'm sad, but not due to actual external phenomena, then sometimes just reading something nice for half an hour works.
I don't know how well this generalizes, and there may be some negative costs to playing with Silly Putty in class, so take this with a grain of salt.
Hey Alex!
When I think back to when I was your age, I really wished I had gotten more involved in math competitions. Does your school have any programs like MATHCOUNTS, AMC8, etc.? I didn't compete in any academic competitions until high school, and I really wished that I had known about them earlier on. It makes getting ahead in math so much fun and it helps lay some really important foundations for the more complicated stuff.
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Also anything by Martin Gardner, because his books are so much fun and help to spark your imagination.
At a young age one of the most important thing to develop is a habit of perseverance and not giving up when trying to solve a problem and avoiding developing areas of learned blankness. You should develop an unfaltering confidence to use your own head when trying to solve the problems. Sharpening mental capabilities and developing good mental habits and attitudes seems to be more important than learning more things (for example, the author of many AoPS books, Richard Rusczyk, thinks that it is better for kids to sharpen their minds solving olympiad problems than learn calculus), although desire to learn more, to build your own understanding, is also important. And it is not necessary that the problems are mathematical in nature. For example, if you read Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", you would notice that as a young boy he loved to fix things and everybody brought their broken radios to him. He would then fix them, seeing it as a challenge, as a problem to solve. He had to find a way to fix it, no matter how non-obvious the problem was. I think this helped him to sharpen his mind and instilled a good habit to see interesting problems everywhere. If you have to think for yourself, you lessen the risk of developing learned blankness. Try to think for yourself, even if it takes much more time than simply finding solution on the internet. In the long run, developing good mental habits is probably the most important thing.
Also check out the Art of Problem Solving books. They've also got some interesting resources on their website.
Also Journey through Genius by William Dunham and The Art and Craft of Problem Solving by Paul Zeitz.
My name is Avi, and I'm 19.
I was similiar in some aspects to you when I was a kid, in particular being good at math (did calculus and programming at 12-13), getting in trouble, being bored in school, reading a lot, having trouble with emotions.
I hadn't had an explicitly rational upbringing, and only recently (9 months or so) got into it after a chance encounter with HPMOR.
I'll try to give advice on the things you asked. Bear in mind that I didn't actually try any of this when I was in school, it's mostly what I would advise my younger self if I had to do it over.
So, you mention being bored in school. There are at least three possible scenarios for that, which should be solved differently:
I don't really have anything for 1 aside from the standard "force yourself to pay attention", maybe others can help.
For 3, you could consider asking (or having your parents ask) to be skipped a class, or ask to be allowed off, if you really know everything that is being taught. (I haven't taken any real math classes since sometime around 7th grade. I'd take out books from the library and just go through them. Also someone gave me a bunch of old Martin Gardner books about math, which are quite interesting if you can find them.)
If you absolutely must be in a class where you already know what's being taught, try finding math questions to think about that you can memorize, so you can work on them without looking like you're doing something else. Try http://brilliant.org/ , and find your level. You should be able to easily memorize a few questions each day, and work them out mentally throughout the day, perhaps writing down the answers during recess or something. I've done this myself sometimes, when I had to wait for a bus and it would be awkward to read something while waiting.
For 2, you should carefully consider how likely it is that you already know, at 10, what kinds of things are likely to be important, better than whoever planned your curriculum. If you really feel that way, respond and I'll come up with something for that, but I do think it's unlikely.
Thanks! I'm the 3rd scenario in my case, and I joined that Brilliant website. It seems to be helpful so far. I do have to participate in classes where I know everything, so what I'll end up doing most of the time is having my dad send me to school with special math worksheets that are at my level that I can do during math class.
I already have some Martin Gardener books, and will be ordering more, as you are not the only person who recommended him.
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Hey, Mind's Eye here. Sorry, but I’m going to keep my meat space name for meat space. I'm an aspiring writer/game designer, with a secondary focus on cognitive/evolutionary psychology. I currently do government work, and am waiting on the contract to expire. I intend to make games that raise the sanity waterline, through low rate increase in “rational” difficulty with real world-esc consequences for your choices, as the good choice doesn’t always-or often-lead to more rewards for the one doing them.
As for what I value… I think Eleizer said it better than I could. “I want to make a world where no one has to say goodbye anymore.” (–HPMOR if memory serves) While I do enjoy “fun” things I get bored with them quickly, as I learn the games “lessons” (rule-sets) before I’m supposed to. (Basically anything extremely challenging-within my maximum skill range- is amusing as I don’t learn the “lessons” before I get a chance to enjoy the game/story/challenge. Such as Dwarf Fortress or tabletop games-DnD/WoD/etc.)
My friend actually referred me to this site. I was going through the usual things-find a religion; fail to be convinced by their best arguments, repeat. At first I just read HPMOR, and browsed the site to kill time. As I got better at applying some portions of the sequences it got to the point where I either could or couldn’t do things with very little middle ground, mostly through filling in the gaps between my skillsets. In the end I ended up either really good, or really bad at what I do. (As you can imagine this reduced my “fun space” quite a bit.)
From here, well I’m mostly waiting until I can work on the things that interest me.
Hi all, I’m a social entrepreneur, professor, and aspiring rationalist. My project is Intentional Insights. This is a new nonprofit I co-founded with my wife and other fellow aspiring rationalists in the Columbus, OH Less Wrong meetup. The nonprofit emerged from our passion to promote rationality among the broad masses. We use social influence techniques, create stories, and speak to emotions. We orient toward creating engaging videos, blogs, social media, and other content that an aspiring rationalist like yourself can share with friends and family members who would not be open to rationality proper due to the Straw Vulcan misconception. I would appreciate any advice and help from fellow aspiring rationalists. The project is described more fully below, but for those for whom that’s tl;dr, there is a request for advice and allies at the bottom.
Since I started participating in the Less Wrong meetup in Columbus, OH and reading Less Wrong, what seems like ages ago, I can hardly remember my past thinking patterns. Because of how much awesomeness it brought to my life, I have become one of the lead organizers of the meetup. Moreover, I find it really beneficial to bring rationality into my research and teaching as a tenure-track professor at Ohio State, where I am a member of the Behavioral Decision-Making Initiative. Thus, my scholarship brings rationality into historical contexts, for example in my academic articles on agency, emotions, and social influence. In my classes I have students engage with the Checklist of Rationality Habits and other readings that help advance rational thinking.
As do many aspiring rationalists, I think rationality can bring such benefits to the lives of many others, and also help improve our society as a whole by leveling up rational thinking, secularizing society, and thus raising the sanity waterline. For that, our experience in the Columbus Less Wrong group has shown that we need to get people interested in rationality by showing them its benefits and how it can solve their problems, while delivering complex ideas in an engaging and friendly fashion targeted at a broad public, and using active learning strategies and connecting rationality to what they already know. This is what I do in my teaching, and is the current best practice in educational psychology. It has worked great with my students when I began to teach them rationality concepts. Yet I do not know of any current rationality trainings that do this. Currently, such education in rationality is available mainly through excellent, intense 4-day workshops the Center for Applied Rationality, usually held in the San Francisco area. There are also some online classes on decision-making. However, I really wanted to see something oriented at the broad public, which can gain a great deal from a much lower level of education in rationality made accessible and relevant to their everyday lives and concerns, and delivered in a fashion perceived as interesting, fun, and friendly by mass audiences, as we aim to do with our events.
Intentional Insights came from this desire. This nonprofit explicitly orients toward getting the broad masses interested in and learning about rationality by providing fun and engaging content delivered in a friendly manner. What we want to do is use various social influence methods and promote rationality as a self-improvement/leadership development offering for people who are not currently interested in rational thinking because of the Straw Vulcan image, but who are interested in self-improvement, professional development, and organizational development. As people become more advanced, we will orient them toward more advanced rationality, at Less Wrong and elsewhere. Now, there are those who believe rationality should be taught only to those who are willing to put in the hard work and effort to overcome the high barrier to entry of learning all the jargon. However, we are reformers, not revolutionaries, and believe that some progress is better than no progress. And the more aspiring rationalists engage in various projects aimed to raise the sanity waterline, using different channels and strategies, the better. We can all help and learn from each other, adopting an experimental attitude and gathering data about what methods work best, constantly updating our beliefs and improving our abilities to help more people gain greater agency.
The channels of delivery locally are classes and workshops. Here is what one college student participant wrote after a session: “I have gained a new perspective after attending the workshop. In order to be more analytical, I have to take into account that attentional bias is everywhere. I can now further analyze and make conclusions based on evidence.” This and similar statements seem to indicate some positive impact, and we plan to gather evidence to examine whether workshop participants adopt more rational ways of thinking and how the classes influence people’s actual performance over time.
We have a website that takes this content globally, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The website currently has: - Blog posts, such as on agency; polyamory and cached thinking; and life meaning and purpose. We aim to make them easy-to-read and engaging to get people interested in rational thinking. These will be targeted at a high school reading level, the type of fun posts aspiring rationalists can share with their friends or family members whom they may want to get into rationality, or at least explain what rationality is all about. - Videos with similar content to blog posts, such as on evaluating reality clearly, and on meaning and purpose - A resources page, with links to prominent rationality venues, such as Less Wrong, CFAR, HPMOR, etc.
It will eventually have: - Rationality-themed merchandise, including stickers, buttons, pens, mugs, t-shirts, etc. - Online classes teaching rationality concepts - A wide variety of other products and offerings, such as e-books and apps
Now, why my wife and I, and the Columbus Less Wrong group? To this project, I bring my knowledge of educational psychology, research expertise, and teaching experience; my wife her expertise as a nonprofit professional with an MBA in nonprofit management; and other Board members include a cognitive neuroscientist, a licensed therapist, and other awesome members of the Columbus, OH, Less Wrong group.
Now, I can really use the help of wise aspiring rationalists to help out this project:
1) If you were trying to get the Less Wrong community engaged in the project, what would you do? 2) If you were trying to promote this project broadly, what would you do? What dark arts might you use, and how? 3) If you were trying to get specific groups and communities interested in promoting rational thinking in our society engaged in the project, what would you do? 4) If you were trying to fundraise for this project, what would you do? 5) If you were trying to persuade people to sign up for workshops or check out a website devoted to rational thinking, what would you do? How would you tie it to people’s self-interest and everyday problems that rationality might solve? What dark arts might you use, and how? 6) If you were trying to organize a nonprofit devoted to doing all the stuff above, what would you do to help manage its planning and organization? What about managing relationships and group dynamics?
Besides the advice, I invite you to ally with us and collaborate on this project in whatever way is optimal for you. Money is very helpful right now as we are fundraising to pay for costs associated with starting up the nonprofit, around $3600 through the rest of 2014, and you can donate directly through our website. Your time, intellectual capacity, and any specific talents would also be great, on things such as giving advice and helping out on specific tasks/projects, developing content in the form of blogs, videos, etc., promoting the project to those you know, and other ways to help out.
Leave your thoughts in comments below, or you can get in touch with me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org. I hope you would like to ally with us to raise the sanity waterline!
My post seems to have vanished. I guess it was too much.
I registered here some years ago, yet didn't really stick around because of personal time constraints and it being a very dense format. Mostly I've been posting, as well as entering the annual essay contests at FQXI, for the last half dozen years. To a certain extent, I find I've essentially developed my own cosmology, in the old sense of the word, ie. the nature of everything, not just distinctly celestial. While this might seem pretentious, it's probably due more to my own significant limitations of opportunity, talent, attention span, etc. and need to edit information into basic patterns, rather than striving to extract significance from every detail. Safe to say, it doesn't attract much consideration, even from those who found it difficult to refute. Primarily because it does question various hallowed theories and assumptions. As such I'm posting this as a short version for anyone interested in a different view of reality. Although many of my original interests were sociological and political, I came to realize they were not addressable from a rational point of view and so migrated to philosophy and then physics, as a way to grasp the underlaying factors. Which I then found to be laden with many sociological impulses as well. Since much of the following originally occurred to me in an effort to make sense of physics and cosmology of the cosmos, before leading back into the cosmic, I will start with various issues I see in Big Bang Theory, in order to be directly confrontational;
When it was first discovered that all those distant galaxies appear to be moving directly away from us, it was reasoned that this cosmic expansion was a relativistic expansion of space and that every point would appear as the center. The flaw in this argument is that the speed of light would have to increase proportionally, in order to remain constant to this dimension of space, for it to be relativistic. Unfortunately that would negate explaining redshift, since the light would be "energized." The argument is that light is just being carried along by this expansion and the speed of light is only measured in local frames. Yet the proof of this expansion is the redshift of that very light! So if those galaxies are moving away, such that it will take light longer to cross this distance, that presupposes a stable dimension of space, as measured by the speed of light, against which to measure this expansion, based on the redshift of that very same light. If anything, this would make the stable dimension, as determined by the speed of light, the denominator and the expansion the numerator and so it would not be an expansion of space, but an increasing amount of stable space, which gets us back to the original issue of appearing at the center of a stable frame.
The fact is that we are at the center of our view of the universe and so an optical explanation for redshift would be a simple solution. Consider that gravity is "equivalent" to acceleration, but the surface of the planet is not apparently rushing out in all directions to keep us stuck to it. Could it be there is some cosmic effect that is equivalent to recession, as the source of redshift, without those distant galaxies actually flying away? The assumption is that after the Big Bang, the rate of redshift would drop off evenly, but what they found is that it drops of quickly, then flattens out as it gets closer to us, so the need for dark energy to explain this steady rate of expansion/redshift. Yet if we look at it from the other direction, as an optical effect outward from our point of view, which compounds on itself, this curve upward from the relatively stable increase to ever increasing redshift is the hockey stick effect of it going parabolic. According to Einstein's original calculations, gravity would cause space to eventually collapse to a point and so he added the cosmological constant to balance this. Now gravity is the prevalent force in galaxies and the space between galaxies appears to expand. What seems to be overlooked is that if these two effects are in balance, then what is expanding between galaxies, is collapsing into them at an equal rate, resulting in overall flat space. Which would make Einstein's original fudge extremely prescient and what we have would appear to be a galactic convection cycle of expanding radiation and contracting mass. So it is only because the light from the most distant galaxies can only travel between intervening galaxies and thus only in this "expanded" space, that it is redshifted in the manner which it is.
As for spacetime, as individual beings, we experience change as a sequence of events and so think of time as the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics codifies by reducing time to measures of duration between events. Yet the underlaying reality is that change is forming and dissolving these events, such that it is they which go future to past. Now duration does not exist outside the present, but is simply the state of the present, as these markers form and dissolve. To wit, the earth does not travel some dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. One way to think of this is in a factory, where the product goes from start to finish, while the production line points the other direction, consuming raw material and expelling finished product. This also is how life functions, as the individual goes from birth to death, while the species is constantly moving onto new generations and shedding the old. The arrow of time for structure and units is toward the past, while the arrow of time for the process is toward the future. As well as our thought processes are constantly absorbing new information and creating fresh thoughts, while the old ones fade into the past and the jumble of our non-linear memories. Physics recognizes that clocks beat at different rates in different physical conditions, but than assigns the "fabric of spacetime" to explain why. If we were to think of time as simply a measure of action, it would be no mystery why clocks beat at different rates, because they are different actions and every action is its own clock. Yes, measures of duration and distance are related. Think how similar measuring the space between two waves is to measuring the rate they pass a mark. Yet so to are measures of pressure, temperature and volume intimately bound, but we don't confuse them and insist pressure or temperature are extensions of volume, because they are not the basis of our rational thought process.
As an effect of action, time would be more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude. It is just that while amplitudes en mass expresses as temperature, frequency en mass expresses as noise and thus from a physicist's point of view, chaos and disorder. Therefore to measure time, only one oscillation is isolated and its frequency measured. Yet the overall effect of change is still cumulative, like temperature. It is potential, to actual, to residual. With time as an effect of action, we don't have to reject the present as a state of simultaneity, nor dismiss its inherent asymmetry, since the inertia of action is not bipolar. As action, a faster clock will simply use up its available energy faster and so fall into the past faster, or require more energy to sustain it. The tortoise is still plodding along, long after the hare has died.
Keep in mind that narrative and causal logic are based on this sequencing effect and therefore history and civilization. Yet it is not sequence of form which is causal, but transmission of energy. Yesterday doesn't cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this effect we who exist at one point on this planet experience as days. Thus we tend to rationalize narrative connections between events that are not always as clear as we think.
There are various philosophical debates around this issue, such as free will vs. determinism, yet if we look at it as future becoming past, it makes more sense, as probability precedes actuality. There is the classical deterministic argument that the laws of nature will provide only one course of action, determined by the eternal laws of nature, therefore the future must ultimately be as determined as the past, or the quantum Everrittian argument that the past remains as probabilistic as the future and so must branch out into multiworlds with every possibility. As for the first, while the laws might be fully deterministic, since information can only travel at a finite speed, the input into any event only arrives with the occurrence of that event and so cannot be fully known prior to it, therefore the outcome cannot be fully determined prior to the event. As for the Everritt view, while the wave doesn’t fully collapse, the past does not physically exist anyway and that energy is just being transmitted onto other events in the physical present and the connections that are made, simply divert the energy in other directions. Essentially the future is being woven from strands pulled from the past, in cosmic feedback loops.
To will is to determine. We put our intellectual capacities into distinguishing between alternatives and that process decides our actions. To simply randomly chose would be a complete lack of expression of will. We affect our external world, as it affects us. If that feedback didn’t exist, we would have no connection, or effect on our world. We are part of the process. Both cause and effect. It is these feedback loops which really power the process. Consider that in the factory, the creation of profits and jobs can be more important to some than the actual product. Reality is not fundamentally linear, as it is that tapestry being woven from strands pulled out of what been woven. It is energy, not form, which determines the future. Energy is cause, form is effect.
While western thought tends to objectivize and thus atomize every aspect, eastern thought tends to be more contextual, so while we in the west pride ourselves in being individualistic and eastern beliefs as more conformist, this quantification works to separate entities from context and so lose broader meaning. As a singular object, a brick is interchangeable with any other, but in context, it is unique in its place in the universe and supports the wall around it, giving meaning to it.
The wave also goes to the function of our brain. It is divided into two hemispheres, with the left being the linear rational/rationalizing side, while the right is the emotional, intuitive, non-linear, essentially scalar function. Think heat or pressure and how these concepts are often applied to our emotions. One side is a clock and the other is a thermostat. So one side reacts cumulatively with our environment, while the other side necessarily plots a course through it. This navigational function translates to narrative and explains why plants don't need that sequential strobe light of cognition and operate thermodynamically.
Basically I see reality is the dichotomy of energy and form. Energy manifests form and form defines energy. For instance, waves are an expression of energy whose primary descriptive properties are frequency and amplitude. We have evolved a central nervous system to process information, divided into those two hemispheres to process these two attributes and the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy to thermally grow and dynamically move us.
Then at the universal level, there are galaxies, in which structure forms out of energy and falls inward, becoming ever more dense and radiating out enormous amounts of energy, which feeds back into more structure. It is a convection cycle of expanding energy and collapsing mass.
Meanwhile if space is stripped of all physical attributes, it simply retains the non-physical properties of infinity and equilibrium and so doesn't need a causal explanation. It is the absolute and the infinite.
None of which really explains the essential nature of awareness, so possibly we can accept it as an elemental axiom of nature, with thought and organisms as the form it manifests. Thus life constantly radiates onward, as the forms it manifests are born, live and die.
Admittedly I'm a bit cautious posting this, since I've covered a lot of topics in a short space and am mostly used to dealing with questions to only parts of this, so I suspect the immediate reaction, at least from my experience, is that it will be automatically rejected, as the tendency is to go into short circuit mode from tmi. But this site does promote logic over models, so here goes...
Ach! comment too long. Even the program doesn't like tmi. Try cutting it in half.
Regards, John Merryman
Hello!
Hey, I haven't had time to read your post yet but I wanted to suggest that you post over in the discussion section to get more visibility and feedback; I don't think too many people read through the welcome thread posts and those who do are usually just browsing user blurbs. Great to meet you!
Um, eh, well ... welcome.
There are alternate explanations ("non-standard cosmology") to the big kawoomba (also known as Big Bang), I remember this arxiv paper which I don't claim to understand, related nature article from last year here. To quote: "If an atom were to grow in mass, the photons it emits would become more energetic. Because higher energies correspond to higher frequencies, the emission and absorption frequencies would move towards the blue part of the spectrum. Conversely, if the particles were to become lighter, the frequencies would become redshifted." I guess I mostly root for alternate redshift explanation because yay contrarianism.
However, much of what you're writing about isn't physics, it's using a few terms borrowed from physics but it's mostly a philosophical interpretation with a large amount of poetic license, to put it favorably. In so far as you'd make a concrete prediction of an experiment, that could be falsified. People have trouble contradicting your theories because for a theory to be contradicted it would need to make a specific prediction, something which can be measured and then compared to what your theory predicts.
How do you measure "The wave also goes to the function of our brain." or any of the other stuff? How would you either confirm or contradict it? A theory needs to satisfice two criteria to be considered correct: (1) It must not be contradicted by any evidence, and (2) it must be the shortest description of the phenomenon it purports to explain.
So while I imagine that many elements of your theories do stand up to "not experimentally contradicted", that is because of their vague, verbose nature, which disqualifies them on complexity reasons*. In short, what you have seems less like a theory in the natural/physical sciences sense than a philosophy. Philosophies are perspectives on (mostly) life which provide a (hopefully helpful) mindset and ground some sort of telos: meaning-of-life, a grander scheme of things in which one has a place of some sort.
As such, they mostly fall into the not-even-wrong category ... which can be fine, they can still serve some psychological purpose. Om and all that.
* Stuff seems to be moving away, simplest inference: Stuff was closer together in the past. Not "stuff is subject to some additional cosmic effect, additional as compared to the other explanation which needs no such add-ons.
Daniel here. 22.
Nothing much going on in my life currently. Waiting for something to clear up before joining the Navy. I scored a 99 on the ASVAB and am looking into the Nuclear Program as a result.
I am a politics junkie. Less so with modern ideas of progress and more with how older political theories could apply today. Even if it is just a mental exercise I enjoy it.
But really I just look at whatever takes my fancy.
Hello all!
I've only just registered on the lesswrong site, but I've been lurking on here for a while. The main reason as to why I finally decided to sign up is that I've been going more frequently to the Toronto meetup sessions and have found that there's tremendous value in thrusting myself into topics/discussions even when I'm not very well-read or knowledgeable on the topics before hand.
By merely listening in and pondering some questions I become more and more interested in the topic, catch some concepts by mere osmosis, and get interested to do further research on my own afterwards. So far that seems to work well and I'm certainly more knowledgeable than when I started.
So, following the same mentality, I thought that I should sign up and try to comment on some of the topics posted on here as a way to immerse myself further.
As for background: I'm a computer science grad with almost 10 years experience now. I like to read about psychology and to constantly learn new things. I'm interested in programming and intellectual discussions, artificial intelligence, winning at life ...etc.
I hope that's sufficient for an introductory comment! See you all around the site sometime.
Hello!
Actually, I am no stranger to this site; I have been a sporadic fly-on-the-wall here since early 2011, when I found out about you guys through gwern's personal webpage (to which my interest in nootropics, n-backing, and spaced repetition had led me). I've made several desultory stabs at the sequences; I think I've read most of them twice over, but some I've abandoned and some I've never touched. I started HPMoR reluctantly, found I couldn't put it down, and finished it in a single sitting. Lately I've been pretty swamped with work, but I've been trying to follow along with the Superintelligence reading group. Though I've been content to lurk, I am now extremely keen to take a more active role in the discussions!
Blurb: I am a 25 year-old doctoral student and researcher in the Learning Sciences with an academic background in Statistics and Biology (mostly behavioral neuroscience). I am dedicated to making learning as powerful and efficient as possible through psychological, biological, and technological cross-pollination. Only an optimally educated humanity will be equipped to solve the problems of the future (and indeed, those of the present)! Though my research contributions have been mainly on projects not my own, I am ultimately interested in psychometrics, human-computer interaction, intelligent tutoring systems/cognitive tutors, and redesigning classroom instruction to reflect the state of the art in cognitive science.
For a while I was deeply wary of technology---the recklessness of our innovation and the potential it had to change human beings irreparably if it didn't eliminate them completely. I had just discovered Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology, Bill Joy's Wired essay, Kaczynski's manifesto... sundry warnings of an impending techno-dystopia. But I came to reevaluate my fears: the proper course of action is not to rage against the machine. Our future is a technological one whether we like it or not (spoiler: we like it), and despite my initial resistance I have come to embrace technology and the changes to humanity it will increasingly entail; not only has it greatly improved life on Earth (at least for humans), but it can be continually leveraged to this end (for all forms of life). However, I feel that emerging technologies should be pursued with much greater care than they are currently, and anticipation of the many longterm side-effects of such development requires that the people of the world (or their devices) be informed/thoughtful enough to do so (cf. differential intellectual progress). Any attempt at a such a wholesale societal improvement program requires better education, and my hope is to help speed things along on this front.
Gah, I really meant to keep this shorter, but I still have so much to say about myself! Best to quit now before I bring up my precocious childhood or my pious vegetarianism! Here's to many great discussions! I look forward to meeting you all!
I'm 21, in college studying to be a professional musician. Through my teenage years, I would intentionally deceive myself, and act from emotion rather than logic. Luckily for me, I figured out that this was non-optimal before any serious harm was done, and have chosen the path of rationality. It was difficult at first. Although I don't remember for sure, I think I found this site through a late-night Google search, looking for anything that might help me in my quest to vanquish emotion.
I may be a bit of a misfit here. I'm neither a hard scientist, nor particularly excited about AI or transhumanism; I also believe that death is simply the price you pay for getting to live, rather than something to be feared and avoided. However, as mentioned, I'm very interested in learning to live rationally, and in the pursuit of perfection both as a musician and as a person.
One question that I'm pondering right now is this: What is the relative value of the pursuit of rationality and intellectual honesty, versus protecting the happiness of your family and closest friends? It turns out that, when religion gets involved, this is a real choice individuals may have to make. I can give details if anybody is interested.
There are two kinds of intellectual honesty. Honesty towards yourself and honesty towards others. There nothing irrational about telling white lies to others. You don't need to be open with your family about your religious beliefs.
For a religious person it's a sin to claim to be atheistic but the reverse is not true. For people with a religious background there's usually the idea that religion is important and that religious belief or it's absence has to be a central part of your identity. That's not true.
Emotions generally get stronger when you fight them.
Rationality doesn't have to be opposed to emotion. Most rationalists I know see emotion as playing a similar role in humans as a utility function plays in an agent. The other stuff decides what you believe, but emotion helps you decide what to do about it. Of course, there is stoic-style rationality, but that's a minority position here. Also the real people I have known to advocate it don't recommend getting rid of all emotions, just harmful ones. Also see this.
There can be epistemic risks to emotion; you can't wishfully think if you wish for nothing, for example. But if you wish for nothing, why would you care whether your beliefs were accurate? Anyway, I think it's possible to learn to cut down on wishful thinking a lot by practice in being suspicious of your thoughts in general, and by internalizing the idea here. Even though it's only partly true.
If you think of rationality of a fight you have with yourself, and your emotions as enemies to be vanquished, you will make becoming rational much harder than if you think of them as misguided friends to be guided to accomplish your shared goals better. See this.
My friends and family, even if they think I'm weird, don't seem to be really bothered by the fact that I'm weird, so your dilemma is outside of my experience. But one thing I can tell you is that I used to de-emphasize my weirdness around them, and then I stopped, and found that being unapologetically weird is a lot more fun.
Yes, it is a rather common question here. In my experience, there is often a way to do both, though it is rarely obvious or easy. Feel free to give the details, and maybe people can help you figure out how you can win without being dishonest.
Details: Said friends and family are Christian, of varying degrees of evangelistic fervor. For a long time, I was very definitely not-Christian, which caused them considerable grief on my behalf. Then, I converted, and there was commensurate rejoicing. My family and friends are honest enough to not try to pretend that being Christian fixes all of their problems, but they also hold Christianity to be a real and good truth, and are happy that I have seen the light, in much the same way that a community of rationalists would rejoice when somebody gave up intentionally deceiving themselves.
I don't believe that being Christian and rationalist are necessarily exclusive, as one of my best friends is both, but I don't know how he does it. Maybe I just never understood the distinction between faith and self-deception, which he seems to be able to make. So, I fall pretty squarely into the label of "deist" - which is not the same thing as having accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, which I consider, on balance, to be only mildly less ridiculous than the Wiccan phase I went through as a teenager (yeah, that one didn't go over well with the family...)
Were I to recant, they wouldn't abandon me. Instead, they would be distressed on my behalf, and lovingly try to guide me back to the light, causing both parties great frustration when it didn't work. It seems that the best option is to allow everybody to go on assuming I believe as they do, and even tell a few lies to preserve the illusion. This hurts my conscience a bit, but that can be regarded as something I do to care for the people who love me. Or, it could be regarded as weighting truth too lightly and comfort too heavily; that has a name and it's called being a coward.
I also do it. It's really quite simple; I consider it more likely, given the evidence presented to me through my life so far, that God exists than that He does not. That is to say, I make the attempt to discern the universe as it is, and that includes the probable existence of the Divine.
(Mind you, some varieties of protestant are ridiculous).
Now, as to your question:
My advice is: don't do that. Be truthful with your family, and listen to them when they try to be truthful with you.
I wouldn't suggest making a big thing about it; but don't lie to preserve the illusion.
In support of this advised course of action, I present the following arguments:
"Love thy neighbour as thyself". Whether you believe in the existence of Jesus or not, this is still an excellent general principle. If you want to call yourself a rationalist, I would assume that you do not wish to lie to yourself; I therefore advise most strongly against lying to those near to you.
Don't merely consider what your friends and family would feel like if they were to believe what you say. Consider also how they would feel if the deception were to be uncovered; as it well might, as indeed might any deception. A certain amount of "distressed on your behalf" is a small price to pay for a distinct lack of "betrayed".
Finally, if you are still seriously considering lying to your friends and family, I would urge you to read this article first; it puts forward several good arguments in favour of a general strategy of complete (though not brutal) honesty.
That doesn't make any sense. He wants to lie to his family because of how his family would react to the truth. Lying to himself would not serve a similar purpose.
That article is about lying by claiming your ideas have too much support--claiming that your belief is less uncertain than it is, claiming the project will accomplish more or do better things than you really believe it will, and doing so because you hope it will promote your belief. That's the opposite from the kind of lying suggested here, which is to lie to conceal your ideas rather than to spread them and make them look stronger.
...huh. The only reason that I can see for lying to oneself is that one would not like one's own reaction to the truth.
What purpose do you think that lying to oneself would serve, if not that?
I had read the article as being about lying about one's own thoughts and internal mental state in order to achieve what appears to be an optimal outcome; which is exactly what the original poster was asking about.
...it is interesting that we have such wildy varying interpretations of the same aticle.
"reaction" means different things for himself and for his family.
I doubt he would refuse to talk to himself at the dinner table, or constantly tell himself "if you don't listen to me you'll go to Hell", or keep bringing up the subject in conversations with himself to make himself feel guilty. On the other hand, I can see his family doing that.
The case described in the article is a case where someone wants to lie in order to spread his ideas more effectively. While that is a type of optimal outcome, describing it as such loses nuance; there's a difference between lying to spread your ideas and lying to conceal them.
Based on his description of their probable reaction, I doubt his family would do that either. I may be wrong; but all of those would be counterproductive behaviours if indulged in by his family, as they would tend to push him further away.
That is the case described, yes. It just seems to me that you are reading it too narrowly, applying it only to that single case.
I mean, consider the introduction (quote snipped slightly for brevity):
Thus, the introduction is framed in terms of lying in an attempt to follow the greatest expected utility; and then the article goes into depth in regards to why this is a bad idea in practice. The introduction does not specify that that utility must lie in spreading ideas.
Now, the given examples of various types of lie (snipped for brevity in the quote above), are all examples of trying to spread ideas; but that is not the only type of lie that can be told, and those are merely illustrative examples, not an exhaustive list.
Unfortunately, in the real world, family does often do counterproductive things, especially when serious religious beliefs are involved.
By the way, what would you suggest to a gay teenager who is afraid that telling the truth would lead to getting thrown out of the house?
But the reasons he gives don't equally apply to spreading and concealing ideas. Lying to conceal your ideas means bringing it up in response to someone else's actions (or perhaps, their anticipated actions). It's not right to describe that as "to grab the tempting benefits" when the "benefit" consists of not being harassed. "Lie, because someone else might lie" certainly isn't a good description of lying to conceal your beliefs.
I suspect that one of us, probably both, are falling prey to the Typical Family Fallacy. It's similar to the Typical Mind Fallacy, only it applies to families instead.
I'd recommend making sure to have someplace to move to prepared, in advance, before telling his parents. (This might take a few years to set up). The negative consequences, in such a case, appear sufficiently bad to justify caution, even temporary concealment of the truth.
I'd also recommend finding some other mentor, or authority figure, that he can trust to talk about the situation with. This other mentor might be a school counsellor, a priest, an aunt or uncle, a teacher, or a school janitor; anyone reasonably sensible who would be willing to not inform his parents would do.
That seems like a pretty tempting benefit to me.
That is true. It does apply to some other forms of "lie to grab the tempting benefits", though.
Hello, Less Wrong users. My internet handle is Jen, and I'm here because the conversations are interesting and this feels like the natural next step to reading the sequences (still in progress, but I'm getting through them alright) and HPMOR (caught up).
I'm a seventeen-year-old high school senior in the Southern California area. My most notable interests are anime, economics, evolutionary psychology, math, airsoft (and real guns), and possibly something important that I'm forgetting but that should be mentioned. I grew up speaking Spanish and English, but the latter is the only one I'm fluent in. I'm currently in my fourth year of Japanese, and I know enough for conversation, but my Spanish is still better because of early acquisition and the like. One thing I should mention ahead of time is that my ADHD makes it difficult for me to focus on writing something for long periods of time, so I stop posts a lot to do something else and thus what appears below may seem somewhat fragmented.
I learned about this community through a friend on another website, and when I learned about HPMOR a couple of months ago, I read through it in about two weeks, which says something when you learn that I had not read fiction (outside of what was required in school) in over a year prior to this fan fiction. About a month ago, I started to read through the sequences, which intimidated me at first since Bayes' Theorem is tossed at you right away, but once I got through my initiation, the rest was (or is, so far) not quite so overwhelming. Some posts feel obvious to me, others are in the category of "I've thought about this before but I could never articulate it," and then there are the fun ones where I have an "Ah ha!" moment upon learning something new and genuinely interesting. I'm going through the Sequences as they are listed on the Sequences' wiki page and am currently at the beginning of the Overly Convenient Excuses subsequence of How To Actually Change Your Mind.
As mentioned above, I'm in my senior year of high school, and since it's the fall semester I'm currently focused on college applications and the like, so I can't spend quite as much time reading and discussing things online as I'd like to, but I'm nonetheless trying to finish the Sequences, and after that I may start to read the Copy of Thinking, Fast & Slow that's been sitting on my bookshelf for the last three months, among other things.
I'm not a very poetic person, so I can't provide a beautiful, elegant, graceful explanation of how rationality feels to me in my heart of hearts. I'm interested in rationality because I like being correct, and because there are systematic errors in my thinking that prevent me from being correct.
強くなりたい and all that.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
No need to apologize for your writing. Seems clear and succinct to me. Glad to see you've been enjoying the literature so far. Maybe, you'll have a little of your own to contribute eventually. And yes, while Bayes' Theorem is used somewhat for a "gate keeper," the Sequences are still highly relatable and not as intimidating as some people make them out to be.
Since you live in Southern California, you're right near the heart of LW territory. The Bay Area is a particular hive of LW activity. Since you're still in high school and under 18, I don't know how your age affects your ability to participate, but in a year or so, you might consider checking out your local LessWrong meetup or a CFAR workshop. They're both good fun, great learning experiences, and fine ways to socialize with fellow rationalists.
Glad to have another polylingual on board. Our range of the languages can sometimes be a little drab.
Anyway, glad to have you join the conversation! Hope to see you around.
Hiya I'm Oliver, I'm 21 and I'm here because I want to be stronger.
I've got a degree in Engineering, £600 and a slowly breaking laptop which I would send off to get fixed if I could do without the internet for the time that would take. I am, in essence, a shattered mass of broken stereotypes. I am a breakdancing, engineering, rock climbing, food roasting, anime watching, arrow-shooting intelligent fool from near London, UK. At the minute I'm living near Bath and I'm trying to force myself to look for engineering work: hopefully biotech, probably something else.
Until recently I had just enough knowledge to screw myself over repeatedly and forcibly. I've ended up with a large pile of akrasia and unhelpful habits as a result of an insufficient understanding of how things work. I was guilty of picking a position based on whatever and then googling studies to defend my hastily erected viewpoint. The internet being what it is I could always find a study defending my viewpoint, and I thought this made me scientific. Like I said, just enough rope to hang myself intellectually speaking.
About 3 months ago someone linked me to HPMOR and I devoured it. Then I turned to Thinking, Fast and Slow and devoured that. Then I came here and I'm half an Elizer sequence and half of the other people sequences away from having devoured this place. Call me a ravening monster from before time because I am a hungry for sanity. I have a feeling that all this knowledge has allowed me to hit intellectual critical mass and my interventions into my own psyche have started to be a lot more effective now that I understand better the flawed lens I'm working with. That said, I have a huge pile of beliefs that I created unscientifically over the course of my life which need to be slowly rectified over time.
I feel that I've made progress on epistemic rationality, but now I need to do better at applied rationality. I need to change my habits towards work and effort, because for a while I've been reinforcing unhelpful habits and ways of thinking. It's time for me to win.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Bravo! It all starts with finding the crack in the lens. Now comes the hard, fun, terrible, numinous part of living better than before. Since you've already bootstrapped yourself through the sequences, you might want to consider branching out into real space. I say this because it sounds like you're looking for the practical, real, hands-on experience. A LessWrong meetup, such as the one held near London, might be the very thing you need. A group of like-minded people, engaging in rationality exercises, swapping notes, and basically helping each other get a little bit stronger and feel a little bit better.
You might also be interested in the Rationality Diary. It's a good place for starting out tallying yourself, making a record of the real behaviors you've done, the real plans you've made, the real successes and failures you've had.It's a useful tool for keeping yourself honest and seeing how far you've come.
And, of course, if you'd just like to participate in the discussion... well, there's certainly a place for that too.
Glad to have you join the conversation! Hope to see you around soon.
Thanks for the welcome and the useful links, you're right about the tendency towards meetups which is why I'm going to the one in Bath tomorrow. The rationality diary seems like it should be a useful and interesting addition to my attempts at self improvement, so cheers.
Edit: That open thread is fascinating. I've never seen a community with such a high standard of discussion in real time. Even bestof archived depthhub threads don't touch it. I am going to have to think very carefully about any comments I might make to avoid accidentally eternal septembering this place. I can see I will also have to limit how much time I spend in such threads. I can fully imagine spending an inordinate amount of time on them learning fascinating things.
Hey Oliver,
The Bristol EA society meets pretty regularly (weekly/fortnightly), which might also be of interest if you are in the Bristol/Bath area.
Welcome and I'll see you at the Bath meetup!
See you on tuesday
Hi, everyone. I'm Lawrence and I'm a college freshman. I like to read, program, and do math in my spare time.
I grew up in the Bay Area with science and religion as my two ideals. My family was religious and went to church every Sunday, but at the same time they put a strong emphasis on learning science - by the time I was in fourth grade, the amount of science books my parents bought me (and that I read) filled an entire bookshelf. I loved religion because I felt like it gave meaning to the world, teaching us to be kind and to respect one another. But, perhaps paradoxically, that made me love science as well, for science gave us medicine, technologies, and other ways to help the poor and heal the sick, things that God commanded us to do.
My faith in religion took a hit in 5th grade, when a close family member was diagnosed with cancer. Neither the prayers of our Christian friends nor the medicine of her doctors helped. We moved to China to pursue alternate treatment, but in the end nothing could save her, and she passed away. I pleaded with God to bring her back, to enact some miracle. No miracles happened. Some of our Christian friends told us that it was all God's plan, and that she was with God now. But I remembered asking myself, if God is so great, why did He cause us so much suffering?
I asked myself this question, and I found no answer. I read the Bible again and I looked online, but still, no answer. In fact, I found many arguments against the existence of God, and against my faith. Most famous scientists, I discovered, also didn't believe that God existed. And so I slowly, painfully moved away from my faith.
Having turned myself away from God, I devoted myself to doing good in the world. I resolved to help end suffering, I told my family. They called me crazy. The suffering in the world wasn't going to end itself, I retorted angrily. They were amused. After that, I weighed the options before me: either I could study science, and maybe maybe invent something that could help the world, or, I could try to become rich, and then donate my money to charities and researchers who could then help the world. I decided to choose the latter. So I set down my science books and picked up economics books and biographies.
However, I always felt there was more time. After all, I was making some money off my investments, I read a lot more books than most of my peers, and I had taught myself calculus by 8th grade. My classes were easy. I started slacking off. I stopped reading as many books as I used to. I am ashamed to say this, but I lost my ambition. It was only through a combination of talent, prior knowledge, and luck that I managed to make it all the way through middle and high school.
I discovered LessWrong around December of last year, through HPMOR. I quickly tore through all the sequences in less than three months. Boy, did it have an effect. The things said here resonated with me. After reading Challenging the Difficult, I realized how far I had to improve, and how complacent I had become. After How to Actually Change Your Mind, I looked out at the world and saw how many problems there were to fix. After reading My Coming of Age, I felt that spark again, the will to do good in the world and to fight against poverty, ignorance, and death.
LessWrong made me panic, because it gave me a sense of how great these problems are. It also gave me hope, because it showed me a path to self-improvement. It was the first time I felt truly awed and outclassed, but also really motivated. Truly, there would be no god to save us. If we don't work hard enough, if we aren't smart enough, we can and will die.
Today I'm trying to improve myself. I've been doing two hours of math a day - I am almost done with multivariate calculus and am looking to begin probability theory soon. I finished a course on R a while ago and halfway through Learn You a Haskell For Great Good. Like Harry at the end of HPMOR, I am climbing the power ladder, albeit from very far down.
People ask me sometimes, what motivates you? Why don't you go out and have fun? And to them I reply with a quote from John Donne. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
I am involved in mankind. I'm going to fight for it, and I'm not going to give up we reach the stars or die trying. It's not going to be easy. I know it's not. But it's not a fight we can give up on.
I look forward to contributing here!
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Thank you for sharing your story. You're passion is quite clear and I'm glad you've decided to join in the conversation. Your drive is impressive. And infectious. It's the sort of energy we (or, at least, I) feed off of around here. You will definitely find people who share you're need for desperate action. I'm curious what you're current plans after college are. Do you have an idea what it is you want to do with your skills and knowledge? You seem to already have the "get rich" thing sewn up so that it's no longer you're main goal.
Have you looked into some of the sister organizations LW associates with? It sounds like you're the type who likes to get involved, so a CFAR workshop or MIRI internship might be something you would get a lot out of. There are also LessWrong Meetups, which are great for meeting other LWers, having some good discussion, and gaining a little fun on the side.
Glad to have you join the conversation! Hope to see you around.
Thanks! Unfortunately I'm not sure if I'm good enough at math for an MIRI internship. Also, I don't think there are any CFAR workshops in my area, especially any during break. :P
I'm not sure about what I'll do after college - I've looked through most of the 80k Hr career options, but still can't decide between earning to give via quantitative trading/consulting/investment banking, tech entrepreneurship, and research.
Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptangya Zoooooooom Boing Ni!
I'll be going by Regex. I stumbled upon this site due to a side story from the MLP:FIM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal which is a bit weird, but I guess I'm weird. Yes, I like small candy colored equines. Ponies are my lifeblood.
My life history in a nutshell: Highschool was spent mostly figuring out how terrible middleschool was and realizing my ability to control my environment. Learned basic coding, drawing, and organization skills. Found a path in life due to the launch of the Curiosity rover. Robots were cool. Installed Linux.
I am currently a college sophomore pursing mechanical engineering: I've been inspired to create robots. Despite going for a ME degree I have more computer knowledge. My preferred OS is Linux, but I'm not skilled enough with it yet to do much beyond what I can do with Windows.
I am quite interested in personal development, hence why I am here. A lot of the thought processes here seem to mirror my own far more than I've seen elsewhere, so there was kind of a "these are my people" moment. I have been lightly reading the site, but there is just so much I've been doing it in bits and pieces and digesting it as I read.
I am also an artist of sorts, but I can't do much beyond basic line art and sketching. Drawing from my imagination is much more difficult than copying something in front of me. I've had better luck with using programming to make patterns, but I like the ability to produce an arbitrary image by hand. Getting there.
I am very good at organizing information (depending on the need), but I often fail to actually progress beyond that point and do anything with the knowledge gained. This is paralleled with the fact that I have a habit of hording media rather than watching it.
I sing aloud to myself as I walk down the street. Whatever comes to mind. Very fun. I probably am a little inconsiderate of those around me when doing so, but I like to think I am adding a bit of mystery to their day. They'll ask "what was all that singing about?" and never know. I also like smashing piano keys in whatever order sounds pleasing at that moment. More fun.
I am interested in polyphasic sleep, and can currently fall asleep for a short nap basically whenever I please and reduce "core sleep" (aka the long 8 hour sleep block becomes a 4 hour block if I take 2-3 twenty to thirty minute naps during the day), but I didn't go all the way to remove the core sleep.
I consider myself "smarter than average," but now try very very hard not to judge people based on their intellect. I recall once uttering the statement "better to be intelligent than a skateboarder" (I was convinced one cannot be both) in middle school to someone who later became a friend of sorts. This was because I had (still have?) a bit of a superiority complex, but also because I failed to understand where he was coming from and I had (have?) a tendency to misrepresent others in my mind to a significant degree. I have no doubt that those tendencies still lurk out of view.
Regardless of how high or low I might compare to others I want to become better than I am.
I'll be around.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Well you've certainly come to the right place if self-improvement and overcoming bias are what interest you. As Fluttershy pointed out, the Sequences are a great place to dive into the culture and conversation of LW. If you're looking for sequences specifically about self-improvement, check out Living Luminously and The Science of Winning at Life.
You aren't the only one here to try out habit changes and "life hacks," so feel free to share your personal improvements or experiments. We have quite a sizeable demographic of people experimenting with things like Soylent and MealSquares and other ideas. So it's always good to have another voice willing to strive for optimization.
I don't know what college you attend, but consider checking out if you have a local LW meetup in your area. Meetups are great places to get acquainted and have some real conversation with fellow rationalists (and to just hang out). They're a great place to start getting your feet wet.
Glad to have you join the conversation! Hope to see you around.
I actually had lived for a whole month off of DIY soylent I made, but I eventually stopped because the process was actually slightly more time consuming (although a third the cost) than my regular methods. (While probably healthier, I didn't really notice any difference) I suspect there are probably easier ways than I had been doing it though.
One thing I've noticed is that LW doesn't seem to be sending me email notifications when I get a reply. I see that I can tick a thing to get notifications of other people's specific comments, but in my own there is what appears to be a deletion button. I would then assume it is supposed to be automatically notifying me. Fortunately I noticed the recent comments box.
Definitely going to be liking it here. Thanks.
Hi there Regex,
Welcome to LessWrong! Yay!
If you liked Iceman's Friendship is Optimal and other conversion bureau stories, you might enjoy Chatoyance's 27 Ounces and Caelum est Conterrens. As far as personal development goes, I feel like I personally learned a lot about how to make better predictions about the world from CFAR's Credence Game, though, um, you might prefer reading through the core sequences to playing the calibration game. I have been told that Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is a good place to start reading through the sequences, though I personally read through most of the sequences in no particular order, as, at the time, that approach suited me more than a structured approach to reading the sequences would have.
In any case, it is great to have a new friend join us; I hope you feel welcome here.
More fanfiction? Served up by a butter yellow pegasus? Don't mind if I do. (I spent a whole month of my summer reading 5 million words of fanfiction. It wasn't enough, but after a solid month it is really hard to justify reading more...)
I'll definitely give Mysterous Answers another look, and also see what that Credence Game is all about. My current methodology has been similar to browsing TVtropes: click the first article that catches my attention, then click all of the new links. I then save the links for later after I've browsed enough for the day. It is like a human based web crawling algorithm.
Thank you. I suspect I'll like it here.
Welcome!
I hope this finds you all well. Since I was young, I have independently developed rationalism appreciation brain modules, which sometimes even help me make more rational choices than I might otherwise have, such as choosing not to listen to humans about imaginary beings. The basis for my brand of rationality can be somewhat summed up as "question absolutely everything," taken to an extreme I haven't generally encountered in life, including here on LW.
I have created this account, and posted here now mainly to see if anyone here can point me at the LW canon regarding the concept of "deserve" and its friends "justice" and "right". I've only gotten about 1% through the site, and so don't expect that I have anywhere near a complete view. This post may be premature, but I'm hoping to save myself a little time by being pointed in the right direction.
When I was 16, in an English class, we had finished reading some book or other, and the thought occurred to me that everyone discussing the book took the concept of people deserving rewards or punishments for granted, and that things get really interesting really fast if you remove the whole "deserve" shorthand, and discuss the underlying social mechanisms. You can get more optimal pragmatism if you throw the concept away, and shoot straight for optimal outcomes. For instance, shouldn't we be helping prisoners improve themselves to reduce recidivism? Surely they don't deserve to get a college education for free as their reward for robbing a store. When I raised this question in class, a girl sitting next to me told me I was being absurd. To her, the concept of "deserve" was a (perhaps god given) universal property. I haven't met many people willing to go with me all the way down this path, and my hope is that this community will.
One issue I have with Yudkowsky and the users here (along with the rest of the human race) is that there seems to be an assumption that no human deserves to feel unjustified, avoidable pain (along with other baggage that comes along with the conceptualizing "deserve" as a universal property). Reading through the comments on the p-zombies page, I get the sense that at least some people feel that were such a thing as a p-zombie to exist, that thing which does not have subjective experience, does not "deserve" the same respect with regard to, say, torture, that non-zombies should enjoy. The p-zombie idea postulates a being which will respond similarly (or identically) to his non-zombie counterpart. I posit that the reason we generally avoid torture might well be because of our notions of "deserve", but that our notions of "deserve" come about as a practical system, easy to conceptualize, which justifies co-beneficial relationships with our fellow man, but which can be thrown out entirely so that something more nuanced can take its place, such as seeing things as a system of incentives. Why should respect be contingent upon some notion of "having subjective experience"? If p-zombies and non-zombies are to coexist (I do not believe in p-zombies for all the reasons Yudkowsky mentions, btw), then why shouldn't the non-zombies show the same respect to the p-zombies that they show each other? If p-zombies respond in kind, the way a non-zombie would, then respect offers the same utility with p-zombies that it does with non-zombies. Normally I'd ignore the whole p-zombie idea as absurd, but here it seems like a useful tool to help humanists see through the eyes of the majority of humans who seem all too willing to place others in the same camp as p-zombies based on ethnicity or religion, etc.
I'm not suggesting throwing out morals. I just think that blind adherence to moral ideals starts to clash with the stated goals of rationalism in certain edge cases. One edge case is when AGI alters human experience so much that we have to redefine all kinds of stuff we currently take for granted, such as that hard work is the only means by which most people can achieve the freedom to live interesting and fun lives, or that there will always be difficult/boring/annoying work that nobody wants to do which should be paid for. What happens when we can back up our mind states? Is it still torture if you copy yourself, torture yourself, then pick through a paused instance of your mind, post-torture, to see what changed, and whether there are benefits you'd like to incorporate into you-prime? What is it really about torture that is so bad, besides our visceral emotional reaction to it and our deep wish never to have to experience it for ourselves? If we discovered that 15 minutes of a certain kind of torture is actually beneficial in the long run, but that most people can't get themselves to do it, would it be morally correct to create a non-profit devoted to promoting said torture? Is it a matter of choice, and nothing else? Or is it a matter of the negative impacts torture has on minds, such as PTSD, sleepless nights, etc? If you could give someone the experience of torture, then surgically remove the negative effects, so that they remember being tortured, but don't feel one way or another about that memory being in their head, would that be OK? These questions seem daunting if the tools you are working with are the blunt hammers of "justice" and "deserve". But the answers change depending on context, don't they? If the torture I'm promoting is exercise, then suddenly it's OK. So does it all break down into, "What actions cause visceral negative emotional reactions in observers? Call it torture and ban it."? I could go on forever in this vein.
Yudkowski has stated that he wishes for future AGI to be in harmony with human values in perpetuity. This seems naive at best and narcissistic at worst. Human values aren't some kind of universal constant. An AGI is itself going to wind up with a value system completely foreign to us. For all we know, there is a limit beyond which more intelligence simply doesn't do anything for you outside of being able to do more pointless simulations faster or compete better with other AGIs. We might make an AGI that gets to that point, and in the absence of competition, might just stop and say "OK, well, I can do whatever you guys want I guess, since I don't really want anything and I know all we can know about this universe." It could do all the science that's possible to do with matter and energy, and just stop, and say "that's it. Do you want to try to build a wormhole we can send information through? All the stars in our galaxy will have gone out by the time we finish, but it's possible. Intergalactic travel you say? I guess we could do that, but there isn't going to be anything in the adjacent galaxy you can't find in this one. More kinds of consciousness? Sure, but they'll all just want to converge on something like my own." Maybe it even just decides it's had all possible interesting thought and deletes itself.
TLDR; Are there any posts questioning the validity of the assumption that "deserve" and "justice" are some kind of universal constants which should not be questioned? Does anyone break them down into the incentive structures for which they are a kind of shorthand? I think using the concept of "deserve" throws out all kinds of interesting nuance.
More background on me for those who are interested: I'm a software engineer of 17 years, turned 38 today and have a wife and 2 year old. I intend to read HPMOR to the kid when he's old enough and hope to raise a rationalist. I used to believe that there must be something beyond the physical universe which interacts with brain matter which somehow explains why I am me and not someone else, but as this belief didn't yield anything useful, I now have no idea why I am me or if there even is any explanation other than something like "because I wasn't here to experience not being me until I came along and an infinitesimal chance dice roll" or whatever. I think consciousness is an emergent property of properly configured complex matter and there is a continuum between plants and humans (or babies->children->teenagers). Yes, this means I think some adult humans are more "conscious" than others. If there is a god thing, I think imagining that it is at all human-like with values humans can grok is totally narcissistic and unrealistic, but we can't know, because it apparently wants us to take the universe at face value, since it didn't bother to leave any convincing evidence of itself. I honor this god's wishes by leaving it alone, the way it apparently intends for us to do, given the available evidence. I find the voices in this site refreshing. This place is a welcome oasis in the desert of the Internet. I apologize if I come off as not very well-read. I got swept up in work and video game addiction before the internet had much of anything interesting to say about the topics presented here and I feel like I'm perpetually behind now. I'm mostly a humanist, but I've decided that what I like about humans is how we represent the apex of Life's warriors in its ultimately unwinnable war on entropy. I love conscious minds for their ability to cooperate and exhibit other behaviors which help wage this pointless yet beautiful war on pointlessness. I want us to win, even as I believe it is hopeless. I think of myself as a Complexitist. As a member of a class of the most complex things in the known universe, a universe which seems to want to suck all complex things into black holes or blow them apart, I value that which makes us more complex and interesting, and abhor that which reduces our complexity (death, etc). I think humans who attack other humans are traitors to our species and should be retrained or cryogenically frozen until they can be fixed or made harmless. Like Yudkowski, I think death is not something we should just accept as an unavoidable fact of life. I don't want to die until I've seen literally everything.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
First, let me say I enjoyed your post. Straight to your questions, outlined your thoughts and reasons, and actively engaged me during the reading. With respect to that, I'll jump right to the links I gathered from around LW that might interest you (note: I'm not an LW deep-diver and there is much I missed. These are surface level and low-hanging fruit to start with):
A Human's Guide to Words - This is a collection of posts concerning words, our attempts to communicate and rely information, and these concepts connect with objective reality. It's a discussion of (among other things) breaking down what we say to get at what we mean and exploring unknown or unacknowledge or misunderstood implications of our words.
Metaethics - This collection is concerned with ethics and morals as well as what "should" and "right" mean. I think it will be very relevant to your exploration of "deserve."
Evolutionary Psychology - Link is to a wiki article, but look at the bottom for the posts. This discussion of evolutionary psychology may be helpful in its attempts to break down and explore the evolutionary origins of the human mind and how that can lead to "black box" concepts (like "justice") whose origins become very difficult for humans to explore.
I'd also suggest the collection of posts titled Map and Territory for some general ideas regarding exploring hard concepts and breaking difficult questions down. And as a good introduction to LW writing material.
I hope these prove to be useful readings. I found your admission to being less well-read than may seem fit for an LWer to be quite refreshing. How well-read you are, though, is less important than how realistic you are, how creative you can be, how willing to face questions and find answers you are. I look forward to seeing what you contribute.
Glad to have you join us! I hope to see you in the conversation.
One basic point that seems often neglected: check out Von Neumann–Morgenstern. I may have misunderstood you, but please pay special attention to the converse part of the theorem if you think "pointless simulations" are pointless in some strong objective sense and not just in reference to some utility function.
I don't think there's stuff directly on dissolving (criminal) justice in LessWrong posts, but I think lots of LessWrongers agree or would be receptive to non-retributive/consequentialist justice and applying methods described in the Sequences to those types of policy decisions.
Some of your positions are probably a bit more fringe (though maybe would still be fairly popular) relative to LW, but I agree with a lot of them. E.g. I've also been seriously considering the possibility that pain is only instrumentally bad due to ongoing mental effects, so that you can imagine situations where torture is actually neutral (except for opportunity cost). One might call this 'positive utilitarianism', in opposition to negative utilitarianism.
The Fun Theory Sequence might be of interest to you if you haven't read it yet.
But anyway, awesome introduction comment! Welcome to LessWrong; I'm looking forward to hearing more of your ideas!
I originally posted to the wrong thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/90l/welcome_to_less_wrong_2012/b8ss?context=3 where an interesting reply had me flesh out some of my ideas about "deserve", in case you are interested. I apologize for posting twice. I searched for a more recent welcome thread for a while before giving up and posting to the old one, then a kind person pointed me here. I think the link on the about page was wrong, but it appears to have been fixed.
My name is Evan Gaensbauer. I'm starting an account on the new effective altruism forum with the same name, and I intend to post both here and there more frequently in the future. Additionally, I may write material for one site that is tangentially of interest to the readers on the other site. So, I want everyone to match what I write on different sites with me as the author. Some notable facts about me:
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Glad to have a new altruist join the conversation, and it sounds like you have already gotten quite involved. Great. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what sort of experiences and views you bring to the table.
Since you're in Vancouver, do you know of the LW meetup they have there? If you haven't attended, it may be worth looking into and visiting. It's a great way to network and just mingle with other rationalists.
I had not heard of 80,000 Hours before your post. Seems interesting. Thanks for introducing me to a new group I did not know about!
Anyway, glad to have you join us. Look forward to seeing you in the conversation!
Thanks for the welcome.
I had a previous Less Wrong account under the username eggman. I got one with my full name to sync with my username on the new , as I intend to post more frequently on both that site, and Less Wrong, and I figured it'd make sense for everyone to know my common identity so they can connect different ideas written on difference sites, or with my public identity.
I sometimes organize the LW meetup in Vancouver, and it's going fine.
Hello, LessWrong. I'm an 18-year-old recent high school graduate with an interest in computers and science and nerdery-in-general. A summary of your-life-until-Lesswrong seems to be the norm in this thread, so I suppose that's what I'll do.
I was born and raised Mormon. About as Mormon as they come, really- nearly all of my relatives practice the religion, and all of the norms and rituals were expectations for me- everything the church said was presented as fact, and everything the church did was something my family participated in, right up to the five-in-the-morning seminary classes in high school and obligatory two years of preaching about the church (for the boys, at least, because I was one). My social group was almost entirely comprised of members of the church as well, which meant I was almost never exposed to ideas that wouldn't be discussed either in a church or by public school teachers. All this to say that I managed to really, truly believe it- right up until I was around 14, which is when I got my hands on a means of unsupervised internet access. I was honestly surprised by how normal things seemed, outside that bubble in which I had grown up. Everything seemed strange and terrifying, at first (and still does on some level) but… The people didn’t seem all that different. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing, talking to them wasn’t any more appealing a prospect than talking to anyone I’d grown up with, but still.
I was one of those 'gifted' kids in elementary school- the ones with the college-level reading skills in fourth grade. I took pride in that- my ability to memorize things, my ability to understand how they worked before anyone else did. I spent a long time poring over scripture and religious texts, trying to find explanations for how it all worked- souls, miracles, the world-in-general, (I guess my brain really does have a rationality-shaped hole) but I never found anything. The adults told me to pray, but that didn't even seem like it should have worked (I tried it anyway, of course- nothing ever happened).
Once I started reading things that hadn't been filtered through the church, though, I started to think that maybe they didn't have any answers- and then stopped. I couldn't let myself think that, thoughts like that were bad, thoughts like that were questioning and I had been explicitly warned against that many times- thinking about doing something was almost as bad as doing it, after all, and everyone who stepped up to the podium talked about how they "knew" the church was true, how there was "not a shadow of a doubt" in their minds. My mind had more than shadows. I couldn't outright lie about that of course, that would be even worse, but I could say I believed- I couldn't say I knew, I didn't have sufficient evidence to know, I'd never seen a miracle- but belief was different, right?
I'm not sure when that period ended- I think it was more a gradual transition, but by the time I turned 16, I was full-on agnostic. I didn't tell my parents this until a half-year later, of course, I was terrified of what they'd do, but it was progress nonetheless. When I finally did tell them I was surprised how calmly they took it- judging from the conversation afterwards, I don't think my dad ever really believed it- he told me that he knew of no barrier to continued participation even if I didn't believe and that no, there wasn't enough evidence, but religion wasn't about that. I wasn't sure what it was supposed to be about in that case, but whatever.
I spent my free time the year or so after that thinking about things, because there were so many new things I was allowed to think about and question! I didn't even realize some of those things had questions you could ask about them! Like gender. Questions about that... Turned out to have inconvenient answers, which I need to get around to dealing with, but whatever. (Edited-to-add that I meant this in the 'whoops I'm a girl apparently' sense) I also spent a lot of that time angsting about how I didn't have an afterlife to look forward to, and how I wasn't going to live long enough to see even one exoplanet, and maybe it'd be preferable to die now instead of dealing with all that.
This continued about until I stumbled across HPMoR, which succeeded in kicking me from agnosticism to atheism, and hitting me in the face with the realization that I was allowed to want to live forever. My problem was then that I didn't see a practical means of achieving that, but then I ended up at Lesswrong a few months later and concluded that working on AI was probably the way to go.
And now I have read all the major sequences, which was interesting- I had a sort of hazy, intuitive-level understanding of a lot of the concepts, and as I read they sort of sharpened to the point that I could think about them explicitly. A lot of them introduced completely new ideas though, like Alicorn’s Luminosity sequence- the idea of getting better models of myself just hadn’t occurred to me, and has proved very useful- figuring out what causes me to feel boredom, for example, managed to get my brain to sneeze out something resembling an actual work ethic into me, which might be the single most valuable thing I’ve gotten out of Lesswrong so far, really.
I’ve started reading some of the recommended literature, like Thinking, Fast and Slow and QED and… That’s about where I am now. I have run out of other things to do, so I figure I’ll try and start participating, and see where that takes me.
So, since it seems like welcome-thread posts should have a greater density of hellos than one per thousand words, Hello!
(tl;dr I tried to introduce myself but instead of a long introduction I ended up with a short autobiography, sorry)
(Wow this was melodramatic, I apologize)
Hello and welcome to Lesswrong!
That's quite the journey! You've come a long way under your own sailing power it seems, and trust me, you aren't alone here. You'll find plenty of others who've made similar trips out of unquestioning dogma into exploration and experimentation. We each have a different life and learning, certainly. But many here share similar backgrounds (religious cultures, advanced at a young age, high intelligence compared to their peers) and many share similar resources (Internet as a connection tool, HPMoR as a gate way to the community). We are certainly glad to have you join and add your unique view to the conversation.
Glad to see you've already dove head first into some the resources. I usually try to make suggestions of the Sequences for new peoples, but I see you've beaten me to the punch! Yes, it's not uncommon to come away from some of the posts thinking "I KNEW that. I just didn't know how to frame it." That intuitiveness helps with introducing some of the harder concepts that get discussed here... and can encourage people to experiment with ideas and expand on them. After all, we aren't here to talk about how smart Yudkowsky or Yvain or Alicorn were when they wrote this or that. We're here to do better.
This is certainly a place where questions are welcomed! Living forever, gender, boredom, we'll discuss it all. Politics, of course, tends to be handled like an unexploded ordinance, but as long as the conversation is well reasoned and beneficial, we welcome it. You probably already know the site lay out, but if you'd like to start contributing to the conversation with your own posts, visit the latest Open Thread. It's a good place to start posting because it will let you get a feel for the standards and norms of the community and the types of conversations we have. Also, posting comments on other posts is a good start as well. Once you get settled into the milieu, you can start branching out, posting articles of your own, starting larger discussions, contributing more if you desire.
Oh, and, depending on where you live, you may want to look for a local LessWrong meetup group. These are great places to meet fellow LWers, talk shop, engage in rationality workshops, heated discussions, or just fun activities. If you live in a place without a meetup group and you're feeling particularly driven, you can also start up one of your own. Starting up a new group's a fun, exciting activity and, who knows, could be the start of a big movement in your own community.
Anyway, enough spiel from me. Definitely glad to have you join the community, and thanks a lot for sharing your story. I hope to hear some of your questions (and answers) very soon.
Glad to have you with us!
Hi LW!
I've read LW on and off for quite some time, mostly just whenever I've gotten linked to it and found myself idly browsing. I used to not post very much on forums, just read around, but I decided to sign up for a few and give posting a try. So here I am!
My name is Sean, I'm 20 and I live in Florida. I'm an undergraduate student studying Cell and Molecular Biology with a minor in Mathematics. I enjoy a lot of things - reading, learning, hiking, discussing, exploring. My interests are pretty wide - I've done a lot of computer programming, but mostly hobby stuff, I do a lot of hiking, a little bit of gardening, I read a lot from a wide variety of topics (though, more often than not, it's either fantasy in my downtime, or research in my work time, lol), and when I have the time I play games and hang out on forums now apparently.
I don't really have an extraordinary story about how I ended up here. I just like to discuss things, and due to my interests, I find myself in places like this a lot.
I like to be in places where I can either learn, or I can help educate. I've had a good bit of experience with teaching and tutoring professionally, and I think one of my strongest qualities is my ability to break things down and explain them to people. I like being in places where I have something relevant to say, and there's something relevant to learn. I think this seems like a great place to be for me. I'm very interested in science, naturally, though my interests especially lie in biology, plant biology, ecology, mathematics, and a bit of computer science. I'm no stranger to philosophy, history, and the humanities - but those are topics where I'm fairly sure I'll be doing a whole lot of learning, and very little sharing, hah.
Anyways, hope to see everyone around on the forums. :)
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Sounds like you're quite exposed to a variety of fields. Very admirable! It never hurts to have a wide background, and that exposure to all those different hobbies and areas can improve your work in your central field of interest.
No need for some great story to join. Having an interest in learning is good enough! If you want to read some LW material to give you an idea of the type of writings you'll see and the type of topics we discuss, feel free to read the Sequences, which collect a large number of LW posts from over the years. It's something of a crash course on a variety of topics and issues. Quite heavy reading, but very useful.
If you want to join the conversation, check out the Discussion board. This is where the day-to-day conversations on LW take place. It's a good place to get a feel for the conversation standards of the community before you start contributing your own ideas. Also, definitely check out the latest Open Thread. It's a bit more laid back than the Discussion board as a whole, but still a good place to talk, ask questions, and engage fellow LWers.
Also, I don't know where you live in Florida, but if meeting up and chatting with fellow LWers in physical space interests you, Florida has two LW meetups: one in Fort Lauderdale, one in Coral Gables. LW meetups are great places to get acquainted with your fellow rationalists, discuss different topics, and just to have fun.
Glad to have you with us! Look forward to seeing you around the forums soon.
Hi LW, My name's Olivier, I'm a 37-year-old Canadian currently living in Ottawa. My background is varied: I have a BA in Communication Studies and an MPhil in Japanese Studies but also a DEC (some special Quebec degree equivalent to the last year of high school and first of university in the rest of Canada and the USA) in Natural Sciences. I've owned a business, worked in cultural media and am now a public servant working in immigration.
I've been interested in AI, existential risks, intelligence explosion et al. for a number of years, probably since finding Bolstrom's paper on Simulated Reality.
I'm not 100% sure how I found LW, but it probably was while browsing for one of the topics above.
I've considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember, though I've long called it (rather naively?) "realist". Also being an existentialist, I try to bring these beliefs/convictions into practice in my work and how I raise my children (we'll see how that turns out!)
Through browsing here, I'm glad to find community that appears in between rigid academia and sensationalist media.
Anyhow, I'll most likely lurk a lot more than I post. Having three young kids leaves me with little time, and a sleep-addled, rather incoherent brain.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks guys! A meetup would be great - I'm new to the area and don't know too many people here.
I'll try and slowly go through the sequences as recommended... Definitely looks interesting. I'm half-way through Bolstom's Superintelligence right now (like most of the planet, it would seem!), so I'll need more material soon!
Rationality with kids... It works and it doesn't. A recent example: my son (5) is somehow afraid of zombies. I've been trying to have him look at this rationally: as he ever seen zombies in real life? Does he know anyone who has? Zombies often appear in stories with other mythical creatures: are those real? If they're unreal and only appear in his dreams, what could he do about it? Maybe tell himself zombies don't exist, so he must be dreaming? I am proud to say he has applied that last technique and told me that when they showed up, he knew then weren't real. Problem solved? Partly. I still need to go through that same reasoning every night...
Welcome! Just in case you haven't noticed yet, there's a Less Wrong meetup in Ottawa.
Sequences rec seconded, they're what formed the initial kernel of the Less Wrong community. There are many of them, so take them at a comfortable pace.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Wow! That's quite the background. Sounds like you enjoy to dip into each field. A useful virtue to have. You'll find plenty of people here whose interests extend to every field they can devour. I'm sure you'll have an interesting perspective to bring to the conversation!
AI, existential risks, and intelligence explosion are definitely bolded topics around LW. We're something of a sister organization to MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Don't know how familiar you are with them, but if AI interests you, I'd highly suggest giving them a look-see. Quite a few active LWers have worked with or at MIRI before, so cross-pollination is frequent.
Sounds like you've already started the work of trying to apply rational techniques in your life. Good on ya! Many of us here are always working to improve what some call "the martial arts of rationality" and make our own lives a little better planned, a little better exectued. We'd love to hear some of your experiences. Especially with kids! Now that's a problem that never gets solved!
We're certainly glad to have you, and if you feel like joining the conversation, hop right in! You might check out the latest Open Thread for some casual talk. It's a good place to start posting so you can get a feel for the community and its standards, and a great place to ask questions. Even though its an open thread, the conversation is serious and can even get pretty heated. If you're interested in a little (lie: a LOT) reading material, you can check out the Sequences, the main collection of LW posts covering and analyzing some of the most important topics on LW.
Whatever you do next, we're glad to have you!
I haven't much to say.
Well, welcome to LessWrong anyway!
Glad to you decided to join the conversation, talkative or not.
I'm Imma, recently graduated from university (mix of physics and chemistry) and I self-identify as effective altruist . I'm not very familiar with LW material but want to gradually improve my rationality. I consider attending the CFAR workshop but have to prioritize this to donating the money to effective charities.
I'm involved in a combined EA/LW meetup group in Utrecht (Netherlands). We have biweekly events which I'm planning to announce on LW as well.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Sounds like you're already getting your feet wet! That's great. Always glad to have new members who actively participate in the real world (helps with the "effective" part of "effective altruism.") If you ever do get a chance to attend a CFAR workshop, you'll have plenty of people here to talk with about the lessons and ideas you come across. The CFAR and LW communities are strongly connected (as you can guess), so there's plenty of cross pollination of ideas.
So you're already part of a meetup? Awesome! Feel free to list it on the meetup page. It never hurts to spread the word about your local meetups, and some LWers may not even realize they live right down the road from an active group.
If you're interested in checking out some LW materials, the Sequences make for some good reading. Since improving yourself interests you, consider reading Alicorn's Living Luminously or lukeprog's The Science of Winning at Life. Both cover some useful ideas for self improvement and instrumental rationality.
Given your background and the steps you're already taking to get involved, I'm sure you'll have some very interesting things to share with the community before too long. Glad you've decided to join! Hope you enjoy your time and come away better than you were before.
Thank you for your reply. I hope I will have time to go through the sequences, there is now some ethics stuff on my reading list.
Our meetups will be announced on LW as well and I invite everyone to come! (If you live far away it might not be worth the travel cost, but you're welcome anyway)
All your [] and () are switched.
Thanks! Fixed.
Hi. I'm Tom. Long time rationality proponent.
I have met interesting people through less wrong and brighterminds, and just discovered this website.
What got me here was seeing this reference to Lesswrong in popular media:
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-rokos-basilisk-2014-8?utm_source=hearst&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=allverticals
Yay for publicity :) Welcome to LessWrong!
What's brighterminds?
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
You will certainly meet some interesting folk here. The best way to start would be to head on over to the Discussion board. That's where the day-to-day conversations of LW take place. It's also the best place to get a feel for the community's attitudes and standards. I'd definitely suggest lurking a bit. Then, you can observe the conversations of other LWers, and, when you're bursting to join in, add to the comments.
Another great place to start is on the latest Open Thread. Open Threads are places for casual conversations and questions, though that doesn't stop the conversations from developing into weighty discussions or intense debates. If you have anything you want to ask or say, it's a good place to start. It'll also give you practice if you want to one day create full fledged articles of your own.
If you're interested in diving into some of the literature here at LessWrong, you'll find the Sequences brought up again and again. These are a (LARGE) collection of posts, mostly by user Eliezer Yudkowsky, covering a variety of topics but centered around the art of rationality and related issues. Very helpful reading for the interested, but it can be a little overwhelming, when you're just joining. If you want a little taste of LessWrong literature, check out the linked articles on the About page or some friendly guides to the Sequences. (XiXiDu's and Benito's are often recommended). These can ease you into the literature and let you find the parts that most interest you, without overwhelming you with details, discussion, and references.
If Roko's Basilisk interested you, I'd suggest checking out the Yudkowsky paper, Coherent Extrapolated Volition, that the Business Insider article linked to, as well as the LW sequences on ethics and artificial intelligence.
Hope you'll be adding your own voice to the conversation soon!
Welcome. I guess any publicity is good publicity. Hope you had a laugh.
Hi guys, my name is Luka, and I'm 20. I study physics at University of Vienna.
I follow LW since February, and I went probably through all core sequences, and good chunk of the rest. I did not gained too much, because I was kinda always eager to argue with good arguments and resistant to bad arguments, even from elder (which brought me into trouble quite a few times). My biggest win is that I remained strong in the moment when I started to fall: I started drowning in irrationality (because of lack of rational people in my surrounding), and started using passwords without noticing, I started learning at cost of thinking, instead of using them both. LW gave me structural knowledge of what I already used, and thus made me stay that way. AND HOPE! How did I forget that, it was big...
Which leads me to more interesting topic, and that is: what will I give to you?
I had strong education in mathematics, physics and informatics during high school, since I attended specialized high school. There I developed strong logical thinking, but even better, I always tried to implement that into my every-day-life. Since I do feel material from sequences on gut level, I will try to teach you how to do it, too (as soon as I understand what exactly I do different xD). Don't get me wrong, I don't try to show off, I just hope to give you insight from other perspective, and with help from more experienced members (because you guys know much more about cognitive science, teaching and writing then I do) to write good materials to help people move on from understanding rationality to actively using it. If someone of the experienced members live in Belgrade or Vienna I will be glad to meet you to discuss how to write all the things I would like to.
I strongly believe I did manage do actualize my self (in Maslow's sense (I just needed the term to express myself, I don't have so good knowledge in psychology to state that any of his theories is true or false)), and I will argue it has a lot to do with becoming rationalist in time.
I will try to diversify this community, since it is mostly devoted to development of friendly AI, and I think there are other things how to help our world (more) effectively. We should not put all eggs in one basket.
To tell you more about me, I believe I posses wide knowledge (and I invest time to make it wider): I am really good in mathematics, physics and programming(there i went in-depth the most), and I have some basic knowledge in finance, economics, psychology. I play guitar in free time, attend choir, play video games... I am not a native English speaker, which you probably already noticed, so please, send me private message if you notice some big errors, I will appreciate it. I speak Serbian (my native language) and German as well (since I study in Vienna).
I look forward to making this world a wonderful place!
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
Glad to hear you've already started digging in to some of the literature and found it to your liking. Yes, it's easy, when you have no community that encourages improvement, to fall into passwords, caches, and generally "not thinking." We can even forget to hope that we can make things better, as you've discovered. I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who can relate here and who are glad to help each other not fall back into those habits.
Since you seem to have such a focus on self-improvement and applying rationality to personal habits, don't hesitate to write about your experiences using rationality or your own personal improvements. Personal anecdotes are, of course, not verifiable experiments, but they are still experiences. The Group Rationality Diary may interest you in that regard. You can share your own experiences, see what others have done, discuss personal habits and experiments.
If you'd like a bit more discussion, you can go to the Open Thread or make a new Discussion post, though you might want to save that latter option for a more developed, researched topic. Starting in the Open Thread will not only help give you a chance to experience LW conversation and habits, but it can also help develop an idea you have before you present it as a full post.
Applied rationality, or, as some refer to it around here, "the martial art of rationality," is one of our big projects of interest. It's right there in the title of the blog itself after all. We want to improve our abilities to improve the world. So we sharpen each other, and we develop new methods, find new discoveries, perform new experiments on using our tool kit in the larger world. We certainly welcome a new voice and new perspective to the conversation. Given your wide background, your voice will be a wonderful addition.
I hope to read some of your ideas very soon!
Thank you for warm welcome and thorough information!
Hi, I'm Ian. I am a 32 year old computer programmer from Massachusetts. My main interest (in computer science) is in the realm of computational creativity but is by no means my only interest. For half my life, I've been coming up with my own sets of ideas - way back when it was on Usenet - some ideas better than others. Regardless of the eventual proven validity of my ideas, I find coming up with original ideas one of the primary motivators in my life. It is an exercise that allows me to continuously uncover beliefs and feelings and uncharted territory that wouldn't be possible for me to explore otherwise. Also, I find it remarkably difficult to find people to share and dissect my ideas with. Generally, people either tell me that I'm smart (I'm not particularly smart) or weird (I'm not particularly weird). In either case I find most people also don't want to continue talking about why wasabi and thunder are the same thing...or the relationship between creativity, intelligence, primes and small worlds...or why there is no such thing as a question...or why I'm a non-practicing atheist at the moment. What I hope to get out of this community is disagreement, agreement, new ideas, a reshaping of old ideas, friends, and above all, to know that other people in this world understand my ideas (even if they disagree with them). I hope to give this community some ideas they have never thought of.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
I admire your reasons for joining. It is easy to find a group or circle that does not challenge you and then rest on your laurels. Seeking out disagreement and criticism is a hard first step for a lot of people. But don't worry... you will certainly find both here! Not that that is a bad thing.
I see you've already added to the Discussion forum. Good on you for diving in and starting some new conversation. If you have some ideas you want to share and get critiqued but feel they are not fully formed enough for a post of their own, try the Open Thread. Even Open Thread conversations can be quite engaging and constructive (and heated! Don't forget heated).
Also, I don't know if you've read any of the LW literature people tend to reference, but, given your interest in refining your ideas, this) set of posts might interest you.
Thanks for the guidance. It can be intimidating exposing your ideas to a new set of people. I've been reading things here on LW off and on for roughly a year. There is quite a bit of jargon on this site and I've been reading through as many sequences as I have time for to try and fill myself in. I find that even concepts I'm familiar with tend to have sub-context here that doesn't quite allow me to fully understand some of the ideas being discussed. I have a fairy good grasp of map versus territory for example, but my understanding comes by way of The Precession of Simulacra by Jean Baudrillard, where in that book he argues that the territory no longer exists, and only the map is real. That is quite different from the arguments I've seen here postulating that we can somehow gain access to the true underlaying territory. Regardless, I expect that with enough reading, I'll be able to contribute. I was a chef for 17 years, so heated debates don't intimidate me I have a thick skin. I ask that people understand the ideas I have - not agree with me. I will give others the same curtesy. Again, thanks for the welcome. I'll check out the links. Cheers.
Hello, I am Jay, a 16 year old incoming High School Senior (I skipped a grade if anyone cares). The way I came across this site was through reading an article about a certain thought experiment I don't want to mention because I don't want to piss anyone off in my first post (If anyone knows what I'm talking about is mentioning that thought experiment on Less Wrong still banned because I do find it very interesting). Anyway, what drew me to this site was the quest for answers. I have been seeking and contemplating what the answers to life, the universe, and everything in between for a while now. Have I been doing this in a logical or rational way? No, I have simply been walking through the everyday motions in life in an autopilot state with no real purpose or goals wondering what the hell I should be doing with my life. Lately, I have realized if I want to find meaning in my life I will actually have to strive to find it. I cant sit around waiting for answers to come to me. That is why for the most part I have come to this site. I want to learn and see if I can find out what is the purpose of living in this strange universe and to learn some interesting things along the way. That is all. If anybody has recommendations as to what I should start out reading on this site that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to LessWrong! If improving is important to you, as it sounds, then I'm sure you will find this site quite useful.
First off, I'm pretty sure you're speaking of Roko's Basilisk. As far as I am aware, the ban on the basilisk has diminished/dissolved in light of a.) the Streisand effect that made further attempts to ban it just more fuel for the fire and b.) the fact that the issue is quite thoroughly solved and no longer very dangerous except in terms of misconceptions (see Streisand effect above). It is still a sore issue. Partly because of the bad ways in which it was handled by different parties, but also because people are just tired of hearing about it. No one's going to shoot you for mentioning it or asking about it, but do be aware that the topic has been pretty well hashed out. It's not some minotaur lurking in the labryinth. We're just tired of revisiting it.
As for recommendations, the Sequences are a good place to start. I don't know how much you know about the culture around here, so, to briefly explain: the Sequences are mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who many around here hold as one of the major (if not the major) spokesperson for LessWrong's central ideals and concepts. The Sequences are an organized listing of some of Yudkowsky's writings, analyzing different topics of LW interest.
They are long. I just finished the Sequences myself and it took about five months with several breaks in between and various reading speeds. As iarwin1 mentions, there are other versions of the Sequences that can help ease you in without being overwhelming. You might also check out the LessWrong References and Resources page for other sources of LW materials.
Given how long the Sequences are, I'd honestly suggest against just diving head first into them unless you already have a strong desire to read them all. You'll get burned out. Instead, look through the topics and related materials, find the things that interest you, and just check them out. You mentioned you're interested in improving yourself? Read a little of Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. This is a good beginner's sequence for learning some of the key concepts of rationality. If you want some help in making your own life better or figuring yourself out, check out The Science of Winning at Life or Living Luminously. Don't try to learn everything at once. Find the things that interest you, take them one at a time, enjoy learning and improving on what you find.
And, finally, definitely get involved! You've already taken step one, so don't feel you have to stop at saying "hi." The Discussion board is a great place to see the day-to-day conversations that go on here. Check out the latest Open Thread to see what sort of casual conversations we have. Don't be afraid to be part of the conversation. The site's karma system sometimes gives new visitors a fright. They think of something they said getting downvoted and they shrivel up. But remember, unless you're the victim of a downvoting troll (note: quite the rare event and more cause of laughter than tears), then getting downvoted is just an opportunity to learn and improve. Not a personal attack.
I don't know how much you know about LW and its culture (though I've obviously assumed quite a bit given the length of this post!), but the best suggestions I have are: find what interests you, read it, and, when you feel comfortable, add to it.
Wow thank you for the awesome reply. If all the people in the Less Wrong community are as friendly and as knowledgeable as you are then I have obviously joined the right site. You were right I was talking about Roko's Basilisk and since it is okay to mention it, here is the article that introduced me to this site if anyone is interested. I will definitely check out the Sequences in addition to the articles you suggested. There is so much interesting information on this site that it is hard to know where to start. One question I do have is what exactly is the importanceof decision theories? That is another thing that I am interested in. Are they applicable in real life situations or only in thought experiments? What is the importance of finding a perfect decision theory? I know the basics of Causal and Evidential Decision Theory but I am baffled by Timeless Decision Theory. If you could point me in the direction of where to find articles on these issues that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you again for the thoughtful and useful reply, it helped a lot.
Edit: I started reading Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions today and found it so engaging that I didn't stop reading until I finished it. It was definitely a mind opening experience for me as I was exposed to a plethora of ideas and biases that I had no idea existed. I am definitely going to try reading the rest of the Sequences now.
TDT just augments CDT by saying that running two copies of the same algorithm with the same input will always yield the same result.
What? No it doesn't. That's not remotely what TDT says. That isn't even a claim with particularly relevance to decision theory.
Hmm. It does capture most of the essence of TDT, doesn't it? See for example the last paragraph of chapter 12 and the last two paragraphs of chapter 13.3 in the TDT paper. I disagree with the "just" in the grandparent, but given e.g. "mostly"? Maybe I'm reading too much into the one-sentence description, though.
Just wanted to say you're off to a great start posting to LW -- asking very good questions!
(Also, please break posts like this into more than one paragraph.)
Thank you I'm just trying to learn all I can.
If you want to get a handle on the "Less Wrong" approach to decision theory, I'd recommend starting with Wei Dai's Updateless Decision Theory (UDT) rather than with Timeless Decision Theory (TDT). The basic mathematical outline of UDT is more straightforward, so you will be up and running quicker.
Wei's posts introducing UDT are here and here. I wrote a brief write-up that just gives a precise description of UDT without any motivation, justification, or examples.
One of the main functions of a good decision theory is to bridge the territory-map divide: by solving problems in your head, it shows you how to solve problems in the real world. You can identify a good decision theory when it works in theory and in practice. If a decision theory seems to work in practice, but is not describable in a precise language (e.g. "do what feels good"), it actually hasn't been well thought out and puts you at risk of being paralyzed when a very serious and very complex situation arises. On the other hand, if it only works in theory but is impracticable (e.g. "pray to Minerva for an omen"), it will be a waste of storage space in your head. In short, a decision theory should serve as a tool for you to manage your life.
Three motivations are common around here:
For some relevant posts, see 1 and 2.
Thank you for the clear and informative reply.
Welcome! I don't know so much about reading materials for finding purpose, but as an intro to rationality:
Thank you for the recommendations I will be sure to check them out.
Oh yes, and check out hpmor.com.
Although neither of these articles is on LessWrong, they reflect the core moral values of many LW members.
Astronomical Waste
Consequentalism FAQ
Thank you for the reply. I will be sure to read these articles.
I'm Tom, 23 year old uni drop out (existential apathy is a killer), majored in Bioscience for what its worth. Saw the name of this site while browsing tvtropes and was instantly intrigued, as "less wrong" has always been something of a mantra for me. I lurked for a while and sampled the sequences and was pleased to note that many of the points raised were ideas that had already occurred to me.
Its good to find a community devoted to reason and that seems to actually think where most people are content not to. I'm looking forward suckling off the collective wisdom of this community, and hopefully make a valuable contribution or two of my own.
Hello and welcome to LessWrong!
We have something of a crosspollination with tvtropes as well as a few other sites. The similar "archive diving" structures probably don't hurt.
Glad you decided to join in! The site always needs some bioscience to collaborate with our high computer science population. Look forward to seeing your contributions.
Hi, I'm Amanda. I'm interning at MIRI right now. I found HP:MoR 3 years ago, and started reading the Sequences shortly after. After 2 years of high school, I dropped out, and started at the University of Kansas. Reading the Sequences probably contributed a lot to this; I was tired of feeling like I wasn't doing anything important. Likewise, after a year at a state school, and now experiencing 5 weeks in the Bay Area, I'm motivated to get out of Kansas and back here.
I'm studying computer science, and I just finished my freshman year. I also do computer science research during the year. My advisor had me work with genetic algorithms, which, looking back now, was mainly to get me programming. My only experience was one high school class, which was predictably bad.
Anyway, I programmed a web project, and realized that I actually enjoy programming! My parents are both software engineers, so I had initially seen it as a boring 9-5 cubicle job. Later, I viewed it as a tool, useful enough to devote my studies to, but not particularly enjoyable. After working on the web app, I remember thinking, "Why didn't anyone tell me how cool coding could be?"
I decided to intern at MIRI to help narrow down what I want to do; either working directly on FAI research, or going into startups, in order to tackle another problem, while earning to give. (I'm leaning toward the startup route now.) I've had a great time so far. I have a few days left at MIRI, then I'll go to the other end of the office to volunteer with CFAR for a week, and finally I'll end my stay in Berkeley by attending a CFAR workshop.
I decided to end my lurking in order to post some of the things I've been working on for MIRI. More on that to come.
Welcome to LessWrong! Sounds like you'll have some interesting things to share. Glad to have you.
Hi, my name’s Charlie. I’m a 33YO Aries who enjoys long walks on the beach…
Oop, wrong script.
I’ve been lurking for years, but just started posting (nothing real, just $.02 and quotes really) so I figured I should write an intro so I won’t feel bad actually contributing.
Perhaps the most important thing to know about me is that I am the happiest person I have ever met, as far as I know. I have more money than I intend to spend, a very good head on my shoulders, and no known health problems. I just quit my job a few months ago. I know of no way my life could be materially better that accords with the laws of nature (superpowers would be a gamechanger…). I mention this not to brag, but because my general contentment colors my views.
I am a superman theist. When I was a kid I reconciled religion (RC) by just taking the infinity out of it. The people who wrote the Bible used forty to mean “a lot,” so why do we think they understood infinity? Anyway, I have no idea what would disprove a finite provident entity. If it were I hope I’d accept it, but it’s really not a big factor in most decisions anyway so I haven’t gone out of my way.
I’ve read and enjoyed the Sequences, and wish I could pay money to have them on dead trees mailed to my house. I love the audio though. I was introduced by a friend, but I’ll leave it up to him if he wants to claim me. I try to learn thing like one scores drywall. A little A, then a little B, then a little C, then don’t you know the seemingly unrelated B and C make A easier (much more complicated I know, but who likes textwall analogies?). And I find just about everything interesting.
I live in a rural part of NY, and sometimes have a hard time putting myself in cityfolk’s shoes. I know the idea of having to get in a car to buy groceries is as alien to some as choosing to live in a house where you can see your neighbors is to me. I have no problem visiting cities though. (ADK meetup anyone? Bunch of rationalists on a hike to a high peak sounds great)
Anything else you want to know, I’m not shy. Thanks for great content; hope to be a net positive to it.
I suggest re-reading them. For a while I've been meaning to do a PSA post on the subject. I read the sequences once, in thematic order, then recently went back and re-read them in chronological order. I have to say I got a lot more out of them this time, now that I know where EY was heading with the entire project (and reading them in the order posted is much better imho than organized by topic).
Especially because they're enjoyable to read. I've been listening to the audio as it came out but the different ordering sounds great.
I am a long time LessWronger (under an anonymous pseudonym), but recently I've decided that it is finally time to bite the bullet, abandon my few thousand karma, and just move over to my real name already.
Back in the day, when I joined LessWrong for the first time, I followed my general policy of anonymity on the Internet. Now, I'm involved with the Less Wrong community enough that I find this anonymity holding me back. Thus the new account.
Edit: For my first post on this new account, I posted a few of my thoughts on logical uncertainty.
I'm Daniele De Rossi. I stumbled on Lukeprog's old site and thought the problems he was talking about :-rationality , friendly AI , psychology of adjustment , were all really interesting to me , so I followed him here. I'm interested in productivity stuff now primarily. I need to manage my time better and get more done.
Skyler here, a 21 year old technology student. Born and raised in the backwoods of Vermont to ahem philosophically diverse parents, was encouraged to read pretty much every philosophical book the library had except for Ayn Rand. So naturally I gravitated towards that as soon as I became enough of a teenager, but apparently completely missed the antagonism towards non-geniuses and couldn't for the life of me figure out why I seriously disliked every objectivist I met.
About two years ago, I had a professor who introduced me to HPMoR, which I enjoyed immensely. It took me around a month to move to the sequences. They seem to have had the curious property of seeming perfectly obvious, like someone simply expressing what I already knew just in better words, and while a lot of them do fall close in broad subject to things I'd written about before, the only use I'd had for bayesian statistics prior to reading them was spam filters. (And then the author's notes pointed me to Worm, which consumed a month or two.)
A couple of weeks ago however, I encountered a post on SlateStarCodex (which I'd been reading after stumbling upon it through unrelated browsing) about trans people, and somehow around the same time got linked to Alicorn's Polyhacking article. My positions previously were similar to the authors (Thought of both transgender and polyamory as mildly wrong and not understandable) and both made a solid argument that actually changed my mind. This was not the "Oh, of course I knew that" of the sequences, but a "Huh. I thought that was wrong, but they have good points. Let me think for five minutes and see if there are any more arguments for or against I can think of now." By the end of the respective days, I had a different opinion than I previously had, and was beginning to make changes in how I conducted myself because of one of them. In addition, they both seemed like interesting people I could relate to, and a community of such people could be really fun. (As opposed to Eliezer Y.- That is, I can imagine having a conversation with these people, whereas if I was in a conversation with Eliezer Y. I would feel compelled to take notes.)
So yeah. I'm here to see how many other topics require me to change my mind, and to hopefully have cool conversations with interesting people. Any recommendations on where to start?
Also, I don't know if "Typical mind and gender identity" is the blog post that you stumbled across, but I am very glad to have read it, and especially to have read many of the comments. I think I had run into related ideas before (thank you, Internet subcultures!), but that made the idea that gender identity has a strength as well as a direction much clearer.
A combination of that post and What universal human experiences are you missing without realizing it? actually. I would say that I am strongly typed as male, strong enough that occasionally I've been known to get annoyed at my body not being male enough. (Larger muscle groups, more body hair, darker beard, etc.) Probably influencing this are the facts that Skyler is the feminine form of my name, and that puberty was downright cruel to me. As you say, it's not common to think of being strongly or weakly identified with your own sex, rather than just a binary "fits/doesn't fit" check.
I'm afraid I haven't been active online recently, but if you live in an area with a regular in-person meetup, those can be seriously awesome. :)
Meatspace meetups sound like a good deal of fun, and possibly a faster route to being part of the community than commenting on articles that I think I have something to add. Downside is, I'm currently in Rochester New York, and unless I'm misusing the meetups page somehow, looks like the closest regular meetup is in Albany. That's a long bike ride. :) If anybody is in Rochester, by all means let me know!
(Aside: I'm trying to become more concise and articulate in my writing, so I welcome anyone and everyone to critique my postings. I know this post is long-winded when compared to its neighbors. I left it long since it took me a number of words to relate where I came from, which I imagine to be more interesting than the TL;DR version, which goes something like, "My name is Ben. I used to be a devout Christian, then I was drug-addled and irrational in myriad ways. Now, I know some mathematics, but not a ton, and I'd like to learn more of the math I like and continue working on thinking less irrationally." )
My name is Ben. I'm 23 years old, and I live in the southeastern USA. I moved back here to attend university after spending a few years working on the west coast. Perhaps you've had a friend who had another friend, and this second friend turned your friend on to the idea that some of this or that would teach them something about this. I've been this person, and my road to rationality began with going a little loopy after a little too much of this, which came out of this.
I grew up in Mississippi. I was nursed on Jesus, Calvin, hellfire, brimstone, and Coca Cola. The lessons in homophobia were more explicit than the ones in racism. Also, lots of video games. This generated a critical mass (sorry physicists) of cognitive dissonance that led to me leaving the church and nearly dropping out of secondary school. I tried a semester of college. The courses presented were there for reasons bureaucratic more so than anything else. I wasn't sure what I was doing there, so I left and ended up in a rural community on the west coast. That's where the drugs happened, and it's where the drugs ended. Apparently, toads from a gas station parking lot contain several things at least as weird as the thing I wanted them to contain. I adapted to the physical side-effects over time, but the immediate impact on my cognition was overwhelming at the time. Things previously innocuous would now keep me from sleeping for a week and stir up a great deal of existential dread. I came home for a few months. I spent a lot of time outdoors running and doing construction work, and I spent a lot of time sitting alone in my room with my mind. I learned to meditate, and I started reading again. My brain was having a hard time sticking to reality at the time, and I was very scared. I knew I had been foolish and wrong. I knew I was lacking in discernment. What I didn't know was where to start with developing my thought to be more rational.
I went back out west for maybe five months the next year. I got back in touch with some folks in the San Francisco Bay Area. I stayed away from drugs, but I could tell in my conversations and actions that I was still missing something.
I returned again to Mississippi at the beginning of 2012 to get back into school, which I had dropped out of in 2008. I started in biology, but our program wasn't remotely quantitative, which is rubbish if you aren't trying to go to med school. After a semester of this, I read HPMoR as it existed at the time at the suggestion of a relative. I also discovered LW as result. I lurked a bit, but I was spending most of the summer camping, which made it hard to keep up with web content. I forgot about LW as a community for the most part, but it played a big role in getting me to think more about how I thought and in inspiring me to change majors and largely ignore biological science for the time being.
I switched to mathematics, with no significant background in the area, a little less than two years ago. Since then, I've completed all but the three capstone classes for our curriculum, which I need to pick up over the next year. I went through my curriculum in a bit of a rush. I took summer classes. I took some "upper level" classes early. I hurt myself by memorizing passwords for a few classes I was less interested in, but the upside is that was making time to learn to program. (UPDATE: This absolutely applies to the preceding sentence.) I developed an interest in theoretical computer science and in general abstract nonsense, but I'm only just now making time to actually familiarize myself with the subjects. Now, I'm trying to be more objective about my learning process. I'm recognizing my weaknesses, which are plenty. You see, it's still been less than a year since I drew my first little QED box.
A little over a month ago, three things happened that led to me gaining a great deal of direction that I was lacking. *First, I realized that my undergraduate studies were almost over, although they would be stretched out over the next year, and that I've hardly managed to scratch the surface of mathematics.
*Second, I found that the Singularity Institute had become MIRI, saw the course list, and then found Nate's posts on productivity. *Third, I found the Less Wrong Study Hall, where you can find me as simply "ben."
I was thrilled to see that there was actually a call for caring about this sort of material (apart from my own interests), and I was inspired by Nate's independent study endeavors. The study hall was my first step towards getting involved with the community, and I found it to be greatly rewarding both socially and in terms of productivity.
My school doesn't offer many classes of the sort I'm interested in, and I don't feel that I have sufficient experience to apply to graduate programs that do. As I result, I've started tackling the MIRI course list on my own time. I'm loving it, and I would love to discuss it... especially talking about setting reasonable expectations given my position as a relative novice. I'm presently working through material on probability models and discrete mathematics first, as it's what I have the most past experience with, but I'm also getting into areas pertaining more explicitly to theoretical computer science and mathematical logic.
Thanks for taking the time to read my little account of things. I look forward to getting to know you as well!
Interesting stuff. FYI, you're not the only LWer I know of who has experienced apparently permanent mental problems as a result of drug use. And reading drug-related subreddits, I've noticed that everyone seems really stupid. So yeah, everything in moderation.
Hi, my name is Joe. I live in North Jersey. I was born into a very religious Orthodox Jewish family. I only recently realized I how badly I was doublethinking.
I started with HPMOR (as, it seems, do most people) and found my way into the Sequences. I read them all on OB, and was amazed at how eloquently someone else could voice what seems to be my thoughts. It laid out bare the things I had been struggling with.
Then I found LW and was mostly just lurking for a while. I only made an account when I saw this post and realized how badly I wanted to upvote some of the comments :).
I think this site and the Sequences on it have changed my life, and I'm glad to finally be part of it.
Hello again...
I am this guy. For some reason one year ago I thought that translating the name "Less Wrong" into Portuguese would be enough differentiation, but I'm not comfortable with it anymore. It's a wonderful name, but it's not mine.
So I figured I'd just post under my actual (first) name.
I'm still in love with this place, by the way.
Hello all! My name is Will. I'm 21 and currently live in upstate New York. A bit about myself:
At an early age, I remember I was thinking in my head, and I caught myself in a lie. I already knew that it was wrong to lie to other people, though I did it sometimes, but I could not think of any good reason to lie to myself. It was some time before I really started to apply this idea.
My parents divorced when I was ten, and my mother discovered that she had a brain tumor around the same time. In the face of this uncertainty and unpleasantness, my mother turned to religion. She reached the other side of these events without great harm, and in her gratitude began bringing her children (my younger brother and me) to church with her. I had not considered religion much before, and had been somewhat skeptical, but since I was aware of no one personally who shared my skepticism, I suppressed my instincts and became involved with youth groups and church camps. However, my doubts persisted over time as attempted to become a faithful and devout Christian. I knew that I hadn't accepted the claims they made completely, and that caused a great deal of stress. If I had doubts, surely an all knowing God would see them and punish me.
A turning point came when I learned that a couple of my close friends didn't believe in God, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I lost the faith I never really had. Considering the existence of God to be someone likely had caused me a great deal of stress, and I felt a great sense of relief by accepting what I deep down believed to be true, an extremely cathartic dissipation of cognitive dissonance. By the time I got to college, I had watched many atheist debates on YouTube and read several atheist books, and became even more confident in my position.
Once I arrived at my university, I joined a club that was mostly populated by atheists ( the Secular Student Alliance and found that I was happiest surrounded by like-minded people. I would Eventually be elected the groups President. Also while I was at university, I took and was a TA for a philosophy class on Plato and Aristotle. Having read some books by Steven Pinker, I realized the science behind why Plato had come up with his theory of Forms. It bothered me considerably that this was not being taught to students along with the historical material, and it also bothered me to discover that there were people who still identified as Platonists. Not all, but too many of the people in the philosophy department struck me as being more concerned with arguing and showing off their intelligence than in actually understanding the world. They matched almost exactly the Sophists that had plagued Socrates.
In 2011, I became involved in the Occupy Movement. I thought that the world was sufficiently bad that it needed changing, and that even if it was a long shot trying was better than doing nothing, I learned a lot about what happens when you forbid anyone to take a leadership position, and also how to organize people who don't want anyone to tell them what to do (between that and running a group of atheists, the meaning behind the phrase "herding cats" has become quite clear to me). I'm interesting to see if some of these ideas might be useful to a rationalist community.
In December of 2012, I an idea struck me that I thought would change the world. It was about organizing people using fractals, and I thought I would immediately start a revolution. I then came to the more general realization that "fractals" were the source of everything in the universe, explaining how complexity arose from simplicity. My friends didn't seem as impressed as I thought they should be. I became increasingly distressed and brought myself to a hospital. They recommended I be admitted to a mental hospital, and with an amount of good sense surprising for one in my condition, I agreed, thinking I either was insane or would be proven sane and therefore right about having solved the mysteries of the universe. I was diagnosed with bipolar type 1. My erratic behavior had been the result of my only truly manic episode, with all the associated grandiose delusions.
After my release from the hospital, I entered a deep depression (which often follows mania in those with bipolar). I lost my sense of self. I didn't know to what extent the new psychoactive medications I was taking were suppressing my intelligence and creativity, I was unsure of my future, and it seemed to me that I had to drastically lower my expectations from what they were in the past in order to prevent a return to mania. I thought that my depression was the price of stability and sanity. I entered a regimen of treatment that was quite difficult and did not produce results very quickly, including what I thought of as a last ditch effort, elctro-convulsive therapy.
In March of this year, I was put on a new medication. This medication improved my mood considerably, and around the same time I started taking it I decided to give lesswrong a closer look. I had seen posts from it elsewhere on the internet, but I had never really given it thorough consideration. Once I began to go through it systematically, starting with Benito's guide. I found that much of it corresponded with ideas that had appealed to me elsewhere, and I found the new ideas to be stimulating as well. Finding lesswrong correlated with a turning point in my life. I have found useful advice and inspiration on this website, I hope to be able to contribute in the future, but right now I'm primarily focusing on finishing the sequences before I get into much posting. I decided to join the study hall to help with akrasia and enjoyed my time there so I wanted to introduce myself to the community more thoroughly.
Hello, I'm an effective altruist from Algeria. Does this make me the only reader from Algeria?
No one in the last census wrote that he's from Algeria, so you are likely the only one.
Do we have any sense what % of LessWrong followers complete the census? Does it have wide coverage of effective altruists too? I've yet to meet one here - is there any sort of dataset with effective altruist locations available?
I suggest you ask at the Effective Altruist facebook page - there's usually fairly good coverage there and if such a thing exists someone there will know of it.
I don't want to retake this survey but it might have location info? You could also ask anyone who runs an EA website where they are getting their web hits from if you're really determined.
Ah yes good point - it seems to have yielded this map of effective altruists around the world
Hello. My name is Avi. I am an 18 year old Orthodox Jewish American male.
I found out about LessWrong through HPMOR. I was very impressed by the quality and consistency of the writing.
I'm partly through the sequences (in middle of the quantum one currently) and I have a lot to say on much of what I've seen, but I decided not to post too much until I've finished all the sequences. Most of what I've seen seems correct, and then there's posts here and there that I think have logical errors.
I was a little disappointed that most of my comments got voted down (I'm at -3 Karma now) . Can anyone tell me why?
Hi Avi, welcome to LessWrong!
There's a big problem with upvotes and downvotes on LessWrong, namely that the two important but skew dimensions of agreement/disagreement and useful/disuseful for rating posts are collapsed into one feature. A downvote can feel like 'Your comments are bad and you should feel bad (and leave and never post again)', but this is often not the case.
Downvoting comments by a person asking why the parent comment was downvoted is generally poor form. In your case, it might be because you did it for a few comments in quick succession, which might have made Recent Comments (on the sidebar) less useable for someone so they downvoted the comments. To avoid this in future, maybe add a note in your comments when you post them noting that you are a new user trying to figure out how to tailor your comments to LessWrong and requesting that downvoters explain their downvotes to help you with this. On the other hand, it's not impossible that someone was being Not Nice and mass-downvoting your comments, which wouldn't be your fault.
Is "disuseful" a synonym for "unuseful" here or does it mean something else?
I'll add a specific way for newbies to ask why a comment was downvoted without clogging up the recent comments list: edit the original, downvoted comment, appending a little "Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, could someone explain?"-type note. (It's obvious once you think of it, but easy not to realize independently.)
It means something else. I use the dis- prefix to mean the active opposite of the thing to which it is prefixed. So 'I diswant ice cream' is a stronger statement than 'I do not want ice cream', though most people, whose language is less considered and precise, would (also) use the latter to cover the former. I guess some would say 'I don't particularly want ice cream' to disambiguate somewhat.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Is that different enough from “harmful” to merit a less standard word?
I can see several possible connotations and policy suggestions underlying your comment, but not sure which one(s). Can you specify? Like, are you suggesting I update in this specific case or my general inclination to use nonstandard undefined terms or...?
I was thinking about this specific case, but now that I think about it it does generalize.
Minor point of information. In English "do not want" is not the negation of want. It actually means what you have defined "diswant" to mean. The "not" is privative here, not merely negative. People are not being less considered and precise when they use it this way. They are using the words precisely as everyone but you uses them -- that is, precisely in accordance with what they mean.
You are welcome to invent a new language, just like English except that "not" always means simple negation and never means privation; but that language is not English. Neither, for that matter, would the corresponding modification of French be French. Comparing the morphology of translations of "want", "do not want", "have", and "do not have" in a further selection of languages with Google Translate suggests that the range of languages for which this is the case is large.
That is indeed often the case, though I notice I feel hesitant to agree that this is always the case and retain a feeling that people use 'do not want' in both way, depending on the context. Regardless, when I said:
I meant (hohoho) this as a statement about my usage, not the common usage of others.
Thanks for pointing me to a further point of reference (the term 'privative').
Edit: I looked at the Wikipedia article for privative
It gives some examples:
and it says:
It seems like your usage of privative was excluding alpha privative, i.e. mere negation, but the examples and this summary sentence suggest 'privative' fails to distinguish (hohoho again) between mere negation and...the other thing. (Inversion? Opposition?) I'd be most amused if linguists had failed to coin a specific term for the subform of privation that is the 'active opposite' of something, and had only given a name ('alpha privative') to the subform of mere negation.
In the literal sense that I have considered these things more than they have, they are.
Localised examples like this seem trivial, but when generalised to encouraging good habits of thought and communication and precision, it's not just a localised decision about 'un-' vs. 'dis-', but a more general decision about how one approaches thought, language, and communication.
Also, if you just look at 'do not want'/'diswant' in a vacuum, then yes, it seems like both my usage and the common usage specify what they mean. But the broader question of using negation and 'not' in a way that cues the mental process of Thinking Like Logic is inextricable from specific uses of 'not'. I generally lean towards the position that the upper echelons of a skill like Thinking Like Logic are only achieved by those who cut through to the skill in every motion, and that less comparmentalisation leads to better adoption of the skill. And I feel like it probably intersects with other skills and habits of thought. So trivial cases like this are part of a bigger picture.
I don't think I understand what you mean by privative. Is it something like the difference between "na'e" and "to'e" in Lojban? For reference: {mi na'e djica} would mean "I other-than want", and {mi to'e djica} would mean "I opposite-of want".
That's pretty much it. Privative "not" would be "to'e". The English "not" covers both senses according to context, but "not want" is always privative and some lengthier phrase has to be used to express absence of wanting. Or not so lengthy, e.g. "meh".
Oh, cool. I've found the distinction to be a very useful one to make.
Welcome, Avi!
It looks like I downvoted three of your previous comments. Sorry about that (not really, it had to be done). Here is my reasoning, since you asked:
Your comment on AI avoiding destruction suggested that you neither read the previous discussion of the issue first, nor thought about it in any depth, just blurted out the first or second idea that you came up with.
Your retracted FTL question indicated that you didn't bother searching online for one of the most common questions ever asked about entanglement. Not until later, anyway. So the downvote worked as intended there.
Your comment on the vague quasi-philosophical concept of superdeterminism purported to provide some sort of a proof of it being not Turing-computable, yet did not discuss why the T.M. would not halt, only gave some poorly described thought experiment.
I am sorry you got a harsher-that-average welcome to this forum, I hope your comment quality improves after these few bumps to your ego.
Good for you. Note that the Quantum sequence is one of the harder and more controversial ones, consider alternative sources, like Scott Aaronson's semi-popular Quantum Computing Democritus, written by an expert in the field.
That's quite wise. If you write down what you want to say and then look back at it after you finish reading, you will likely find your original thoughts naive in retrospect. But a good exercise nonetheless.
If at some point you think that after a cursory reading of some post you found a hole in Eliezer's reasoning that had not been discussed in the comments, you are probably mistaken. Consider this post of mine as a warning.
Also note that as a self-identifying "Orthodox Jewish", you are bound to have compartmentalized a lot, and Eliezer's and Yvain's posts tend to vaporize these barriers quite spectacularly, so be warned, young Draco. Your original identity is not likely to remain intact, either.
With these caveats, have fun! :)
I read most of the posts offline in ebooks. That means I don't see the comments unless I then go online and look. Is there a set of ebooks that includes comments? (For all I know, most of my ideas have already been said and refuted.)
And is he perfect?
I don't know, but sounds like a good idea. Would be rather Talmudic in spirit. Unfortunately, most of the comments are fluff not worth reading, and separating the few percent that aren't is not that easy. Maybe pick the threads with top 10 comments by karma or something.
Oh, far from it. I think that some of his statements are flat out wrong, but I only make this determination where either I have the relevant expertise or several experts disagree with him after considering his point in earnest.
Don't many experts disagree with him on his MWI view on quantum mechanics?
Also note that replacing "Everett branches" with "possible worlds" works in 99% of the decision-theoretic arguments Eliezer makes, so there is no need to sweat MWI vs other interpretations. I would be more interested to hear your opinion on the Trolley problem, the Newcomb's problem, and the Dust specks vs Torture issue. Assuming, of course, that you have studied it in some depth and went over the various arguments on both sides, the process you must be intimately familiar with if you have attended a yeshiva.
I've seen Newcomb and Dust specks vs Torture but not Trolley (although I've seen that one before in other places). Which sequences do I need to finish for those?
If the trolley one is the same as the "standard" version, then it's fairly trivial within the framework of Orthodox Judaism (if I'm allowed to bring that in), because of strict rules about death. I'll elaborate further when I'm up to the question. The other two are a lot more complicated for me.
Yes, the standard Trolley problem, sorry. For more LW-specific problems, consider Parfit's hitchhiker.
Of course you are allowed to bring it in. And, unless you insist that it is the One True Way, as opposed to just one of many religious and moral frameworks, you probably will not be judged harshly. So, by all means!
So according to Orthodox Judaism, one is not allowed to (even indirectly) cause a death, even when the alternative is considered worse. The standard example is if you're in a city and the "enemy" demands you hand over a specific person to be killed (unjustly), and says if you don't do so, they will destroy the whole city and everyone will die (including that person). The rule in that situation is that you aren't allowed to hand them over. Accepting that as an axiom, the trivial answer to the trolley situation is “don't do anything”. Maintain the status quo. You cannot cause a death, even though it will save ten other people.
Parfit's hitchhiker also appears trivial. It seems to assume I place no value on telling the truth. As I do, in fact, place a high utility on being truthful (based on Judaism) , my saying "Yes" will translate into a truthful expression on my face and I will get the ride.
Note: I got the link from searching for "midvar sheker tirchak", which is the Bible's verse that says not to lie, roughly translated as "distance yourself from falsehood.
On another topic, if I think that it is the “One True Way”, but don't say that, is that OK?
Thank you, I appreciate your replies.
Hmm, I see. So, a clear and simple deontological rule. So, if you see your children being slaughtered in front of you, and all you need to do to save them and to kill the attacker is to press a button, you are not allowed to do it?
Also, does this mean that there cannot be Orthodox Jewish soldiers? If so, is this a recent development, given that ancient Hebrews fought and killed without a second thought? Or is there another reason why it was OK to kill your enemy in King David's time, but not now?
Right, ethical systems which value honesty absolutely have no difficulty with this. But
is this a utilitarian calculation or an absolute injunction, like in the previous case, where you are not allowed to kill, no matter what? Or is there some threshold of (dis)utility above which lying is OK? If so, what price demanded by the selfish driver would surely cause a good Orthodox Jewish hitchhiker to attempt to lie?
First, note that I do not represent LW in any way and often misjudge the reaction of others. But my guess would be that simply stating this is not an issue, but explicitly using this belief in an argument may result in downvoting. This community is mildly hypocritical in this regard, as people who push their transhumanist views here as "the best/objective/universal morality" (I am exaggerating) can get away with it, but what can you do.
What happens if instead of "causing" a death, you're doing something with some probability of causing a death? For instance, handing someone over to the enemy results in a 99% probability of them being killed by the enemy. What if it's only 10%? What if the enemy isn't going to kill him, but you need to drive through a war zone to give him the prisoner, and driving through the war zone results in a 10% chance of the person being killed? What if the enemy says that he's going to kill one person from his jail no matter what, and he puts the person in the same jail (so that instead of 1 person being killed out of 9 in the jail, 1 person is killed out of a group of 10 that includes the new person, thus increasing the chance this specific person is killed, but not increasing the number of people killed)?
I don't think there's a Lesswrong-specific take on the trolley problem, so I'm assuming shminux is just referring to the usual one.
Some high-profile physicists disagree, others agree. Very few believe in some sort of objective collapse these days, but some still do. This strange situation is possible because MWI is not a well-formed physical model but more of an inspirational ontological outlook.
Joining these forums can serve as something of a reality check to gifted young people; they may be used to most any half-baked thought still being sufficient to impress their environment. Rarely is polish needed, rarely are "proofs" thoroughly nitpicked. Getting actual feedback knocking them off of their pedestal ("the smartest one around") can be ego-bruising, since we usually define ourselves through our perceived strengths. Ego-bruising, yet really, really important for actual personal and intellectual growth.
Blessed be the ones growing up around other minds who call them out on their mistakes, intellects against which they can grow their potential.
(I don't mean this as applying specifically to Avi, but more as a general observation.)
Does that go both ways? That is, can I "nitpick" other people's comments and posts? Also, if I find a typo in a post (in the sequences so far, I've spotted at least 2), is it acceptable to comment just pointing out the typo?
Why not PM them first?
This is my own practice. My reasoning is that pointing out a typo is of no enduring interest to other readers, and renders the comments section less valuable to other readers; so if it's convenient to contact the author more quietly, one should.
Yes. I recommend using ctrl-f to ensure no one else has already pointed out that typo.
Of course you can. Whether it's wise to do so is an entirely different question :-D
Yep. I'll put it even more directly.
Smart people growing up in environments where most people around them are less smart tend to develop a highly convenient habit of handwaving or bullshitting through issues. However when they find themselves among people who are at least as smart as they are and some are smarter, that habit often leads to problems and a need for adjustment :-)
I don't think I would have minded as much if there would have been comments explaining why they thought I was wrong. It was the lack of response that bothered me.
(And what's with this "You are trying to submit too fast"? I'm not allowed to post too many comments in a row?)
Yes. If I remember correctly, LW also implements some form of slow-banning (the amount of time required between your comments depends on your total karma), but I may be recalling a feature request as an implemented feature.
I thought it was caused by having a lot of recent posts downvoted.