why this idea is linked to the LW ideology

Question presupposes that it is linked to the LW ideology (wow, let's not use that phrase ever again), which isn't clear to me.

I don't think they are, except in a waffly 'compared to the general population' sense; look at the surveys.

I think this is mostly a community thing: it just so happened that some key figures in the two largest rationalist communities (SF and NY) were polyamorous, so it became popular relative to the general population, and probably also popular relative to the coasts' populations.

Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances. In the general population many naturally poly people are 'conformed' into being mono the same way they might be conformed into being religious. Thus 'people who want to be poly can be' would reasonably be expected to correlate with elements of the Correct Contrarian Cluster, and you would expect to find more polyamorous atheists or (he predicted more boldly) polyamorous endorsers of no-collapse quantum mechanics than in the general population, even outside LW. There are also specifically cognitive-rationality skills like 'resist Asch's conformity' and 'be Munchkin', and community effects like 'Be around people who will listen with interest to long chains of reasoning instead of immediately shunning you.'

Not being poly and only a bit rational (so far), I'll only propose

• Is polyamory actually higher amongst LW people than the general population? Do you just have more exposure to polyamorous LW people than a wider polyamorous population?
• Do polyamorous LW people talk about their polyamory more than polyamorous non-LW people?

I think it's the influence of San Francisco

More seriously: I think it follows perfectly well from rationality which is at it's core about doing non obvious things that result in better outcomes once you do the math. Obviously it comes down to preferences but many people seem to prefer multiple partners and only refrain because society condemns it. Polyamkry is more honest than cheating and more preference satisfying than monogamy for those with poly amorous inclinations.

Plus there's all the conveniences.

i suspect that religious prohibitions significantly reduce the amount of westerners who are poly, so it kinda follows from the atheism part.

Adding to the laundry list of explanations and trivializations, gender skew!

Perhaps rationalist in a modern society, values things like careers and quality of life more importantly than sharing resources and a stable relationship to raise a family and feel monogamy is not as optimal. Besides, isn't a large part of the culture of monogamy rooted in religion? Most religious people are monogamous because that is what their religion tells them to do.

In addition to some of the things other people have suggested, it is my possibly incorrect observation that there is at least a weak inverse correlation between desire for personal immortality and desire to have children. If one has already ruled out having children, a lot of the complications that arise from polyamory disappear.

A combination of that and brief flashes of visual imagery.

I'm definitely an internal-monologue thinker. I've tried breaking myself from it and going into pure thought(which feels like it ought to be an option, because I know how the sentence I'm thinking will end when I'm halfway through, and I've successfully tested breaking monologue and still proceeding with the mental understanding of what I was going to think), but I spend more time thinking "No! Stop monologuing!" than I save by not monologuing.

The most common for me are verbal (if I think while taking a walk, I basically talk to myself), spatial/kinesthetic (which key on my ring goes to this door again?), and visual/symbolic (integrate Sin(Ln(x))/x dx). But there's plenty more stuff I'd call thinking.

Verbal and symbolic thinking are often just expressions of conceptual problem-solving, where my brain can actually fit concepts together rather than just talking. Like in the integral above - I pattern-match it to the general concept "change of variables," without using words or symbols, and then after a second or so of brewing I can examine the idea in terms of symbols and words.

I experience a thought all at once, usually without words or images. I sometimes reflexively start verbalizing thoughts internally at a spoken-conversation rate. I tend not to think of this inner monologue as the content of my thought but some incidental surface activity. It trails off after a couple words, since I already knew the entire verbalization before I even started inner-monologuing it.

Visualization and imagined conversations both feel very different from this and from each other.

Folks who are more verbal: do you talk to yourself in real time? How does reading feel in comparison? When you recall a conversation, do you re-verbalize the content? Can you speak without knowing what you're about to say beforehand? (I'm pretty sure I can't.)

Most idle thought comes across as a mental conversation.

Math (Calculus, Numeric Methods, structural design stuff, not actually numbers) is visualized as shapes, patterns, trends.

And decision making is more felt than anything else, where the attractiveness, consequences, and uncertainty of opposing ideas are weighted side my side.

Three to the to the to the three / is how you say it if you're M to the P

I've heard "three up up up three."

Threee-eee-eee.

"three up arrow up arrow up arrow three"

ETA: The notation is called Knuth's up-arrow notation, and is usually written with up-arrows instead of carets.

"Three to the pentation of three".

See here.

MIRI's journal publications:

Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom (2012). How Hard Is Artificial Intelligence? Evolutionary Arguments and Selection Effects. Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (7–8): 103–130.

Kaj Sotala (2012). Advantages of Artificial Intelligences, Uploads, and Digital Minds. International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4 (1): 275-291.

Kaj Sotala and Harri Valpola (2012). Coalescing Minds: Brain Uploading-Related Group Mind Scenarios. International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4 (1): 293–312.

(Bostrom and Shulman both work for FHI, and Bostrom doesn't work for MIRI. I'm not sure how mainstream the International Journal of Machine Consciousness is. ETA: It was one of the original journals Luke mentioned as targets, so I assume it qualifies.)

MIRI also has a larger number of CS conference papers, which this claims are higher status in CS than journal publications; Luke was presumably biased towards journals because he had less of a background in CS.

Also see this post, posted a month later and stating that he'd "recently updated hugely toward SIAI not publishing in mainstream journals."

Spend more time around them. Form hypotheses about what they're going to do and test them.

Take a sculpting class with live nude models.

Humans are generally pretty well-equipped to model other people, and you can practice using that equipment. Imagine as vividly as possible what it would be like to be the other person. Be aware of your own past feelings and other mental processes, in such a way that you can access those memories when you notice that the other person might be experiencing something which is (on some axis) familiar to you. Keeping a journal can help with that. It's also useful take some time to think of your own ways to practice this, where 'practice' includes getting and incorporating feedback. As Qiaochu points out you can be empirical. I would add that 'testing hypotheses' includes asking people about their internal state.

If you know anyone who seems to 'get people' especially well, ask them how they do their thing.

Look for existing resources on building empathy skills.

If you mean explicitly/mathematically, you can't learn that, you have to discover that (and likely get a Nobel shortly thereafter).

If you mean intuitively/qualitatively, well, I bet B&N has a shelf of books about that, though they're probably called How To Understand (or Manage) People.

It might also be that you actually mean "How can I forecast how will that girl react to X?". That's a different question altogether :-D

This question bothers me so much that once I get to be a good enough programmer I actually want to build a website that will connect adult beginners with each other so that maximum learning can happen with minimal embarrassment and no interaction with children. A system where you can trade tutoring ("I'll teach you the violin if you'll teach me painting") or simply pay for classes, with some way to rate and view the quality of each person's teaching would be useful.

As long as there is no larger system like that, I'd suggest that your best bet is to find a friend or acquaintance who is good at whatever you want to learn and offer them something they want but wouldn't ask for, whether it's money or a favor. That way, you get to learn things at a personalized pace while building a friendship.

Check out your local craft stores: often there will be flyers advertising classes, meetups, and so on. For non-messy crafts like knitting, it's common to have weekly meetups in a bookstore or such, in which people of different skill levels will work on their own projects and help each other out or answer questions.

Aren't music instruments usually taught in 1-on-1 sessions with a teacher anyway? Then you don't need to interact with the teacher's other students.

Or, books!

For example, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Craigslist should be able to connect you with people willing to offer instruction. Of course quality will be all over the map. Community colleges also offer open classes for some things, which might also have info on where to pursue further instruction once the class is over.

In the U.S., adult education programs often offer art and music classes.

Just a couple of thoughts about this. First, as far as anyone can tell music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon (and "music" itself is a term that describes a pretty giant range of human behaviors). There's no single reason, or even manageably short list of reasons, why people like it. It seems to be wrapped up in many different physical, neurological, cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural systems, any of which (in any combinations) could be responsible for a certain person's reaction to a certain kind of music. Some of the aspects of that seem to be relatively innate, like finding certain sonic timbres inherently pleasurable, while others are highly learned, like the kind of pleasurable "understanding" that comes from knowing how a classical sonata movement is ordinarily structured.

In your case, I'd guess that you have an atypically low physiological/neurological enjoyment of things like instrumental timbres, which makes the more cognitively demanding aspects of music-listening no more than a chore. For comparison, this is why we don't generally listen to spoken words (e.g., audiobooks) as background listening: there's nothing to be gained from it outside the semantic content, which is distracting unless you can tune it out, in which case why bother.

(Merely finding music distracting is not at all rare. In fact, the various professional musicians and music scholars I know listen to less music than most other people do, because our training makes it hard for us to listen as other than a "foreground" mental activity. I myself almost never listen to background music. Unlike you, though, I do like music a lot.)

We seem to have a tendency, when discussing music as when discussing other things, to assume that other people are more like us than we have any good reason to think they are. For example, I find the timbres and general sound world of noise music to be extremely unpleasant. So when I imagine someone who likes noise music a lot, my first impulse is to think they must in some sense "enjoy unpleasant things" (an obvious category error), or at least that they must find something in noise music that's rewarding enough to get past how clearly unpleasant the sounds are. And yet when I actually talk to a fan of noise music, they often tell me they find the timbres and sounds of noise music (exactly the aspects of it I can't even imagine liking) to be very pleasant or arousing in some way. The enjoyment of these basic aspects of a kind of music (what kinds of sounds it's made up of) seems to be sufficiently physiologically/neurologically determined for a lot of people that it is almost impossible to imagine liking a kind of music you don't "naturally" like.

In other words, and I do not mean this even slightly pejoratively, I would expect it to be very difficult for you to imagine why other people find, say, the sound of an orchestra playing a single major triad (NB, a purely sonic event with no syntactic or semantic content) pleasant. Much as it is for me to imagine finding noise music pleasant—it's just not what my brain is built to enjoy.

Relatedly, the history of the questions "why do people like music?" and "what kind of music is best?" feature some truly aggravating episodes that seem to stem from the idea that music is (or should be) a single kind of thing to all people, and that we just have to figure out what. (To be clear, I'm in no way suggesting that you're taking that point of view.) The idea that music is just a really, really complicated phenomenon with which everyone interacts a bit differently—and the corresponding aesthetic pluralism that follows from that fact—has been amazingly slow to spread, no less so in professional music circles than elsewhere.

There is evidence that people with amusia tend to report lower levels of musical appreciation. Perhaps you have amusia?

There are a few online tests that claim to test for amusia, such as this or this. If its not too unpleasant for you, you might consider taking one of them.

I doubt anyone has sufficient introspective powers over their own brains to answer this satisfactorily.

Or: I expect answers more complicated than "because it sounds good (to me)" to be mostly confabulation...

Upvoted for blowing my mind.

Every time I think I've finally taken the measure of the Typical Mind Fallacy... Anyone want to announce that they dislike oxygen and rainbows? Let's get it over with!

Actual answer: for many people, including me, it's an incredibly useful mind-altering drug, that allows powerful immediate manipulation of my emotional state. In fact, I should really abuse it a lot more strategically than I do.

Here's a tautological answer: It's because music is designed to be exactly the kind of sound that people want to listen to!

This may be relevant; "Bad brains: some people are physically incapable of enjoying music; Research shows that people who say "I don't like music" aren't just trying to sound cool":

Not necessarily, says Josep Marco-Pallerés, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona and lead author of a new study ["Dissociation between Musical and Monetary Reward Responses in Specific Musical Anhedonia"] that explores why some people feel indifferent to music. "Music isn't rewarding for them, even though other kinds of rewards, like money, are," he says. "It just doesn't affect them." To find out why, researchers recruited 30 university students, each of whom had been identified as very sensitive to music, moderately sensitive, or not sensitive at all thanks to a questionnaire. Researchers also made sure that the study's participants weren't depressed, tone-deaf, hearing-impaired, or otherwise unable to understand music — all factors that would have dampened their pleasure response. Then, researchers monitored the student's heart rates and sweat levels during listening sessions involving familiar pieces of music (previous studies have shown that people react more strongly to music they know). "We asked them to bring music from home that they like," Marco-Pallerés recalls, "and most of them had problems doing that." Those who were indifferent to music either ended up bringing a smaller number of recordings — some didn't own music at all — or had to borrow music from a family member. The study's results, published today in Current Biology, are surprising. Although these participants were perfectly capable of perceiving when a tune was sad or happy, they didn't show physical or emotional reaction. They didn't shiver if a singer hit a high note, and their heart rate didn't increase with each crescendo. But when asked to play a game involving a monetary reward, those who were indifferent to music reacted just like everyone else: the thought of winning even a small amount of money was enough to make their hearts race. The results were unchanged a year later, when 26 of the students took the test again.

...Researchers even have a name for the condition: "specific musical anhedonia." The term anhedonia is used by psychologists to describe a person's inability to derive pleasure from activities that most find enjoyable. But as the monetary-reward experiment indicates, this specific anhedonia only affects music perception. "Now that we know that there are people with specific musical anhedonia," Marco-Pallerés says, "we want to know the neural bases that might explain [it]." The research team plans to conduct a new experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how the brain's reward system differs in these people.

A lot of people talk about having emotional reactions to music as their primary reason for liking it. I don't generally have this reaction to music, so I might as well talk about what I do get out of it for a different perspective.

1. It can drown out other noises. It is more regular than the sound of ventilation or traffic or chirping birds or upstairs footsteps, and I prefer it; I turn my (almost constantly on) music up when there are non-conversation noises about. (Conversation, though, competes too directly with music; I can't understand people talking over significant other sound.)

2. It can control sensory overload. When I am spun up to unmanageable levels of sensory sensitivity, putting on familiar music with a solid, thumpy beat forces my thoughts to match it somewhat. When I am not spun up like that, it's still nice to have a modestly engaging track for my attention to fall into when I'm not doing enough to occupy myself - I don't function well when I'm not multitasking, my brain decides it's not wanted and turns off if I try. This probably doesn't apply to anyone else, at least anyone else who isn't autistic in a way similar to me.

3. But that's all about the use of music, not the enjoyability of music. There is also enjoyability. Some music is a good source of word-pleasure, either in the poetic sense or just in the sense of some words sounding cool and feeling cool to say. People seem to vary widely in how much they appreciate this as a thing.

4. Notes and timbres and rhythms vary a lot, and some of them sound pretty together. I think this for me is less like visual art being pretty - sequence is too important; if it's like visual art it's more like animation than like a painting - and more like an especially complex version of enjoying running my hands over soft things. Music is texture for my ears.

You don't enjoy any kind of music? Gregorian chant, polyphonic medieval, celtic, African percussions, Caribbean, classical, baroque, house, electronic, alt-rock, progressive, industrial, rap, metal in all its infinite variations, pop music, tuvan chant, trance, etc. None of them evokes pleasurable feelings?
Boy, you are an outlier :) That's perfectly fine, of course.
I can only answer that for me, I enjoy different kind of music for different reasons.
Listening to classical music evokes sensations akin to reading a novel: it evokes powerful emotions and tells an elaborate story.
Listening to pop music is much more like eating junk food: a fast, powerful kick of positive emotions, that anyway lasts very little and leaves nothing behind.
I also listen to salsa music, over which I try to dance: the rythm combined with the movements makes me feel sexy and passionate.
House music is pleasurable in a kind of guilty way: it's a complete immersion in group-think, a primordial forgetting of individuality.
In all those cases anyway the underlying theme is the evocation of powerful positive or negative emotion (which can be meta-positive).

It is possible that you perceive it differently. Do you have abnormal sound perception, e.g. inability to distinguish pitches or timbres, or to hear rhythms?

For example, if you hear a note, can you find it on a piano keyboard? Likewise a chord? Do you know what people mean when they talk about high pitches and low? If you hear a violin or a trumpet, can you tell which it is? Can you tap out a rhythm after hearing it? Can you appreciate poetry written with regular scansion and rhyme?

Wow, I thought I was the only one.

Not only do I like music but I wouldn't even know where to start explaining why I do; I didn't like music until in my teens and I don't even know what changed in me!

This is an excellent question. grouchymusicologist above has it right that "music enjoyment is a remarkably multifaceted phenomenon", and I would like to expand on this.

Michael J. Parsons, in How we understand art: a cognitive developmental account of aesthetic experience, identifies a sequence of developmental stages in the appreciation of visual art. This is of necessity a very rough and un-nuanced summary since I don't have the book to hand, but I think this sequence is: first, colour ("this painting is red"); second, subject matter ("this painting is of a dog"); third, emotional content ("this painting makes me feel wistful"); fourth, technique ("this painting is pointillist"); and fifth, historical relationships ("this painting is a witty riposte to a work of Velasquez").

I can't point you at a corresponding developmental study of music, but I'm sure that similar stages of appreciation are there. To give a flavour of the different kinds of thing going on in the appreciation of music, let's take an example: here's Ian Bostridge singing Schubert's setting of "Der Erlkönig" by Goethe.

When listening to this, I appreciate: (i) the timbre of the piano and voice; (ii) the driving and urgent rhythm; (iii) the words and the story; (iv) the way the harmony creates and releases the dramatic tension at appropriate points in the text; (v) the skill of the performers: stamina is needed by the pianist to keep the triplets going, and vocal control by the singer to maintain timbre of the high notes; (vi) the "tone-painting": that is, the ways in which the musical notes illustrate aspects of the story, for example the repeated notes representing the horse's hooves; the way that the "child's" entries are a semitone above the piano, this discord illustrating his distress; the way that each entry is higher and more distressed than the previous one; (vii) the vocal acting of Ian Bostridge: his use of different vocal timbres to differentiate the four parts, and details of expression like the snarl on "so brauch ich Gewalt"; (viii) the different choices Schubert made in this composition compared with Carl Loewe's setting of the same text.

(I recognize that this doesn't explain why I appreciate these aspects of the performance. But I think it's still useful to give an indication of how complex the phenomenon of music appreciation is.)

Music increases my motivation by making me feel like I am the main character in a story (since I have a "soundtrack") and prevents me from being distracted by people talking nearby (which makes it extremely difficult for me to study) because I can no longer hear them them with sound coming through the headphones.

Also, some music can make me feel more relaxed than I otherwise would (possibly due to sounds that mimic peaceful ancestral environments, such as gently moving water, etc...).

I imagine you’ve read about synesthesia. Someone with synesthesia might find a particular color has texture or taste—some atypical crisscrossing between the senses. I find music (especially considering those who can’t understand music) can be well modeled as a near-universal form of synesthesia, a linking between the emotional parts of the brain and those that process auditory information. Now this analogy is not perfect, as synesthetes almost never achieve consensus; the taste and/or texture of any particular color varies wildly between synesthets. This isn’t true about music, as it doesn’t vary that much in structure; and there seems to be some consensuses on the “sadness” or “energy” of particular songs.

But still, this might be a good, non-confusing way for you to think about music. When someone describes the beauty of a song, treat their statement as you would a synesthete saying, “Wow, that sunset tastes like a cheese burger.”

It can cause or intensify a large range of emotions or moods.

Do you not have an emotional reaction to any music?

People are weird. I don't like music either. I mean, what's the point? For that matter, why do people like sex? Why do they LIKE to eat food, or get hungry for that matter, all things I have never experienced myself? More things that make absolutely no sense to me. I mean, obviously those serve a biological purpose, but I mean something deeper than a utilitarian reason. ALTHOUGH I do associate certain songs with things I like in a pavlovian sort of way, and so there actually is some music I like in a sense, but not for its own accord. For instance, certain video game music, just because I liked the video games that I was playing while I was hearing the music. But I would never, ever, ever derive any enjoyment from just listening to the music, I'd have to be playing the game. Though I may hum those songs while I'm running if it's a game with lots of running, like canabalt or doom. I don't know how many hundreds of miles I have run endlessly humming the canabalt song. Unfortunately humming it doesn't seem to give me the power to run 100+ mph :(.

Personally, I find it difficult to enjoy "typical" lyrical poetry, but I appreciate epic poetry a great deal more. Epic poetry not only aims to capture the drama of an event, but also to encapsulate an entire culture of a people. The Iliad and the Odyssey were the first two i have read, and they are not only about the Trojan War and the return home of one of its heroes, but it touches on every aspect of Greek society. War, love, food, honor, virtue, cowardice, honoring the gods, pissing off the gods, the gods pissing you off, hospitality, ethics, punishment, the afterlife, nobility and servitude, all touched upon.

For more conventional (and shorter) poetry, some of the enjoyment comes from the prosody and lyrical qualities of the poem. Reading them out loud increases my own enjoyment. Otherwise, there is oft a multitude of "senses" and meanings in poetry, which provides a pleasant meditation. Some quality poems to read (as a start) would be "the Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe, and "Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley

What poetry have you tried? Perhaps it's only a question of finding the right author.

People appreciate words differently. Sometimes I'll hear a turn of phrase, just something someone says outside of any kind of artistic context, and it'll just feel really pleasant. Maybe it's the rhythm of the phrase, or the image it conjures up, or maybe it'll have some sort of immediate underlying theme. Some things just sound poetic, by various criteria my brain doesn't necessarily reveal to me, and if they sound poetic enough, they can be really, achingly beautiful.

Formal verse can often have a different appeal. It takes cleverness to express something in a constrained form, but from my experience in writing poetry, often that constraint helps promote good ideas to your attention when you're writing it. Seeing something difficult done well is satisfying.

A combination of the two can be extremely pleasurable to read or write.

I think it's sometimes related to liking wordplay. If you want to try to like it, I'd suggest reading a wide variety of poems to see if anything sticks. I'm not sure where one goes to find varied, good poetry, though.

You might try attending a poetry reading or two, Hearing them read and discussed might help.

This donation page lists their accomplishments in 2013 so far, which mostly seems to be research papers and analysis.

I realise that you did not say it was, but it is important to bear in mind that FAI is not MIRI's only goal. They also aim to prevent UFAI, and to prevent/adjust/encourage other possible future phenomena in AI to make things better.

Apparently we need a thread for questions too stupid to make it into the stupid questions thread :-/

This recurses well :-D

I think it would make sense to disable up/downvoting for top-level comments in 'stupid question' threads, actually. This would have the added benefit of attracting conversation from lurkers and 'outsiders', without the danger of having the whole forum go to hell. A little outside opinion would always be welcome.

Unfortunately that's kind of like asking what the difference in rank is between a Knight and a samurai. Poly is not monolithic and friends with benefits is itself a fairly new and evolving phrase, but from my point of view, a secondary poly partner is in a formal arrangement and fwb is informal. A poly partner is more likely to have constraints about what they do with others and has stronger emotional attachment. An fwb is a "we can both do whatever but when convenient we have sex"

Large amounts of male nerds

Meta-contrarianism.

There's apparently some connectivity in/through the rightward edge of transhumanism to them: http://habitableworlds.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/darkenlightenment2.png Note that from any two random points there you might not have moeven 50% agreement--but in each case you'll have emphatic disagreement with mainstream positions marking each as an outsider in some way.

(If I were to be sarcastic, I would answer your second question as "an interest in sexbots")

I have never heard of the manosphere.

Indeed. To put it another way, "absence of evidence" is just a different kind of evidence. If hearing a dog bark would tell you something then not hearing it bark also tells you something.

Yes.

Taboo the word "word", and what does your question become?

A word is already partly a thing-in-the mind, and partly a thing-outside-the-mind, the latter being a sound when spoken or a string of glyphs when written. Neither the sound nor the glyphs are, or contain, meanings. If you define "word" to mean the whole arrangement, including the meanings, then you have merely answered the question by definition: meanings are contained in words. The same is true if you define "word" to mean just the sound and string of glyphs: meanings are not contained in words. This method of answering a question is incapable of being a discovery about the world.

So the question becomes "what is the relationship between the sound and the meaning?" The answer is that people learn from the speech of those around them to associate a given sound with a given meaning, and that these agreements are what enable meanings to be communicated. However, there is no necessary connection between the two, and no correlation not explained by the shared history of related languages, borrowings, and a few onomatopoeic regularities. Contemplating the meaning will not tell you the sound that people use to express it, which will be different in different languages. Contemplating the sound will not tell you the meaning, else you could understand every language without learning it.

ETA: I should also have pointed out the third thing that is a part of what can be meant by the word "word": the thing-in-the-world that people are talking about when they use the word. This book may repay study.

BTW, why are you taking a philosophy course on metaphysics?

If we put you inside a box and told you to think of a name for a cat, could we tell what the name was by looking at the cat? No, we'd have to open up the box and look at (or listen to ) you. Ditto for any similar game, like creating slang, interchanging meanings, creating private spellings, doing math and then giving names to important theorems, etc.

This only works for (at least partly-) intentional definition though - if your definition of red is to point at a stop sign, then a fire truck, then a tomato, and then to point at grass and say "not this," then we can't figure out your meaning for red just by looking at what's inside the box. First we have to get the definition from you, and then we have to go look at stop signs and fire trucks.

So depending on how you want to cash out "meaning," it can be in your mind, or in your mind+context. But it's not just in the outside world, because there's no way an alien knows what to call a capybara just from examining one.

You mean, do words have an intrinsic meaning? If that were true, there would be only one language, no? I probably misunderstood the question, but I can't think of another interpretation.

Implement a tiger-recogniser in exactly five Unicode characters and get back to us.

CEV questions

...are just a proxy for "Should I think this is morally wrong on my own terms?" - I don't think invoking CEV helps on this.

I am better than some people at some things and I like that. If I practice or try harder and achieve more than others that also makes me feel good. I enjoy playing games in which winning means others must lose and vice versa.

And because you also will that these things should continue into the future of the galaxies, even to the children's children, therefore, you are of the Competitive Conspiracy and its secrets will be made yours.

where everyone can bypass what they were by chance given

Doesn't imply everyone is equal in all respects. If you can get better at anything by practicing, screw talent, it doesn't mean everyone has to spend the same amount of time practicing the same things.

If you demand that you be more formidable than some others in all respects so that they lose at the very game of life, then this I may dispute, but this the Competitive Conspiracy does not hold as an ideal. Though there may be some within the Erotic Conspiracy who would endorse that their masters be truly higher than them at any given point in time.

I enjoy playing games in which winning means others must lose and vice versa.

Gamblers fallacy helps us out here. If winning is more memorable than losing everyone can win sometimes/in some activities and everyone is happy. Also, I wouldn't play a sport in which I always won.

I think it's very likely, for the same reasons why boredom is an important human value, that humans value that kind of diversity enough to make it into CEV (or whatever the actual morality function is).

Anecdote time!

I had the high school resume to get into highly selective universities. For financial reasons, I instead went to my flagship state university. I expected the big fish in small pond effect to play to my advantage, and I did develop a reputation as "(one of) the smartest student(s) in the room" (which I'll at least admit was a boon to my romantic desirability), but the most salient result was extreme loneliness. I wasn't able to find many people I could have stimulating conversation with, and while I did make a few friends, none of them shared my degree of passion for intellectual subjects. This summer I've been at Hacker School, which I think is a correctly-sized pond for me, but the damage to my mood and social expectations from three years of being stuck in too small a pond has definitely impeded my ability to make friends and feel socially engaged. As of right now I'm attempting to find a job as a software developer so I can drop out of college in relative security, because college is that intolerable and I think I have a much better chance of finding more correctly-sized ponds on this path. (Transferring to a more selective university is still not a financial burden I'm willing to accept.)

I guess the takeaway here might be: while a small pond of the right size can have its advantages, larger ponds are much more likely to help you grow more, and ponds that are too small can be absolutely crushing. If finding a smaller pond consists of moving away from your current large pond, be extremely careful that it's not too small.

Binary search? Find a pond. If it's too big for you to conquer, try a pond half its size. If that's so small you're unsatisfied with being its biggest fish, try a pond 50% larger, etc.

Pond in what sense? Online community, company, soccer league, town, what? Or do you not care?

Define what you want out of it.

Alpha-maleness or status in general? Money? A sense of superiority? Something else?

Build your own pond. That is, start your own business, work for yourself.

Of course, you will need customers, but as long as you don't think of them as fish, you'll be fine.

Presumably, you are asking how to hack the status detectors of other people? If not, then you need to put a lot of work and energy into doing something that other people value, and not be shy about letting the kinds of people who value that thing know what you have done and can do. I think this is usually called "earning it."

But if you are seeking to acquire status as status, essentially, the reputation for something which you are not, then you are asking how to hack people's status detectors. The answer will very much depend on WHO you want to think you are high status, as different people will have different status. If it is biker chicks, for example, you should get the biggest hog (motorcycle, not mammal) you can, get a pot belly, go to some biker clothes stores and get the outfit, get some bitchin' tatoos. You should lie about having been in the marines, having been in jail, probably a crime of passion carries more status than a crime of violence, and either of those would be better than a white collar crime. Of course, you can lie about these but you will need to do some research to get the lie going.

If you want to hack the status of some other group, you'll have to do some research on what they think of as status-ful and then do enough research to come up with a good false story, and make yourself look like a high status individual in that crowd.

If my answer seems funny, it did seem like a funny question to me. Maybe I missed the point, if so I apologize in delay.

Are we in PUA-land?

The specifics of status acquisition very much depend on which social group do you want to grant you status.

The same way you optimise the colour of a wheel for purposes of velocity-acquisition.

I'd say the average Mathematics PhD student that has a publication has already solved such a problem!

There's usually a fair amount of low-hanging fruit in niche disciplines--for certain subdisciplines of mathematics, you really can count the number of people working on that discipline on one hand.

I would guess that there are many problems that nobody cares about. Producing new problems in math isn't really that hard. Just add a new axiom to an existing theory and you have a bunch of new problems.

The problem is that nobody necessarily cares and so they won't cite you.

Solomonoff induction is a formalization of Occam's razor.

You may find this article useful.

In order for the prior probabilities you assign to programs to be well-formed, they must limit to 0 as the length of the program goes to infinity. Otherwise the probabilities won't add up to 1.

No matter what prior you choose, you'll always end up with a variant of Occam's Razor where programs beyond a particular length are always assigned very low probabilities.

You don't necessarily have to decrease proportionally to 2^(-length), instead of say 3^(-length) or 1/Ackermann(length), like the Solomonoff prior does. However, since each additional bit lets you identify a value from a space that's twice as big (i.e. the precision grows like 2^length), it seems like a natural choice to penalize by that much.

(Personally, I prefer a prior that also lightly penalizes for running time. That removes computability issues and makes the induction approximable by dove-tailing.)

I am almost always aware if the author is someone with a distinct name that posts a fair amount. Otherwise it doesn't really register.

(its almost impossible for me not to read the username before the comment unless I put real effort into it)

I use the anti-kibitzer. (This anonymises LessWrong, with the hope of reducing bias in judging posts. I think there's an option for it in Preferences.) It's great.

About 90% of the times for comments and about 60% of the times for posts, I think. (And I'm more likely to notice it when it's a regular than when it's a newbie.)

I only notice if the commenter happens to be someone I know in real life or whose posts I have taken particular note of. Every other LW username could be replaced by "Anonymous Internet Person Number 3," and I would barely notice.

I normally don't register the name at all, but if it's a high-status person on LW (gwern, eliezer, lukeprog), it might grab my attention.

When I'm reading a comment written by a name that I've seen enough to associate a personality with, I'm almost always aware of whose comment it is. But, when it's not a name I know well, I'm not consciously aware of having looked at the name and made that determination.

So I think I must always read the name, and if my brain doesn't recognize it, it automatically filters it out.

I check when a comment a surprises me, in either direction.

Having a meaningful life is a very strong human value, and if FAI is done right, it will have something to keep your life meaningful post-singularity.

If people get smarter, they'll write smarter stories.

At least you probably won't feel too bad about present-day stories no longer feeling compelling at a point where they no longer feel compelling. Maybe think about the horror of a three-year-old you at the idea of no longer liking their favorite picture-book, and your current feelings about you no longer finding the same picture-book very interesting. That's not quite enough though, people also probably won't feel bad about being wireheaded once they have been wireheaded, and they don't feel bad about being in a coma while they're in a coma...

A more positive thought might be that if your abilities to perceive patterns are much improved, you might find many more interesting things going on in actual reality, instead of needing to have massively simplified stylized narratives laboriously distilled from the huge messy soup of actual stuff.

This is also a thing that happens with people right now, just from getting more used to the story patterns. Many older people probably find themselves feeling increasingly distant from the sort of storytelling culture we have now where many popular stories are made to be understandable and compelling to teenagers, like most all of science fiction and fantasy. You could try looking into what people significantly older than you who liked the sort of stories you like at your age think about stories now.