If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
The Brain Preservation Foundation has (finally) started evaluating their first candidate brain!
We like our referencing here on Less Wrong. Reference-heavy people (gwern, Yvain, lukeprog, I'm looking at you), do you have some system for keeping track of your common go-to references that you use over and over again in multiple pieces of work?
I'm kind of expecting "yes, I have a dirty great text file" as a response to this, but perhaps hoping for something more awesome.
I'm told, and quite willing to believe, that your salary has more to do with the five minutes of salary negotiation than the next several years of work. I am also told that salary negotiation is very much a skill.
As such, it seems it would be worth a fairly substantial amount of time and money to practice and/or get coaching in this skill. Is this done? That is, how likely am I to be able to find someone, preferably someone who has worked on the business end of salary negotiation at somewhere like Google, who I can pay to practice salary negotiation with?
ETA: I've read extensively about how to negotiate (though of course there's always something more). What I'm interested in is practice.
Referrals are the best source for finding someone involved in negotiation at a specific company. I believe that Google has HR negotiate salaries, so if you know any Googlers, asking them to introduce you to someone in HR will probably work.
If you haven't done so already, you can get ~80% of the value here just by practicing with a random friend playing the role of hiring manager. As you mentioned, most of the value is in ingraining the behaviors through practice, not in the extra knowledge you get. So you don't necessarily need a specialist for this.
If you are interested in Effective Altruism (donate 10% or more of your income or work at an EA organization) then I would be happy to help. I have successfully negotiated 80%+ raises before, and taught 7 people to negotiate with average results of 30% or more raises. About half of the teaching was role-played practice. Feel free to email me at satvik.beri@gmail.com .
Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18? What would your sexual ethics be if it happened to have been raised to 21 not 18? Indeed this almost happened. Think about a wide array of questions, relationships, policies and norms you approve or disapprove of in light of this.
Even better, when you next time find yourself making judgements on them, try for a short time seeing them from the perspective of world-21-you instead of world-18-you. Applying the reversal test can be fun, but other people might not see it your way if you point it out.
Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18?
The age of consent differs over the world. Even within the US. Kansas has one of 16 while it's 18 in Florida.
According to Wikipedia Spain even has an age of consent of 13 (with some exceptions) and the government recently announced that it wants to raise it to 15.
I don't think my morals on sexuality would change much by living in Spain.
Historically the first conscription in modern times was done by the French:
"Conscription in its modern form arose in revolutionary France, where universal military service was regarded both as a Republican duty, based on the principles of equality and fraternity, and as a necessity for national survival. In August 1793, a law limited liability for service to men between the ages of 18 and 25" (source)
In those times most people did not go to high school or the local equivalents.
I went to an early college program — a residential four-year college where most students entered at age 15 or 16, after two years of high school. This was in a state where the legal age of consent was (and is) 16. As a consequence, many sexual relationships among first-year students were illegal. However, they were also very common.
The culture at this institution was such that students were treated as "college students who happen to be two years younger", not as "gifted young teenagers who happen to be doing college-level academics". As such, the age-of-consent law was basically regarded as an inappropriate technicality. Students were cautioned about it, but along the lines of "Technically, if someone really wanted to hurt you, they could charge you with this ..."
So far as I know, the only time while I was there that anyone was even seriously threatened with legal charges over an "underage" relationship was one case where a freshman boy (age 15) cheated on his girlfriend with another guy (age 17). The girlfriend initially wanted to report this as "child abuse" but changed her mind before doing so.
What are some facts that would cause, an immediate update in beliefs and non trivial daily life application? I am looking for things that are relatively uncontroversial, things that people just aren't aware of and if they knew about it, they would change they way they feel about it immediately.
For example I just found out that 2/3rds of imported extra virgin olive oil is adulterated or not actually olive oil. Some brands that I recognize and have bought my whole life is not really extra virgin olive oil, therefore I never got the health benefits. Consu...
Is there a sentence or a word for an English-speaker to express this concept: a thing that is supposedly a secret, but everyone knows it, but still behave as if it were a secret?
Since there's a precise term in Italian for that, I was recently wondering that I wouldn't know how to express that concisely in English.
Why haven't we done an systematic investigation of drugs as means towards debiasing?
I recall some limited discussion of nootropics and microdosing on LSD but not much else. In particular I'm thinking about substances that are easily acquired such as off label use of medication, easy to synthesize substances or recreational drugs (legal and otherwise).
I spent about £19 on half a year's worth of 1mg Melatonin pills. I swallowed one last night at about 2300, then went to bed at midnight.
Thoughts:
I didn't notice any extra sleepiness during that hour interval between taking it and going to sleep. This may mean that melatonin as a solution to hyperbolic discounting may not work for me. Alternatively I just went to sleep too early and had I stayed awake, the melatonin would have kicked in and made me want to go to sleep anyway.
I woke up over an hour before my alarm, feeling /much/ more refreshed than usual, a...
Nope. That's moderate Civilizational Incompetence; science knows well that 1mg is often way too much for a first dose, but shops have presumably found that the average customer thinks "More melatonin is better" and that informed customers are too scarce to market to. You can get correctly dosed melatonin on the Internet, as with any other niche market.
Civilizational competence: Biologists discover deadly new strain of Botulinum Toxin, withhold details until treatment is developed.
Conway Hall Ethical Society has an interesting history, which shows the Christian origins of Progressive Secular Humanist memeplex.
...The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at Conway Hall, is thought to be the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and is the only remaining ethical society in the United Kingdom. It now advocates secular humanism and is a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
...
The Society was formed in 1793 by a group of nonconformists known as Philadelph
I can't seem to change my password. It's 41 characters long (I don't know why I thought that was a good idea), which might have something to do with it. I've tried multiple times, and every time it says "Incorrect password" next to the "Current password" field. Any tips?
An anecdote on a cat that sort of passes a version of the Mirror Test. Interesting comment suggesting the mirror test is too human-centric: "Perhaps the difference in outcome is because touching your cat is a movement, which she can see in the mirror and expect; while the spot on fur is background, since it doesn’t move. This would be consistent with the tendency of hunting animals to track motion against a largely ignored background. "
Candidate for a forbidden topic: Celibate pedophilia
I saw a post somewhere (can't find it again) asking if there were forbidden topics on LessWrong, with the implication that this would be undesirable.
This post I made to the Discussion section was seriously downvoted: http://lesswrong.com/lw/it3/assertion_a_large_proportion_of_pedophiles_are/ There is no attribution behind downvotes, so the reasons can't be determined.
Perhaps it belonged here in the open thread; I'm not experienced enough to judge that. There are also complaints that it was obvious and ha...
Folks, this is what "things you can't say" looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.
Notice how different the community response is to this, versus to some of the things that are claimed by their proponents to be "things you can't say" but which are actually merely explicit statements of common beliefs in the cultural mainstream.
When someone triggers a social taboo, the response isn't so much "I will argue against this person!" — not even in the "someone is wrong on the Internet!" fashion. That's just disagreement (sometimes ideological or partisan disagreement), not taboo.
When someone triggers a social taboo, the response is more to try to stifle or exclude it quickly. This sometimes ends in trying to pretend that it never happened.
(I am not asserting that the taboo response is right or wrong on this subject. I am pointing out that it is different.)
While I did not upvote the original post itself, I'll note here my disagreement with all the comments taking issue with the post for being "off topic." We entertain topics related only very tangentially to rationality on a regular basis, and the issue is not that this subject is off topic beyond our usual tolerances, it's that practically any community will get the screaming heebie jeebies the moment it's raised. This is one of our existing taboos which is still strong enough for people to be hit by social splatter damage just by being near it and not protesting.
It's hard for me to believe the difference was just that he didn't post in the open thread.
Well, it is a huge difference. An article has a name, it can be linked independently, and it appears on a new web page with the logo of LessWrong above it. The only context it has is "this is the article published on LessWrong".
A comment is just a comment. Yeah, in LW software it can also be linked separately, but at least the web page starts with saying that this is just one article and you can click here to see the whole context. And that specific article says that this is the place for controversial topics, so it's like any comment posted there is automatically labeled as controversial. (It's like coming with a monster costume on Halloween; everyone knows it's a monster constume for Halloween.)
Imagine how newspaper websites look like, because many people have more experience reading them. The articles are written by editors; the newspaper owner is responsible for them. The comments are written by anyone, and it is obvious they don't represent the opinion of the newspaper owner. Criticizing a newspaper for the article they published is reasonable, but people usually don't criti...
I wrote one of the comments you quote, and I also downvoted your article. Originally I felt I shouldn't upvote it, because it is a PR suicide, but I also shouldn't downvote it, because it is essentially correct. At that moment the article karma was zero, so maybe other people had similar thoughts. So instead of voting I wrote the comment. But then I saw that you also added the tags to the article, and that was the last straw. It felt like one article was just a one-time incident that could be left ignored, but creating tags felt like saying: this is one of the official topics of this website. Also the fact that you announced your intention to write more articles like this. At that moment it wasn't a vote about one specific article, but about whether I want this topic to be regularly discussed on LW. Which I don't.
I completely agree with fubarobfusco that this is what a real social taboo looks like. Quoting Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say":
...When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denou
Perhaps it belonged here in the open thread; I'm not experienced enough to judge that. There are also complaints that it was obvious and had no significant rationality-related issues, but I humbly invite people to consider whether these may be rationalizations -- when evaluated against the relevance of posts in this open thread.
Most off-topic discussions here are relatively harmless to LW image. You pretty much chose the most taboo subject available, and you didn't even try to justify that by making it relevant to rationality. You could have tested the waters by making comments first, and actually participating in discussions available, but no, you just had to start by pushing your political agenda.
Let's think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases -- if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the "civil liberties" concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.
I feel bad for the oppressed group in question, but pushing a singular political cause is bottom priority. LW doesn't exist to...
I think this probably should be a taboo topic because a) the number of people possibly helped by better legislation about this issue is fairly low b) Reputational hazard is extremely high c) it's not actually something that we can easily get RIGHT. I think the balance between protection of children and the happiness of pedophiles is not something this where we'll find the right balance on in a discussion here, which lowers the potential benefit even further. The stigmatization of people who have certain feelings they can't control is likely to be harsher than is good but I can't actually picture reasonable policy changes that will help the situation.
On the other hand I hate having taboo topics. I downvoted your original post because it was poorly argued and also something I think should probably not be a top-level post but I upvoted this comment for reasonability and because I think the issue is somewhat interesting.
I've been thinking about this statement in particular: 'If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.' People naturally seem to gravitate to the logical contraposition: If P, then Q. Therefore if !Q, then !P. If you have something to hide, then you MUST have done something wrong. Drawing from this logical statement, they infer that anyone who even tries to hide anything MUST be doing something wrong.
It seems obvious to me, however, that not all people who attempt to hide things have done something wrong. Where is the logical error? Is it in the inversion of 'nothing' and 'something'? It's been a long time since my symbolic logic courses involving the negation of universal quantification.
If you disagree with "anyone who even tries to hide anything MUST be doing something wrong.", then you disagree with it's logically equivalent contraposition 'If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.'. And indeed you do, you say there are people who've done nothing wrong but do have something to hide. There's no logical error, you just disagree with a premise.
Oh, I thought your main concern was about the logic, not the propositions.
Cases where you done nothing wrong yet have something to hide:
Part of the problem turns out to be equivocation on "wrong". Consider the position of a chocolate-lover living in a hypothetical society where 1% of people are chocolate-lovers, 89% of people are not chocolate-lovers but are tolerant of people who are, and 10% of people think that anyone who eats chocolate should be shunned, persecuted, fired, exiled, tortured, or what-have-you.
Eating chocolate is not wrong according to our standards, nor by their own, nor by those of the majority of their society. However, many chocolate-eaters in this hypothetical society would prefer to cover up their actions, not out of shame but out of risk avoidance. They don't want to be mistreated by the anti-chocolate people who outnumber them ten to one. In the 1 in 10 chance that their boss is anti-chocolate, they don't want to be fired or mistreated on the job. And so on.
In effect, the saying should be, "If you haven't done anything that anyone anywhere disapproves of, you have nothing to hide."
Nikola Danaylov interviewed Noam Chomsky on his Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.
Chomsky is smart, but in discussing the future of AI, he is stuck on something -- he never quite steps up to answer the questions.
Can someone figure out the nature of Chomsky's mental block? What is he missing here?
A decision theory idea I just had, which may or may not grow into something interesting.
Sometime ago I proposed to evaluate logical counterfactuals by their proof length. At the September workshop we managed to develop that idea into a full candidate solution to the problem of logical counterfactuals. Another long-standing open problem is "who moves first" in timeless negotiations. Could that problem also be solved by proof lengths? For example, do we feel that a "defecting rock" is impossible to manipulate because there are short proof...
I am not particularly interested in the answer to this question but this community's answer: I know English and German. Should I learn another language and if yes which? Please explain your reasoning.
I think this is probably really hard to answer sensibly without some more information about you and your goals.
Cautiously playing around with supplements I found melatonin to be effective in aiding sleep quality, though not with time to fall asleep. Any suggestions to that effect?
I want to try vitamin D3 in the morning before my coffee or green tea. Any suggestions for specific brands?
There used to be a thread on LW that dealt with interesting ways to make small sums of money and ways to reduce expenditure. I think among other things going to Australia for a year was discussed. Does anyone know which thread I'm talking about and can provide me with the link? I can't seem to find it.
I'm currently in the US for a research internship (I'm from the Netherlands) and I'd like to travel a bit on the weekends while I'm here. At the moment I'm thinking of visiting Montreal (I've heard it's nice this time of year?) and New York in the near future. Does anyone have any travel recommendations? I could especially use recommendations for (cheap) places to stay overnight.
Note: I do not have a drivers license so will be depending on public transport.
"I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist" -- John Wesley founder of Methodism.
Not sure what to make of this.
It's from a sermon in which Wesley advocates that Christian should "gain all you can", "save all you can", and "give all you can" — a teaching somewhat similar to efficient altruism. Wesley has slightly different priorities, though: he emphasizes providing for the local community first rather than distant humans.
The line you quote comes from the provisos he puts around "gain all you can" — in gist, don't earn money at the expense of your bodily or mental health or your neighbor's well-being.
Some context for the quote:
...We are, Secondly, to gain all we can without hurting our mind [...]. We must preserve, at all events, the spirit of an healthful mind. [...] There are yet [other trades] which many pursue with perfect innocence, without hurting either their body or mind; And yet perhaps you cannot: Either they may entangle you in that company which would destroy your soul; and by repeated experiments it may appear that you cannot separate the one from the other; or there may be an idiosyncrasy, — a peculiarity in your constitution of soul, [...] by reason whereof that employment is deadly to you, which another may safely follow. So I am convin
I'm trying to find a post by Eliezer where he comments that people who want to believe something will arguing that believing it isn't forbidden, while people who don't want to believe something will argue that believing it isn't required. Does anyone know what post I'm talking about?
Assertion: Child porn availability does not increase child sex abuse
There are a few different reasons why people oppose the existence of child pornography. One is the harm to the children when it is made. This is a valid objection. I think that putting children in sexual situations should remain a serious crime. It does not apply, however, to virtual child porn, made with young-looking actors or any of the variety of animation-related techniques.
I believe one major objection to all forms, including the virtual, is rarely formulated: people find it gross an...
Then it is very possible that we intend with "natural inclination" wildly different things.
I see "natural inclination" as whatever innate impulse is strongly present almost universally in humans, such that not meeting it creates a sense of urgency and/or frustration: eating, company, sex, etc.
That's why what you say feels to me like "Of course humans eat truck tires for breakfast!" :)
Do you (I hope) intend something much less... coercive.
Barring the socializing influences of culture, I expect typical humans to intermittently experience urges to eat, to socialize, to have sex with each other, and to kill each other.
I also expect that every successful human culture has established cultural norms that govern those urges so that they don't become too dangerous to the group. Consequently we mostly don't go around eating whatever we want, having sex with whoever we want, or killing whoever we want... instead, we follow social rules that govern what and when and how it's OK to do those things.
I... (read more)