This is done automatically in a somewhat different way. So my advice is not to worry about it. But, yes, it shouldn't hurt and and it should help in the situation that viglink doesn't fire. In those comments, Wei Dai agrees that this is the referral code.

I thought LW automatically added affiliate links using VigLink already.

Maybe it might even sense to let the forum automatically format links to Amazon that way.

I also think this is a worthwhile endeavor, and speculate that the process and results may be useful for development of a general rationality test, which I know CFAR has some interest in.

What do you mean by "anywhere"? As Vincent Yu mentions, it is available in the US. It hasn't been published in print or ebook in the UK. When you find it in hardback, it's imports, right? If it is published in the UK, it will probably be available as an ebook, but I don't know if that will happen before the US edition is pirated. If you are generally chomping at the bit to read American ebooks, it is worth investing the time to learn if any ebook sellers fails to check national boundaries. The publisher lists six for this book.

Probably not useful, but the US edition is available in France. (Rights to publish English-language books in countries that don't speak English aren't very valuable, so the monopolies to the US and UK usually include those rights. So you if you're in France, you can get the ebook first, regardless of whether it's published in the US or UK. Unless they forget to make it available in France.)

I see a Kindle edition on Amazon.

You can order it to http://1dollarscan.com/ and still read it on your kindle.

I think most people are unaware that they can include images in comments.

I'd go with laziness and lack of overt demand. I know that people love graphs and images, but I don't especially feel the need when writing something, and it's additional work (one has to make the image somehow, name it, upload it somewhere, create special image syntax, make sure it's not too big that it'll spill out of the narrow column allotted articles etc). I can barely bring myself to include images for my own little statistical essays, though I've noticed that my more popular essays seem to include more images.

I haven't tried authoring an article myself, but a quick look now seems to indicate that you can't upload images, only link to them. This means images must be hosted on third parties, meaning you have to upload it there and if not directly under your control, it's vulnerable to link rot. It seems like this would be inconvenient.

There's a design choice on the part of LessWrong against avatar images. Text is supposed to speak for itself and not be judged by it's author. Avatar imaging would increase author recognition.

Some people embed graphics in their articles, and this is seen by many as a good thing. I suspect it's just individuals choosing not to bother with images.

I'd note that the short help for comments does not list the Markdown syntax for embedding images in comments, and even the "more comment formatting help" page is not especially clear. That LessWrong cultural encourages folk to write comments before writing Main or Discussion articles makes that fairly relevant.

LW is mostly pure-text with no images except for occasional graphs. Why is that so?

Why shouldn't it be?

I find it harder to engage in System 2 when there are images around. Heck, even math glyphs usually trip me up. That's not to say graphics can't do more good than harm (for example, charts and diagrams can help cross inferential distance quickly, and may serve as useful intuition pumps) but I imagine that more images would mean more reliance on intuition and less on logic, hence less capacity for taking things to analytical extremes. So it could be harmful (given the nature of the site) to introduce more images.

I like my flow. I don't have anything against images if they are arranged in a way that doesn't distrupt reading. I'm not sure if lw platform allows for that.

Reading this comment... I suddenly feel very odd about the fact that I failed to include images in my Neuroscience basics for LessWrongians post, in spite of in a couple places saying "an image might be useful here." Though the lack of images was partly due to me having trouble finding good ones, so I won't change it at the moment.

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

Are you sure the error is that you're posting too little to the blog, rather than that you're trying to have a blog in the first place?

Would any of them like to form some loose cabal of blogging spotters, who can egg each other on, suggest topics, provide editorial and stylistic feedback, etc.?

Yes.

(My current excuse for not even having made one post is that I started to experience wrist pain, and didn't want to make it worse by doing significant typing at home. It seems to be getting better now.)

Consider your incentives. Actual (non-imaginary) incentives in your current life.

What are the incentives for maintaining a blog? What do you get (again, actually, not supposedly) when you make a post? What are the disincentives? (e.g. will a negative comment spoil your day?) Is there a specific goal you're trying to reach? Is posting to your blog a step on the path to the goal?

Count me in if anything comes out of it.

Maybe you should consider joining an existing blogging community - livejournal or tumblr or medium? They're good at giving you social prompts to write something.

If I wanted to update a blog regularly, I would consider it imperative to put "update my blog" as a repeating item in my to-do list. For me, relying on memory is an atrocious way to ensure that something gets done; having a to-do list is enormously more effective.

I tried translating the sequences. Gave up on the third post.

Smith et al. (2013). Dendritic spikes enhance stimulus selectivity in cortical neurons in vivo.

Abstract (emphasis mine):

Neuronal dendrites are electrically excitable: they can generate regenerative events such as dendritic spikes in response to sufficiently strong synaptic input. Although such events have been observed in many neuronal types, it is not well understood how active dendrites contribute to the tuning of neuronal output in vivo. Here we show that dendritic spikes increase the selectivity of neuronal responses to the orientation of a visual stimulus (orientation tuning). We performed direct patch-clamp recordings from the dendrites of pyramidal neurons in the primary visual cortex of lightly anaesthetized and awake mice, during sensory processing. Visual stimulation triggered regenerative local dendritic spikes that were distinct from back-propagating action potentials. These events were orientation tuned and were suppressed by either hyperpolarization of membrane potential or intracellular blockade of NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors. Both of these manipulations also decreased the selectivity of subthreshold orientation tuning measured at the soma, thus linking dendritic regenerative events to somatic orientation tuning. Together, our results suggest that dendritic spikes that are triggered by visual input contribute to a fundamental cortical computation: enhancing orientation selectivity in the visual cortex. Thus, dendritic excitability is an essential component of behaviourally relevant computations in neurons.

Transcript

I love this speech, but I suspect it's overoptimistic. I believe that bitcoin will be illegal as soon as it's actually needed.

Still, I appreciate his appreciation of immigration/emigration. I'm convinced that mmigration/emigration gets less respect than staying and fighting because it's less dramatic, less likely to get people killed, and more likely to work.

In "The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview", by the Russian computer scientist and Soviet-era dissident Valentin Turchin, in the chapter "The Ideological Hierarchy", Soviet ideology was analyzed as having four levels: philosophical level (e.g. dialectical materialism), socioeconomic level (e.g. social class analysis), history of Soviet Communism (the Party, the Revolution, the Soviet state), and "current policies" (i.e. whatever was in Pravda op-eds that week).

According to Turchin, most people in the USSR regarded the day-to-day propaganda as empty and false, but a majority would still have agreed with the historical framework, for lack of any alternative view; and the number who explicitly questioned the philosophical and socioeconomic doctrines would be exceedingly small. (He appears to not be counting religious people here, who numbered in the tens of millions, and who he describes as a separate ideological minority.)

BaconServ writes that "LessWrong is the focus of LessWrong", though perhaps the idea would be more clearly expressed as, LessWrong is the chief sacred value of LessWrong. You are allowed to doubt the content, you are allowed to disdain individual people, but you must consider LW itself to be an oasis of rationality in an irrational world.

I read that and thought, meh, this is just the sophomoric discovery that groupings formed for the sake of some value have to value themselves too; the Omohundro drive to self-protection, at work in a collective intelligence rather than in an AI. It also overlooks the existence of ideological minorities who think that LW is failing at rationality in some way, but who hang around for various reasons.

However, these layered perspectives - which distinguish between different levels of dissent - may be useful in evaluating the ways in which one has incorporated LW-think into oneself. Of course, Less Wrong is not the Soviet Union; it's a reddit clone with meetups that recruits through fan fiction, not a territorial superpower with nukes and spies. Any search for analogies with Turchin's account, should look for differences as well as similarities. But the general idea, that one may disagree with one level of content but agree with a higher level, is something to consider.

Could people list philosophy oriented internet forums with high concentration of smart people and no significant memetic overlap so that one could test this? I don't know any and I think it's dangerous.

If Lesswrong would be good at brainwashing I would expect much more people to have signed up for cryonics.

What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic?

Spend time outside of Lesswrong and discuss with smart people. Don't rely on a single community to give you your map of the world.

What probability should I assign to being completely wrong and brainwashed by Lesswrong?

Wrong about what? Different subjects call for different probability.

The probability that the Bayes Theorem is wrong is vanishingly small. The probability that the UFAI risk is completely overblown is considerably higher.

LW "ideology" is an agglomeration in the sense that accepting (or not) a part of it does not imply acceptance (or rejection) of other parts. One can be a good Bayesian, not care about UFAI, and be signed up for cryonics -- no logical inconsistencies here.

What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic?

I'd suggest starting by reading up on "brainwashing" and developing a sense of what signs characterize it (and, indeed, if it's even a thing at all).

For each new visitor who comes in and accuses us of messianic groupthink how far should I update in the direction of believing them?

Presumably this depends on how much new evidence they are providing relative to the last visitor accusing us of messianic groupthink, and whether you think you updated properly then. A dozen people repeating the same theory based on the same observations is not (necessarily) significantly more evidence in favor of that theory than five people repeating it; what you should be paying attention to is new evidence.

The first thing you should probably do is narrow down what specifically you feel like you may be brainwashed about. I posted some possible sample things below. Since you mention Messianic groupthink as a specific concern, some of these will relate to Yudkowsky, and some of them are Less Wrong versions of cult related control questions. (Things that are associated with cultishness in general, just rephrased to be Less Wrongish)

Do you/Have you:

1: Signed up for Cyonics.

2: Agressively donated to MIRI.

3: Check for updates on HPMOR more often then Yudkowsky said there would be on the off hand chance he updated early.

4: Gone to meet ups.

5: Went out of your way to see Eliezer Yudkowsky in person.

6: Spend time thinking, when not on Less Wrong: "That reminds me of Less Wrong/Eliezer Yudkowsky."

7: Played an AI Box experiment with money on the line.

8: Attempted to engage in a quantified self experiment.

9: Cut yourself off from friends because they seem irrational.

10: Stopped consulting other sources outside of Less Wrong.

11: Spent money on a product recommended by someone with high Karma (Example: Metamed)

12: Tried to recruit other people to Less Wrong and felt negatively if they declined.

13: Written rationalist fanfiction.

14: Decided to become polyamorous.

15: Feel as if you have sinned any time you receive even a single downvote.

16: Gone out of your way to adopt Less Wrong styled phrasing in dialogue with people that don't even follow the site.

For instance, after reviewing that list, I increased my certainty I was not brainwashed by Less Wrong because there are a lot of those I haven't done or don't do, but I also know which questions are explicitly cult related, so I'm biased. Some of these I don't even currently know anyone on the site who would say yes to them.

Am I going to burn in counter factual hell for even asking?

You'd be crazy not to ask. The views of people on this site are suspiciously similar. We might agree because we're more rational than most, but you'd be a fool to reject the alternative hypothesis out of hand. Especially since they're not mutually exclusive.

What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic?

Use culture to contrast with culture. Avoid being a man of a single book and get familiar with some past or present intellectual traditions that are distant from the LW cultural cluster. Try to get a feel for the wider cultural map and how LW fits into it.

Less Wrong has some material on this topic :)

Seriously though, I'd love to see some applied-rationality techniques put to use successfully doubting parts of the applied rationality worldview. I've seen some examples already, but more is good.

I'd say you should assign a very high probability for your beliefs being aligned in the direction LessWrong's are, even in cases where such beliefs are wrong. It's just how the human brain and human society works; there's no getting around it. However, how much of that alignment is due to self-selection bias (choosing to be a part of LessWrong because you are that type of person) or brainwashing is a more difficult question.

For each new visitor who comes in and accuses us of messianic groupthink how far should I update in the direction of believing them?

As long as the number is small, I wouldn't update at all, because I already expect slow trickle of those people on my current information, so seeing that expectation confirmed isn't new evidence. If LW achieved a Scientology-like place in popular opinion, though, I'd be worried.

Am I going to burn in counter factual hell for even asking?

No.

Fixed.

In my social circle, explicitly tagging posts as "I'm not looking for advice" seems to work pretty well at discouraging advice. I don't do it often myself though.

And you're right, of course, that it is among other things an assertion of status, though of course it's also a useful piece of explicit information.

Noah Millman also comments:

“Throw the switch or not” is a natural choice actually presented by real conditions – switches imply choices by definition. “Push the fat man or don’t” isn’t a natural choice presented by real conditions – it’s a scenario concocted for an experiment. By definition, those cannot be the only options in the universe. And our brains can tell.

It seems to me that what characterizes the people who choose the “logical” answer – push the fat man – is not that they gave a less-emotional response but that they gave a less-inuitive, less-gestalt-based response. They were willing to accept the conditions of the problem as given without question. That’s a response to authority – they are turning off the part of their brains that feels the situation as a real one, and sticking with the part of the brain that reasons from unquestionable givens to undeniable conclusions.

There’s a place for that kind of response – but I would argue that answering questions of great moral import is emphatically not that place. Indeed, from the French Revolution to the Iraq War, modernity is littered with the corpses of those whose deaths were logically necessary for some hypothesized outcome that could not actually have been known with remotely the necessary level of certainty. In that regard, I suspect an aversion to following logic problems to fatal conclusions is not merely a kind of moral appendix handed down from our Stone Age ancestors, but remains positively adaptive.

The rationality book?

this is the last I've seen

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3a/miris_2013_summer_matching_challenge/9gth

http://hpmor.com/notes/progress-13-10-0/

Eliezer says he'll do a progress report on 11/1. I haven't heard any news otherwise.

Just time is both necessary and sufficient.

There might be eventually.

Something like that was discussed previously. Kevin recommended antidepressants in the comments.

Ask Gwern, he probably knows something that's good enough.

It will get better over time.

You don't need a pill. It's in your head. Mind over matter. Meditate. Learn complete emotional control. It's not hard.

And when you can choose to be happy whenever you want, life is very good ;)

They are on it: http://www.academia.edu/2764401/If_I_could_just_stop_loving_you_Anti-love_biotechnology_and_the_ethics_of_a_chemical_breakup

I've been using Anki daily these past two or three months, and regularly-but-not-quite-daily maybe a year before that. I use it for a fair amount of different things (code, psychology, languages, ...)I recommend it, though it's not really "gamified".

You don't have enough karma to post yet. Consider making some quality comments first.

It especially annoys me when people respond to evidence-based arguments that LessWrong is not a cult with, "Well where did you come to believe all that stuff about evidence, LessWrong?"

Before LessWrong, my epistemology was basically a more clumsy version of what is now. If you described my present self to my past self, and said "Is this guy a cult victim?" he would ask for evidence. He wouldn't be thinking in terms of Bayes's theorem, but he would be thinking with a bunch of verbally expressed heuristics and analogies that usually added up to the same thing. I used to say things like "Absence of evidence is actually evidence of absence, but only if you would expect to see the evidence if the thing was true and you've checked for the evidence," which I was later delighted to see validated and formalized by probability theory.

You could of course say, "Well, that's not actually your past self, that's your present self (the cult victim)'s memories, which are distorted by mad thinking," but then you're getting into brain-in-a-vat territory. I have to think using some process. If that process is wrong but unable to detect its own wrongness, I'm screwed. Adding infinitely recursive meta-doubt to the process just creates a new one to which the same problem applies.

I'm not particularly worried that my epistemology is completely wrong, because the pieces of my epistemology, when evaluated by my epistemology, appear to do what they're supposed to. I can see why they would do what they're supposed to by simulating how they would work, and they have a track record of doing what they're supposed to. There may be other epistemologies that would evaluate mine as wrong. But they are not my epistemology, so I don't believe what they recommend me to believe.

This is what someone with a particular kind of corrupt epistemology (one that was internally consistent) would say. But it is also the best anyone with an optimal epistemology could say. So why Mestroyer::should my saying it be cause for concern? (this is an epistemic "Mestroyer::should")

Something more than a salon and less than a movement, then... English has a big vocabulary, there must be a good word for it.

From my POV it seems like people starting a 'are we a cult' threads/conversations do it mainly for signaling purposes.

I think people also say things just to get conversation going. We need to look at making it easier to find useful ways of getting attention.

When when will these rants go meta?

nope http://lesswrong.com/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsingularity/60ub

You say "cult" like it's a bad thing.

Seriously though, using a term with negative connotations is not a rational approach t begin with. Like asking "is this woman a slut?". It presumes that a higher-than-average number of sexual partners is necessarily bad or immoral. Back to the cult thing: why does this term have a derogatory connotation? Says wikipedia:

In the mass media, and among average citizens, "cult" gained an increasingly negative connotation, becoming associated with things like kidnapping, brainwashing, psychological abuse, sexual abuse and other criminal activity, and mass suicide. While most of these negative qualities usually have real documented precedents in the activities of a very small minority of new religious groups, mass culture often extends them to any religious group viewed as culturally deviant, however peaceful or law abiding it may be.

Secular cult opponents like those belonging to the anti-cult movement tend to define a "cult" as a group that tends to manipulate, exploit, and control its members. Specific factors in cult behavior are said to include manipulative and authoritarian mind control over members, communal and totalistic organization, aggressive proselytizing, systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle-class communities.

Some of the above clearly does not apply ("kidnapping"), and some clearly does ("systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle-class communities" -- CFAR workshops, Berkeley rationalists, meetups). Applicability of other descriptions is less clear. Do the Sequences count as brainwashing? Does the (banned) basilisk count as psychological abuse?

Matching of LW activities and behaviors to those of a cult (a New Religious Movement is a more neutral term) does not answer the original implicit accusation: that becoming affiliated, even informally, with LW/CFAR/MIRI is a bad thing, for some definition of "bad". It is this definition of badness that is worth discussing first, when a cult accusation is hurled, and only then whether a certain LW pattern is harmful in this previously defined way.

Being a cult is a failure mode for a group like this. Discussing failure modes has some importance.

There also the issue that cult are powerful and speaking of Lesswrong as a cult implies that Lesswrong has a certain power.

I believe we are cult. The best cult in the world. The one whose beliefs works. Otherwise, we're the same; an unusual cause, a charismatic ideological leader, and, what distinguishes us from a school of philosophy or even a political party, is that we have an excathology to worry about; an end-of-the-world scenario. Unlike other cults, though, we wish to prevent or at least minimize the damage of that scenario, while most of them are enthusiastic in hastening it. For a cult, we're also extremely loose on rules to follow, we don't ask people to cast off material posessions (though we encourage donations) or to cut ties with old family and friends (it can end up happening because of de-religion-ing, but that's an unfortunate side-effect, and it's usually avoidable).

I could list off a few more traits, but the gist of it is this; we share a lot of traits with a cult, most of which are good or double-edged at worst, and we don't share most of the common bad traits of cults. Regardless of whether one chooses to call us a cult or not, this does not change what we are.

This sounds like a situation in which some people present may consider some other people's beliefs to be an individual-level existential threat — whether to their identity, to their lives, or to their immortal souls. In other words, the problem is not just that these folks disagree with each other, but that they may feel threatened by one another, and by the propagation of one another's beliefs.

Consider:
"If you convince people of your belief, people are more likely to try to kill me."
"If you convince people of your belief, I am more likely to become corrupted."

We are surprised when a local NAACP leader has a calm meeting with a KKK leader. (But possibly not as surprised as the national NAACP leadership were.)

One framework for dealing with situations like this is called liberalism. In liberalism, we imagine moral boundaries called "rights" around individuals, and we agree that no matter what other beliefs we may arrive at, that it would be wrong to transgress these boundaries. (We imagine individuals, not groups or ideas, as having rights; and that every individual has the same rights, regardless of properties such as their race, sex, sexuality, or religion.)

Agreeing on rights allows us to put boundaries around the effects of certain moral disagreements, which makes them less scary and more peaceful. If your Christian colleague will agree, for instance, that it is wrong to kidnap and torture someone in an effort to change that person's sexual identity, they may be less threatening to the others.

What would constitute an apocalypse? When you say "I want to see what happens" do you mean you want to let the situation develop organically but set certain boundaries, a cap on damages, so to say?

A few potentially relevant observations:

• The kind of dissociation you talk about here, where I experience my "self" as unrelated to my body, is commonly reported as spontaneously occurring during various kinds of emotional stress. I've had it happen to me many times.

• It would not be surprising if the same mechanism that leads to spontaneous dissociation in some cases can also lead to the strong intuition that dissociation would be a really good idea.

• Just because there's a mechanism that leads me to strongly intuit that something would be a really good idea doesn't necessarily mean that it actually would be.

• All of that said: after my stroke, I experienced a lot of limb-dissociation... my arm didn't really feel like part of me, etc. This did have the advantage you described, where I could tell my arm to keep doing some PT exercise and it would, and yes, my arm hurt, and I sort of felt bad for it, but it's not like it was me hurting, and I knew I'd be better off for doing the exercise. It is indeed a useful trick.

• I suspect there are healthier ways to get the same effect.

Do you have experience with OBEs? I personally have limited experience. I'm no expert but I know a bit.

In my experience the kind of people who have the skills for engaging in out-of-body-experiences usually don't get a lot done. It rather increases akrasia then decreasing it. If you want to decrease akrasia associating more with your body is a better strategy than getting outside of it.

An even more powerful effect is present for social anxiety. Things like public speaking and rejection therapy are terrifying but by disconnecting my identity from my body, I would find that rejection is not as personal, just directed at this avatar that I control.

That effect is really there. You are making a trade. You lose empathy. Stopping to care about other people means that you can't have genuine relationships.

On the other hand rejections don't hurt as much and you can more easily put yourself into such a situation.

I don't think you're off your rocker, though dissociating at the gym might increase the risk of injury.

I tentatively suggest that you explore becoming comfortable enough in your life that you don't need the hack, but I'm not sure that the hack is necessarily a bad strategy at present.

The Fermi paradox includes us knowing a lot about the density of stuff in the visible universe. You'd expect expansionistic life to populate most of a galaxy in short order since there are only the three dimensions to expand in. The Everett multiverse is a bit bigger. Would you still get a similar expansion model for a difficult to discover cheat, or could we end up with effects only observable in a minuscule fraction of all branches even if a cheat was possible, but was difficult enough to discover?

Getting to Yes is a standard negotiation book; Difficult Conversations seems useful as a supplement for negotiation in non-business contexts (but, as a general communication book, has obvious business applications as well).