If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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I can't count the number of times I didn't do something that would have been beneficial because my social circle thought it would be weird or stupid. Just shows how important it is to choose the people around you carefully.
Someone -- maybe on LW? -- said that their strategy was to choose their friends carefully enough that they didn't have to resist peer pressure.
That has other dangers -- e.g. living in an echo chamber or facing the peer pressure to not change.
I've always been a huge non-conformist, caring relatively little what others think. I now believe that I went too far and my advice to my younger self would be to try and fit in more.
In a great example of serendipity, the talking to myself is a case. I was observed doing that and people thought it would be weird, so I stopped doing that.
When I was younger, some adults told be that "you only understand something when you can teach it to someone", which people in my circle disputed as they were the kind of people that like to think of themselves as smart.
I didn't go to a couple of parties to socialise because there were people drinking copious amounts of alcohol, because there was a stigma against getting drunk and stupid. While the not drinking certainly was a good idea, the not socialising was not.
As a child I was extremely interested in everything scientific. Then in school none of the cooler kids were and neither were the friends I actually had, so I started playing video games. Thankfully I later found people interested in scholarship so I started doing that again.
(I am starting to realise most of these are from when I was in school. Might be because I matured or because I have more perspective through the distance)
Not that peer pressure can't have good effects, it is a tool like any other.
If people were a great deal better at coordination, would they refuse to use news sources which are primarily supported by advertising?
There would definitely be more paywalls. The question is whether it would be a net loss.
Would the quality of information be better? Advertising gets paid for one way or another-- would no-advertising news (possibly even no-advertising media in general) be a net financial loss for consumers?
I don't think "refusing" news sources is helpful. Even a bad newspaper gives some perspective on some topics that you won't find elsewhere.
But reading it takes time that one could spend on something else.
I was recently heartened to hear a very good discussion of effective altruism on BBC Radio 4's statistics programme, More or Less, in response to the "Ice Bucket Challenge". They speak to Neil Bowerman of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Elie Hassenfeld from GiveWell.
They even briefly raise the possibility that large drives of charitable donations to ineffective causes could be net negative as it's possible that people have a roughly fixed charity budget, which such drives would deplete. They admit there's not much hard evidence for such a claim, but to even hear such an unsentimental, rational view raised in the mainstream media is very bracing.
Available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless (click the link to "WS To Ice Or Not To Ice"), or directly here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/moreorless/moreorless_20140908-1200a.mp3
....A thought that I've been carrying around in my head for a while, that I have no idea what to do with:
It seems to me that almost everybody, in relationships, wants the "I Win" button. For those of you who didn't play City of Heroes, it was a developer-team joke that they shared with the public: push one button, and get your way. It became player and developer jargon for times when people wanted to argue that their preferred way of winning wasn't unfair to others. So what's the "I Win" button for relationships?
People who are really good at non-verbal communication want all relationship boundaries, rules, and expressions of wants and needs to be based on non-verbal communication; they want their partner to "just know." People who are really good at written communication want those things to be handled via written rules and relationship contracts and user manuals. People who are really good at verbal, conversational communication want those things handled by talking them out. And all three of those groups think that the secret to happy relationships is for other people to learn to communicate their way.
I have no idea what to do with this in
I think I'd be more inclined to frame this sort of thing as typical mind fallacy. Modeling it in terms of an I Win button seems to violate Hanlon's Razor: we don't need an adversarial model when plain old ignorance will suffice, and I don't think preferred interaction style is a matter of conscious choice for most people.
Does mankind have a duty to warn extraterrestrial civilizations that we might someday unintentionally build an unfriendly super-intelligent AI that expands at the speed of light gobbling up everything in its path? Assuming that the speed of light really is the maximum, our interstellar radio messages would outpace any paperclip maximizer. Obviously any such message would complicate future alien contact events as the aliens would worry that our ambassador was just an agent for a paperclipper. The act of warning others would be a good way to self-signal the dangers of AI.
I'd have thought any extraterrestrial civilization capable of doing something useful with the information wouldn't need the explicit warning.
Can someone point me to estimates given by Luke Muehlhauser and others as to MIRI's chances for success in its quest to ensure FAI? I recall some values (of course these were subjective probability estimates with large error bars) in some lesswrong.com post.
Would there be any interest in an iPhone app for LessWrong? I was thinking it might be a fun side project for learning Swift, and I didn't see any search results on the App Store.
Imagining:
Welcoming other features that would draw users, too. I have to wonder if there are open source Reddit clients I could adapt, given the forked codebase...
Does anyone have any good ideas about how to be productive while commuting? I'll be starting a program soon where I'll be spending about 2 hours a day commuting, and don't want these hours to go to waste. Note: I have interests similar to a typical LessWrong reader, and am particularly interested in startups.
My brainstorming:
Audio books and podcasts. This sounds like the most promising thing. However, the things I want to learn about are the hard sciences and those require pictures and diagrams to explain (you can't learn biology or math with an audioboo
Not really what you're looking for, but I feel obligated:
Move or get a different job. Reduce your commute by 1 or 1.5 hours. This is the best way to increase the productivity of your commute.
I read (can't remember source) that commuting was the worst part of the people's day (they were unhappy, or experienced the lowest levels of their self-assess subjective well being).
Can Bayesian inference be applied to quantum immortality?
I'm writing an odd science fiction story, in which I'd like to express an idea; but I'd like to get the details correct. Another redditor suggested that I might find someone here with enough of an understanding of Bayesian theory, the Multiple Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, quantum suicide, that I might be able to get some feedback in time:
Assuming the Multiple Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory is true, then buying lottery tickets can be looked at in an interesting way: it can be v...
From http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/the-higgs-boson-vs-boltzmann-brains/
...A room full of monkeys, hitting keys randomly on a typewriter, will eventually bang out a perfect copy of Hamlet. Assuming, of course, that their typing is perfectly random, and that it keeps up for a long time. An extremely long time indeed, much longer than the current age of the universe. So this is an amusing thought experiment, not a viable proposal for creating new works of literature (or old ones).
There’s an interesting feature of what these thought-experi
This is a god read: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests
Excerpt:
...It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of
"Whether you have herpes" is not as clearly-defined a category as it sounds. The blood test will tell you which types of HSV antibodies you have. If you're asymptomatic, it won't tell you the site of the infection, if you're communicable, or if you will ever experience an outbreak.
I had an HSV test a while ago (all clear, thankfully), and my impression from speaking to the medical staff was that given the prevalence and relative harmlessness of the disease, (compared to, say, HIV or hepatitis or something), the doubt surrounding a positive test result was enough of a psychological hazard for them to actively dissuade some people from taking it, and many sexual health clinics don't even offer it for this reason.
From Poor Economics by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee
There is potentially another reason the poor may hold on to beliefs that might seem indefensible: When there is little else they can do, hope becomes essential. One of the Bengali doctors we spoke to explained the role he plays in the lives of the poor as follows: “The poor cannot really afford to get treated for anything major, because that involves expensive things like tests and hospitalization, which is why they come to me with their minor ailments, and I give them some little medicines which make them feel better.” In other words, it is important to keep doing something about your health, even if you know that you are not doing anything about the big problem. In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors.
Indeed, 'being poor is expensive' is related to how they frame this fact. From the end of the same chapter:
...The poor seem to be trapped by the same kinds of problems that afflict the rest of us—lack of information, weak beliefs, and procrastination among them. It is true that we who are not poor are somewhat better educated and informed, but the difference is small because, in the end, we actually know very little, and almost surely less than we imagine. Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in—we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own—we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. We have no choice but to get our children immunized—public schools will not take them if they aren’t—and even if we somehow manage to fail to do it, our children will probably be safe because everyone else is immunized. Our health insurers reward us for joining the gym, because they are concerned that we will not do it otherwise. And pe
Thanks to its multiple infection sites, herpes has the unusual property that two people, neither of whom have an STI, can have sex that leads to one of them having an STI. It's a spontaneous creation of stigma! And if you have an asymptomatic infection (very common), there's no way to know whether it's oral (non-stigmatized, not an STI) or genital (stigmatized, STI) since the major strains are only moderately selective.
Is there still a rewards credit card that autodonates to MIRI or CfAR? I've seen them mentioned, but can't find any sign up links that are still live.
Unfortunately the program has been discontinued by Capital One :(
We have it in our queue to look into alternatives.
One thing you might want to look into is that many cards will allow you to donate your reward points etc. to charity. For many credit cards, this generates more value for the charity you choose to donate to.
Has anyone ever worked for Varsity Tutors before? I'm looking at applying to them as an online tutor, but I don't know their track record from a tutor point of view. Has anyone had any experience with them?
Research about online communities with upvotes and downvotes
We find that negative feedback leads to significant changes in the author’s behavior, which are much more salient than the effects of positive feedback. These effects are detrimental to the community: authors of negatively evaluated content are encouraged to post more, and their future posts are also of lower quality. Moreover, these punished authors are more likely to later evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these undesired effects through the community.
I don't think things are quite that bad here.
A friend of mine has started going into REM in frequent 5 minutes cycles during the day, in order to boost his learning potential. He developed this via multiple acid trips. Is that safe? It seems like there should be some sort of disadvantage to this system but so far he seems fine.
How does he know that he actually is in REM? How does he know it boosts his learning potential?
Cryonics vs. Investment:
This is a question I have already made a decision on but would like some outside opinions for while it's still fresh. My beliefs have recently changed from "cryonics is not worth the investment" to "cryonics seems to be worth the investment but greater certainty for a decision is still wanting" (CStbWtIbGCoaDiSW for short). I've explored my options with Rudi Hoffman and found that while my primary choice of provider, Alcor, is out of my current range, my options are not unobtainable. CI with the bare basics, lowe...
Could someone recommend an article (at advanced pop-sci level) providing the best arguments against the multiverse approach to quantum mechanics.
What is the best textbook that explains quantum mechanics from a multiverse perspective (rather than following the Copenhagen school and then bringing in the multiverse as an alternative)? This should be a textbook, not pop-sci, but at a basic a level as possible.
How useful would it be to have more people working on AI/FAI? Would it be a big help to have another 1,000 researchers working on it making $200,000 a year? Or does an incredibly disproportionate amount of the contribution come from big names like Eliezer?
What do we want out of AI? Is it happiness? If so, then why not just research wireheading itself and not encounter the risks of an unfriendly AI?
If I understand correctly, people become utilitarians because they think that global suffering/well-being have such big values that all the other values don't really matter (this is what I see every time someone tries to argue for utilitarianism, (2) please correct me if I'm wrong). I think a lot of people don't share this view, and therefore, before trying to convince them they should choose utilitarianism as their morality, you first need to convince them about the value of harm-pleasure.
What's supposed to happen if an expanding FAI friendly to civilization X collides with an expanding FAI friendly to civilization Y?
So, I read textbooks "wrong".
The "standard" way of reading a textbook (a math textbook or something) is, at least I imagine, to read it in order. When you get to exercises, do them until you don't think you'd get any value out of the remaining exercises. If you come across something that you don't want to learn, skip forwards. If you come across something that's difficult to understand because you don't fully understand a previous concept, skip backwards.
I almost never read textbooks this way. I essentially read them in an arbitrary ord...
What do you guys think about having an ideas/brainstorming section? I don't see too much brainstorming of ideas here. Most posts seem to be very refined thoughts. What about a place to brainstorm some of the less refined thoughts?
Could someone please give me some good arguments for a work ethic? I tend to oppose it, but the debate seems too easy so I may be missing something.
Having a work ethic might help you accomplish more things than you would without one.
It's a good reputation boost. "A highly-skilled, hard-working x" might be more flattering than "a highly skilled x."
Work ethic might be a signal/facet of conscientiousness, a desirable trait in many domains.
My 30 day karma just jumped over 40 points since I checked LW this morning. Either I've said something really popular (and none of my recent comments have karma that high), or there's a bug.
Trans-human thought experiment:
Could someone recommend me a logic textbook? I need it to cover syntax and semantics for propositional and first-order classical logic, as well as preferably including material on intuitionistic logic and higher-order logics. I could really use material on any existing attempts to ground semantics or proof systems in computation, too.
"Computation and Logic" is my first candidate, though I want something else to go with it. This is for trying to work on logical probability research, and also because I've always been interested in type theory as a research field (hence wanting coverage of intuitionistic logic, which might as well be called computational logic what with the Curry-Howard Isomorphism).
we still have no idea...
No, this is an unmitigated triumph. It's amazing how people take such a negative view of this.
So let me get this straight: over the past few decades we have slowly moved from a viewpoint where Gould is a saint, intelligence doesn't exist and has no predictive value since it's a racist made-up concept promoted by incompetent hacks and it has no genetic component and definitely nothing which could possibly differ between any groups at all, to a viewpoint where the validity of intelligence tests in multiple senses have been shown, the amount of genetic contribution has been accurately estimated, the architecture nailed down as highly polygenic & additive, the likely number of variants, and we've started accumulating the sample size to start detecting variants, and not just have we detected 60+ variants with >90% probability* (see the remarks on the Bayesian posterior probability in the supplementary material), we even have 3 which pass the usual (moronic, arbitrary, unjustified) statistical-significance thresholds - and wait, there's more, they also predict IQ out of sample and many of the implicated variants are known to relate to the central nervou...
Pretend for a second it's a nutrition study and apply your usual scepticism :-) You know quite well that "just run a regression" is, um... rarely that simple.
No, that's the great thing about genetic associations! First, genes don't change over a lifetime, so every association is in effect a longitudinal study where the arrow of time immediately rules out A<-B or reverse causation in which IQ somehow causes particular variants to be overrepresented; that takes out one of the three causal pathways. Then you're left with confounding - but there's almost no way for a third variable to pick out people with particular alleles and grant them higher intelligence, no greenbeard effect, and population differences are dealt with by using relatively homogenous samples & controlling for principal components - so you don't have to worry much about A<-C->B. So all you're left with is A->B.
To give one obvious example, interaction effects are an issue, including interaction between genes and the environment.
But they're not. They're not a large part of what's going on. And they don't affect the associations you find through a straight analysis looking for additive effects.
I've been thinking about the Rokos Basilisk thought experiment, considering the drivers of creating a Basilisk and the next logical step such an entity might conceivably take, and the risk in presents in the temptation to protect ourselves. Namely, that we may be tempted to create an alternative FAI which would serve to protect humankind against uFAI, a protector AI, and how it distorts the Basilisk.
A protector AI would likely share, evolve, or copy from any future Basilisk or malevolent intelligence in order to protect and/or prevent us from it or its cre...
I think a predictionbook app or an app version of the credence game, would be more useful than a app for LessWrong.
There already is one for Android.