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Two years ago, I wrote this cringe-worthy thing.
I can't tell if things have gotten worse, or if they've stayed the same. I lean toward worse.
4 years ago, I asked a psychiatrist about my soul-crushing Akrasia issues. He prescribed Focalin, at 5mg/day for the first week, then 10mg/day for the second. The first week saw improvements--I didn't feel like I had much choice over what I wound up focusing on, but I actually finished things--the second week did not work at all, and a pile of unpleasant things all hit at once on one of those nights. So we switched to Prozac, nothing came of it, and here we are.
For reasons, skills that are basic and trainable for most people are down-right mutant to me. (It's almost as though any problems that aren't sheltered-nerd problems amplified by blindness are blindness problems amplified by sheltered nerdiness. There exist blind nerds without this suite of doom-problems, but on investigation nothing seems to generalize.)
I didn't mention psychiatric problems in the 2012 post because all the psych professionals I've spoken to don't seem to believe I have them. But I'm pretty sure I have symptoms of ADHD-PI. And Schizoid Personality. And Avoidant Personality. And Social Anxiety. And Atypical Depression but I'm pretty sure that's a response to everything else. Whether any of these is actually the case is unknown to me, and all of the above mean that finding a professional to ask (then actually telling them everything) is stupidly difficult. Then they need to be competent.
I really have no idea what the best starting place would be. I'm trying to find another psychiatrist (though I dunno if I can actually communicate the problems), I've exhausted the less dramatic training facility and the return-to-college option, and am considering one of the National Federation of the Blind training centers (as a general rule, everyone who is not a member finds the NFB offputting, but it's pretty much their programs or nothing, if the internet is to be believed).
TL;DR: My life sucks and if I can't fix it soon, I will start complaining that decent wireheading is not yet available.
Instead of a psychiatrist maybe a psychologist might be the better option?
Can anyone recommend any good books/resources on dyspraxia?
Ideally suitable for adults with a reasonable background understanding of psychology. Most of the stuff I've been able to find has been aimed for teachers/parents.
I've seen a few discussions recently where people seem to argue past one another because they're using different senses of the terms "subjective" and "objective".
Some things are called "subjective" because they are parametrized by subject. For instance, everyone who can see has a field of vision, but no two people have the same field of vision (because two people can't stand in the same spot at the same time). However, we can reason and calculate accurately about someone else's field of vision.
Other things are called "subjective" because they are internal to a subject. For instance, since humans are not telepathic we don't have access to the thoughts or mood of another person. The only way we can discover them is by being told about them — or, theoretically, brain-scans — and even this doesn't convey how it feels to be that person.
Bayesianism and Causality, or, Why I am only a Half-Bayesian (Judea Pearl)
“The bulk of human knowledge is organized around causal, not probabilistic relationships, and the grammar of probability calculus is insufficient for capturing those relationships.”
How communities Work, and What Wrecks Them
Behavior patterns that grind communities down: endless contrarianism, axe-grinding, persistent negativity, ranting, and grudges.
I agree about all of that except for contrarianism (and yes, I'm aware of the irony). You want to have some amount of contrarianism in your ecosystem, because people sometimes aren't satisfied with the hivemind and they need a place to go when that happens. Sometimes they need solutions that work where the mainstream answers wouldn't, because they fall into a weird corner case or because they're invisible to the mainstream for some other reason. Sometimes they just want emotional support. And sometimes they want an argument, and there's a place for that too.
What you don't want is for the community's default response to be "find the soft bits of this statement, and then go after them like a pack of starving hyenas tearing into a pinata made entirely of ham". There need to be safe topics and safe stances, or people will just stop engaging -- no one's always in the mood for an argument.
On the other hand, too much agreeableness leads to another kind of failure mode -- and IMO a more sinister one.
The article talked about endless contrarianism, where people disagree as a default reaction, instead of because of a pre-existing difference in models. I think that is a problem in the LW community.
On the contrary, from my experience it isn't.
Sorry, I could not resist the opportunity. But seriously, I don't often see people disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. More often, they'll point out different aspects, or their own perspective on a topic. To be honest, support and affirmation are perhaps a bit rarer than they should be, but I've rarely perceived disagreement to be hostile, as opposed to misunderstanding, or legitimate and resolvable via further discussion.
More datapoints, anyone?
If other people disagree with what I write they usually do it for the sake of disagreeing. However if I disagree... ;)
Are there lists of effective charities for specific target domains? For social reasons, I sometimes want to donate to a charity focused on some particular cause; but given that constraint, I'd still like to make my donation as effective as possible.
Training horses to indicate whether they want to wear a blanket or have a blanket taken off
This could be a big deal for the bestiality debate (although conducting the necessary training without falling afoul of the original ethical concerns would probably be a trick).
A general training in do want, don't want for ordinary things like blankets and types of food could go a long way to solving the problem.
Warning: this comment is a ramble without a conclusion. Horses participating in tell culture? Cool. Preferences and consent are complicated.
This line of thinking seems to lead to some interesting places about the idea of consent.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the whole notion of "consent" is socially constructed (that is, learned) — that it is desirable but cannot be assumed to be natural or inherent. People have to learn, not only to ask others' consent, but to recognize when their consent is being asked: not only to ask "Do you want this?" but to know when someone wants them to have and express a preference.
Indeed, the idea of developing preferences of one's own has to be learned. (Possibly the whole notion of having an identity, too.)
People raised in very controlling households seem to have trouble with this — with formulating and communicating preferences and seeking consent, rather than just ① going ahead and doing things that affect others and then seeing how those others react, or ② expecting others to do the reciprocal. They expect interactions to be, not necessarily forced, but certainly not negotiated. "Better to ask forgiveness than seek permission" is one thing as a maxim for decision-making in a bureaucratic office, but quite another thing in personal relationships!
This leads to communications problems between these folks and people who have been taught to exchange consent. For instance, "Would you like to do thus-and-so with me?" for one person can mean "I expect you to do thus-and-so with me and will be disappointed or angry if you don't" whereas for another it can mean "I actually don't know if thus-and-so would be worth doing for us; what do you think?"
Previously I thought that this difference was that (to put it overly strongly) people from controlling households had had their free will beaten out of them — that they had been abused or neglected in a way that made them alieve that people would not respect their preferences or dissent, and so did not bother to express any. But now I think the opposite: "just do stuff and see how others react" is the state of nature, whereas "formulate and express preferences and negotiate with others" is socially constructed.
And as a society, it seems we are demanding more and more of it. That sounds like a pretty good thing to me, especially for people whose preferences would otherwise be denied or disregarded. But it isn't free or obvious; it's a big structure of socially-constructed-stuff that people have to learn.
Computationally speaking, preferences aren't free. Even if we model people as agents with utility functions (which I'm not sure we should!), having a utility function doesn't mean having explicit knowledge of what your utility function is! In order to express preferences, an agent has to notice facts about itself, notice regularities about those facts, figure out what it might want another agent to do ... and so on. All that requires brain power.
Teaching a horse to express preferences — that it can communicate something that will influence its handler's actions, to get something done that it can't do for itself — seems like a pretty big deal. Affirmatively communicating about a specific action is more "consent-like" than, say, merely expressing an emotional state of dissatisfaction or contentment.
I get the sense that people who live with animals generally do have a notion of what the animals like or dislike. But that isn't the same as communicating preferences or consent.
On zoophilia/bestiality, I at one point thought something like: "A dog or horse can obviously express dissatisfaction with physical acts it doesn't like — by pulling away, kicking, biting, etc. Some animals can clearly 'propose' sexual acts with humans, such as a dog humping a person's leg. And we don't expect people to seek animals' consent to a hell of a lot of things that we do expect them to seek consent from humans — such as medical treatment or being put in a cage. So what's the big deal?"
But a dog humping someone's leg isn't proposing a sexual act or consenting to one; it's initiating one. If a human did the equivalent, to random people they didn't have an existing relationship with, well, we wouldn't want to put up with that sort of thing.
People (and, I suspect, horses) have different degrees of insight into their own preferences. It is perfectly possible to be wrong about your preferences: to believe that you would be happier if you ate a bag of candy, when in fact you would give yourself a stomachache and be less happy.
Consent is really tricky.
Imagine a woman sitting at the bar. The woman knows what she's doing and knows that when she smiles in a certain way at a man there a 90% chance that the man will approach her, however only in 10% of the cases the man has an idea that the woman did something to make the woman approach.
If the woman initiates an interaction like that does she have informed consent? Is there some ethical imperative for her to inform the man that she initiated the interaction?
To frame the question in another way, if all you are doing is trigger the system 1 of the other person do let the person engage in certain actions, but you never ask a question to give system 2 the opportunity to reflect, do you have consent?
That seems like a huge leap in terms of capability, though, to add the free parameter of "condition to be started/stopped" somehow.
Suppose I was an unusual moral, unusually insightful used car saleswoman. I have studied the dishonest sales techniques my colleagues use, and because I am unusually wise, worked out the general principles behind them. I think it is plausible that this analysis is new, though I guess it could already exist in an obscure journal.
Is it moral of me to publish this research, or should I practice the virtue of silence?
Obviously the dishonest car salesman is just an example so don't get too tied up on the efficiency of the second hand car market.
Robert Cialdini did something a bit like this in researching his book "Influence", and so far as I can tell pretty much everyone agrees it's a good thing he wrote it.
I suspect attitudes to your doing this would depend on what your publication looked like. You could write
(As an unusually moral person you probably wouldn't actually want to write the first of those books. But some others in a similar situation might.)
My gut reaction to the first would be "ewww", to the second would be "oh, someone trying to drum up sales by attention-grabbing hype",and to the third would be "hey, that's interesting". Other people's guts may well differ from mine. Cialdini's book is mostly the third, with a little touch of the second.
And read by people who want to read the first ;)
And also who want to read the second or the third. But yes, of course, writing for one audience won't stop others taking advantage.
I estimate that 95% of readers of Cialdini read it for business.
I think it depends very much on the case.
There are things in the social skill space that I discovered via experimentation that I don't openly share.
Sales man aren't the only people who care about getting people to make decisions. In medicine compliance is pretty important and choice engineering as a field isn't completely evil.
Understanding our decision making can also give us insight into issues like akrasia.
The outside view.... (The whole link is quoted.)
There have been discussions here in the past about whether "extreme", lesswrong-style rationality is actually useful, and why we don't have many extremely successful people as members of the community.
I've noticed that Ramit Sethi often uses concepts we talk about here, but under different names. I'm not sure if he's as high a level as we're looking for as evidence, but he appears to be extremely successful as a businessman. I think he started out in life/career coaching, and then switched to selling online courses when he got popular. His stuff is generally around the theme of "how to win at life", but focused on his own definition of that, which is mainly having a profitable and interesting career. (He has a lot of free content which is only inconvenience-walled by being part of a mailing list - this video is one of those things.)
I'm curious if anyone else here knows of him, and what you think of him.
I'm not sure if the community has been around long enough for this to be a useful kind of a measurement. Success doesn't happen in an instant and there's a lot of turnover. People who are already successful don't have much pressure to join in.
Additionally, "extreme success" is usually defined in zero sum terms that make it definitionally extremely rare, in addition to the strong influence of chance in whether one achieves success in most fields. So a community as small as ours with "not many extremely successful people" may still be completely worthwhile and have a high rate of extreme success per capita compared to most groups.
Side point: I've found material like his, "concepts we talk about here, but under different names", extremely useful when I want to explain the idea of rationality to someone without having to work around the lesswrong lingo and trying to have a conversion while tabooing all the lesswrong phases and cached thoughts.
Yes! In my opinion, it's a great habit to be on the lookout for things under a different name. This is the "academic coordination problem:" things are often rediscovered again and again, because people have incentives to write but not to read.
Fully agree that he uses concepts used with less wrong, under different names. And I've seen him referenced frequently on less wrong as somewhere to look for rational financial / career advice.
I follow his free material, it has provided me with inspiration/direction/confidence to aggressively pursue increased compensation, successfully. I've been tempted to purchase his material before, but am always discouraged last second by the smell of snake oil.
I've been doing the same thing, for a while. I also get turned off a bit by the snake oil, and I've been following some of the mailing lists long enough that the content starts to feel repetitive. I might still buy, if he ever put out anything inexpensive (doesn't seem likely, but Jeff Walker did a while ago even though his business has a similar strategy, so it might happen..).
I wonder if everyone gets that slight snake oil feeling from him? And in particular, whether the kinds of marketing he's using still work when the reader recognizes what tactic is being used.
Seeking LWist Caricatures
I've written the existence of a cult-like "Bayesian Conspiracy" of mostly rebellious post-apocalypse teens - and now I'm looking for individuals to populate it with. What I /want/ to do is come up with as many ways that someone who's part of the LW/HPMOR/Sequences/Yudkowsky-ite/etc memeplex could go wrong, that tend not to happen to members of the regular skeptical community. Someone who's focused on a Basilisk, someone on Pascal's Mugging, someone focused on dividing up an infinity of timelines into unequal groups...
Put another way, I've been trying to think of the various ways that people outside the memeplex see those inside it as weirdos.
(My narrative goal: For my protagonist to experience trying to be a teacher. I'd be ecstatic if I could have at least one of the cultists be able to teach her a thing or two in return, but since I've based her knowledge of the memeplex on mine, that's kind of tricky to arrange.)
I can't guarantee that I'll end up spending more than a couple of sentences on any of this - but I figure that the more ideas I have to try building with, the more likely I will.
(Also asked on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2kopgx/qbst_seeking_lwist_caricatures/ .)
Someone who applies useful effective behaviors towards the achievement of a ridiculous or reprehensible end goal.
I think I have this one covered; my character entry is simply "I wanna be a pony!".
(And, now that I think about it, my protagonist has said that if they don't have any other end goals they can think of, they're going to act as if their end goal is to "read comics".)
When judging how weird a community is, people often approximate a kind of "weirdness Pagerank" by looking at people the community holds in high esteem. I think Yudkowsky can come across as weird and offputting to some folks (not in person, but online. This is a bit of a tangent, but I think it is very interesting to think about the systematic ways our online and offline personas differ and why they do so). If people perceive that, their alarms immediately go off and they conclude folks are brainwashed since they are not seeing the weirdness themselves.
The person who airs fringe supremacist (or even eliminationist) views ... then is surprised and offended when members of the targeted groups shun him or her instead of arguing the points as if they were a matter of abstract intellectual interest.
No, wait, that's probably not LW-specific enough.
The lurker, who may not be gaining as much utility as they would if they participated. However, they still receive the same (or a degree of) connotations from those outside the memeplex, due to their association with the group. These percepts from the outside may be either good or bad.
Calculating Bayes rule for everything can be quite weird for a lot of people. I remember a case where someone found it weird that another person asked on LW how to do a Bayesian calculation for the likelihood that a specific girl likes him.
Calculating probabilities for many everyday issues is hugely weird for many people. You might even have to take care to make it sound believable even if you do describe a real world character.
I remember an anecdote of a person doing an utility calculation that suggest having sex without a condom and being exposed to the chance of getting AIDS is quite okay.
Another of those things that CFAR preaches that can be seen as pretty weird is purposeful comfort zone extension. It's the kind of topic where you also have to worry about believability if you just tell real world stories.
And rightly so. The great majority of people are badly calibrated, can't estimate priors properly, etc. If they tried to calculate probabilities for "many everyday issues" I would bet most of them would land straight in the valley of bad rationality.
The person who uses ev psych to justify their romantic preferences to potential and current partners. (There's a generalisation of this that I'm not sure how to describe, but I've fallen into it when talking with friends about the game-theoretical value of friendship.)
If the problem is that you shouldn't have to justify your romantic preferences then I can see where you are coming from, but if you do want a justification, what is wrong with evo psych?
One possible generalization: Being insecure about personal preferences, and so seeking to show that one's personal likes are rooted directly in something universal — something outside one's own personal history, culture, subculture, upbringing, etc.
“Every few years over the past decade we ask our people ‘What are the dumb things we do? What is stopping you doing your job?’
A look at the cost of bad self-imposed regulations in businesses.
I stumbled across an article about Amelia, a program that can supposedly perform low-level human jobs like call center operator. A brief search hasn't turned up anything particularly illuminating. Has this been discussed on LW before?
On the one hand, everything I read about her sounds sufficiently vague that I suspect it's hype (and possibly native advertising). Still, I'm curious about the underlying tech - is it some kind of substantial improvement over past attempts, or is she just Siri++ in the way that Eugene Goostman was a slightly better chatbot?
Probably Siri-- in the way that Eugene Goostman was a slightly worse chatbot.
Hey, does anyone else struggle with feelings of loneliness?
What strategies have you found for either dealing with the negative feelings, or addressing the cause of loneliness, and have they worked?
Sometimes negative emotions are just bad weather -- you have to get stuff done anyways. I also agree with and second sensible advice below on dealing with causes.
Joining clubs is good - especially if you're willing to put in enough work for it to be implicitly joining a social scene (unfortuanately, this bit has plenty of caveats, but trial and error sometimes works fine). Do you make music? There are scenes for that. Dance, ditto. Playing card games, ditto.
LW is almost big enough to work for this, actually - certainly if one lives in a big city.
Do you feel lonely because you spent your time alone or because you will you don't connect with the people with whom you spend your time?
Two separate problems.
Not feeling connected with people, or, increasingly feeling less connection with people.
I actively socialize myself, and this helps, but the other thing maybe suggests to me I'm doing something wrong.
(Edit: to clarify, my empathy thingy works as well (maybe better) than it ever has, I just feel like the things I crave from social interactions are getting harder to acquire. Like, people "getting" you, or having enough things in common that you can effectively talk about the stuff that interests you. So, like, obviously, one of the solutions there is to hang out with more bright-and-happy CFAR-ish/LW-ish/EA-ish people.)
I found the Nonviolent Communication method extremely helpful for feeling more connected to my friends.
www.meetup.com can be a good place to find groups of likeminded people.
In my experience, "dealing with the negative feelings" is useless, because if you deal with them today and you're still lonely tomorrow, the feelings will just come back. It's better to find people who are interested in the same things as you, and hang out with them.
NY Times on the wrongness of political party-related discrimination.
David Brooks is more or less correct about the US where the two mainstream parties are not very distinguishable. He is entirely wrong about many other places of the world. There are enough countries where someone's political views are "a marker for basic decency".
P.S. I am amused by a piece of incidental research he cites:
That is called blatant racism and in case of s/black/white/ would be cause for much hand-wringing, soul-searching, and probably obligatory "diversity training" for everyone.
I doubt this generalizes very well.
There have clearly been cases in the history of the world where one party made it clear that they really did intend to hurt or kill their perceived opponents. And then, after acceding to power, went on to do just that.
I've seen remarks here on LW from at least one person in a central European country that he or she felt increasingly personally unsafe due to particular political factions in that country producing increasingly violent rhetoric. I would not tell that person that he or she would be wrong to shun people who advocated political violence against him or her.
Here in the U.S., it sure seems that political eliminationist rhetoric (of the "All the Other Party should be killed as traitors" sort) is produced largely as a form of commercial entertainment, not serious political advocacy. But I say that from a position of relative security and privilege ....
Today I had an aha moment when discussing coalition politics (I didn't call it that, but it was) with elementary schoolers, 3rd grade.
As a context: I offer an interdisciplinary course in school (voluntary, one hour per week). It gives a small group of pupils a glimpse of how things really work. Call it rationality training if you want.
Today the topic was pairs and triple. I used analogies from relationships: Couples, parents, friendships. What changes in a relationship when a new element appears. Why do relationships form in the first place? And this revealed differences in how friendships work among boys and among girls. And that in this class at this moment at least the girl friendships were largely coalition politics: "If you do this your are my best friend," or "No we can't be best friends if she it your best friend." For the boys it appears to be at least wquantitatively different. But maybe just the surface differs.
I the end I represented this as graphs (kind of) on the board. And the children were delighted to draw their own coalition diagrams, even abbreviating names by single letters. You wouldn't have bet that these diagrams were from 3rd grade.
How did you deal with the prospect of one of the kids being emotional hurt by the whole process of being explicit about relationships?
I of course have an eye on the emotional wellbeing of the children. But I'm not really clear what kind of emotional hurt you mean. Being exposed to e.g. be the loner possibly? I probably wouldn't try it in this relatively direct way if the group weren't that small (4 children) when I can keep the discourse inspirational and playful at all time.
Yes. Getting children to openly state: "We can't be best friend because you are best friends with X" seems to ask for trouble but if you have enough presence in the room to keep the discourse inspirational and playful it might be fine.
Ah yes. "We can't be best friend because you are best friends with X" wasn't literally said with respect to someone in the room. Something like that was quoted by a girl as an example thus it wasn't personal in that moment but I assume that it is a real statement too.
I wonder what would happen if we trained monkeys to reveal this kind of detalis with us.
You may be interested in "Chimpanzee Politics", by Frans de Waals (something like that), which is about exactly that (observing a group of Chimps in a zoo, and how their politics and alliances evolves, with a couple coups).
Great! Added to my Amazon whislist ;)
But maybe we could. Considering the tricky setups scientists use to compare the intelligence of mice and rats I'd think that it should be possible to devise an experiment which teaches monkeys to reveal their clan structure. I'm thinking along the line of first training association of buttons with clan members (photos) and the allowing to select groups which should get or not get a treat.
Someone has created a fake Singularity Summit website.
(Link is to MIRI blog post claiming they are not responsible for the site.)
I did a little research to find out whether there are free survey sites that offer "check all answers that apply" questions.
Super Simple Survey probably does, but goddamned if I'll deal with their website to make sure.
On the almost free side, Live Journal enables fairly flexible polls (including checkboxes) for paid accounts, and you can get a paid account for a month for $3. Live Journal is a social media site.
Doodle poll, select "free text" might work.
http://support.doodle.com/customer/portal/articles/645362-how-to-create-a-poll-
I posted a link to the 2014 survey in the 'Less Wrong' Facebook group, and some people commented they filled it out. Another friend of mine started a Less Wrong account to comment that she did the survey, and got her first karma. Now I'm curious how many lurkers become survey participants, and are then incenitivized to start accounts to get the promised karma by commenting they completed it. If it's a lot, that's cool, because having one's first comment upvoted after just registering an account on Less Wrong seems like a way of overcoming the psychological barrier of 'oh, I wouldn't fit in as an active participant on Less Wrong...'
If you, or someone you know, got active on Less Wrong for the first time because of the survey, please reply as a data point. If you're a regular user who has a hypothesis about this, please share. Either way, I'm curious to discover how strong an effect this is, or is not.
My first comment was after I completed the 2014 survey. I've only been lurking for about a month, and this was the first survey I've participated in.
I have been an on-and-off lurker for ~15 months, and only recently created an account (not because of the survey though). I have participated in both 2013 and 2014's surveys.
I keep finding the statistic that "one pint of donated blood can save up to 3 lives!" But I can't find the average number of lives saved from donating blood. Does anyone know/is able to find?
What do you mean with "lives saved by donating blood" in the first place?
Quantity people who would die without any blood donations
Liters of blood donated
That's not a pretty useful number if you want to make personal decisions based on it. If our Western system would need more blood, raising the incentives for donations isn't that hard.
WHO prefers all blood donations to be unpaid:
"Regular, unpaid voluntary donors are the mainstay of a safe and sustainable blood supply because they are less likely to lie about their health status. Evidence indicates that they are also more likely to keep themselves healthy."
Interesting. So the core question seems to be: "How much value is produced by healthy blood donors making decisions to donate without incentives, compared to blood that's "brought"".
Bought blood has been subject of an interesting debate:
"Since increased blood shortages are to be expected anyway in the near future, all measures improving the supply of safe blood, including monetary compensation, should be objectively discussed without prejudice."
"Paid blood donation still has its defenders, who cite economic doctrines denying the existence of altruism per se, the inability of most countries with exclusively voluntary donations to achieve self-sufficiency and the supposedly successful use of selected groups of paid donors."
"Majority would consent to free blood donation only in case of emergency or as a family replacement..."
"Several countries are already self-sufficient in blood and blood products, based on a voluntary, unpaid donor system."
"The European Association of the Plasma Products [...] believes that the most important aspect of self-sufficiency is a sufficient supply of safe and efficacious product; the question of paid or unpaid donations is of lower importance."
The expression "can save up to" should immediately trigger your bullshit detector. It's a reliable signal that the following number is meaningless.
It has been experimentally shown that certain primings and situations increase utilitarian reasoning; for instance, people are more willing to give the "utilitarian" answer to the trolley problem when dealing with strangers, rather than friends. Utilitarians like to claim that this is because people are able to put their biases aside and think more clearly in those situations. But my explanation has always been that it's because these setups are designed to maximise the psychological distance between the subject and the harm they're going to inflict - the more people are confronted with the potential consequences of their actions, the less likely they are to make the utilitarian mistake. And now, a new paper suggests that I was right all along! Abstract:
However, given my low opinion of such experiments, perhaps I should be very careful about uncritically accepting evidence that supports my priors.
I highly doubt the subjects were drunk enough to have trouble figuring out that 5 > 1. So one could equally offer an interpretation that e.g. drunk people answered honestly, while sober people wanted to signal that they were too caring to kill someone under any circumstances.
It's a fascinating result, but I don't think the interpretation is a slam dunk.
I've been wondering whether utilitarianism undervalues people's loyalty to their own relationships and social networks.
Those who are currently using Anki on a mostly daily or weekly basis: what are you studying/ankifying?
To start: I'm working on memorizing programming languages and frameworks because I have trouble remembering parameters and method names.
Geography: "what direction [relative to central london] is this tube stop in?", English counties (locations), U.S. states (locations, capitals), Canadian territories and provinces (locations and capitals), countries (locations, capitals, and at some point I'll add flags). (Most of these came from ankiweb originally, but I had to add reverse cards.)
Bayes: conversions between odds, probabilities and decibels (specific numbers and more recently the general formulas)
Miscellaneous: the NATO phonetic alphabet, logs (base 2 of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and base 10 of 2 through 9), some words I can never remember how to spell (this turns out not to help), some computer stuff (the order of the arguments in python's
datetime.strptime, and the difference between aleft joinand aright join), some definitions in machine learning, some historical dates (e.g. wars, first moon landing, introduction of the model T), some historical inflation rates, some astronomical facts.Also a deck based on the twelve virtues of rationality essay. (This one and most of the bayes one I found through LW.)
I'm not sure most of this is useful, but most of it hasn't cost me significant effort either.
if you memorize logs, I recommend memorizing natural logs of primes. This is all you need to quickly calculate natural log, log2, and log10 of any integer.
You get ln of any number by adding together the natural logs of the prime factors, and you get log_m of n by the formula
log_m(n)=ln(n)/ln(m)
(maybe memorize ln(10) too to make the calculation a little easier)
I can't do real division in my head, but if I wanted to maximise my logarithm-ability while minimizing my number of cards, I would go for logs base (probably 10) of primes, and 1/log(e) and 1/log(2).
But I'm not too fussed about minimizing cards, or about natural logs. Learning more primes might be helpful, but I can get them approximately. E.g. I don't have log_10(11) memorized, but I know it's between log_10(10) and log_10(2*6) which are 1 and 1.08, and it would be closer to the latter (my calculator says 1.041, which is slightly lower than I would have guessed, but if I put it in Anki I'd only go to 1.04 anyway).
These days, most of my time on Anki is on Japanese (which I'm learning for fun) and Chinese (which I already know, but I'm brushing up on tones and characters).
Looking through my decks, I also have decks on:
(also a few minor decks with very few cards)
I review those pretty much every day (I sometimes leave a few unfinished, depending on how much idle time I have in queues, transport, etc.)
That's fantastic. How many cards total do you have, and how many minutes a day do you study?
Apparently I have 6887 cards (though that includes those I suspended because they're boring, useless, too difficult, duplicated, or possibly wrong; I tend to often suspend cards instead of deleting them); of those around 3000 are Chinese pinyin cards I automatically created with a Python script (I set them up to get between 1 and 5 new ones per day, depending on how busy I tend to be), 1000 are Japanese (the biggest deck of manually-entered cards), and the remaining decks rarely go over 300 cards.
I study probably between 20 and 40 minutes per day, usually in public transit or during "downtime" (waiting in line, carrying the baby around the house hoping for him to sleep, in the restroom, the elevator...). The time depends of how many new cards I entered recently.
I've recently started a tumblr dedicated to teaching people what amounts to Rationality 101. This post isn't about advertising that blog, since the sort of people that actually read Less Wrong are unlikely to be the target audience. Rather, I'd like to ask the community for input on what are the most important concepts I could put on that blog.
(For those that would like to follow this endeavor, but don't like tumblr, I've got a parallel blog on wordpress)
Noticing confusion is the first skill I tried to train up last year, and is definitely a big one, because knowing what your models predict and noticing when they fail is a very valuable feedback loop that prevents you from learning if you can't even notice it.
Picturing what sort of evidence would unconvince you of something you actively believe is a good exercise to pair with the exercise of picturing what sort of evidence would convince you of something that seems super unlikely. Noticing unfairness there is a big one.
Realizing when you are trying to "win" at truthfinding, which is... ugh.
Map and territory - why is rationality important in the first place?
Excercises in small rational behaviours. E.g. people genrally are very reluctant to apologize about anything, even if the case means little to them and a lot to the other person. Maybe it's "if I apologize, that will mean I was a bad person in the first place" thinking, maybe something else.
It's a nice excercise: if somebody seems to want something from you or apparently is angry with you when you did nothing wrong, stop for a moment and think: how much will it cost me to just say "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you". After all, those are just words. You don't have to "win" every confrontation and convince the other person you are right and their requirements are ridiculus. And if you apologize, in fact you both will have a better day - the other person will feel appreciated and you will be proud you did something right.
(A common situation from my experience is that somebody pushes me in a queue, I say "excuse me, but please don't stand so close to me/don't look over my arm when I'm writing the PIN code etc." and then the pusher often starts arguing how my behaviour is out of line - making both of us and the cashier upset)
Come to think of it, it's a lot like Quirrell's second lesson in HPMoR...
Admitting you are wrong.
Highly related: When you even might be wrong, get curious about that possibility rather than scared of it.
Taking stock of what information you have, and what might be good sources for information, well in advance of making a decision.
Not all of the MIRI blog posts get cross posted to Lesswrong. Examples include the recent post AGI outcomes and civilisational competence and most of the conversations posts. Since it doesn't seem like the comment section on the MIRI site gets used much if at all, perhaps these posts would receive more visibility and some more discussion would occur if these posts were linked to or cross posted on LW?
I had the same thought when I read Hayworth's recent interview. It's really good.
Re: "civilizational incompetence". I've noticed "civilizational incomptence" being used as a curiosity stopper. It seems like people who use the phrase typically don't do much to delve in to the specific failure modes civilization is falling prey to in the scenario they're analyzing. Heaven forbid that we try to come up with a precise description of a problem, much less actually attempt to solve it.
(See also: http://celandine13.livejournal.com/33599.html)
I too, have seen it used too early or in contexts where it probably shouldn't have been used. As long as people don't use it so much as an explanation for something, but rather as a description or judgement, its use as a curiosity stopper is avoidable.
So I suppose there is a difference between saying "bad thing x happens because of civilisational incompetence", and "bad thing x happens, which is evidence that there is civilisational incompetence."
Separate to this concern is that it also has a slight Lesswrong-exceptionalism 'peering at the world from above the sanity waterline' vibe to it as well. But that's no biggie.
Is the recommended courses page on MIRI's website up to date with regards to what textbooks they recommend for each topic? Should I be taking the recommendations fairly seriously, or more with a grain of salt? I know the original author is no longer working at MIRI, so I'm feeling a bit unsure.
I remember lukeprog used to recommend Bermudez's Cognitive Science over many others. But then So8res reviewed it and didn't like it much, and now the current recommendation is for The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, which I haven't really seen anyone say much about.
There are a few other things like this, for example So8res apparently read Heuristics and Biases as part of his review of books on the course list, but it doesn't seem to appear on the course list anymore, and under the heuristics and biases section Thinking and Deciding is recommended (once reviewed by Vaniver).
I have some suggestions for books related to the topics you mentioned. There's a pretty good section on cognitive ergonomics in Wickens' Introduction to Human Factors Engineering that is a clear introduction to the topic, and mentions some examples of design issues that can arise from human beings' cognitive limitations and biases.
Also, Chris Eliasmith's book Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation, and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems shows some of the technical approaches people have taken to modelling what happens in the brain.
I'm not sure if either of those is what you're looking for, but I found them interesting.
No, it's not up to date. (It's on my list of things to fix, but I don't have many spare cycles right now.) I'd start with a short set theory book (such as Naive Set Theory), follow it up with Computation and Logic (by Boolos), and then (or if those are too easy) drop me a PM for more suggestions. (Or read the first four chapters of Jaynes on Probability Theory and the first two chapters of Model Theory by Chang and Keisler.)
Edit: I have now updated the course list (or, rather, turned it into a research guide) that is fairly up-to-date (if unpolished) as of 6 Nov 14.
I think Understanding Machine Learning (out this year) is better than Bishop's book (which is, frankly, insufferably obscurantist), and that instead of model-checking you ought to be learning a proof assistant (I learned Coq from Benjamin Pierce's Software Foundations).
The book the page recommends is Kevin Murphy's Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective. I don't see any of Chris Bishop's books on the MIRI list right now, was Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning there at some point? Or am I missing something you're saying.
Oh, well all right then. I was under the mistaken impression Bishop's book was listed. My bad!
Assume that Jar S contains just silver balls, whereas Jar R contains ninety percent silver balls and ten percent red balls.
Someone secretly and randomly picks a jar, with an equal chance of choosing either. This picker then takes N randomly selected balls from his chosen jar with replacement. If a ball is silver he keeps silent, whereas if a ball is red he says “red.”
You hear nothing. You make the straightforward calculation using Bayes’ rule to determine the new probability that the picker was drawing from Jar S.
But then you learn something. The red balls are bombs and if one had been picked it would have instantly exploded and killed you. Should learning that red balls are bombs influence your estimate of the probability that the picker was drawing from Jar S?
I’m currently writing a paper on how the Fermi paradox should cause us to update our beliefs about optimal existential risk strategies. This hypothetical is attempting to get at whether it matters if we assume that aliens would spread at the speed of light killing everything in their path.
This is related to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, and in general the answer depends what you're trying to do with "probability". For lots and lots more, Bostrom's PhD thesis is very detailed: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy.
Bostrom's Observation Selection Effects and Human Extinction Risks paper is less philosophical and sounds like it's more relvant to the paper you're working on.
I had a conversation with another person regarding this Leslie's firing squad type stuff. Basically, I came up with a cavemen analogy with the cavemen facing lethal threats. It's pretty clear - from the outside - that the cavemen which do probability correctly and don't do anthropic reasoning with regards to tigers in the field, will do better at mapping lethal dangers in their environment.
Thanks for letting me know about "Leslie's firing squad[s]"
You're welcome. So what's your actual take on the issue? I never seen a coherent explanation why bombs must make a difference. I seen appeals to "but you wouldn't be thinking anything if it was red", which ought to perfectly cancel out if you apply that to the urn choice as well.
edit: i.e. this anthropics, to me, is sort of like how you could calculate the forces in a mechanical system, but make an error somewhere, and that yields an apparent perpetuum mobile, as forces on your wheel with water and magnets fail to cancel out. Likewise, you evaluate impacts of some irrelevant information, and you make an error somewhere, and irrelevant information makes a difference.
To a first approximation I don't think it makes a difference, but it does add some logical uncertainty. Also, intuitively I want to be able to use anthropic reasoning to say "there is only a tiny chance that the universe would have condition X, but I'm not surprised by X because without X observers such as us won't exist", but I think doing this implies I have to give a different estimate if red = bomb.
Hmm, that's an interesting angle on the issue, I didn't quite realize that was the motivation here.
I would be surprised by our existence if that was the case, and not further surprised by observation of X (because I already observed X by the way of perceiving my existence).
Let's say I remember that there was an strange, surprising sign painted on the wall, and I go by the wall, and I see that sign, and I am surprised that there's that sign on the wall at all, but I am not surprised that I am seeing it (because I can perform an operation in my head that implies existence of the sign - my memory tells me I seen it before). Same with the existence, I am surprised we exist at all but I am not surprised when I observe something necessary for my existence because I could've derived it from prior observations.
I think this particular example doesn't really exemplify what I think you're trying to demonstrate here.
A simpler example would be:
You draw one ball our of a jar containing 99% red balls and 1% silver balls (randomly mixed).
The ball is silver. Is this surprising? Yes.
What if you instead draw a ball in a dark room so you can't see the color of the ball (same probability distribution). After drawing the ball, you are informed that the red balls contain a high explosive, and if you draw a red ball from the jar it would instantly explode, killing you.
The lights go on. You see that you're holding a silver ball. Does this surprise you?
Well, being alive would surprise me, but not the colour of the ball. Essentially what happens is that the internal senses (e.g. perceiving own internal monologue) end up sensing the ball colour (by the way of the high explosive).
A side note: under the cherry bomb scenario the probability of you hearing the word "red" is zero.
Before I actually do the math, "you hear nothing" appears to affect my estimate exactly in the same way as "you're still alive."
The following model is my new hypothesis for generating better OKCupid profiles for myself while remaining honest.
I brainstorm what I want to include in my profile in a positive way without lying. This may include goal-factoring on what honest signals I'm trying to send. Then, I see how what I brainstormed fits into the different prompts on OKCupid profiles.
I generate multiple clause-like chunks for each item/object/quality of myself I'm trying to express in my profile. I then A/B test the options for each item across a cross-section of individuals similar to the ones I would want to attract on OKCupid. This may include random assignment to conditions to participants to some extent. I would still need to think of metrics or ratings for this to best suit my goals.
Construct complete paragraphs for the various sections of my profile using whichever were the most successful Caveats: I would want enough experimental control to ensure the test participants were people I could trust to respond honestly, and without trolling me. However, this would decrease random selection. How much should I care about random selection, and thus external validity, in this case?
Otherwise, what do you think of the model? What's wrong with it? If it's not completely awful, I'll play-test it with an OKCupid profile just for the value of information, and see if we can't learn something.
Just test it and report back the result :) That will teach you and us many things we can't see right now.
I'd like to ask LessWrong's advice. I want to benefit from CFAR's knowledge on improving ones instrumental rationality, but being a poor graduate I do not have several thousand in disposable income nor a quick way to acquire it. I've read >90% of the sequences but despite having read lukeprog's and Alicorn's sequences I am aware that I do not know what I do not know about motivation and akrasia. How can I best improve my instrumental rationality on the cheap?
Edit: I should clarify, I am asking for information sources: blogs, book recommendations, particularly practice exercises and other areas of high quality content. I also have a good deal of interest in the science behind motivation, cognitive rewiring and reinforcement. I've searched myself and I have a number of things on my reading list, but I wanted to ask the advice of people who have already done, read or vetted said techniques so I can find and focus on the good stuff and ignore the pseudoscience.
(Apologies for the slight thread hijack here.)
It occurs to me that CFAR's model of expensive workshops and generous grants to the impoverished (note: I am guessing about the generosity) is likely to produce rather odd demographics: there's probably a really big gap between (1) the level of wealth/income at which you could afford to go, and (2) the level of wealth/income at which you would feel comfortable going, especially as -- see e.g. cursed's comments in this thread -- it's reasonable to have a lot of doubt about whether they're worth the cost. (The offer of a refund mitigates that a bit.)
Super-handwavy quantification of the above: I would be really surprised if a typical person whose annual income is $30k or more were eligible for CFAR financial aid. I would be really surprised if a typical person whose income is $150k or less were willing to blow $4k on a CFAR workshop. (NB: "typical". It's easy to imagine exceptions.) Accordingly, I would guess that a typical CFAR workshop is attended mostly by people in three categories: impoverished grad students, etc., who are getting big discounts; people on six-figure salaries, many of them quite substantial six-figure salaries; and True Believers who are exceptionally convinced of the value of CFAR-style rationality, and willing to make a hefty sacrifice to attend.
I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it strikes me as a pretty good recipe for getting an interesting mix of people. But it does mean there's something of a demographic "hole".
I rather think there may be demand for a cheaper, less time dependent method of attending. It may be several seasons before they end up back in my country for example. Streaming/recording the whole thing and selling the video package seems like it could still get a lot of the benefits across. Their current strategy only really makes sense to me if they're still in the testing and refining stage.
I think they are. If everything goes well they will have published papers that proves that their stuff works by the time they move out of the testing and refining stage.
Any idea how long that will be (months, years, decades)?
I've been to several of CFAR's classes throughout the last 2 years (some test classes and some more 'official' ones) and I feel like it wasn't a good use of my time. Spend your money elsewhere.
What made it poor use of your time?
I didn't learn anything useful. They taught, among other things, "here's what you should do to gain better habits". Tried it and didn't work on me. YMMV.
One thing that really irked me was the use of cognitive 'science' to justify their lessons 'scientifically'. They did this by using big scientific words that felt like they were trying to attempt to impress us with their knowledge. (I'm not sure what the correct phrase is - the words weren't constraining beliefs? don't pay rent? they could have made up scientific sounding words and it would have had the same effect.)
Also, they had a giant 1-2 page listing of citations that they used to back up their lessons. I asked some extremely basic questions about papers and articles I've previously read on the list and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
ETA: I might go to another class in a year or two to see if they've improved. Not convinced that they're worth donating money towards at this moment.
(This is Dan from CFAR again)
We have a fair amount of data on the experiences of people who have been to CFAR workshops.
First, systematic quantitative data. We send out a feedback survey a few days after the workshop which includes the question "0 to 10, are you glad you came?" The average response to that question is 9.3. We also sent out a survey earlier this year to 20 randomly selected alumni who had attended workshops in the previous 3-18 months, and asked them the same question. 18 of the 20 filled out the survey, and their average response to that question was 9.6.
Less systematically but in more fleshed out detail, there are several reviews that people who have attended a CFAR workshop have posted to their blogs (A, B+pt2, C +pt2) or to LW (1, 2, 3). Ben Kuhn's (also linked above under "C") seems particularly relevant here, becaue he went into the workshop assigning a 50% probability to the hypothesis that "The workshop is a standard derpy self-improvement technique: really good at making people feel like they’re getting better at things, but has no actual effect."
In-person conversations that I've had with alumni (including some interviews that I've done with alumni about the impact that the workshop had on their life) have tended to paint a similar picture to these reviews, from a broader set of people, but it's harder for me to share those data.
We don't have as much data on the experiences of people who have been to test sessions or shorter events. I suspect that most people who come to shorter events have a positive experience, and that there's a modest benefit on average, but that it's less uniformly positive. Partly that's because there's a bunch of stuff that happens with a full workshop that doesn't fit in a briefer event - more time for conversations between participants to digest the material, more time for one-on-one conversations with CFAR staff to sort through things, followups after the workshop to work with someone on implementing things in your daily life, etc. The full workshop is also more practiced and polished (it has been through many more iterations) - much moreso than a test session; one-day events are in between (the ones advertised as alpha tests of a new thing are closer to the test session end of the spectrum).
I've seen CFAR talk about this before, and I don't view it as strong evidence that CFAR is valuable.
For these ratings to be meaningful, I'd like to see something like a control workshop where CFAR asks people to pay $3900 and then teaches them a bunch of techniques that are known to be useless but still sound cool, and then ask them to rate their experience. Obviously this is both unethical and impractical, so I don't suggest actually doing this. Perhaps "derpy self-improvement" workshops can serve as a control?
(Dan from CFAR here)
Hi cursed - glad to hear your feedback, though I'm obviously not glad that you didn't have a good experience at the CFAR events you went to.
I want to share a bit of information from my point of view (as a researcher at CFAR) on 1) the role of the cognitive science literature in CFAR's curriculum and 2) the typical experience of the people who come to a CFAR workshop. This comment is about the science; I'll leave a separate comment about thing 2.
Some of the techniques that CFAR teaches are based pretty directly on things from the academic literature (e.g., implementation intentions come straight from Peter Gollwitzer's research). Some of our techniques are not from the academic literature (e.g., the technique that we call "propagating urges" started out in 2011 as something that CFAR co-founder Andrew Critch did).
The not-from-the-literature techniques have been through a process of iteration, where we theorize about how we think the technique works, then (with the aid of our best current model) we try to teach people to use the technique, and then we get feedback on how it goes for them. Then repeat. The "theorizing" step of this process includes digging into the academic literature to get a better understanding of how the relevant parts of the mind work, and that often plays a role in shaping the class. With "propagating urges," at first none of the people that Critch taught it to were able to get it to work for them, but then Critch made a connection to some neuroscience he'd been reading, we updated our model of how the technique was supposed to work, and then more people were able to make use of the technique. (I'm tempted to go into more specifics here, but that feels like a tangent and this comment is going to be long enough without it.)
Classes based on from-the-academic-literature techniques also go through a similar process of iteration. For example, there are a lot of studies that have shown that people who are instructed to come up with implementation intentions for a particular goal make more progress towards that goal. But I don't know of any academic research on attempts to teach people the skill of being able to create implementation intentions, and the habit of actually using them in day-to-day life. And that's what we're trying to do at CFAR workshops, so that class has gone through a similar process of iteration as we get feedback on whether people are making use of implementation intentions and how it goes for them. (One simple change that helped get more people to use implementation intentions: giving the technique a different name. We now call it "trigger action planning").
So the cognitive science literature plays both of these roles for us: it's a source of evidence about particular techniques that have been tested and found to work (or to not work), and it's a source of models of how the mind works so that we can develop better techniques. We mention both of these types of scientific references in class (and in the further resources), and we try to be careful to distinguish them. Sharing our models in class (e.g., saying a few sentences in the propagating urges class about what we think the orbitofrontal cortex might be doing in this process) seems to be helpful for getting people to use the technique as we understand it (rather than getting confused about the steps, or rounding the technique off to the nearest cached thought). It also seems to help with getting people to take ownership of the technique and treat it as something that they can tinker with, rather than as a rote series of steps for them to follow (cf. learned blankness).
Finally, a brief comment on this:
Each CFAR class has one staff member who takes the lead in developing the class, and I'm the research specialist who does a lot of digging into the literature and sharing/discussing research with whoever is developing the class. The aim is for the two of us to be conversant in the relevant academic literature. For the rest of the CFAR team, the priority is to be able to use the techniques and help other people use them, not to know all the studies. (Often there will be more than just us two puzzling things over together, but it typically isn't the whole team.) The instructor who teaches a class at a CFAR event isn't always the person who has been developing it, especially at one-day events which are just being run by 2 instructors instead of the full CFAR staff. If I'd been at the event you came to, the instructor who you asked about the articles probably would've referred you to me and we could've had an interesting conversation.
Do you think it was unhelpful because you already had a high level of knowledge on the topics they were teaching and thus didn't have much to learn or because the actual techniques were not effective? Do you think your experience was typical? How useful do you think it would be to an average person? An average rationalist?
I don't believe I had a high level of knowledge on the specific topics they were teaching (behavior change, and the like). I did study some cognitive science in my undergraduate years, and I take issue with the 'science'.
I believe that the majority of people don't get much, if anything, from CFAR's rationality lessons. However, after the lesson, people may be slightly more motivated to accomplish whatever they want to, in the short term just because they've paid money towards a course to increase their motivation.
There was one average person at one of the workshops I attended. e.g. never read LessWrong/other rationality material. He fell asleep a few hours into the lesson, I don't think he gained much from attending. I'm hesitant to extrapolate, because I'm not exactly sure what an average person entails.
I haven't met many rationalists, but would believe they wouldn't benefit much/at all.
Well that's a bit dispiriting, though I suppose looking back my view of CFAR was a bit unrealistic. Downregulating chance that CFAR is some kind of panacea.
CFAR has financial aid.
Also, attending LW meetups and asking about organizing meetups based on instrumental rationality material is cheap and fun.
Somehow I doubt the financial aid will stretch to the full amount, and my student debt is already somewhat fearsome.
I'm on the LW meetups already as it happens. I'm currently attempting to have my local one include more instrumental rationality but I lack a decent guide of what methods work, what techniques to try or what games are fun and useful. For that matter I don't know what games there are at all beyond a post or two I stumbled upon.
You could ask Metus how much they covered for them, or someone at CFAR how much they'd be willing to cover. The costs for asking are small, and you won't get anything you don't ask for.
Fair point, done. On a related note, I wonder how I can practice convincing my brain that failure does not mean death like it did in the old ancestral environment.
CFAR suggests doing exercises to extend your comfort zone for that purpose.
Exposure therapy: Fail on small things, then larger ones, where it is obvious that failiure doesn't mean death. First remember past experiences where you failed and did not die, then go into new situations.
Even in the ancestral environment, not all failures (I suspect a fairly small proportion of them) meant death.
Luke's IAMA on reddit's r/futurology in 2012 was pretty great. I think it would be cool if he did another, a lot has changed in 2+ years. Maybe to coincide with the December fundraising drive?
If he could not repeat the claim that UFAI is so easily compressible it could "spread across the world in seconds" through the internet, that would be quite helpful, actually. Even in the rich world, with broadband, transferring an intelligent agent all across the world will take whole hours, especially given the time necessary for the bugger to crack into and take control of the relevant systems (packaging itself as a trojan horse and uploading itself to 4chan in a "self-extracting zip" of pornography will take even longer).
I just sent a message to Luke. Hopefully he will notice it.
I have a question for anyone who spends a fair amount of their time thinking about math: how exactly do you do it, and why?
To specify, I've tried thinking about math in two rather distinct ways. One is verbal and involves stating terms, definitions, and the logical steps of inference I'm making in my head or out loud, as I frequently talk to myself during this process. This type of thinking is slow, but it tends to work better for actually writing proofs and when I don't yet have an intuitive understanding of the concepts involved.
The other is nonverbal and based on understanding terms, definitions, theorems, and the ways they connect to each other on an intuitive level (note: this takes a while to achieve, and I haven't always managed it) and letting my mind think it out, making logical steps of inference in my head, somewhat less consciously. This type of thinking is much faster, though it has a tendency to get derailed or stuck and produces good results less reliably.
Which of those, if any, sounds closer to the way you think about math? (Note: most of the people I've talked to about this don't polarize it quite so much and tend to do a bit of both, i.e. thinking through a proof consciously but solving potential problems that come up while writing it more intuitively. Do you also divide different types of thinking into separate processes, or use them together?)
The reason I'm asking is that I'm trying to transition to spending more of my time thinking about math not in a classroom setting and I need to figure out how I should go about it. The fast kind of thinking would be much more convenient, but it appears to have downsides that I haven't been able to study properly due to insufficient data.
Each serves its own purpose. It is like the technical and artistic sides of musical performance: the technique serves the artistry. In a sense the former is subordinate to the latter, but only in the sense that the foundation of a building is subordinate to its superstructure. To perform well enough that someone else would want to listen, you need both.
This may be useful reading, and the essays here (from which the former is linked).
reads the first essay and bookmarks the page with the rest
Thanks for that, it made for enjoyable and thought-provoking reading.
As someone with a Ph.D. in math, I tend to think verbally in as much as I have words attached to the concepts I'm thinking about, but I never go so far as to internally vocalize the steps of the logic I'm following until I'm at the point of actually writing something down.
I think there is another much stronger distinction in mathematical thinking, which is formal vs. informal. This isn't the same distinction as verbal vs. nonverbal, for instance, formal thinking can involve manipulation of symbols and equations in addition to definitions and theorems, and I often do informal thinking by coming up with pretty explicitly verbal stories for what a theorem or definition means (though pictures are helpful too).
I personally lean heavily towards informal thinking, and I'd say that trying to come up with a story or picture for what each theorem or definition means as you are reading will help you a lot. This can be very hard sometimes. If you open a book or paper and aren't able to get anywhere when you try do this to the first chapter, it's a good sign that you are reading something too difficult for your current understanding of that particular field. At a high level of mastery of a particular subject, you can turn informal thinking into proofs and theorems, but the first step is to be able to create stories and pictures out of the theorems, proofs, and definitions you are reading.
I'm a math undergrad, and I definitely spend more time in the second sort of style. I find that my intuition is rather reliable, so maybe that's why I'm so successful at math. This might be hitting into the "two cultures of mathematics", where I am definitely on the theory builder/algebraist side. I study category theory and other abstract nonsense, and I am rather bad (relative to my peers) at Putnam style problems.
I don't tend to do a lot of proofs anymore. When I think of math, I find it most important to be able to flip back and forth between symbol and referent freely - look at an equation and visualize the solutions, or (to take one example of the reverse) see a curve and think of ways of representing it as an equation. Since when visualizing numbers will often not be available, I tend to think of properties of a Taylor or Fourier series for that graph. I do a visual derivative and integral.
That way, the visual part tells me where to go with the symbolic part. Things grind to a halt when I have trouble piecing that visualization together.
This appears to be a useful skill that I haven't practiced enough, especially for non-proof-related thinking. I'll get right on that.
I usually think about math nonverbally. I am not usually doing such thinking to come up with proofs. My background is in engineering, so I got a different sort of approach to math in my education about math than the people who were in the math faculty at the university I attended.
Sometimes I do go through a problem step by step, but usually not verbally. I sometimes make notes to help me remember things as I go along. Constraints, assumptions, design goals, etc. Explicitly stating these, which I usually do by writing them on paper, not speaking them aloud, if I'm working by myself on a problem, can help. But sometimes I am not working by myself and would say them out loud to discuss them with other people.
Also, there is often more than one way to visualize or approach a problem, and I will do all of them that come to mind.
I would suggest, to spend more time thinking about math, find something that you find really beautiful about math and start there, and learn more about it. Appreciate it, and be playful with it. Also, find a community where you can bounce ideas around and get other people's thoughts and ideas about the math you are thinking about. Some of this stuff can be tough to learn alone. I'm not sure how well this advice might work, your mileage may vary.
When I am really understanding the math, it seems like it goes directly from equations on the paper right into my brain as images and feelings and relations between concepts. No verbal part of it. I dream about math that way too.
I only got to a nonverbal level of understanding of advanced math fairly recently, and the first time I experienced it I think it might have permanently changed my life. But if you dream about math...well, that means I still have a long way to go and deeper levels of understanding to discover. Yay!
Follow-up question (just because I'm curious): how do you approach math problems differently when working on them from the angle of engineering, as opposed to pure math?
It seemed to me that the people I knew who were studying pure math spent a lot of time on proofs, and that math was taught to them with very little context for how the math might be used in the real world, and without a view as to which parts were more important than others.
In engineering classes we proved things too, but that was usually only a first step to using the concepts to work on some other problem. There was more time spent on some types of math than on others. Some things were considered to be more useful and important than others. Usually some sort of approximations or assumptions would be used, in order to make a problem simpler and able to be solved, and techniques from different branches of math were combined together whenever useful, often making for some overlap in the notation that had to be dealt with.
There was also the idea that any kind of math is only an approximate model of the true situation. Any model is going to fail at some point. Every bridge that has been built has been built using approximations and assumptions, and yet most bridges stay up. Learning when one can trust the approximations and assumptions is vital. People can die if you get it wrong. Learning the habit of writing down explicitly what the assumptions and approximations are, and to have a sense for where they are valid and where they are not, is a skill that I value, and have carried over into other aspects of my life.
Another thing is that math is usually in service of some other goal. There are design constraints and criteria, and whatever math you can bring in to get it done is welcome, and other math is extraneous. The beauty of math can be admired, but a kludgy theory that is accurate to real world conditions gets more respect than a pretty theory that is less accurate. In fact, sometimes engineers end up making kludgy theory that solves engineering problems into some sophisticated mathematics that looks more formal and has some interesting properties, and then it has a beauty of its own, although some of the beauty comes from knowing how it fits into a real world phenomenon.
Also, engineers tend to work in teams, not alone. So communicating with each other, and making sure that all the people on the team have a similar understanding of a situation, is a non-trivial part of the work. You don't want a situation where one person has one type of abstraction in their head, and another person has a different one, and they don't realize it, and when they go off to do their separate work, it doesn't match up. This can lead to all sorts of problems, not limited to cost overruns, design flaws, delays, and even deaths. So, if you hear engineers discussing nitpicky details and going over technical concepts more than once, that is one major reason why. You really need people to be on the same page.
Teamwork is so important to engineering that when taking classes, we were encouraged to talk to each other and work together on problems, before submitting answers. Whereas the people over in math were forbidden to talk to each other about their work before handing it in. That policy might be different at different schools. But I think it shows an important difference in culture.
Math is certainly something that can be enjoyed and practiced solo. But especially on some of the most tricky concepts of math that I have learned, I benefitted a lot from being able to discuss it with people, and get new insights and understanding from their perspectives. Sometimes I didn't even realize that I didn't properly understand a concept until I attempted to use it, and got a completely different answer from someone else who was attempting to use it.
I said it can get kludgy, and that the focus is on real world problems, but there are times when it does feel clean and pure, especially when people make real world objects that correspond pretty well to ideal mathematical objects. For example, using 4th-order differential equations to calculate the bending moments for I-beams felt peaceful and pretty, once I got the hang of it, and I think not it is not unlike something you might find in a pure math course.
I'm pretty enthusiastic about math, it's one of my favourite things to think about and do.
As someone employed doing mid-level math (structural design), I'm much like most others you've talked to. The entirely non-verbal intuitive method is fast, and it tends to be highly correct if not accurate. The verbal method is a lot slower, but it lends itself nicely to being put to paper and great for getting highly accurate if not correct answers. So everything that matters gets done twice, for accurate correct results. Of course, because it is fast the intuitive method is prefered for brainstorming, then the verbal method verifies any promising brainstorms.
Could you please explain what you mean by "correct" and "accurate" in this case? I have a general idea, but I'm not quite sure I get it.
Correct and Precise may have been better terms. By correct I mean a result that I have very high confidence in, but that is not precise enough to be useable. By accurate I mean a result that is very precise but with far less confidence that it is correct.
As an example, consider a damped oscillation word problem from first year. You are very confident that as time approaches infinity that the displacement will approach a value just by looking at it, but you don't know that value. Now when you crunch the numbers (the verbal process in the extreme) you get a very specific value that the function approaches, but have less confidence that that value is correct, you could have made any of a number of mistakes. In this example the classic wrong result is the displacement is in the opposite direction as the applied force.
This is a very simple example so it may be hard to separate the non-verbal process from the verbal, but there are many cases where you know what the result should look like but deriving the equations and relations can turn into a black box.
Right, that makes much more sense now, thanks.
One of my current problems is that I don't understand my brain well enough for nonverbal thinking not to turn into a black box. I think this might be a matter of inexperience, as I only recently managed intuitive, nonverbal understanding of math concepts, so I'm not always entirely sure what my brain is doing. (Anecdotally, my intuitive understanding of a problem produces good results more often than not, but any time my evidence is anecdotal there's this voice in my head that yells "don't update on that, it's not statistically relevant!")
Does experience in nonverbal reasoning on math lend actually itself to better understanding of said reasoning, or is that just a cached thought of mine?
Doing everything both ways, nonverbal and verbal, has lent itself to better understanding of the reasoning. Which touches on the anecdote problem, if you test every nonverbal result; you get something statistically relevant. If your odds are more often than not with nonverbal, testing every result and digging for the mistakes will increase your understanding (disclaimer: this is hard work).
So, essentially, there isn't actually any way of getting around the hard work. (I think I already knew that and just decided to go on not acting on it for a while longer.) Oh well, the hard work part is also fun.
I'm only a not-very-studious undergraduate (in physics), and don't spend an awful lot of time thinking about maths ourside of that, but I pretty much only think about maths in the nonverbal way - I can understand an idea when verbally explained to me, but I have to "translate it" into nonverbal maths to get use out of it.
I don't see a clear verbal vs. non-verbal dichotomy - or at least the non-verbal side has lots of variants. To gain an intuitive non-verbal understanding can involve
visual aids (from precise to vague): graphs, diagrams, patterns (esp. repetitions), pictures, vivid imagination (esp. for memorizing)
acoustic aids: rhythms (works with muscle memory too), patterns in the spoken form, creating sounds for elements
abstract thinking (from precise to vague): logical inference, semantic relationships (is-a, exists, always), vague relationships (discovering that the more of this seems to imply the more of that)
Note: Logical inference seems to be the verbal part you mean, but I don't think symbolic thinking is always verbal. Its conscious derivation may be though.
And I hear that the verbal side despite lending itself to more symbolic thinking can nonetheless work its grammar magic on an intuitive level too (though not for me).
Personally if I really want to solve a mathematical problem I immerse myself in it. I try lots of attack angles from the list above (not systematically but as it seems fit). I'm an abstract thinker and don't rely on verbal, acoustic or motor cues a lot. Even visual aids don't play a large role though I do a lot of sketching, listing/enumerating combinations, drawing relations/trees, tabulating values/items. If I suspect a repeating pattern I may tap to it to sound it out. If there is lengthy logical inference involved that I haven't internalized I speak the rule repeatedly to use the acoustic loop as memory aid. I play around with it during the day visualizing relationships or following steps, sometimes until in the evening everyting blurs and I fall asleep.
Personally, the nonverbal thing is the proper content of math---drawing (possibly mental) pictures to represent objects and their interactions. If I get stuck, I try doing simpler examples. If I'm still stuck, then I start writing things down verbally, mainly as a way to track down where I'm confused or where exactly I need to figure something out.
I don't really draw that distinction. I'd say that my thinking about mathematics is just as verbal as any other thinking. In fact, a good indication that I'm picking up a field is when I start thinking in the language of the field (i.e. I will actually think "homology group" and that will be a term that means something, rather than "the group formed by these actions...")
Just to clarify, because this will help me categorize information: do you not do the nonverbal kind of thinking at all, or is it all just mixed together?
I'm not really conscious of the distinction, unless you're talking about outright auditory things like rehearsing a speech in my head. The overwhelming majority of my thinking is in a format where I'm thinking in terms of concepts that I have a word for, but probably not consciously using the word until I start thinking about what I'm thinking about. Do you have a precise definition of "verbal"? But whether you call it verbal or not, it feels like it's all the same thing.
I don't really have good definitions at this point, but in my head the distinction between verbal and nonverbal thinking is a matter of order. When I'm thinking nonverbally, my brain addresses the concepts I'm thinking about and the way they relate to each other, then puts them to words. When I'm thinking verbally, my brain comes up with the relevant word first, then pulls up the concept. It's not binary; I tend to put it on a spectrum, but one that has a definite tipping point. Kinda like a number line: it's ordered and continuous, but at some point you cross zero and switch from positive to negative. Does that even make sense?
It makes sense but it doesn't match my subjective experience.
Alright, that works too. We're allowed to think differently. Now I'm curious, could you define your way of thinking more precisely? I'm not quite sure I grok it.
So, I'd say there are three modes of thinking I can identify:
It had never occurred to me that the term "applause light" could be taken so literally.
Politician, noun: a person who cheers in-group values professionally.
My friend recently attended an event at which Ray Kurzweil and an urban planner named Richard Florida were speaking. He didn't like Richard Florida as a speaker, citing how Richard Florida 'sounded just like a politician', and was speaking 'only in applause lights'. I noted it was funny to use 'applause light' in that context, as an auditorium where the speaker looks over a crowd while bathed in light, saying things specifically to garner applause, is just about the most literal interpretation of 'applause light' I could think of.
"Applause lights" is a metaphor based on a concrete thing that really exists
What chores do I need to learn how to do in order to keep a clean house?
Learn to notice things that need cleaning.
Know a good way to get rid of everything you possess when you no longer need it (bookcrossing, electronic waste recycling or just a trash bag). Learn to notice when you have things cluttering up the place that you no longer need.
Adding on to Emily:
Having a particular hamper or even corner of your room where you put dirty laundry, so that it isn't all over your floor. When this hamper / corner is full, do your laundry.
Analogous organized or occasionally-organized places for paperwork or whatever else is being clutter-y.
If you have ancient carpet and it's dirty and stinky, learn how to rent a Rug Doctor-type steam cleaner from a nearby supermarket.
If you have a bunch of broken or dirty / stinky stuff in your house, learn how to get the trash people to haul it away, and learn where to buy cheap used furniture / cheap online kitchen supplies / whatever to replace your old junk.
Having tools handy to tidy up nails / tighten loose screws etc. when you notice them.
Keeping a bush and plunger near your toilet.
If your sink has clogged any time in the past 6 months, also consider having chemical unclogger / a long skinny "snake" (that's what it's actually called) that you shove down the drain and wiggle around to bust clogs.
Figure out where all the places that are hard to clean are. These are the places that will have 50 years of accumulated nasty dirt that will make the whole house smell better when you get rid of it.
Laundry (plus ironing, if you have clothes that require that - I try not to), washing up (I think this is called doing the dishes in America), mopping, hoovering (vacuuming), dusting, cleaning bathroom and kitchen surfaces, cleaning toilets, cleaning windows and mirrors. That might cover the obvious ones? Seems like most of them don't involve much learning but do take a bit of getting round to, if you're anything like me.
I'd add, not leaving clutter lying around. It both collects dust, and makes cleaning more of an effort. Keep it packed away in boxes and cupboards. (Getting rid of clutter entirely is a whole separate subject.)
An good semi-rant by Ken White of popehat on GamerGate. I recommend it as an excellent example of applied rationality and sorting out through the hysterics.
Recently, I started a writing wager with a friend to encourage us both to produce a novel. At the same time, I have been improving my job hunting by narrowing my focus on what I want out of my next job and how I want it. While doing these two activities, I began to think about what I was adding to the world. More specifically, I began to ask myself what good I wanted to make.
I realized that writing a novel was not from a desire to add a good to the world (I don't want to write a world changing book), but just something enjoyable. So, I looked at my job. I realized that it was much the same. I'm not driven to libraries specifically by a desire to improve the world's intellectual resources; that's just a side effect. I'm driven to them out of enjoyment for the work.
So, if I'm not producing good from the two major productions of my life, I thought about what else I could produce or if I should at all. But I couldn't think of any concrete examples of good I could add to the world outside of effective altruism. I'm not an inventor nor am I a culture-shifting artist. But I wanted to find something I could add to the world to improve it, if only for my own vanity.
I decided, for the time being, on myself. Since my two biggest enjoyments (work and play) were important to me as personal achievements, not world achievements, I decided that the best thing to start with was to make myself the most efficient version of me that I could. Part of this probably came from my reading of Theodore Roosevelt's doing much the same to transform himself from an idiot into a badass. Sure, I've already been engaging in self-improvement for a while, but this idea of making the best me is more about trying to produce an individual worth having, rather than just maximizing my utility in a few areas for a few limited goals (i.e. writing a book, getting a job).
I'm sure this sounds simplistic since much of the LW literature already discusses such things, but it was a bit of an "aha" moment for me, and it made optimization and self-improvement more interesting. It made them into concrete projects with a real world application. I'm trying to give the world one less ineffective, dangerously deluded person. That's a good goal to strive for, I like to think.
Link/source?
Yes, take the Invisible Hand approach to altruism, by pursuing your own productive wellbeing you will generate wellbeing in the worlds of others. Trickle down altruism is a feasible moral policy. Come to the Dark Side and bask in Moral Libertarianism.
Important insights usually happen to sound simple but the insight still takes years to achieve.
After reading through the Quantum Physics sequence, I would like to know more about the assumptions and theories behind the idea that an amplitude distribution factorizes, or approximately factorizes. Where would be a good place to learn more about this? I would appreciate some recommendations for journal articles to read, or specific sections of specific books, or if there's another better way to learn this stuff, please let me know.
In the blog posts in the sequence, an analogy comes up a few times, saying that it doesn't make sense to distinguish between the two factors of 3 when multiplying 3 x 3 x 2 to get 18, and that similarly, the amplitude blobs in configuration space that can sometimes appear to be like particles are factors of...I'm not sure what. The wavefunction? A probability density function (but we're calling it amplitude instead of probabilities)? Something else? I didn't entirely follow that section, so I'm not sure how to look it up.
When I searched on Google Scholar for "quantum factorization" I got journal articles about how to use quantum computers to factor prime numbers. When I looked up "particle indistinguishability" I got papers about very small numbers of particles in a state of quantum entanglement. When I searched for "amplitude distribution factorizes" I got articles about tomography and mesons and keys for quantum cryptography.
I'm also confused about: what precisely is an amplitude distribution? Amplitude of what? Distributed over what? I can make some guesses, but how do I look it up?
I would also like to know: what needs to be true in order for this concept to be true? Does it depend on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or would it hold true in the other interpretations? Does it require the wavefunction? Just how good is the analogy about the factors of 18, and where would the analogy break down? What do the equations look like that lead to these conclusions, and what are they called, so I can look them up? What assumptions are used to formulate the equations? What is the difference between factorizing exactly and approximately? Why does the idea of roughly factorizing come up at all, why isn't it all exact? How accurate would it be to describe a person as a factor of the wave function, and what does that mean? Is there a technical term for "blob of amplitude"?
The Quantum Physics sequence is the best introduction to quantum mechanics that I've read, but it is rather incomplete about explicitly stating the assumptions it is using, or giving references to where to learn more about each topic.
Help?
Relevant wikipedia link. The keyword is something like "many-body wavefunction."
But seriously, if you're curious, try to find a textbook online, or a series of video lectures for an introductory course (you might either watch the whole course, or skip to what you want to learn and then try and figure out what the prerequisites are, then do the same thing for the prerequisites).
Where are you right, while most others are wrong? Including people on LW!
It is extremely important to find out how to have a successful community without sociopaths.
(In far mode, most people would probably agree with this. But when the first sociopath comes, most people would be like "oh, we can't send this person away just because of X; they also have so many good traits" or "I don't agree with everything they do, but right now we are in a confict with the enemy tribe, and this person can help us win; they may be an asshole, but they are our asshole". I believe that avoiding these - any maybe many other - failure modes is critical if we ever want to have a Friendly society.)
I think it's extremely likely that any system for identifying and exiling psychopaths can be co-opted for evil, by psychopaths. I think rules and norms that act against specific behaviors are a lot more robust, and also are less likely to fail or be co-opted by psychopaths, unless the community is extremely small. This is why in cities we rely on laws against murder, rather than laws against psychopathy. Even psychopaths (usually) respond to incentives.
How do you even reliably detect sociopaths to begin with? Particularly with online communities where long game false social signaling is easy. The obviously-a-sociopath cases are probably among the more incompetent or obviously damaged and less likely to end up doing long-term damage.
And for any potential social apparatus for detecting and shunning sociopaths you might come up with, how will you keep it from ending up being run by successful long-game signaling sociopaths who will enjoy both maneuvering themselves into a position of political power and passing judgment and ostracism on others?
The problem of sociopaths in corporate settings is a recurring theme in Michael O. Church's writings, but there's also like a million pages of that stuff so I'm not going to try and pick examples.
All cheap detection methods could be fooled easily. It's like with that old meme "if someone is lying to you, they will subconsciously avoid looking into your eyes", which everyone has already heard, so of course today every liar would look into your eyes.
I see two possible angles of attack:
a) Make a correct model of sociopathy. Don't imagine sociopaths to be "like everyone else, only much smarter". They probably have some specific weakness. Design a test they cannot pass, just like a colorblind person cannot pass a color blindness test even if they know exactly how the test works. Require passing the test for all positions of power in your organization.
b) If there is a typical way sociopaths work, design an environment so that this becomes impossible. For example, if it is critical for manipulating people to prevent their communication among each other, create an environment that somehow encourages communication between people who would normally avoid each other. (Yeah, this sounds like reversing stupidity. Needs to be tested.)
It seems to me there may be more value in finding out how to have a successful community with sociopaths. So long as the incentives are set up so that they behave properly, who cares what their internal experience is?
(The analogy to Friendly AI is worth considering, though.)
Ok, so start by examining the suspected sociopath's source code. Wait, we have a problem.
What do you mean with the phrase "sociopath"?
A person who's very low on empathy and follows intellectual utility calculations might very well donate money to effective charities and do things that are good for this community even when the same person fits the profile of what get's clinically diagnosed as sociopathy.
I think this community should be open for non-neurotypical people with low empathy scores provided those people are willing to act decently.
I'd rather avoid going too deeply into definitions here. Sometimes I feel that if a group of rationalists were in a house that is on fire, they would refuse to leave the house until someone gives them a very precise definition of what exactly does "fire" mean, and how does it differ on quantum level from the usual everyday interaction of molecules. Just because I cannot give you a bulletproof definition in a LW comment, it does not mean the topic is completely meaningless.
Specifically I am concerned about the type of people who are very low on empathy and their utility function does not include other people. (So I am not speaking about e.g. people with alexithymia or similar.) Think: professor Quirrell, in real life. Such people do exist.
(I once had a boss like this for a short time, and... well, it's like an experience from a different planet. If I tried to describe it using words, you would probably just round it to the nearest neurotypical behavior, which would completely miss the point. Imagine a superintelligent paperclip maximizer in a human body, and you will probably have a better approximation. Yeah, I can imagine how untrustworthy this sounds. Unfortunately, that also is a part of a typical experience with a sociopath: first, you start doubting even your own senses, because nothing seems to make sense anymore, and you usually need a lot of time afterwards to sort it out, and then it is already too late to do something about it; second, you realize that if you try to describe it to someone else, there is no chance they would believe you unless they already had this type of experience.)
I'd like to agree with the spirit of this. But there is the problem that the sociopath would optimize their "indecent" behavior to make it difficult to prove.
Steve Sailer's description of Michael Milken:
Is that the sort of description you have in mind?
I really doubt the possibility to convey this in mere words. I had previous experience with abusive people, I studied psychology, I heard stories from other people... and yet all this left me completely unprepared, and I was confused and helpless like a small child. My only luck was the ability to run away.
If I tried to estimate a sociopathy scale from 0 to 10, in my life I have personally met one person who scores 10, two people somewhere around 2, and most nasty people were somewhere between 0 and 1, usually closer to 0. If I wouldn't have met than one specific person, I would believe today that the scale only goes from 0 to 2; and if someone tried to describe me how the 10 looks like, I would say "yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you mean" while having a model of 2 in my mind. (And who knows; maybe the real scale goes up to 20, or 100. I have no idea.)
Imagine a person who does gaslighting as easily as you do breathing; probably after decades of everyday practice. A person able to look into your eyes and say "2 + 2 = 5" so convincingly they will make you doubt your previous experience and believe you just misunderstood or misremembered something. Then you go away, and after a few days you realize it doesn't make sense. Then you meet them again, and a minute later you feel so ashamed for having suspected them of being wrong, when in fact it was obviously you who were wrong.
If you try to confront them in front of another person and say: "You said yesterday that 2 + 2 = 5", they will either look the other person in the eyes and say "but really, 2 + 2 = 5" and make them believe so, or will look at you and say: "You must be wrong, I have never said that 2 + 2 = 5, you are probably imagining things"; whichever is more convenient for them at the moment. Either way, you will look like a total idiot in front of the third party. A few experiences like this, and it will become obvious to you that after speaking with them, no one would ever believe you contradicting them. (When things get serious, these people seem ready to sue you for libel and deny everything in the most believable way. And they have a lot of money to spend on lawyers.)
This person can play the same game with dozens of people at the same time and not get tired, because for them it's as easy as breathing, there are no emotional blocks to overcome (okay, I cannot prove this last part, but it seems so). They can ruin lives of some of them without hesitation, just because it gives them some small benefit as a side effect. If you only meet them casually, your impression will probably be "this is an awesome person". If you get closer to them, you will start noticing the pattern, and it will scare you like hell.
And unless you have met such person, it is probably difficult to believe that what I wrote is true without exaggeration. Which is yet another reason why you would rather believe them than their victim, if the victim would try to get your help. The true description of what really happened just seems fucking unlikely. On the other hand their story would be exactly what you want to hear.
No, that is completely unlike. That sounds like some super-nerd.
Your first impression from the person I am trying to describe would be "this is the best person ever". You would have no doubt that anyone who said anything negative about such person must be a horrible liar, probably insane. (But you probably wouldn't hear many negative things, because their victims would easily predict your reaction, and just give up.)
Not a person, but I've had similar experiences dealing with Cthulhu and certain political factions.
Sure, human terms are usually applied to humans. Groups are not humans, and using human terms for them would at best be a metaphor.
On the other hand, for your purpose (keeping LW a successful community), groups that collectively act like a sociopath are just as dangerous as individual sociopaths.
I'm not saying that the topic is meaningless. I'm saying that if you call for discrimination of people with a certain psychological illness you should know what you are talking about.
Base rates for clinical psychopathy is sometimes cited as 5%. In this community there are plenty of people who don't have a properly working empathy module. Probably more than average in society.
When Eliezer says that he thinks based on typical mind issues that he feels that everyone who says: "I feel your pain" has to be lying that suggests a lack of a working empathy module. If you read back the first April article you find wording about "finding willing victims for BDSM". The desire for causing other people pain is there. Eliezer also checks other things such as a high belief in his own importance for the fate of the world that are typical for clinical psychopathy. Promiscuous sexual behavior is on the checklist for psychopathy and Eliezer is poly.
I'm not saying that Eliezer clearly falls under the label of clinical psychopathy, I have never interacted with him face to face and I'm no psychologist. But part of being rational is that you don't ignore patterns that are there. I don't think that this community would overall benefit from kicking out people who fill multiple marks on that checklist.
Yvain is smart enough to not gather the data for amount of LW members diagnosed with psychopathy when he asks for mental illnesses. I think it's good that way.
If you actually want to do more than just signaling that you like people to be friendly and get applause, than it makes a lot of sense to specify which kind of people you want to remove from the community.
I am not an expert on this, but I think the kind of person I have in mind would not bother to look for willing BDSM victims. From their point of view, there are humans all around, and their consent is absolutely irrelevant, so they would optimize for some other criteria instead.
This feels to me like worrying about a vegetarian who eats "soy meat" because it exposes their unconscious meat-eating desire, while there are real carnivores out there.
I am not even sure if "removing a kind of people" is the correct approach. (Fictional evidence says no.) My best guess at this moment would be to create a community where people are more open to each other, so when some person harms another person, they are easily detected, especially if they have a pattern. Which also has a possible problem with false reporting; which maybe also could be solved by noticing patterns.
Speaking about society in general, we have an experience that sociopaths are likely to gain power in different kinds of organizations. It would be naive to expect that rationalist communities would be somehow immune to this; especially if we start "winning" in the real world. Sociopaths have an additional natural advantage that they have more experience dealing with neurotypicals, than neurotypicals have with dealing with sociopaths.
I think someone should at least try to solve this problem, instead of pretending it doesn't exist or couldn't happen to us. Because it's just a question of time.
What do you mean by "harm". I have to ask because there is a movement (commonly called SJW) pushing an insanely broad definition of "harm". For example, if you've shattered someone's worldview have you "harmed" him?