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Comments (431)
Strong statement from Bill Gates on machine superintelligence as an x-risk, on today's Reddit AMA:
"It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit."
I like Bill's EA tendencies.
Sometimes when one learns something it makes many other things "click" by making them all make sense in a broader framework. Moreover, when this happens I will be astounded I hadn't learned about the thing in the first place. One very memorable such occasion is when I learned about categories and how many different mathematical structures could be thought of in that context. Do people have other examples where they have been "Wow. That makes so much sense. Why didn't anyone previously say that?"
Basic game theory: Nash equilibriums and the idea of evolutionary game theory.
An unbelievable number of human problems map onto the property that a particular Nash equilibrium or evolutionarily stable strategy isn't guaranteed to be socially desirable (or even Pareto-efficient, or even when compared only to other Nash equilibrium).
Likewise, you really can't do non-trivial consequentialist reasoning without accounting for the impact of your proposed strategy on the strategies of other agents.
Once you've seen the patterns, you can avoid painstakingly deriving or arguing for the general picture over and over again, which probably consumes about a third of all policy and ethics debate. And more critically, you can avoid missing the importance of interlocking strategies in cases where it does matter: Another third of public debate is reserved for wondering why people are acting in the way that the actions of other people encourage them to act; or for helpfully suggesting that some group should move unilaterally along a moral gradient, and then blindly assuming that this will lead to a happier equilibrium once everything adjusts.
Basic chemistry. I hated chemistry the first 2-3 of years of high school (UK; I don't know if it's taught differently elsewhere). It was all about laundry lists of chemicals, their apparently random properties, and mixing them according to haphazard instructions with results that very occasionally corresponded approximately with what we were informed they should be. We were sort of shown the periodic table, of course, but not really enlightened as to what it all meant. I found it boring and pointless. I hated memorising the properties and relationships of the chemicals we were supposed to know about.
Then, all of a sudden (I think right at the start of year 10), they told us about electron shells. There was rhyme! There was reason! There were underlying, and actually rather enthralling and beautiful, explanations! The periodic table made SO MUCH SENSE. It was too late for me... I had already pretty much solidified in my dislike of chemistry, and had decided not to take an excessive amount of science at GCSE because similar (though less obvious) things had happened in biology and physics, too. But at least I did get that small set of revelations. Why on earth they didn't explain it to us like that right from the start, I have no idea. I would have loved it.
Electron shells didn't really make sense to me without having taken quantum mechanics. I mean, I understood that they were there, but I didn't have a clue why they ought to take on any particular shape.
Yeah, of course I also had no idea about the next layer down of explanation. But just having one layer seemed so much preferable to having none! It was the awareness that chemistry was dealing with a system, rather than a collection of boring facts, that made the difference to me.
Huh. Electron shells were one of the first things they taught us in our first-ever chemistry class, and to a 13-year-old I have to say they don't make much sense. I mean yeah, they shed some light upon the periodic properties of the table of elements, most of us could get that at that age, but man was it a pain in the ass to do the computations for them.
Then again maybe someone else would have reacted differently to exposure to the same info at the same age; maybe there's nothing that could make me in particular like chemistry. Well into college, I still have to take chemistry-like classes, and I still hate them.
I took A-level chemistry (= last two years of high school in the UK, ages ~16-18) and while indeed we learned a bit about electron shells and all that, I still found it really frustrating for similar reasons.
The thing I remember hating most was a category of question that was pretty much guaranteed to be in the exams. It went like this: "Describe and explain how property P varies across the elements down column C of the periodic table". And the answer was always this: "As we go down column C of the periodic table, characteristic A increases, which tends to increase property P, while characteristic B decreases, which tends to decrease property P." followed by some explanation of how (e.g.) the effect of A predominates to begin with but B is more important for the later elements, so that property P increases and then decreases. Or B always predominates, so property P just decreases. Or some other arbitrary fact about how A and B interact that you couldn't possibly work out using A-level chemistry.
So it was a big exercise in fake explanations. Really, you just had to learn what property P does as you go down column C of the periodic table, and then to answer these questions you also had to be able to trot out these descriptions of the underlying phenomena that do nothing at all to help you determine the answer to the questions.
The underlying problem here is that chemistry is really quantum mechanics, and figuring out these questions from first principles is way beyond what high-school students can do.
I seem to have had a different A-Level experience from you (1998-2000). There was a certain amount of learn-this-trend-by-rote, but I would easily class A-Level chemistry (which I didn't even do that well in) as one of the most practicably useful subject choices I've taken.
There's a bunch of stuff I know which my other similarly-educated peers don't, and which I attribute to A-Level chemistry. Some of it is everyday stuff about which paint and glue and cleaning products are appropriate for which purpose. Some of it is useful for reasoning about topical scientific claims, such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals or nutrition.
I even have a control case for this, in that my sister and I studied all the same subjects, only she took electronics at A-Level over chemistry. When one of us says something "obvious" which the other person doesn't recognise as such, we have a pretty good idea where it came from.
Yeah, you're never going to get fully to the bottom of things in a high school class. But it really does help when the curriculum at least tries to point you in the right direction!
I've never taken chemistry beyond high school, but my impression is that even at university level it involves large amounts of memorization. Like, we know that there is an underlying model, because chemistry is a special case of physics, but in practice using that model to make predictions is computationally unfeasible.
Thinking only of shells works for simple reactions, but has anyone ever had a "click" for organic chemistry reactions? Orbitals and shells are the only part of O-Chem that ever made sense to me...it seems like all my friends who "get it" are just practicing their butts off until they arrive at an intuition which isn't amenable to simple rule-based explanations (they seem to know the answers but can't always articulate why).
I'd really like it if organic chemistry made systematic sense.
Schmidhuber's formulation of curiosity and interestingness as a (possibly the) human learning algorithm. Now when someone says "that's interesting" I gain information about the situation, where previously I interpreted it purely as an expression of an emotion. I still see it primarily about emotion, but now understand the whys of the emotional response: it's what (part of) our learning algorithm feels like from the inside.
There are some interesting signaling implications as well.
I would be wary of concluding too much from phatic statements. "That's interesting" is more likely to be a phatic utterance than not in some contexts/with some people
Direct link to the page on the theory.
That's really interesting! (ha!) I recommend reading the full page for good examples, but here's a summary:
1) The idea of constructing things out of axioms. This is probably old hat to everyone here, but I was clumsily groping towards how to describe a bunch of philosophical intuitions I had, and then I was learning math proofs and understood that any "universe" can be described in terms of a set of statements, and suddenly I understood what finally lay at the end of every chain of why?s and had the words to talk about a bunch of philosophical ideas...not to mention finally understanding what math is, why it's not mysterious if physics is counterintuitive, and so on. (Previously I had thought of "axioms" as"assumptions", rather than building blocks.). Afterwards, I felt a little cheated, because it is a concept much simpler than algebra and it ought to have been taught in grade school.
2) Something more specialized: I managed to get a B.S. in neuroscience without knowing about the thalamus. I mean, knew the word and I knew approximately where it was and what it did, but I did not know that it was the hub for everything. (By which I mean, nearly every connection is either cortico-cortico or cortico-thalamic). After graduation, I was involved in a project where I had to map out the circuitry of the hippocampus, and suddenly... Oh! This is clearly one of the single most important organizational principles of the brain and I had no idea. After that, a whole bunch of other previously arbitrary facts gradually began to made sense...Why did no one simply show us a picture of a connectome before and point out that big spot right in the middle where it all converges?
3) We learned all this minutia of history, but no one really talked about the hunter-gatherer <--> agriculture transition and its causes. Suddenly, historical trends in religion, the demographic transition, nutrition, exercise, cultural differences, and a bunch of other things start clicking together.
I think what all these 3 things have in common, is that they really aught to have been among the very first lessons on their respective subjects...but somehow they were not.
This is a pet peeve of mine, Axioms as assumptions (or self-evident truths) seem to be a very prevalent mode of thinking in educated people not exposed to much formal maths.
What's wrong with treating axioms as assumptions?
Well, it's hard to articulate. There's of course nothing wrong with assumptions per se, since axioms indeed are assumptions, my peeve is with the baggage that comes with it. People say things like "what if the assumptions are wrong?", or "I don't think that axiom is clearly true", or "In the end you can't prove that your axioms are true".
These questions would be legitimate if the goal were physical truth, or a self-justifying absolute system of knowledge or whatever, but in the context of mathematics, we're not so interested in the content of the assumptions as we are in the structure we can get out of them.
In my experience, this kind of thing happens most often when philosophically inclined people talk about things like the Peano axioms, where it's possible to think we're discussing some ideal entity that exists independently of thought, and disappears when people are exposed to, say, the vector space axioms, or some set of axioms of set theory, where it becomes clear that axioms aren't descriptions but definitions.
Actually, you can ignore everything I've said above, I've figured out precisely what I have a problem with. It's the popular conception of axioms as descriptive rather than prescriptive. Which, I suppose OP was also talking about when they mentioned building blocks as opposed to assumptions.
I don't think it's "wrong" in the sense of "incorrect"... it's just that if you don't also realize that axioms are arbitrarily constructed "universes" and that all math takes place in the context of said fictional "universes", you kind of miss the deeper point. Thinking of them as assumptions is a simple way to teach them to beginners, but that's a set of training wheels that aught to be removed sooner rather than later, especially if you are using axioms for math.
And , handy side effect, your intuition for epistemology gets better when you realize that. (In my opinion).
About that, how would you evaluate the state of the typical undergrad neuroscience curriculum today and how relevant it is to modern knowledge about the organization and workings of the brain?
Hmm
I think the undergraduate curriculum is good enough to get the average college student up to a level where they are comfortable reading and understanding a scientific paper in biology even if they start out with only a very rudimentary knowledge of science coming in.
You spend the first 3 years kind of learning the basic fundamentals of biology, like how evolution and cells and hormones and neurons work, and I think for Lesswrong's demographic that sort of thing is general knowledge so most of y'all could skip it without any major issues. I found these courses challenging because of the amount of stuff to memorize, but I am not sure I found them useful. I kind of wish I could have replaced some of those introductory courses with work in computer science or a stronger biochem/chem foundation, because I already knew about evolution and mitochondria and that sort of thing.
The last 2 years, for me, were quite useful. In these upper level classes, professors in a given sub-specialty would select primary literature which was important to their field, and it would be discussed in depth. What you learn will largely depend on what the professor is passionate about. There are also classes where many different researchers come in and present their work, and one ends up picking up many little threads from that which can later be pursued at leisure. Despite already being comfortable with primary literature in neuroscience and psychology before joining these classes, I still found them very useful because of the specific content of the work I was exposed to. Many of these courses were technically graduate courses, but it is standard for undergraduates to attend them.
Overall, I think if you are generally comfortable reading scientiic papers in biology, bachelors-degree level neuroscience is not an extremely difficult subject for a motivated autodidact to acquire without formal coursework (assuming you have access to all the major scientific journals). The coursework is good - but there's no secret esoteric knowledge you can only acquire from the coursework. it's not necessarily better than self-study, but it's awesome when combined with self-study and is fairly decent even without any self-directed study.
Direct contact with researchers is definitely a very positive thing for keeping a pulse on stuff, knowing what is important to study and what isn't, and generally learning faster than you could on your own. You're also expected to join a lab during your undergrad, and you will inevitably learn a lot through that process.
TL:DR - As with many fields, if you want to be up to date on modern knowledge, there is absolutely no substitute for constantly skimming the new papers that come out. The undergraduate curriculum spends 2-3 years preparing you to successfully read a scientific paper in biology, and 1-2 years having you read papers which are selected to be particularly important in the field. Also, you will typically join a lab, which is certain to cause learning.
I used to be frustrated by the idea that my nation's stated principles were often undermined by its historical actions. Then I realized that this is true of every nation, everywhere at all times. Same with politicians, public figures, parents, companies, myself, etc.
Hypocritical actions happen all the time, and it is a victory when their severity and frequency is tempered. At the same time, justifications for those hypocritical actions abound. The key is not to take them at face value or reject them completely, but remember with humility that your favored group makes the same excuses at varying levels of validity.
So now I can empathize much more easily when people try to defend apparently hypocritical and reprehensible behavior. Even if I AM better than they are, I'm not qualitatively better, and its disingenuous to try to argue as if I am. This realization leads to a more pragmatic, more fact-and-context-sensitive approach to real-world conflicts of values.
I had many of these while reading Jaynes.
Bryan Caplan's "Myth of the Rational Voter" and "Mises, Bastiat, Public Choice and Public Policy."
The titles seem promising, but what concepts or insights did they brought about? Or why should I read them, if I had spare time?
I seem to recall that some Democrat and Republican donors have agreed not to give to their respective parties, but rather to charity, on the condition that their opponents do the same. Does anyone know about this? Mine and Google's combined efforts have been fruitless. Seems a very nice idea that could be used much more widely to re-distribute resources away from zero-sum games to games with joint interests.
I found http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/super-pac-money-flows-effort-divert-cash-charity-16050 with the search terms "political donors redirect to charity" on Google.
It doesn't appear to be active, possibly due to not getting FEC approval, though.
Searching "repledge charity" gives several more articles on this. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-influence-industry-new-group-hopes-to-divert-campaign-contributions-to-charities/2012/04/11/gIQAzF6QBT_story.html
Excellent!!! Many thanks. :) Exactly what I was looking for.
Natural experiments: I've been trying a new acne wash for the past 6 months, and although I felt like it was working, I wasn't sure. Then, the other day when I was applying it to my back, my partner noticed there was an area I wasn't reaching. In fact, there was an entire line on my back where I wasn't stretching enough to get the wash on. This line coincided exactly with a line of acne, while the rest of my back was clear.
Now I know the wash works for me.
Related: http://xkcd.com/700/
Do you mind sharing the brand and product name, for others?
I've been using this benzol peroxide wash.
Someone here mentioned the idea that making objects very cold was a more plausible source of unexpected physics leading to extinction than high energy physics because high energy events occur in the atmosphere all the time whereas there's no reason to expect any non-artificial cause of temperatures in the millKelvin range. Does someone have a source for this observation? I'm writing a post where I'd like to attribute this properly.
Cool risks outside the envelope of nature?
Yes. Thank you.
Hm, that's an interesting idea. I don't think it's at all workable, though. You can't mess up a stable equilibrium by making it colder, so the only option I see for cool novel physics at low temps is a spontaneously broken symmetry. Which will then re-symmetrize as it heats up in a way that is much more guaranteed than heating something up and then cooling it down.
I agree that it doesn't seem likely: part of why I wanted it was not the specific scenario but the point that it isn't always obvious when we we are pushing the universe into configurations where material is not naturally in and don't appear in nature in any way.
I think it is interesting in so far as you not only create setups wiith very low temperature but also with very regular structures. Structures where quantum computing is possible and exploits the calculation power of reality. I think it's at least conceivable that this could trigger novel effects. Especially so if the universe it a simulation where this could cause things like stack-overflow :-)
Could use an editor or feedback of some kind for a planned series of articles on scarcity, optimization, and economics. Have first four articles written and know what the last article is supposed to say, and will be filling in the gaps for a while. Would like to start posting said articles when there is enough to keep up a steady schedule.
No knowledge of economics required, but would be helpful if you were pretty experienced with how the community likes information to be presented. Reply to this comment or send me a message, and let me know how I can send you the text of the articles.
I'd be able to help. Contact info sent by PM.
Contact info sent.
On Sunday at 11 AM Eastern and 8 AM Pacific*, I will be playing a round of AI Box with a person who wishes to remain anonymous. I will be playing as AI, and my opponent will be playing as Gatekeeper (GK). The loser will pay the winner $25, and will also donate $25 to the winner's charity of choice. The outcome will be posted here, and maybe a write-up if the game was interesting. We will be using Tuxedage's ruleset with two clarifications:
The transcript will not be made public, sorry. We are looking for a neutral third party who will agree beforehand to read and verify the transcript. Preferably someone who has already played in many games, who will not have their experience ruined by reading someone else's transcript.
I've been using LyX for preparing my doctoral dissertation and I'm amazed that such a complete and capable tool isn't more widely known and used. I can't imagine preparing scientific documents now with anything other than LyX, and I can't imagine that I used to use software like MS Word for this purpose. Anyone have any other examples of obscure but amazingly capable software?
(I hope this doesn't sound condescending) but do you mean Latex, or LyX specifically? Latex itself seems almost humorously field-dependent: everywhere in the hard sciences and nowhere in business.
http://www.thebrain.com/ is a little known but amazingly useful knowledge modeling/ridiculously powerful mindmapping software.
Mind-mapping is something that would seem to be highly relevant to the LW community. Personally, though, I find that the restriction to a tree structure is too limiting. Unless I've completely misunderstood how mind-mapping works.
You haven't, but that's what makes personalbrain so awesome. It doesn't limit you to the tree structure,anything can be a parent or child of anything else, and there's sideways "jump" connections that don't follow the parent child relation at all.
Not to mention the ability to link to any file or website, take notes on each connection, and name the connections. It's an incredibly powerful piece of software.
I guess LyX must have improved a lot in the last few years. When I tried using it for my PhD thesis I had to give up after it refused to import classes and templates mandated by the university, and the documentation on how to deal with this issue was, well... open-sores level. I did use it to create a few snippets, later manually edited. It did not really save me any time.
Re other obscure software, Total Commander is a great Windows file manager, similar to the Linux Midnight Commander.
It seems weird that it would refuse to import templates, I've had no trouble with that at all. Even when templates use highly non-standard settings, you can still directly edit the LaTeX preamble in LyX, and done correctly that should take care of 99% of problems.
I was introduced to LaTeX via LyX as a freshman and found the interface very off-putting and confusing and forgot about the whole thing for years. When I found out I could just type a text file instead, run a few commands, and get the same gorgeous result, it was a revelation and I never went back to OpenOffice.
Probably not news to anyone here, but learning to use a good text editor like vim or emacs is hugely useful and I wish I hadn't waited so long to do it. Git for version control is pretty great too.
For me it was the exact opposite. I'd been using LaTeX for years before I discovered LyX. I can't imagine writing in raw LaTeX anymore. Especially, live math preview has become indispensable for me, as well as 'smart' label handling and intelligent handling of documents composed of multiple independent files (like chapters in a book).
I am also a massive fan of Lyx.
I'm only an undergrad physics major, but I'm in 2 classes where I have to submit moderately high level reports, and I'm working on a thesis. And I've only ever had to use one special format, which also happened to be the default format.
So far, I've found documentation to be eh, but I haven't had too many problems where that was an issue yet. The biggest problem is that my knowledge of LaTeX is sorely lacking because I've been using Lyx for everything!
There's some pretty compelling research that indicates most people dislike open office designs. It also seems to lower productivity.
Which leads to the question of why so many companies use open office designs. My guess is that open offices make the company seem more cool/laid-back and less stodgy than cubicle farms. This might help to attract employees, even though it actually makes them less happy in the long-run.
This is it, basically. You see it a lot in companies based on churning through employees rather than building up a stable longterm workforce. The open-plan spaces look hip and make newcomers feel like they're working in a Cool Modern Company, so they're more willing to endure the daily annoyances like half a dozen distracting conversations going on at once across the room. It doesn't matter that they eventually wear down under the realization that they are working in a Panopticon prison yard. In fact it's probably considered a feature instead of a bug - I can't think of a better way to make employees feel small and pressured to perform.
Cubicle farms might seem like the prime example of drudgery, but at least you get your own little space and have an unexposed back.
There's a good deal of research on how open offices can increase creativity, through concepts like propinquity. An open office may point to the fact that they value innovation over productivity.
That's the usual argument. The Davis meta-analysis cited in that New Yorker article found that open offices hurt creativity, which is what I would expect from a more distracting environment. Anyway if there is any good counter-evidence I would like to see it.
The New Yorker claims that the 2011 Davis review (not meta-analysis) found that open offices hurt creativity, but I don't see that in in the paper. It only uses the word "creativity" twice, once citing Csikszentmihalyi, and once in the bibliography. If you have read the paper and claim that it does talk about creativity, can you suggest a better word to search for or give a more specific citation?
Maybe this is the difference between the roles of "predator" and "prey". As a "prey", you hate open spaces. As a "predator", you love them. Guess who has the power to make the decision?
The bosses are probably making the decisions that feel right to them, ignoring the research. And maybe the employees' ability to endure the increased stress is some kind of costly signalling. (Not sure what exactly is signalled here: loyalty? self-confidence? resistance to stress?)
Was the author Gerald Durrell? I don't remember him specifically talking about that issue but he wrote a lot of humorous books about his time as a naturalist and helping run zoos.
I am such a worker, and my immediate boss sits literally right behind me. It's mildly uncomfortable, but not really much more uncomfortable than a traditional set of cubicles. It helps that my boss doesn't care if I'm e.g. reading this site instead of working at any given time, as long as I get my work done overall.
I estimate I would have about a 50% increase in work done if I had an office with a door, no increase if my boss was not in the same building and I had an open plan office, and no increase if I had traditional cubes (open plan offices really do make it easier to talk to people if you need to).
I could never work in an open-plan office. The entire idea is a nakedly aggressive intrusion into employees' personal space on the part of management.
A few day ago, I saw an interesting article on a site somewhat related to lesswrong. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to read it, so I bookmarked it.
Computer crashed, lost my last bookmarks and now I spent 2 hours trying to find this article, without luck. Here is the idea of the article, in a nutshell : we human are somewhat a king of learning machine, trying to build a model of the “reality”. In ML, overfitting means that in insisting too much on fitting the data, we actually get a worse out-of-sample performance (because we start to fit the modeling noise and the stochastic noise). By carrying this ML idea into the human realm, we can argue that insisting too much on consistency can be a liability rather than an asset in our model-building.
Does that decription rings someone bells ? If yes, please link the article :)
I still don't understand the apparently substantial difference between Frequentist and Bayesian reasoning. The subject was brought up again in a class I just attended—and I was still left with a distinct "... those... those aren't different things" feeling.
I am beginning to come to the conclusion that the whole "debate" is a case of Red vs. Blue nonsense. So far, whenever one tries to elaborate on a difference, it is done via some hypothetical anecdote, and said anecdote rarely amounts to anything outside of "Different people sometimes treat uncertainty differently in different situations, depending on the situation." (Usually by having one's preferred side make a very reasonable conclusion, and the other side make some absurd leap of psuedo-logic).
Furthermore, these two things hardly ever seem to have anything to do with the fundamental definition of probability, and have everything to do with the assumed simplicity of a given system.
I AM ANGRY
The whole thing is made more complicated by the debate between frequentist and Bayesian methods in statistics. (It obviously matters which you use even if you don't care what to believe about "what probability is", or don't see a difference.)
This debate is boring and old, people getting work done in ML/stats have long ago moved past it. My suggestion is to find something better to talk about: it's mostly wankery if people other than ML/stats people are talking.
They are the same thing. Gertrude Stein had it right: probability is probability is probability. It doesn't matter whether your interpretation is Bayesian or frequentist. The distinction between the two is simply how one chooses to apply probability: as a property of the world (frequentist) or as a description of our mental world-models (Bayesian). In either case the rules of probability are the same.
I saw Ex Machina this weekend. The subject matter is very close to LWs interests and I enjoyed it a lot. My prior prediction that it's "AI box experiment: the movie" wasn't 100% accurate.
Gur fpranevb vf cerfragrq nf n ghevat grfg. Gur punenpgref hfr n srj grezf yvxr fvatheynevgl naq gur NV vf pbasvarq, ohg grfgre vf abg rkcyvpvgyl n tngrxrrcre. Lbh pbhyq ivrj gur svyz nf rvgure qrcvpgvat n obk rkcrevrzrag eha vapbzcrgnagyl, be gur obk rkcrevzrag zbhyqrq gb znxr n pbzcryyvat/cbchyne svyz.
For those that worry it's Hollywood, hence dumb I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. The characters are smart and act accordingly, I spotted fewer than 5 idiot ball moments.
Script/movie development was advised by CSER advisor and AI/neuroscience expert Murray Shanahan (Imperial). Haven't had time to go see it yet, but looking forward to it!
Other than Superintelligence and Global Catastrophic Risks what should I read to find out more about existential risk?
"X-Events:The Collapse of Everything" covers some similar ground but from a more popular perspective.
What are the implications of this with Cryonics? What about cryonically freezing half of your brain?
They are mostly talking about the cortex, the outer wrinkled layer. Functionally, however, the cortex is completely useless without a whole suite of subcortical structures and actually only has something like 20% of your neurons. Its a part of the whole functional network, not the whole thing, though in mammals it expanded quite a bit and took on a lot of specialization. I dont know if theres such a thing as a 'generic' thalamus network vs 'your' thalamus network, sounds like a question for the connectomics researchers to get on.
A lot of these things A - lie near or on the midline and have much less lateralization and more crosstalk, B - are absolutely vital if you say dont want parkinsonism or to fall into permanent slow wave sleep. Hemispherectomies generally go after the cortex and white matter sometimes taking some of the superficial subcortical stuff, in chunks. The results of such things are usually much more positive in young people of course.
However, since you dont lose autobiographical memories from careful excision of brain parts it does indeed suggest that they're present and distributed throughout...
Let's assume that the information that makes you you is contained within a half cortext. What do you think the chances are that they'd be able to "figure the rest out"? Ie. integrate the half cortex with other parts (maybe biological, maybe mechanical).
Politics as entertainment
For many policy questions I normally foresee long term 'obvious' issues that will arise from them. However, I also believe in a Singularity of some sort in that same time frame. And when I re-frame the policy question as will this impact the Singularity or matter after the Singularity the answer is usually no to both.
Of course, there is always the chance of no Singularity but I don't give it much weight.
So my question is: Has anyone successfully moved beyond the policy questions (emotionally)? Follow up question: once you are beyond them do you look at them more as entertainment like which sports team is doing better? Or do you use them for signalling?
I just read a crapton of political news for a couple years until I was completely sick of it.
I also kind of live in a bubble, in terms of economic security, such that most policy debates don't realistically impact me.
High belief in a near singularity is unnecessary.
This reminds me forcefully with some of the politics associated with apocalypitic rapture theology. "X doesn't matter, Jesus is coming."
There is a line in the Talmud about how if one is busy planting a tree and someone comes to tell you the Messiah has come, you should finish planting the tree before you check it out.
I think I can pretty confidently say "yes." Well, emotions are still there, but I think they are more like the kinds of emotions a doctor might feel as he considers a cancer spreading through a patient and the tools they have to deal with it, not the sort of excitement politics in particular provokes.
Well, you are free to do what you want at that point, but I think economists look at them as scientific questions, ones that are quite important, though often not as important as people seem to think.
I am working on a series of articles about economics, and I would like one mini-series to be "How To Think About Policy" or something to that effect....
I remember somewhere in the sequences EY mentioned that Bayesianism was a more general method of which the scientific method was merely a special case. Now I find this, Dempster-Shafer theory, which according to Wikipedia is an even more general method, of which Bayesianism is merely a special case.
Has this topic been given any treatment here?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Dempster-Shafer+theory+site:lesswrong.com
11 results. That should get you started.
I think in many professions you can categorize people as professionals or auteurs (insofar as anyone can ever be classified, binaries are false, yada yada).
Professionals as people ready to fit into the necessary role and execute the required duties. Professionals are happy with "good enough", are timely, work well with others, step back or bow out when necessary, don't defend their visions or ideas when the defense is unlikely to be listened to. Professionals compromise on ideas, conform in their behavior, and to some degree expect others to do the same. Professionals are reliable, level-headed, and can handle crises or unexpected events. They may have a strong and distinct vision of their goals or their craft, but will subsume it to another's without much fuss if they don't think they have the stance or leverage to promote it. Professionals accurately assess their social status in different situations, and are reluctant to defy it.
On the worse end of this spectrum is the yes-man, the bureaucrat, and the aggressive conformer. On the better end are the metaphorical Eagle Scouts, the executive, the "fixers" who can come in and clean up any mess.
Auteurs are guided first by their own vision, maybe to the point of obsession. Auteurs optimize aggressively and wildly, but only for their own vision. Auteurs will interrupt you to tell you why their idea is better, or why yours is wrong. Auteurs have a hard time working together if they disagree, but can work well together if they agree, or with professionals who can align with their thinking. Auteurs don't care that their ideas are non-standard, or don't follow best practices, or have substantial material difficulties. Auteurs will let a deadline fly past if their work is not ready. Auteurs might look past facts that contradict thems. Auteurs don't feel that sorry if they make themselves a pain in the ass for others to move toward their goals. Auteurs will disregard status, norms, and feelings to evangelize.
On the worse end they are kooks, irrationally obstinate and arrogant, or quixotic ineffectuals. On the best they are visionaries, evangelists for great ideas, obsessive perfectionists who elevate their craft whether the material rewards are proportional to their pains or not.
I think LW might have more sympathy for the Auteurs, but I hope people recognize the virtues of the professional and the shortcomings of the auteur, and that there is a time and place to channel the spirit of each side.
I can buy these as character sketches of two imaginary individuals, but are there actual clusters in peoplespace here? There's a huge amount of burdensome detail in them.
It's not burdensome detail; its a list of potential and correlated personality traits. You don't need the conjunction of all these traits to qualify. More details provide more places to relate to the broad illustration I'm trying to make. But I'll try to state the core elements that I want to be emphasized, so that it's clearer which details aren't as relevant.
Professionals are more interested in achieving results, and do not have a specific attachment to a philosophy of process or decision-making to reach those results.
Auteurs are very interested in process, and have strong opinions about how process and decision-making should be done. They are interested in results too, but they do not treat it as separate from process.
And I'll add that like any supposed personality type, the dichotomy I'm trying to draw is fluid in time and context for any individual.
But I think it's worth considering because it reflects a spectrum of the ways people handle their relationship with their work and with coworkers.
Essentially, treat it as seriously as a personality test.
Do you think it's a circle?
I can see the " irrationally obstinate and arrogant" bureaucrats and "aggressive conformers" at one junction, and I can see evangelist Eagle Scouts and perfectionist fixers at the other junction.
Steve Jobs seems to be a classic second-junction type.
Are human ethics/morals just an evolutionary mess of incomplete and inconsistent heuristics? One idea I heard that made sense is that evolution for us was optimizing our emotions for long term 'fairness'. I got a sense of it when watching the monkey fairness experiment
My issue is with 'friendly ai'. If our ethics are inconsistent then we won't be choosing a good AI but instead the least bad one. A crap sandwich either way.
The worst part is that we will have to hurry to be the first to AI or some other culture will select the dominate AI.
Sublinear pricing.
Many products are being sold that have substantial total production costs but very small marginal production costs, e.g. virtually all forms of digital entertainment, software, books (especially digital ones) etc.
Sellers of these products could set the product price such that the price for the (n+1)th instance of the product sold is cheaper than the price for the (n)th instance of the product sold.
They could choose a convergent series such that the total gains converge as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = exp(-n) + marginal costs )
They could choose a divergent series such that the total gains diverge (sublinearly) as the number of products sold grows large (e.g. price for nth item = 1/n + marginal costs )
Certainly, this reduces the total gains, but any seller who does it would outcompete sellers who don't. And yet, it doesn't seem to exist.
True, many sellers do reduce prices after a certain amount of time has passed, and the product is no longer as new or as popular as it once was, but that is a function of time passed, not of items sold.
A psychological effect could be at play. If you pay $10 for a product and this causes the next person to pay $9 for it, it's an incentive against being the first to buy it. You would wait until others have bought it before buying. Or you might think the product is being priced unfairly and refuse to buy at all.
It seems that to counter this, you'd need another psychological effect to compensate. Like, for instance, offering the first set of buyers 'freebies' that actually have zero or near-zero cost (like 'the first 1000 people get to enter a prize-giving draw!')
Reminds me of kickstarter.
Snowdrift.coop is essentially trying to solve the same problem in a different way. Instead of changing the product price as more units are sold, they ask folks to finance its fixed component directly, using a game-theoretic mechanism that increases total contributions superlinearly as more people choose to contribute. (This boosts the effectiveness of any single user's contributions through a "matching" effect). However, there is no distinction between "earlier" vs. "later" contributors; they're all treated the same. The underlying goal is to generalize the successful assurance-contract mechanism to goods and services that do not have a well-defined 'threshold' of feasibility, especially services that must be funded continuously over time.
I don't think Snowdrift understands why communism failed (or economics in general).
It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure it has the psychology behind crowdfunding right. It seems to be constructed to minimize the risk donors carry in the event of a failed campaign, and to maximize the perceived leverage of small donations; but it does that at the expense of bragging rights and fine-grained control, which might make a lot of donors leery. I think you could probably tweak it to solve those problems, though.
It also does nothing at all to solve the accountability issues of traditional crowdfunding, but that's a hard problem. I wouldn't even mention it if they hadn't brought it up in the introduction.
(Also, that's some ugly-ass web design. I get that they're trying to go for the XKCD aesthetic, but it's... really not working.)
Yes, crowdfunding is mostly based on trust, not accountability. But a service that's funded continuously over time (the Snowdrift.coop model) ought to be inherently more accountable than a single campaign/project.
I think it's been constructed to maximize democracy -- the crowdthink determines the flow of money. I can't tell if the author considers the inevitable snowballing to be a feature or a misfeature (or even realizes it will happen).
I don't get what you're getting at.
Pricing is a well-studied area. Price discrimination based on time and exclusivity of 'first editions' and the like is possible, but highly dependent on the market. Why would anyone be able to sell an item with a given pricing scheme like 1/n? If their competitor is undercutting them on the first item, they'll never get a chance to sell the latter ones. And besides there's no reason such a scheme would be profit-maximizing.
One could note that natural markets are going to this direction. For example steam has pretty reliably games appear on sale year or two after their release. Savvy consumers already know to wait if they can. This can get so bad taht early access games hit sales before they are released!
I tired to bring this topic up at a LessWrong meeting I have been calling my thoughts on this direction as "contributionism".
There is some additional even more radical suggestions. Instead of treating at each new sell as lesser amount, retroactively lower the price for already happened purchases (I am pretty sure they dont' mind). Otherwise there is this contention that if two customers are about to buy the product they try to make the other guy buy first so they get the cheaper price (which leads to a mexican standoff that chills selling).
Also normally when a seller and a customer are negotiating for a price seller wants to make it high and the buyer wants it to go low. However if the seller fixes the total amount of money he wants form all of his products then the price negotiation is only about whether the buyers wants to opt in now that it is higher or later when it is lower. However if the price retroactively changes you are "ultimately" going to be spending the same amount of money. If you attach your money early you get earlier access and run the risk that the product never hits high sales numbers (ie that you do not get any returns on it).
However the more people attach money the more the instant price lowers and more money is prone to flow in. This can also be leveraged to overcome a coordination problem. Even if the current instant price too much for you the seller can ask you how much you would honestly be willing to pay for it. (Answering this question too high will not cost you (too much) money). Then when the next customer that doesn't quite have enough buying willingness he might still promise the same level of sum of it. At some point that enough promisers have visited the sum of the promises actually covers for whaqt the seller wants to get for all of his products combined. At this point we can inform the promisers of each others existence - ie that a working sale configuration has been found. This might be a lot of people for a small sum of money each indivudally totalling up to a considereable sum.
Howeer this runs contary to a lot of curretn economical "ethos". Essentially every seller is expected ot try make as much money with the products as possible, there is no sum that is "good enough" that he would settle for. There is also talk of profit motive and letting the pricing game go on is said to make the wheels of the economy run smoothly. However in practise sellers will settle at some price as they think the proabbility of getting more diminishes faster than the gain.
However instead of maximising profits we could set profits to be constant and minimise cost per user. Ie instead of trying to maximse the wealth transfer we try to make the sale happen with as little fuss as possible.
One of the current economys problems is also that advertising and such creates otherwise frivoulous needs that prodeucts can be marketed for. The customer is taken into the decision procees only in what product they choose from the super market self. The decision to build the factory and logistic chain is a money lord with a profit motive trying to be greedy.
However we start from the needs of the customer for example that "I want our village to be educated and I am willing to do 10 hours of work for that end". When you got 100 of these kind of people someone might come suggest aplan to build a school that would take about 150 hours + 50 hours of someone teaching. It turns out that for contrucetion 1.5 hours of work on average is required per villager. Howevver the teacher is doing 50 hours of work when his "fair share" would have only be 1.5 hours. Probably the teacher has other desires beside wanting the village to be educated, the other promise to work on those projects for 48.5 hours. Divided evenly amongs the rest of the 99 willing villagers this amounts to 0.5 hours on those other projects.
That is in this village scenario the customer/investors put in 2 hours of effort 1.5 which most do themself and part is focused on one teacher.
I am interested if anyone wants to talk start-up or similar thingies, or just plainly would be okay purchasing some kind of services in this manner. The most challenge I have faced that people don't like it when a product doesn't cost a fixed amount of money even if they could argue that it's a fixed cost + free money afterwards however it comes back. Also it reminds of a ponzi scheme. However you can never go into a negative price ie you can't profit by buying a product. At most you get the product for (practically) free.
I would like to point out that kick starter uses clever methods in making sure taht the donation amount doesn't degenerate into nothingness. Ie it has perks where you get something when you enough. I am not sure whether being the "not profit making version" of kickstarter is a big enough difference to go compete with such recognised thing. But it has other alluring properties. However it is hard to pitch as a venture capital idea because it is "anti-profit" the most close is that sellign in this way would slightly outcompete with a profit maker because the profit makes has to guess beforehand the price point right to exact digits in order to have similar performance. In practise sales deviate somewhat from projected sales, contributionistic sale is sure to make econimcal sense at whatever scale but a beforehand fixed pricepoint will always live in a slightly uncompatible scale.
I think you could probably model Kickstarter as a sneaky version of this.
Kickstarter is an excellent example of how to monetize affective biases :-D
Kickstarter implements dominant assurance contracts, e.g. it solves a coordination problem and takes a cut for doing so. It's an example of doing well by doing good.
Kickstarter is really sneaky, because I tend to assume (and I assume everyone assumes) that the preorders will get a better price than the postorders. But the only time I used kickstarter final cost was lower than what I paid. I don't know if that it is typical. Probably one should charge more to preorders for price discrimination reasons: they are the principle fans. But that is a different reason.
For the practical real-world analogue of this, look up price discrimination strategies.
Anyhow, this doesn't work out very well for a number of reasons. In short antiprediction form, there's no particular reason why price discrimination should be monotonic in time, and so it almost certainly shouldn't.
If they have less gains, then in what way are they outcompeting other sellers? If they want to sell the most copies, they should just give them away, or better yet, pay people to take them.
I have written a draft post on why prediction markets are confounded, and what implications this has for the feasibility of futarchy. I would very much appreciate any comments on the draft before I publish it. If anyone is willing to look at it, please send me a private message with your contact details. Thank you!
I intend to publish several posts on the Effective Altruism Forum in the coming weeks. Some of these articles seem to me like they would be apply to topics of rationality, i.e., assessing options and possibilities well to make better decisions. So, this is an open call for reviewers for these various posts. For topics for which I have insufficient content or information, I'm seeking coauthors. Reply in a comment, or send me a private message, if you'd be interested in reviewing or providing feedback on the any of the following. Let me know what how I can send you the text of the posts.
Does It Make Sense to Make A Multi-Year Donation Commitment to A Single Organization? Essentially, this already published comment.
Neglectedness, Tractability, And Importance/Value The idea of heuristically identifying a cause area based on these three criteria was more or less a theme of the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit. This three-prong approach was independently highlighted by Peter Thiel, not just for non-profit work but entrepreneurship and and innovation more generally, and Holden Karnofsky, as the basis for how the Open Philanthropy Project asks questions about what cause areas to consider. I would go over these three-prong approach in more detail.
What Different Types of Organizations Can Do At the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit, I met multiple entrepreneurs who suggested start-ups and for-profit efforts can produce through their goods or services provide an efficient mechanism for positive social impact in addition to the money to be donated that they generate for their owners or employees. Since then, I've noticed this idea popping up more. Of course, start-ups contrast with bigger corporations. Additionally, I believe there are different types of non-profit organizations, and their differences are important. Charities doing direct work (e.g., the Against Malaria Foundation), foundations (e.g., Good Ventures, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), research think tanks (e.g., Givewell, RAND), advocacy and awareness organizations (e.g., Greenpeace, the Future of Life Institute), scientific research projects (e.g. the International Panel on Climate Change), and political advocacy (Avaaz.org, Amnesty International) are all different. *To lump all "for-profit" types of work, and all "non-profit" types of work into two categories underrates the advantages and disadvantages of how to structure an organization driven toward a goal. *Different types of organizations differ across nations and law codes, the cultures and traditions of their respective sectors, and their structural limitations. It makes sense to me to be aware of such so those intending to pursue a goal(s) organizationally can figure out how best effectively achieve their goal(s).
Are there any updates on when the Sequences e-book versions are going to be released? I'm planning a reread of some of the core material and might wait if the release is imminent.
We don't have an official release date yet, but it will most likely come out in March, before Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ends.
An ancient extrasolar system with five sub-Earth-size planets
"To put that into perspective, by the time Earth formed, these five planets were already older than our planet is today."
I'm actually in the process of writing a discussion post on Great Filter issues that mentions this. It should be clear why this sort of thing should be pretty scary.
Incidentally this is the paper in question http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.06227
I look forward to it!
Tried making a blog and it wouldn't let me because "karma". Drafts can't be publicly read either so this is the best I can do.
Can we please have a feature where I can opt to instead of going through user XYZ's posts, I can just see the title and choose the one I want (or was looking for?)
So it'll be like, instead of:
XYZ's posts
[Title]
[TEXT]
[TEXT]
[TEXT]
[REPEAT]
It'll be
[TITLE WITH LINK]
[TITLE WITH LINK]
[TITLE WITH LINK]
[REPEAT AD EXHASTIUM]
Basically just like the sequences, where you have links to the posts themselves rather than the whole damn thing in one page.
And in the case of blogs, make it so that once you have 20 positive karma regardless of your negative karma. I guess you can sharpen this better than me because I'm probably not going to make a serious post (or one that will be taken seriously) ever In the case of drafts, make them unlisted and simply let people the ability to link to their own draft and let other view and comment on it.
It's worth estimating when existential risks are most likely to occur, as knowing this will influence planning. E.g. If existential risks are more likely to occur in the far future, it would probably be best to try to invest in capital now and donate later, but if they are more likely to occur in the near future, it would probably be best to donate now.
So, what's everyone's best estimates on when existential catastrophes are most likely to occur?
The BBC has an article about how Eric Horvitz (director of Microsoft Research's main lab) doesn't think AI poses a big threat to humanity.
Not a very high-quality article, though. A few paragraphs about how Horvitz thinks AI will be very useful and not dangerous, a few more paragraphs about how various other people think AI could pose a huge threat, a few kinda-irrelevant paragraphs about how Horvitz thinks AI might pose a bit of a threat to privacy or maybe help with it instead, the end.
Apparently Horvitz's comments are from a video he's made after getting the Feigenbaum Prize for AI work. I haven't looked at that yet; I suspect it's much more informative than the BBC article.
Could someone get past the paywall for this?
It's a paper linking some commonly used prescription drugs to increased risk of dementia, and none of the popular press articles I've seen about it say how large the increased risk is.
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2015/01January/Pages/media-dementia-scare-about-common-drugs.aspx appears to have more info than the abstract.
In the spirit of admitting when I am wrong, I would like to say that when /u/Azathoth123/ said that schools were encouraging children to be gay and transsexual, I thought he was being paranoid. I thought that schools were preaching tolerance, and this had been misinterpreted.
I was wrong, and he was right
Also, the strategy of asking children whether any of their friends are trans is bizarre, because (a) if about 0.1% of adults are trans, then you really wouldn't expect any children to be trans unless the population of the school is gigantic, regardless of the school's attitude to tolerance and (b) children should not be discussing their friend's private secrets with strangers.
I have nothing against transexuals, and in fact they seem like obvious allies of transhumanists. But, unlike homosexuality, 'being trapped in the wrong body' clearly causes a lot of psychological distress - otherwise people wouldn't undergo serious surgery to correct it (although this is not necessarly true of people who don't identify as either gender). As long as there is a possibility that it has partially psychological roots (apparently twin studies show 62% heritability), priming people at a young age (10) to induce gender identity disorder is insane.
Edit & clarification:
I think gender identity disorder (of the 'trapped in a body' form, not of the 'not identifying as either gender' form) is a mental disease because it causes suffering. This doesn't mean that transgender people need to feel bad about being trans, because that will just make matters worse. I've met people who are trans and I know people who suffering from other mental illnesses and I hope I'm not coming across as insensitive but I just don't see the point in mincing my words.
Edit 2:
Its been pointed out to me that these claims are allegations made by biased people who can't be trusted, and that even if the allegations are true, I still overstated the case.
Also, I'm defending a statement Azeroth123 made (schools are encouraging kids to be gay - although I'm not so sure about this now) while not endorsing his conclusions, which also might make what I have written seem confusing or even contradictory.
While it is good to acknowledge when one is wrong, this is hardly strong evidence. One has one school in one location making an allegation. There also seems to be a big leap between asking people if they know anyone trapped and pushing people to be gay or transsexual. (I agree though with your points in your second paragraph.)
I suppose that this is only an allegation at the moment, although other similar allegations about the same organisation pushing a left-wing agenda at the expense of education have been made, which makes the whole thing more plausible (plus there is Azathoth's original allegation).
Asking an adult if they know anyone who is trapped is ok. The problem is that asking a 10 year old primes them with a concept they would not previously have had. If there is some sort of train of thought one can go down, which ends with 'help I'm trapped in the wrong body' when they would otherwise not have had this problem, then you do not prompt them to start this train of thought. For mostly the same reason, you don't ask children "do your friends drink vodka?".
Essentially, its conceivably possible that the idea of transsexualism poses an information hazard to children.
Of the same magnitude as the idea of drinking alcohol, shooting guns, or doing stupid things on video..?
I tend to think that in the age of internet-connected smartphones the concept of protecting children from information hazards is... quaint and counterproductive.
Having said that, I would interpret the events which led to this discussion as authorities attempting to shape the kids' value system which is a different and, probably, a more dangerous thing.
Definitely not!
I would say that smartphones should have age filters on them, although I could equally say that in the internet age, the whole idea of sex education, gay or straight, is quaint and counterproductive.
I also agree that the far bigger issue is whether political indoctrination (I'm trying to think of a more positive way to phrase this, but I can't) of this form is justified. The impression I got from the article is that this is partially a reaction against the growth of fundamentalist Islamism in schools, where state funded teacher were caught teaching small children certain things like "Hindus drink their god's piss". Clearly, forcing schools to teach children about how lesbians have sex is going to really annoy the Islamists (although its not obvious whether this will make the problem of Islamism better or worse), but to avoid discrimination the same thing has to apply to Christian schools.
I suppose one could argue that enforcing certain cultural norms (e.g. the belief that all religions and sexual orientations are equally valid) is necessary to prevent society from breaking down into factions engaged in armed conflict with each other, which is far more important than any other issue we have discussed here.
OTOH... well I certainly don't hold either hetrosexuality or cissexuality as terminal values (my argument was purely about avoiding suffering), but I think some people, such as Azathoth, do, and it does seem rather unfair that the state can declare that your values are wrong and demand that your children hold different values.
I'm really not sure how to answer this.
I agree. We should encourage children to develop an interest in anonymous filter-dodging web access systems like Tor, securely encrypting their messages such that they can't be monitored for inappropriate language usage, and other related skills while they're still young.
Can/should a school teach that different racial groups are morally the same? What about that slavery is wrong? What about "be kind to each other and share your toys"? Is the difference purely that more people disagree with one claim as opposed to the others?
Let's add to that list.
Can/should a school teach that Kim Jong-un is the greatest human being who ever lived and that only his incessant efforts keep the people safe and prosperous? What about "it is the highest moral duty to immediately report all rule-breaking to the authorities"?
I want logical positivist schools that only teach scientifically verifiable truths about objective reality :)
But seriously, you make a good point. I think the number of people who agree with the claim is important, but there is perhaps a second issue in that some people claim that certain information can produce irreversible personality changes. If advocating homosexuality turned people gay (and shared environment does affect the prevalence of lesbians) then this causes a permanent hit to the utility function of a homophobe, whereas if some one wants their child not to share their toys ( because that's communism, maybe?) then the child could still change their mind after they leave school.
I would be opposed to the idea.
Um, as opposed to Christians who drink their god's blood..?
I am sorry, is the goal of the exercise to annoy Islamists..? 8-0
This historically has been argued A LOT. Pretty much every time the question of enforcing cultural norms came up. The funny thing is, those currently in power always argue that the cultural norms which help with keeping them on top are "necessary to prevent society from breaking down".
It didn't reach this level of specificity, but I remember similar questions on an allegedly anonymous survey passed around when I was in middle school (age 11 or 12, don't remember which). Along with a number of questions about sex and illegal drug use.
That was about when the War on Drugs and related moral panics were peaking, though.
This entirely depends on which path the causality takes.
Trans folks are much more depressed and tend to have much higher levels of mental illness than the general population.*
Obviously, experiences are different for different people. But most trans people experience extreme discomfort in the gender roles they are expected to perform and have some form of gender dysphoria. I would expect these things to be present regardless if they knew that the label "trans" exists. If this is the reason for the higher rates of mental illness, then encouraging awareness of what trans is will let people do things to help fix some of these issues.
However, if the causal path is that people become aware of the idea of being trans, then realize that they do not fit the gender they were assigned at birth, leading to higher rates of mental illness, that would be a different issue.
Anecdotally, almost all the trans people I know have the experience of learning what being trans is, then having an "Oh! That's I'm feeling" moment. This would be evidence for the first method.
(Side note: The term most trans people use is transgender rather than transexual, because it is the gender that is different. On a similar note, most trans people do not have the surgeries you were talking about.) *I am not counting gender identity disorder as a mental illness, both because I don't think it should be classified that way and because this statement would be pointless if I did.
I think there is a third causal path, which goes:
Thinking about being the opposite sex -> psychosomatic alteration of hormone levels during puberty-> structural differences in the brain -> transgender.
I'm not saying this is plausible, or that I have evidence for it. This is not my field. But AFAIK I cannot rule it out.
I would say that since transgender people are much more depressed, presumably due to being trapped in the wrong body (which, as we both mentioned, doesn't apply to all trans people) then GID is a mental illness because it causes depression and suffering.
This doesn't mean that transgender people need to feel bad about being trans, because that will just make matters worse. I know people who are trans and I know people who suffering from other mental illnesses and I hope I'm not coming across as insensitive but I just don't see the point in mincing my words.
I don't understand. Nothing in the article you linked to describes anyone
and the article isn't about what schools do, or even about what one school does. It's about what some government inspectors are alleged to have done, and I think a little context might be in order.
This is about the inspection of Grindon Hall Christian School. I think it's clear that the inspectors were concerned that the school might be instilling hostility to, and/or ignorance of, various things that conservative Christians commonly disapprove of: other religions, homosexuality, transsexualism. So they asked pupils some questions intended to probe this.
The school has issued a complaint about those questions. (This is where the stuff in the Telegraph article comes from.) The inspection report, now it's out, is extremely negative.
If the complaint made by the school is perfectly accurate, then it does sound as if the probing was done quite insensitively. Tut tut, naughty inspectors. But it's worth noting that complaints of this sort -- especially when, as one might suspect here, they're made partly in self-defence -- are not always perfectly accurate. And, e.g., if you look at the headmaster's letter of complaint to the authorities and his somewhat-overlapping complainy letter to parents of his pupils, you'll see that he apparently has trouble distinguishing "inspectors asked pupils whether they celebrate festivals of any religions other than Christianity" from "inspectors think the school should be celebrating festivals of other religions". Which is just silly, and doesn't give me much confidence in his ability to describe impartially (or even correctly) what happened in the inspection.
I suppose you can argue that even mentioning (e.g.) transsexualism is "encouraging" it in the rather aetiolated sense that children who have never heard of transsexualism are a bit less likely to end up being overtly transsexual. (But maybe correspondingly more likely to have no idea what it is they're going through and maybe kill themselves.) But it seems pretty clear that that isn't what Azathoth123 meant, and it's not (I think) what any reasonable reader would understand, by saying that "schools encourage children to be transsexual". (Even if any school were doing it, which I repeat this report doesn't even allege, never mind give evidence for.)
[EDITED to add: It is alleged that at this school (1) some teachers labelled girls "sluts", (2) there was a campaign of abuse against lesbian girls, ignored by staff, and (3) the school has links to some Christian group that "condemns all homosexual practice". The article I linked to is behind a paywall and I have no further details; given what a lot of Christian groups condemn all homosexual practice, #3 isn't necessarily terribly surprising. But if this sort of allegation was flying around before the inspection, or for that matter discovered during the inspection, then it might help to explain why the inspectors were asking such oh-so-insensitive questions. And it isn't the inspectors I'd blame for that.]
I don't see the encouraging there, other than possible "medical student syndrome". (When uncalibrated people hear "X suggests Y", they are prone to see tiny amounts of X and assume high probability of Y.) For example, a child with no realistic idea about what transsexuality means could mistake a thought "in this situation it would be (in far mode) better to be a boy/girl" for transsexuality; which could cause unnecessary turmoil.
Yes, this seemed very wrong to me, too. Even if the idea of teaching about sexuality was to increase tolerance, outing someone is wrong, and it could also inspire bullies to expand their arsenal of labels for their classmates.
But to put things in context, I still think the religious education is more harmful on the average, so it seems funny when people with cute ideas like "if you explore your sexuality, the sadistic omnipotent alpha male will torture you for eternity" complain about possible harm to children's sexuality caused by improper education.
If inducing trans and gay were that easy it would be as easy to cure it. It isn't.. Trans is so incurable that despite the side-effects it is considered much easier to change the body than the mind.
But I agree with your second paragraph. I'd say that there is such a thing as information hazard. You need anti-memes for such. And best before being exposed to the info-hazard. Kind like an innoculation. At least as a minor when you don't have a sufficiently general mindset to dispose with such ideas easily (stronger immune system).
That depends on the motivations and rationality of those doing the considering.
I don't think this follows. While it is true that one expects that something like that should be true in general, we know that as far as sex and gender issues, weird things can happen. In particular, sexual fetishes can apparently arise from fairly innocuous stimuli and once in place are extremely difficult to remove.
A self-improvement inquiry. I've got an irrational tendency to be too relaxed around other people; too sincere, transparent, and trusting. In general I'm very uninhibited and uncontrolled, and this goes to spectacular levels when I'm the slightest bit intoxicated. This has come back to bite me in more than one occasion.
I've had trouble finding documentation on how to improve on this. "Being too honest/sincere/open" doesn't seem like a common problem for people to have.
I said before that I was going through Lepore's Meaning and Argument. I was checking my answers for exercise 4.3 when I get to solution #27 and read:
To which I reply, "Whoaaaa." To be clear, problem #27 reads:
which appears to be related to solution #28, and there are 30 problems and 31 solutions. Looks like they removed the problem but not the solution.
Tighten up, Lepore. (And Lepore's editor.)
Small observation of mine. While watching out for sunk cost fallacy it's easy to go to far and assume that making the same spending is the rational thing. Imagine you bought TV and the way home you dropped it and it's destroyed beyond repair. Should you just go buy the same TV as the cost is sunk? Not neccesarily - when you were buying the TV the first time, you were richer by the price of the TV. Since you are now poorer, spending this much money might not be optimal for you.
In principle, absolutely.
In practice, trying to fit many observed instances to to a curved utility-money curve will result in an implausibly sharp curve. So unless the TV purchase amounts to a large chunk of your income, this probably won't match the behavior.
Rabin has a nice example of this for risk aversion, showing that someone who wasn't happy taking a -100:110 coin flip due to a utility-money curve would have an irrationally large risk aversion for larger amounts.
If the price of the TV is a small enough fraction of your wealth and there isn't any special circumstance that makes your utility depend in a weird way on wealth (e.g., there's a competition this weekend that you want to enter, it's only open to people who can demonstrate that their net wealth is at least $1M, and your net wealth is very close to $1M), then your decision to buy the TV shouldn't be altered by having lost it.
Some TVs are quite expensive and most people aren't very wealthy, so this particular case might well be one in which being one TV's cost poorer really should change your decision.
[EDITED to fix a trivial typo.]
A useful guide to interpreting statistical significance numbers in published papers.