He is also running to be U.S. President, briefly posted on LW, and wrote an Amazon review of my book. He has managed to get lots of publicity for transhumanism, and I think on net will do tranhumanism lots of good.

EVEN MATERIALISTS CRAVE RELIGION

Even materalists crave some things that are traditionally associated with religion.

FTFY.

We should do something about this meme that "meaning" has to be associated with "believing in ontologically basic mental things".

I would like to see a published list of recommended improvements that could be made to lesswrong, (discussed and voted on by people) and then consider using your $$ to put a bounty up to pay someone to implement solutions. Do you think that would work?

I personally dislike the way that discussion posts age. It is doubtfully the most reasoning that can be done on a post where posts seem to die after a week, nor are we getting the most out of them when they are "too far behind us" in about two weeks. Not sure how to solve this, but its been bugging me for a while now.

Since utilions are a unit of caring and Less Wrong (the website) has helped me immensely in making the transition from a somewhat despondent college graduate to a software engineer job with an annual salary + benefits, is there any way I can donate some dollars towards the site's upkeep?

Currently the site is run officially run by MIRI, CFAR and FHI. If you want to donate money to thank for LW's existence donating it to one of those three organisations makes the most sense.

Apart from just donating you can also support CFAR by taking part in a CFAR workshop.

Please take some status for doing this :-)

I've wondered for a while now if we could do a Kickstarter and use the money to hire someone to upgrade the site or to implement some of the suggestions that people have been making.

I've been a regular on LW and have obtained a PhD and well-paying job since my time here. I've been wondering, since we have a lot of seemingly-successful people on this site, can't we form some kind of group to bring rational thinking to the masses? Society at large seems extremely mistrustful of scientists and scientific opinion at the moment. It would be great if we could do something meaningful to change that.

I can honestly say that utilizing a memory palace and linking was a significant jump in my life. I started training myself in their use about a year ago, but never had to put them into action in a constrained time frame until recently. It felt wonderful. Currently working on incorporating spaced repetition into my routine. My chief problem is prioritizing lists. Figuring out what needs to be memorized in a subject requires some understanding, and I usually lack that in subjects I'm deeply interested in.

A combination of mnemonic techniques and mental math methods that I'd never encountered in childhood make a huge difference. I wonder why they are not taught in schools.

CARVER encourages tertiary recon to validate whatever data was initially gathered. I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem for a neo-rationalist civilian or SOCOM, but when it's applied in regular Army, the element that's engaged in tertiary recon has incentive to simply agree with the initial report, especially if that's the sort of thing command encourages.

That's about all the topics I have serious familiarity with on that thread. Will check out the rest.

I asked my son Alex to post this because I'm proud of his writing skill, but also to show a challenge of raising a child without religion. He is far from obsessed with death, and told me he is thinking of death less than 1% of the time. Still, it would be comforting to be able to honestly tell him that he has nothing to fear from death, although knowing Alex he would use this as a counterargument when I tell him to be safe by, for example, buckling his seat-belt or looking both ways when crossing the street.

(The line spacing got all wacko, sorry about that)

That prompted me to look up how to make line breaks in Markdown syntax, which I'd been wondering about myself for a while.

Try typing two or more spaces and then hitting enter
whenever you want a new line.

Do it if you can.

That last part plays a role in my thinking. But I'd consider the world ban idea if I thought for a second that we could convince, not only China, but every nation-level player that might pose a threat. If you're imagining a UN ban that does the job, you have either a mental picture of AI research or a level of confidence in the UN that I find bizarre.

If society doesn't end first, banning X-risks research worldwide is an effort that must be prolonged indefinitely, always ensuring that nobody ever fiddles with her computer in a way that could create an AGI. This means that with time the probability to enforce successfully the ban always decreases.
Building an FAI instead, is an effort that once accomplished stays so: its probability, however small, might even increase with time.

You make the mistake of equating something being generally banned and it not happening. Selling MDMA is generally banned. On the other hand it's still possible to purchase it in many places.

It's extremely hard to ban the research worldwide, and then it's extremely hard to enforce such decision.

Firstly, you'll have to convince all the world's governments (btw, there are >200) to pass such laws.

Then, you'll likely have all powerful nations doing the research secretly, because it provides some powerful weaponry / other ways to acquire power; or just out of fear that some other government will do it first.

And even if you somehow managed to pass the law worldwide, and stopped governments from doing research secretly, how would you stop individual researchers?

The humanity hasn't prevented the use of nuclear bombs, and has barely prevented a full-blown nuclear war; while nuclear bombs require national-level industry to produce, and are available to a few countries only. How can we hope to ban something which can be researched and launched in your basement?

One can imagine someone who hears promotion of the AMF but doesn't grok effective altruism deciding that it means they should be researching Malaria. Even without such promotion, Malaria is a big-name disease and I wouldn't be surprised at non-EAs ending up contributing to an oversupply of malaria researchers because they don't realise that some disease that's less of a big deal but has fewer people working on it might be better.

I think the actions of the Gates Foundation matter more than GiveWell's when it comes to the general public impression that malaria research is important.

By some estimates around "one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria." This just might be contributing to the medical community's interest in malaria.

Prestige as viewed by students or professors doesn't match funding provided by NIH, which focuses on diseases that affect Americans, both by mandate and because of lobbying by individuals. Other sources of funding are drug companies that don't have much opportunity to sell to poor people, and disease-specific charities, established by rich people because of relatives who have the diseases of rich people.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with prestige, but the perk of a field trip.

I have two somewhat contradictory arguments.

First, this is probably a poor candidate for the great filter because it lacks the quality of comprehensiveness. Remember that a threat is not a candidate for a great filter if it merely exterminates 90%, or 99%, of all sentient species. Under those conditions, it's still quite easy to populate the stars with great and powerful civilizations, and so such a threat fails to explain the silence. Humans seem to have ably evaded the malthusian threat so far, in such a way that is not immediately recognizable as a thermodynamic miracle, so it's reasonable to expect that a nontrivial fraction of all civilizations would do so. At least up to our current stage of development.

Second, I'll point out that bullets two and four are traits possessed by digital intelligences in competition with one another (possibly the first as well), and they supplement it with a bullet you should have included but didn't- functional immortality. These conditions correspond to what Nick Bostrom calls a 'multipolar scenario', a situation in which there exist a number of different superintelligences with contradicting values. And indeed, there are many smart people who think about the dangers of these selection pressures to a sufficiently advancd civilization.

So, malthusian pressures on biological systems are unlikely to explain the apparent lack of spacefaring civilizations. On the other hand, malthusian pressures on technologically optimized digital entities (possibly an obligate stage of civilization) may be much more of a threat, perhaps even one deserving the name 'Great Filter'.

Your Malthusian collapse seems to be conditional on some particulars of aliens' biology, but the Great Filter has to be very very general and almost universal.

More generally, you can imagine a lot of failure modes where an alien species evolves to become intelligent, but cannot build technological civilization because it cannot achieve large scale social cooperation.

They're r-selected like insects, i.e. their natural reproduction process involves creating lots of children and then allowing most to die.

That doesn't seem like it would lend itself to evolving culture. Specifically, since parents don't invest in their offspring they don't tell them what they've learned. Thus no matter how smart individuals are, knowledge doesn't pass to the next generation.

I think a too easy reproduction mechanism means not evolving intelligence. The selective pressure for human intelligence could not have came from the environment or else many species would be similarly intelligent like how many species can fly. It was some sort of a competition inside our species, probably sexual. And when reproduction is easy, sexual competition is not so tight. In fact, the most likely answer is that the runaway explosion of intelligence that resulted in us must be probably a mutually reinforcing process: intelligence made reproduction harder, hence more sexual competition, hence more pressure for intelligence.

How did intelligence make reproduction harder? Through big heads making childbirth harder. Frankly I don't know why didn't evolution just came up with the idea of giving women gigantic hips and large vaginas, but what happened instead is that babies are born far too prematurely so that their head size is not too big, and thus require a huge amount of care and investment after birth. This, postnatal maternal investment, then intensified sexual competition and thus pressure for more intelligence.

This really rules out the external eggs.

This filter applies even before they invent technology. Brains use lots of energy and development time. This is typically selected against. Therefore most organisms only evolve the minimum amount of intelligence they need. And human level intelligence is never an advantage in most environments.

So you need some really weird set of conditions to create an environment that selects for high intelligence, and doesn't select too strongly against energy efficiency or development time. I don't know what these conditions are, but they only occurred once on Earth, over hundreds of millions of years. This suggests these conditions occur very rarely, and we might just be very lucky.

How do you know meetups all meetups attract "losers"? What is - to you - the defining characteristic of such "losers"? How certain are you that your personal experience with one kind of meetup generalizes well to all meetups? How do you know there are fewer or no losers elsewhere, e.g. on the internet?

meta: I neutralised the downvote here but in future you can probably find a way to be more delicate than the use of the word "loser". I understand the sentiment; but maybe there are better words.

Socially inept (genuinely socially inept)

Also there is probably a specific branch of loser that you are avoiding more than others; I for one can tolerate some loser-ish behaviours for limited periods of time. i.e. addictive personalities, a trait I avoid surrounding myself with; but can live with if thats an orthogonal trait to a group I am visiting.

In kinda answer to your question;

Background: I run a lesswrong group - we are not on meetup. I have run other groups in the past and attend several groups as well.

From another LW group; and something I take to be true; (from the inside of a group) meetup seems to cross promote your group to many many people; whether they are relevant people or not; is not up to meetup to deal with. They then show up; and realise that they are not quite the target; then leave. In the mean-time your group gets diluted while the meetup-style deluge of people appear and disperse.

<them people I try to avoid> happen less often than I have expected. From personal experience; trying out a group once does not equal permanent commitment; its worth trying once; if only to see who the <losers> are in your town and decide it is in fact worth avoiding them.

From a cost/benefit or utilons perspective; you are burning a few hours for a range of opportunities including meeting new people; finding new good things and learning new things.

What do you want to optimize for? ("everything" is not a good answer)

The scandal about /r/fatpeoplehate directed my attention to the obesity problem and its outcomes and one weird angle I figured out is that people are increasingly better at harming themselves with things that considered harmless. For example, we would be horrified if we saw a 8 year old child purchase vodka or drugs, but purchasing chocolate looks entirely innocent and harmless. And yet, it seems, more and more adults can kill themselves with chocolate and pizza.

The interesting thing here is that sugar or similar things do not give such a high as alcohol or most drugs and the health effects are far more visible, a wide girth is more visible and less likely to be hidden by an Ugh Field than a scarred liver.

So it sounds a lot like this is a particularly unlikely form of destructive hedonism, low pay-off and highly visible costs. Why is it becoming so popular then?

The best answer I could figure out was ease. It is simply far easier than finding a drug dealer and less shameful than chugging whiskey I guess.

The lesson is that even in self-destructive hedonism there is a growing trend to go for the easy and not too much fun (chocolate) not the hard and much fun (drugs). I think back in 1968 an acid-dropping hippie would have simply called that lazy or boring.

My point is here a kind of a "not with a bang but with a whimper" kind of outcome, not particularly spectacularly ka-boomish Great Filters but simply the loss of energy and drive.

Possibly relevant: Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Panel - The Price Of Modern Life Is Depression And Loneliness.

One of the main points I got from that is that it is not at all clear that mental illness is growing, because one thing that has definitely been growing is the sensitivity of diagnosis and if there was any growth of mental illness it'd just be obscured by that.

I'd add that alcoholism can mask a lot of smaller but more complicated mental issues, and since alcoholism is going down, those should be becoming more visible.

When considering candidates for the Great Filter, you must keep in mind that it stopped all the to-be universe conquerors in our past light cone. Your suggestion doesn't seem that insurmountable.

I am not really sure what you are asking here, maybe a rewording could help. But let me add something else. I remember the huge holy wars on Reddit 10 years ago about various programming paradigms, object-oriented being one and functional the other and so on. While today OOP is incredibly popular and widespread, it has its own drawbacks. Detractors say it was mainly made for simulation and it is very easy to get lost in simulational, "what is what" type of problems like X is an subclass of Y or Z, what is the proper type for something or things like that, so these structural issue, instead of doing what programming is arguably about: writing algorithms to process data. Of course I don't want to start those debates over, I just want to say OOP is generally as simulational paradigm. Or you could say OOP is a map. And sometimes simulational approaches are an overkill, and sometimes not the best idea. This was for example one anti-OOP article: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

My programs are not very complicated, but it is suprising how far I can get with plain simple basic structural programming paradigm. This means basic types, basic data structures like arrays or hashes, and functions that process them. Adding a bit of a functional programming paradigm i.e. instead of looping over arrays, mapping a function or lambda function to them takes it even further.

My point is that one decision is to be done really early: am I more or less simulating something? Then OOP. Am I trying to massage some input data into a different form of output data? Probably structural with a bit of functional does it. If the language itself is OOP like Java, structural programming largely means using public static classes as functional libraries, not instantiating them, just calling their methods as functions. int four = Math.add(2,2) type of approach, that is what is generally called structural here, where the class is just a function library.

You want to learn about programming paradigms, and maybe also design patterns.

Programming paradigms are usually described as traits of programming languages, and sometimes lead to flame wars about which programming language is best. I recommend seeing programming paradigms as obligations you accept, and get some benefits in return. Some languages make those obligations mandatory, but sometimes you can decide to voluntary accept the obligation of some programming paradigm even in a language that doesn't require it naturally. For example, even if you want to program in Java, I would recommend learning some functional languages just to see what advantages those languages offer and how do they achieve it, so that when you return to writing Java code, you will have an option to write it in a way that provides you some of those advantages.

For example: Even in Java you can decide to write functions that don't use global variables. I mean functions that only use the values of their explicit input parameters, and only call other functions which follow the same rule. At first sight, this may seem like an pointless obligation, inconvenient in some situations. However, if you carefully write a part of program like this, you will not have to worry about multithreading: because those functions only use their explicit inputs, you can run them in multiple parallel threads, and there will be no bugs. (Which is not a small thing, because multithreading bugs are sometimes really annoying to find.) People who are not familiar with functional languages and frequently use global variables usually produce multithreaded code full of bugs, which in turn makes them afraid of multithreading. By understanding the trade-offs, you will be able to write code that works well in multithreaded applications, and you will not even have to think too much about it. You will just follow the rules.

The big picture in my opinion is this: You have an idea of a program you want to make. Let's suppose your specification is unambiguous -- if you would tell me, a human, what you want to do, I would be able to do exactly that program without giving you further question. Why can't a sufficiently smart compiler do this? I mean, this would be the ultimate form of programming. It would still be a programmer's duty to give an unambiguous description, but beyond that, anything you do, is merely compensating for imperfections of today's programming languages. (Also, if your description is not unambiguous, a good compiler should tell you that.)

Think about it. Not just like "yeah, I also wish programming was easier", but instead as someone who decided to create such perfect programming language; someone who is ready to do that hard job in the following decades. What problems would you have to solve? Let's ignore parsing natural language; suppose there is a formal syntax and the programmers have to follow it. What you want to avoid is forcing programmers to write unnecessary code; the code that does not contribute to their goals, but is required to solve some technical problem imposed by your language.

For example, let's suppose that you have a list of numbers, and you want to get a list of squares of these numbers. From {10, 20, 30} you want {100, 400, 900}. Compare the following solutions in pseudocode:

1)

a list of (X * X) for X in {10, 20, 30}

2)

a new empty list of integers called L
for each X in {10, 20, 30}:
... append X * X to L

3)

for brevity, {10, 20, 30} will be called Z
an integer called N, initially zero
a new list of integers called L, with the same size as Z
while N is smaller than size of Z:
... X is the N-th element of Z
... put X * X into N-th position of L
... increase N by one

The first approach is Python or Perl, the second one is Java, and the third one is C or Basic. All of the pseudocodes were written to accomplish the same goal, but what a difference there is in legibility! (JavaScript would be somewhere between the first and second one; it supports both styles.)

The first one says what needs to be done. The second one must first create an empty list, and then process the values in the existing list, because it lacks brief idioms for converting lists to lists. It's actually worse than it seems: for example, in the second example, the items in the list must be processed sequentially. Imagine that instead of "X * X" you would have a difficult function that takes a whole minute to compute. Luckily, you also have three processors available. The first program, hypothetically, could let each processor compute the function for one item (the calculations for individual items are independent), and then put the results together, so the whole computation would only take one minute. But the second program must process the items sequentially, otherwise the "append" commands could be executed in a wrong order. The third program specifies so much it is difficult to see what exactly was the intention of the programmer -- imagine reading thousands of lines like this.

So, if you want to make a perfect programming language, you should have good idioms for list processing (how about other data structures? which ones? could you devise a fully general approach?), and it would be nice if it could recognize where to use multithreading, so you don't have to write it specifically. This is already rather difficult and we have only touched the surface.

Don't read documentation. It is for people who already know the general outlines, not for people who want to know what programming is, or what object-oriented programming is. You need a textbook. There's probably one specific to Android Apps, but it's more important to get a good textbook than one that is precisely tailored to your goals.

Why did you decide to keep a reading journal in the first place? This might help you come to an answer.

I have taken notes on fiction only a few times when reading for pleasure - mostly in reading sf when some new idea or speculation made me wonder about its further implications and I jotted it down for discussion with other like minded people. That worked fine and I still do it once in a while. I also took notes once or twice when reading fiction as part of a reading group, again with the idea of highlighting discussion points that interested me. But I felt that taking notes detracted from the actual reading and enjoying part of reading - discussion wasn't any different without notes.

I have contemplated doing it but never actually done it. The benefit I idly imagine I might get doesn't have anything to do with re-reading the notes later; I hope it might improve the attention I pay and the amount I retain. (I am horrified at the number of books on my shelves that I know I have read but can remember scarcely anything about.) Both of these surely matter less for fiction than for non-fiction.

It is very necessary when reading certain Greg Egan novels.

Since I have a hard time remembering names (not just of people, I have a huge list of gene names at my desk in the lab) sometimes I need to make a minor-character list for a book.

he can give me a guaranteed 10% ROI

Heh. Ask him to actually guarantee it -- that is, structure the transaction as a loan yielding 10% (or 15%) with him fully liable for the principal and the interest. See if he agrees :-/ Don't forget to check that the counterparty (the borrower) has assets to pay you back.

There are financial securities called REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) which invest in property (sometimes commercial, sometimes rental, read the prospectus) and return the income to you less a haircut. As a sanity check you can take a look at how high returns do they provide.

I have a friend who invests in rental real estate, and he says he can give me a guaranteed 10% ROI if I invest $10,000+ with him, or 15% if I invest $100,000+.

I don't believe it. If he could guarantee it, he would instead borrow from a bank at 3-5% as much as he can (potentially using his house as a collateral) and invest that. Besides, at that rate of return, other investors would flock in, including fund managers, and saturate the market.

Theoretically, the market portfolio, which is the efficient portfolio according to Modern Portfolio Theory should replicate the world's assets weighted by value. For America, household (and non-profit) net worth is ~$85T and the value of real estate holdings is ~$14T (value less mortgages) (source), so about 16% is pretty justifiable. This is all pretty back of the envelope though.