I provide our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Work your brain and gain prestige by doing so in E-prime (or not, as you please).
I provide our monthly place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Work your brain and gain prestige by doing so in E-prime (or not, as you please).
One of the things I worry about the LW community is that we'll get too enamored of signaling rationality and become afraid to bounce ideas off each other that we're not quite sure are rigorous enough. This thought is brought on by the seemingly small number of top level posts that people try to make (given how many members we have). Are people refraining from posting after they see that one such thread gets voted down? I know how discouraging that can be, and it seems to me that it would be worse for the budding rationalist who is unsure of themselves. To some extent these monthly open threads help, but even in these comments seem pretty conservative. What say you LW? Are we capable of entertaining ideas without adopting them or is the risk of diluting the signal to noise ratio too high?
edit: it occurs to me that maybe I'd like to see another tab up top called "passing thoughts" or some such. The S:N ratio of the regular posts could be kept up and shorter posts could go there. We could all agree simply to not hold it against each other if we make a gaffe in these shorter posts (obvious mistake). I think this would be valuable because even if an idea is flawed it can generate great discussion (one of the reasons I enjoy hacker news). As an added bonus, this could serve as a space for "Ask LW" posts without disrupting anything.
Apropos my comment here, what do you guys think of making The Simple Math of Everything a reality?
The LW community probably has a diverse enough group of scholars to cover most of the major fields, and if not, we all have contacts. Splitting it up into sections for different individuals to write would make the project much easier to complete, provided someone is coordinating everything. What do you guys think?
Speaking of improving the LW website, I'd like to see little homepages for each user to provide a self-introduction, which I know has been suggested before, but in particular I'd like to see an implementation of userboxes as Wikipedia does (see my homepage there). This would allow people a standardized and easy-to-reference way to show their opinions on various common issues on the site.
I need relationship advice and I trust the wisdom and honesty of this community more than most of my friends. I created a new account to ask this question.
I'm with an incredibly compassionate, creative woman. She excels at her job, which is a "helping profession," and one which I believe improves social welfare far more than most. The sex is outstanding.
But she loves magical thinking, she is somewhat averse to expected-utility calculations, my atheism, etc. She is, by her own admission, subject to strong swings of emotion and at greater tha...
How should I go about deciding whether to continue this?
With science!
Specifically, the science of John Gottman. Short version: irreconcilable differences of viewpoint are not an intrinsic bar to a long-lasting relationship. The most potent relationship poison is contempt.
it would appear to the average person that most rational types are only moderately successful while all the extremely wealthy people are irrational. due to not seeing the whole sample space (that larger proportion of rational people enjoy moderate success vs a tiny fraction of irrational people who enjoy major success) I don't think a lot of our arguments gain traction with people. Most people infer from outliers as a matter of course.
Now combine this with the idea that signaling rationality is also signaling that we think we deserve more status and deci...
Educate me, LW hive mind. Robin Hanson has mentioned that prediction markets can give not just probability assessments on discrete sets of outcomes but also probability distributions over such assessments that let us know how (un)certain the market is concerning a particular assessment (or at least, that's how I interpreted his words). Does anyone have links to descriptions of such methods?
In case it hasn't already been posted by somebody, here's a nice talk about irrational behaviour and loss aversion in particular.
Perhaps this is a known issue, but since I haven't seen it discussed, I thought I'd mention that images don't seem to work in some (all?) of the old posts imported from Overcoming Bias. See for example:
The first few pics in that particular post is available from an external server if you click them, but I don't see them inline. The last picture seems to have been hosted at Overcoming Bias, and is no longer accessible.
Has anyone read: "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated by Donald E. Knuth"
http://www.amazon.com/3-16-Bible-Texts-Illuminated/dp/0895792524
...?
Hi,I have a question I haven't seen adressed after a qucik search. A friend of mine has been diagnosed with mild paranoid schizophrenia after he attacked his brother and got hospitalized thereafter. this was 2 years ago.he got (and still gets) medical treatment (some sort of neuroleptica, I suppose), but not much more. it sort of helped, he has a nice job and some superficial friendships (he never had great interest in things social). Now, the paranoia has surfaced again. I guess it was there all along, but nobody knew for sure. We're afraid it'll get wo...
And for another suggestion for the site itself, it should be possible to tag posts (especially articles, possibly comments) by language, and let users pick what languages they want to see. The interface wouldn't necessarily have to be translated; it would just be nice to have some support for multilingualism.
I'm considering donating to World Vision UK. Does anyone know much about them?
More generally, is there an easy way to find out how good a charity is? Are there reviews done by third parties?
This might not be the right place to ask, but I'll try anyway:
I read an online paper/article on global dictatorship / totalitarianism as an existential threat a while ago, but I can't find it anymore. I've probably found it on OB / SIAI's website or something like that in the first place, but can't find it there now. Would anyone know of such an article (or any good article on the topic, for that matter)?
Two links that might foster discussion:
http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/
Fun online rationality and anti-bias oriented games. I particularly enjoyed "Staying Alive" (testing conceptions of selfhood). And
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20086
Great discussion, I hadn't seen Gendler before but Bloom is always good. Reminded me a little of the IAT discussion here a few months ago.
What a critic might say about Less Wrong:
1) The purpose of the pursuit of rationality is to increase an individual's understanding of and power over their environment and the people in it.
2) The only way to establish rational thinking in a group of people not otherwise disposed towards it* is to establish a group norm of praising rational thinkers and shaming the irrational, by an established standard of rationality.
Therefore:
Rationalists are power-seekers, and the pursuit of rationality is inherently elitist and exclusionary.
*That is to say, the vast majority of people.
Would you even care enough to respond?
Anticipating critics and responses to them is largely a waste of time, if they are determined to be against you. Whatever you say will only be fodder for the next attack, and you are wasting precious time and energy being pinned down by their fire.
What we want is responses for people who are not the critics, but may have heard the critics' arguments. That's a considerably less-demanding audience.
How to design utility functions for safe AIs?
Make a utility function which will only emit positive values if the AI is disabled at the moment the solution to your precise problem is found. Ensure that the utility function will emit smaller values for solutions which took longer. Ensure the function will emit higher values for world which are more similar to the world as it would have been without the AI interfering.
This will not create friendly AI, but an AI which tries to minimize its interference with the world. Depending on the weights applied to the three parts, it might spontaneously deactivate though.
New rationalist blog: "gullibility is bad for you":
I am pretty sure that most strong male rationalists are better off learning how the typical woman thinks than holding out for a long-term relationship with a strong female rationalist. Since this point is probably of general interest, I put it in a top-level post.
Converting her to your worldview sounds like a bad idea in general. An additional consideration that applies in your particular situation is that converting a helping professional from deontologism to consequentialism will more likely than not make her less effective at work (because helping professionals need all the help they can get to care enough about their patients and clients, and worldview is definitely one source of significant help in that regard).
Nobody has responded to the following:
I, too, will refrain from commenting because you probably mean "strong swings of mood" and I do not have romantic experience with a moody woman. I do have romantic experience with a fiery woman, i.e., a woman easily aroused to strong negative emotions, but I doubt that is what you mean: in what I am calling a "fiery" woman, the emotion always dissipates quickly -- usually in a few minutes.
You say,
I would consider that a very positive sign in a prospective sexual partner -- maybe an extremely positive sign (the reason for my uncertainty being that I have never been with a woman whose expected global utility was as high as you describe) -- a sign that would make me pursue the woman much more keenly. The fact that you use language such as "would have net-benefits for her and for the world long-term" (emphasis mine) suggests to me that you are like me in the relevant characteristics and consequently should take it to be a very positive sign, too.
The most I can say about the global expected utility (i.e., expected effect on the world in the long term) of any of my girlfriends up to now is that (1) she has many close friendships of long duration, and she is very caring and helpful to those friends or that (2) she is a resourceful and clearly productive member of the labor force and does not harm anyone unless you consider the occasional cheating of the government a harm. If I were with a woman whose expected global utility was much higher than any of my girlfriends up to now, there is a good chance that I could become much more unconditionally loving to her than I have been to any of my girlfriends up to now. By "unconditionally loving" I mean being helpful and caring to her without any regard for how much she has done for me or is expected to do for me.
So, that is why I would consider what you wrote a very positive sign: lack of expected global utility is my best current guess as to what has been holding me back from being more unconditionally loving to my girlfriend up to now. (Why I even want to become more unconditionally loving to my girlfriend is a long story.)
And yeah, I know that "expected global utility of the girlfriend" is an odd and cold phrasing, but if that oddness or coldness is enough to prevent you from reading this comment, then we are probably too different for the advice in this comment to be of any use to you.
Thanks very much for your thoughts, and for making a top level post on the topic. Yes, her contribution to social welfare is something I find very attractive, and you help me remember just how important and rare that is.