(This is a "Pareto translation" of Bring up Genius by László Polgár, the book recently mentioned at Slate Star Codex. I hope that selected 20% of the book text, translated approximately, could still convey 80% of its value, while taking an order of magnitude less time and work than a full and precise translation. The original book is written in an interview form, with questions and answers; to keep it short, I am rewriting it as a monologue. I am also taking liberty of making many other changes in style, and skipping entire parts, because I am optimizing for my time. Instead of the Hungarian original, I am using an Esperanto translation Eduku geniulon as my source, because that is the language I am more fluent in.)

Introduction

Genius = work + luck

This is my book written in 1989 about 15 years of pedagogic experiment with my daughters. It is neither a recipe, nor a challenge, just a demonstration that it is possible to bring up a genius intentionally.

The so-called miracle children are natural phenomena, created by their parents and society. Sadly, many potential geniuses disappear without anyone noticing the opportunity, including themselves.

Many people in history did a similar thing by accident; we only repeated it on purpose.

1. Secrets of the pedagogic experiment

1.1. The Polgár family

The Polgár sisters (Susan, Sofia, Judit) are internationally as famous as Rubik Ernő, the inventor of the Rubik Cube.

Are they merely their father's puppets, manipulated like chess figures? Hardly. This level of success requires agency and active cooperation. Puppets don't become geniuses. Contrariwise, I provided them opportunity, freedom, and support. They made most of the decisions.

You know what really creates puppets? The traditional school system. Watch how kids, eagerly entering school in September, mostly become burned out by Christmas.

Not all geniuses are happy. Some are rejected by their environment, or they fail to achieve their goals. But some geniuses are happy, accepted by their environment, succeed, and contribute positively to the society. I think geniuses have a greater chance to be happy in life, and luckily my daughters are an example of that.

I was a member of the Communist Party for over ten years, but I disagreed with many things; specifically the lack of democracy, and the opposition to elite education.

I work about 15 hours a day since I was a teenager. I am obsessed with high quality. Some people say I am stubborn, even aggressive. I am trying hard to achieve my goals, and I experienced a lot of frustration; seems to me some people were trying to destroy us. We were threatened by high-ranking politicians. We were not allowed to travel abroad until 1985, when Susan was already the #1 in international ranking of female chess players.

But I am happy that I have a great family, happy marriage, three successful children, and my creative work has an ongoing impact.

1.2 Nature or nurture?

I believe that any biologically healthy child can be brought up to a genius. Me and my wife have read tons of books and studies. Researching the childhoods of many famous people that they all specialized early, and each of them had a strongly supportive parent or teacher or trainer. We concluded: geniuses are not born; they are made. We proved that experimentally. We hope that someone will build a coherent pedagogical system based on our hypothesis.

Most of what we know about genetics [as of 1989] is about diseases. Healthy brains are flexible. Education was considered important by Watson and Adler. But Watson never actually received the "dozen healthy infants" to bring up, so I was the first one to do this experiment. These are my five principles:

* Human personality is an outcome of the following three: the gifts of nature, the support of environment, and the work of one's own. Their relative importance depends on age: biology is strongest with the newborn, society with the ten years old, and later the importance of one's own actions grows.

* There are two aspects of social influence: the family, and the culture. Humans are naturally social, so education should treat the child as a co-author of themselves.

* I believe that any healthy child has sufficient general ability, and can specialize in any type of activity. Here I differ from the opinion of many teachers and parents who believe that the role of education is to find a hidden talent in the child. I believe that the child has a general ability, and achieves special skills by education.

* The development of the genius needs to be intentionally organized; it will not happen at random.

* People should strive for maximum possible self-realization; that brings happiness both to them and to the people around them. Pedagogy should not aim for average, but for excellence.

2. A different education

2.1. About contemporary schools

We homeschooled our children. Today's schools set a very low bar, and are intolerant towards people different from the average by their talent or otherwise. They don't prepare for real life; don't make kids love learning; don't instigate greater goals; bring up neither autonomous individuals nor collectives.

Which is an unsurprising outcome, if you only have one type of school, each school containing a few exceptional kids among many average ones and a few feeble ones. Even the average ones are closer to the feeble ones that to the exceptional ones. And the teacher, by necessity, adapts to the majority. There is not enough space for individual approach, but there is a lot of mindless repetition. Sure, people talk a lot about teaching problem-solving skills, but that never happens. Both the teachers and the students suffer at school.

The gifted children are bored, and even tired, because boredom is more tedious than appropriate effort. The gifted children are disliked, just like everyone who differs from the norm. Many gifted children acquire psycho-somatic problems, such as insomnia, headache, stomach pain, neuroses. Famous people often had trouble at school; they were considered stupid and untalented. There is bullying, and general lack of kindness. There are schools for gifted children in USA and USSR, but somehow not in Hungary [as of 1989].

I had to fight a lot to have my first daughter home-schooled. I was afraid school would endanger the development of her abilities. We had support of many people, including pedagogues, but various bureaucrats repeatedly rejected us, sometimes with threats. Finally we received an exceptional permission by the government, but it only applied for one child. So with the second daughter we had to go through the same process again.

2.2. Each child is a promise

It is crucial to awaken and keep the child's interest, convince them that the success is achievable, trust them, and praise them. When the child likes the work, it will work fruitfully for long time periods. A profound interest develops personality and skills. A motivated child will achieve more, and get tired less.

I believe in positive motivation. Create a situation where many successes are possible. Successes make children confident; failures make them insecure. Experience of success and admiration by others motivates and accelerates learning. Failure, fear, and shyness decrease the desire to achieve. Successes in one field even increase confidence in other fields.

Too much praise can cause overconfidence, but it is generally safer to err on the side of praising more rather than less. However, the praise must be connected to a real outcome.

Discipline, especially internal psychological, also increases skills.

I believe the age between 3 and 6 years is very important, and very underestimated. No, those children are not too young to learn. Actually, that's when their brains are evolving the most. They should learn foreign languages. In multilingual environments children do that naturally.

Play is important for children, but play is not an opposite of work. Gathering information and solving problems is fun. Provide meaningful activities, instead of compartmentalized games. A game without learning is merely a surrogate activity. Gifted children prefer games that require mental activity. There is a continuum between learning and playing (just like between work and hobby for adults). Brains, just like muscles, becomes stronger by everyday activity.

My daughters used intense methods to learn languages; and chess; and table tennis. Is there a risk of damaging their personality by doing so? Maybe, but I believe the risks of damaging the personality by spending six childhood years without any effort are actually greater.

When my daughters were 15, 9, 8 years old, we participated in a 24-hour chess tournament, where you had to play 100 games in 24 hours. (Most participants were between age 25 and 30.) Susan won. The success rates during the second half of the tournament were similar to those during the first half of the tournament, for all three girls, which shows that children are capable of staying focused for long periods of time. But this was an exceptional load.

2.3. Genius - a gift or a curse?

I am not saying that we should bring up each child as a genius; only that bringing up children as geniuses is possible. I oppose uniform education, even a hypothetical one that would use my methods.

Public ideas of geniuses is usually one of two extremes. Either they are all supposed to be weird and half-insane; or they are all supposed to be CEOs and movie stars. Psychology has already moved beyond this. They examined Einstein's brain, but found no difference in weight or volume compared with an average person. For me, genius is an average person who has achieved their full potential. Many famous geniuses attribute their success to hard work, discipline, attention, love of work, patience, time.

All healthy newborns are potential geniuses, but whether they become actual geniuses, depends on their environment, education, and their own effort. For example, in the 20th century more people became geniuses than in the 19th or 18th century, inter alia because of social changes. Geniuses need to be liberated. Hopefully in the future, more people will be free and fully developed, so being a genius will become a norm, not an exception. But for now, there are only a few people like that. As people grow up, they lose the potential to become geniuses. I estimate that an average person's chance to become a genius is about 80% at age 1; 60% at age 3; 50% at age 6; 40% at age 12; 30% at age 16; 20% at age 18; only 5% at age 20. Afterwards it drops to a fraction of percent.

A genius child can surpass their peers by 5 or 7 years. And if a "miracle child" doesn't become a "miracle adult", I am convinced that their environment did not allow them to. People say some children are faster and some are slower; I say they don't grow up in the same conditions. Good conditions allow one to progress faster. But some philosophers or writers became geniuses at old age.

People find it difficult to accept those who differ from the average. Even some scientists; for example Einstein's theory of relativity was opposed by many. My daughters are attacked not just by public opinion, but also by fellow chess players.

Some geniuses are unhappy about their situation. But many enjoy the creativity, perceived beauty, and success. Geniuses can harm themselves by having unrealistic expectations of their goals. But most of the harm comes from outside, as a dismissal of their work, or lack of material and moral support, baseless criticism. Nowadays, one demagogue can use the mass communication media to poison the whole population with rage against the representatives of national culture.

As the international communication and exchange of ideas grows, geniuses become more important than ever before. Education is necessary to overcome economical problems; new inventions create new jobs. But a genius provokes the anger of people, not by his behavior, but by his skills.

2.4. Should every child become a celebrity?

I believe in diversity in education. I am not criticizing teachers for not doing things my way. There are many other attempts to improve education. But I think it is now possible to aim even higher, to bring up geniuses. I can imagine the following environments where this could be done:

* Homeschooling, i.e. teaching your biological or adopted children. Multiple families could cooperate and share their skills.

* Specialized educational facility for geniuses; a college or a family-type institution.

Homeschooling, or private education with parental oversight, are the ancient methods for bringing up geniuses. Families should get more involved in education; you can't simply outsource everything to a school. We should support families willing to take an active role. Education works better in a loving environment.

Instead of trying to a find a talent, develop one. Start specializing early, at the age of 3 or 4. One cannot become an expert on everything.

My daughters played chess 5 or 6 hours a day since their age of 4 or 5. Similarly, if you want ot become a musician, spend 5 or 6 hours a day doing music; if a physicist, do physics; if a linguist, do languages. With such intense instruction, the child will soon feel the knowledge, experience success, and soon becomes able to use this knowledge independently. For example, after learning Esperanto 5 or 6 hours a day for a few months, the child can start corresponding with children from other countries, participate at international meet-ups, and experience the conversations in a foreign language. That is at the same time pleasant, useful for the child, and useful for the society. The next year, start with English, then German, etc. Now the child enjoys this, because it obviously makes sense. (Unlike at school, where most learning feels purposeless.) In chess, the first year makes you an average player, three years a great player, six years a master, fifteen years a grandmaster. When a 10-years old child surpasses an average adult at some skill, it is highly motivating.

Gifted children need financial support, to cover the costs of books, education, and travel.

Some people express concern that early specialization may lead to ignorance of everything else. But it's the other way round; abilities formed in one area can transfer to other areas. One learns how to learn.

Also, the specialization is relative. If you want to become e.g. a computer programmer, you will learn maths, informatics, foreign languages; when you become famous, you will travel, meet interesting people, experience different cultures. My daughters, in addition to being chess geniuses, speak many foreign languages, travel, do sports, write books, etc. Having deep knowledge about something doesn't imply ignorance about everything else. On the other hand, a misguided attempt to become an universalist can result in knowing nothing, in mere pretend-knowledge of everything.

Emotional and moral education must do together with the early specialization, to develop a complex personality. We wanted our children to be enthusiastic, courageous, persistent, to be objective judges of things and people, to resist failure and avoid temptations of success, to handle frustration and tolerate criticism even when it is wrong, to make plans, to manage their emotions. Also, to love and respect people, and to prefer creative work to physical pleasure or status symbols. We told them that they can achieve greatness, but that there can be only one world champion, so their goal should rather be to become good chess players, be good at sport, and be honest people.

Pedagogy puts great emphasis on being with children of the same age. I think that mental peers are more important than age peers. It would harm a gifted child to be forced to spend most of their time exclusively among children of the same age. On the other hand, spending most of the time with adults brings the risk that the child will learn to rely on them all the time, losing independence and initiative. You need to find a balance. I believe the best company would be of similar intellectual level, similar hobbies, and good relations.

For example, if Susan at 13 years old would be forced to play chess exclusively with 13 years old children, it would harm both sides. She could not learn anything from them; they would resent losing constantly.

Originally, I hoped I could bring up each daughter as a genius in a different field (e.g. mathematics, chess, music). It would be a more convincing evidence that you can bring up a genius of any kind. And I believe I would have succeeded, but I was constrained by money and time. We would need three private teachers, would have to go each day to three different places, would have to buy books for maths and chess and music (and the music instruments). By making them one team, things became easier, and the family has more things in common. Some psychologists worried that children could be jealous of each other, and hate each other. But we brought them up properly, and this did not happen.

This is how I imagine a typical day at a school for geniuses:

* 4 hours studying the subject of specialization, e.g. chess;

* 1 hour studying a foreign language; Esperanto at the first year, English at the second, later choose freely; during the first three months this would increase to 3 hours a day (by reducing the subject of specialization temporarily); traveling abroad during the summer;

* 1 hour computer science;

* 1 hour ethics, psychology, pedagogy, social skills;

* 1 hour physical education, specific form chosen individually.

Would I like to teach at such school? In theory yes, but in practice I am already burned out from the endless debates with authorities, the press, opinionated pedagogues and psychologists. I am really tired of that. The teachers in such school need to be protected from all this, so they can fully focus on their work.

2.5. Esperanto: the first step in learning foreign languages

Our whole family speaks Esperanto. It is a part of our moral system, a tool for equality of people. There are many prejudices against it, but the same was true about all progressive ideas. Some people argue by Bible that multiple languages are God's punishment we have to endure. Some people invested many resources into learning 2 or 3 or 4 foreign languages, and don't want to lose the gained position. Economically strong nations enforce their own languages as part of dominance, and the speakers of other languages are discriminated against. Using Esperanto as everyone's second language would make the international communication more easy and egalitarian. But considering today's economical pressures, it makes sense to learn English or Russian or Chinese next.

Esperanto has a regular grammar with simple syntax. It also uses many Latin, Germanic, and Slavic roots, so as a European, even if you are not familiar with the language, you will probably recognize many words in a text. This is an advantage from pedagogical point of view: you can more easily learn its vocabulary and its grammar; you can learn the whole language about 10 times easier than other languages.

It makes a great example of the concept of a foreign language, which pays off when learning other languages later. It is known that having learned one foreign language makes learning another foreign language easier. So, if learning Esperanto takes 10 times less time than learning another language, such as English, then if already knowing another foreign language makes learning the second one at least 10% more efficient, it makes sense to learn Esperanto first. Also, Esperanto would be a great first experience for students who have difficulty learning languages; they would achieve success faster.

3. Chess

3.1. Why chess?

Originally, we were deciding between mathematics, chess, and foreign languages. Finally we chose chess, because the results in that area are easy to measure, using a traditional and objective system, which makes it easier to prove whether the experiment succeeded or failed. Which was a lucky choice in hindsight, because back then we had no idea how many obstacles we will have to face. If we wouldn't be able to prove our results unambiguously, the attacks against us would have been much stronger.

Chess seemed sufficiently complex (it is a game, a science, an art, and a sport at the same time), so the risks of overspecialization were smaller; even if children would later decide they are tired of chess, they would keep some transferable skills. And the fact that our children were girls was a bonus: we were able to also prove that girls can be as intellectually able as boys; but for this purpose we needed an indisputable proof. (Although, people try to discount this proof anyway, saying things like: "Well, chess is simple, but try doing the same in languages, mathematics, or music!")

The scientific aspect of chess is that you have to follow the rules, analyze the situation, apply your intuition. If you have a favorite hypothesis, for example a favorite opening, but you keep losing, you have to change your mind. There is an aesthetic dimension in chess; some games are published and enjoyed not just because of their impressive logic, but because they are beautiful in some sense, they do something unexpected. And – most people are not familiar with this – chess requires great physical health. All the best chess players do some sport, and it is not a coincidence. Also it is organized similarly to sports: it has tournaments, players, spectators; you have to deal with the pain of losing, you have to play fair, etc.

3.2. How did the Polgár sisters start learning chess?

I don't have a "one weird trick" to teach children chess; it's just my general pedagogical approach, applied to chess. Teach the chess with love, playfully. Don't push it too forcefully. Remember to let the child win most of the time. Explain to the child that things can be learned, and that this also applies to chess. Don't worry if the child keeps jumping during the game; it could be still thinking about the game. Don't explain everything; provide the child an opportunity to discover some things independently. Don't criticize failure, praise success.

Start with shorter lessons, only 30 minutes and then have a break. Start by solving simple problems. Our girls loved the "checkmate in two/three moves" puzzles. Let the child play against equally skilled opponents often. For a child, it is better to play many quick games (e.g. with 5-minute timers), than a few long ones. Participate in tournaments appropriate for the child's current skill.

We have a large library of different games. They are indexed by strategy, and by names of players. So the girls can research their opponent's play before the tournament.

When a child loses the tournament, don't criticize them; the child is already sad. Offer support; help them analyze the mistakes.

When my girls write articles about chess, it makes them think deeply about the issue.

All three parts of the game – opening, middle game, ending – require same amount of focus. Some people focus too much on the endings, and neglect the rest. But at tournament, a bad opening can ruin the whole game.

Susan had the most difficult situation of the three daughters. In hindsight, having her learn 7 or 8 foreign languages was probably too much; some of that time would be better spent further improving her chess skills. As the oldest one, she also faced the worst criticism from haters; as a consequence she became the most defensive player of them. The two younger sister had the advantage that they could oppose the same pressures together. But still, I am sure that without those pressures, they also could have progressed even faster.

Politicians influenced the decisions of the Hungarian Chess Association; as a result my daughters were often forbidden from participation at international youth competitions, despite being the best national players. They wanted to prevent Susan from becoming the worldwide #1 female chess player. Once they even "donated" 100 points to her competitor, to keep Susan at the 2nd place. Later they didn't allow her to participate in the international male tournaments, although her results in the Hungarian male tournaments qualified her for that. The government regularly refused to issue passports to us, claiming that "our foreign travels hurt the public order". Also, it was difficult to find a trainer for my daughters, despite them being at the top of world rankings. Only recently we received a foreign help; a patron from Netherlands offered to pay trainers and sparring partners for my daughters, and also bought Susan a personal computer. A German journalist gave us a program and a database, and taught children how to use it.

The Hungarian press kept attacking us, published fake facts. We filed a few lawsuits, and won them all, but it just distracted us from our work. The foreign press – whether writing from the chess, psychological, or pedagogical perspectives – was fair to us; they wrote almost 40 000 articles about us, so finally even the Hungarian chess players, psychologists and pedagogues could learn about us from them.

At the beginning, I was a father, a trainer, and a manager to my daughters. But I am completely underqualified to be their trainer these days, so I just manage their trainers.

Until recently no one believed women could play chess on level comparable with men. Now the three girls together have about 40 Guiness records; they repeatedly outperformed their former records. In a 1988 interview Karpov said: "Susan is extraordinarily strong, but Judit... at such age, neither me nor Kasparov could play like Judit plays."

3.3. How can we make our children like chess?

Some tips for teaching chess to 4 or 5 years old children. First, I made a blank square divided into 8x8 little squares, with named rows and columns. I named a square, my daughter had to find it; then she named a square and I had to find it. Then we used the black-and-white version, and we were guessing the color of the named square without looking.

Then we introduced kings, in a "king vs king" combat; the task was to reach the opposing row of the board with your king. Then we added a pawn; the goal remained to reach the opposing row. After a month of playing, we introduced the queen, and the concept of checkmate. Later we gradually added the remaining pieces (knights were the most difficult).

Then we solved about thousand "checkmate in one move" puzzles. Then two moves, three moves, four moves. That took another 3 or 4 months. And only afterwards we started really playing against each other.

To provide an advantage for the child, don't play with less pieces, because that changes the structure of the game. Instead, provide yourself a very short time limit, or deliberately make a mistake, so the child can learn to notice them.

Have patience, if some phase takes a lot of time. On stronger fundamentals, you can later build better. This is where I think our educational system makes great mistakes. Schools don't teach intensely, so children keep forgetting most of what they learned during the long spaces between the lessons. And then, despite not having fully mastered the first step, they move to the second one, etc.

3.4. Chess and psychology

Competitive chess helps develop personality: will, emotion, perseverance, self-discipline, focus, self-control. It develops intellectual skills: memory, combination skills, logic, proper use of intuition. Understanding your opponent's weakness will help you.

People overestimate how much IQ tests determine talent. Measurements of people talented in different areas show that their average is only a bit above the average of the population.

3.5. Emancipation of women

Some people say, incorrectly, that my daughter won the male chess championship. But there is officially no such thing as "male chess championship", there is simply chess championship, open to both men and women. (And then, there is a separate female chess championship, only for women, but that is considered second league.)

I prepared the plan for my children before they were born. I didn't know I would have all girls, so I did not expect this special problem: the discrimination of women. I wanted to bring up my daughter Susan exactly according to the plan, but many people tried to prevent it; they insisted that she cannot compete with boys, that she should only compete with girls. Thus my original goal of proving that you can bring up a genius, became indirectly a goal of proving that there are no essential intellectual differences between men and women, and therefore one can't use that argument as an excuse for subjugation of women.

People kept telling me that I can only bring up Susan to be a female champion, not to compete with men. But I knew that during elementary school, girls can compete with boys. Only later, when they start playing the female role, when they are taught to clean the house, wash laundry, cook, follow the fashion, pay attention to details of clothing, and try getting married as soon as possible – when they are expected to do other things than boys are expected to do – that has a negative impact on developing their skills. But family duties and bringing up children can be done by both parents together.

Women can achieve same results, if they can get similar conditions. I tried to do that for my daughters, but I couldn't convince the whole society to treat them the same.

We know about differences between adult men and women, but we don't know whether they were caused by biology or education. And we know than e.g. in mathematics and languages, during elementary and high schools girls progress at the same pace as boys, and only later the differences appear. This is an evidence in favor of equality. We do not know what children growing up without discrimination would be like.

On the other hand, the current system also provides some advantages for women; for example the female chess players don't need to work that hard to become the (female) elite, and some of them don't want to give that up. Such women are among the greatest opponents of my daughters.

4. The meaning of this whole affair

4.1. Family value

I am certain that without a good family background the success of my daughters would not be possible. It is important, before people marry, to have a clear idea of what expect from their marriage. When partners cooperate, the mutual help, the shared experiences, education of children, good habits, etc. can deepen their love. Children need family without conflicts to feel safe. But of course, if the situation becomes too bad, the divorce might become the way to reduce conflicts.

To bring up a genius, it is desirable for one parent to stay at home and take care of children. But it can be the father, too.

[Klára Polgár says:] When I met László, my first impression was that he was an interesting person full of ideas, but one should not believe even half of them.

When Susan was three and half, László said it was time for her to specialize. She was good at math; at the age of four she already learned the material of the first four grades. Once she found chess figures in the box, and started playing with them as toys. László was spending a lot of time with her, and one day I was surprised to see them playing chess. László loved chess, but I never learned it.

So, we could have chosen math or foreign languages, but we felt that Susan was really happy playing chess, and she started being good at it. But our parents and neighbors shook their heads: "Chess? For a girl?" People told me: "What kind of a mother are you? Why do you allow your husband to play chess with Susan?" I had my doubts, but now I believe I made the right choice.

People are concerned whether my children had real childhood. I think they are at least as happy as their peers, probably more.

I always wanted to have a good, peaceful family life, and I believe I have achieved that. [End of Klára's part.]

4.2. Being a minority

It is generally known that Jewish people achieved many excellent results in intellectual fields. Some ask whether the cause of this is biologic or social. I believe it is social.

First, Jewish families are usually traditional, stable, and care a lot about education. They knew that they will be discriminated against, and will have to work twice as hard, and that at any moment they may be forced to leave their home, or even country, so their knowledge might be the only thing they will always be able to keep. Jewish religion requires parents to educate their children since early childhood; Talmud requires parents to become the child's first teachers.

4.3. Witnesses of the genius education: the happy children

I care about happiness of my children. But not only I want to make them happy, I also want to develop their ability to be happy. And I think that being a genius is the most certain way. The life of a genius may be difficult, but happy anyway. On the other hand, average people, despite seemingly playing it safe, often become alcoholics, drug addicts, neurotics, loners, etc.

Some geniuses become unhappy with their profession. But even then I believe it is easier for a genius to change professions.

Happiness = work + love + freedom + luck

People worry whether child geniuses don't lose their childhood. But the average childhood is actually not as great as people describe it; many people do not have a happy childhood. Parents want to make their children happy, but they often do it wrong: they buy them expensive toys, but they don't prepare them for life; they outsource that responsibility to school, which generally does not have the right conditions.

And when parents try to fully develop the capabilities of their children, instead of social support they usually get criticism. People will blame them for being overly ambitious, for pushing the children to achieve things they themselves failed at. I personally know people who tried to educate their children similarly to how we did, but the press launched a full-scale attack against them, and they gave up.

My daughters' lives are full of variety. They have met famous people: presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors, princess Diana, millionaires, mayors, UN delegates, famous artists, other olympic winners. They appeared in television, radio, newspapers. They traveled around the whole world; visited dozens of famous places. They have hobbies. They have friends in many parts of the world. And our house is always open to guests.

4.4. Make your life an ethical model

People reading this text may be surprised that they expected a rational explanation, while I mention emotions and morality a lot. But those are necessary for good life. Everyone should try to improve themselves in these aspects. The reason why I did not give up, despite all the obstacles and malice, is because for me, to live morally and create good, is an internal law. I couldn't do otherwise. I already know that even writing this very book will initiate more attacks, but I am doing it regardless.

And morality is also a thing we are not born with, but which needs to be taught to us, preferably in infancy. And we need to think about it, instead of expecting it to just happen. And the schools fail in this, too. I see it as an integral part of bringing up a genius.

One should aim to be a paragon; to live in a way that will make others want to follow you. Learn and work a lot; expect a lot from yourself and from others. Give love, and receive love. Live in peace with yourself and your neighbors. Work hard to be happy, and to make other people happy. Be a humanist, fight against prejudice. Protect the peace of the family, bring up your children towards perfection. Be honest. Respect freedom of yourself and of the others. Trust humanity; support the communities small and large. Etc.

(The book finishes by listing the achievements of the Polgár sisters, and by their various photos: playing chess, doing sports. I'll simply link their Wikipedia pages: Susan, Sofia, Judit. I hope you enjoyed reading this experimental translation; and if you think I omitted something important, feel free to add the missing parts in the comments. Note: I do believe that this book is generally correct and useful, but that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with every single detail. The opinions expressed here belong to the author; of course, unless some of them got impaired by my hasty translation.)

LW has a problem. Openly or covertly, many posts here promote the idea that a rational person ought to be able to self-improve on their own. Some of it comes from Eliezer's refusal to attend college (and Luke dropping out of his bachelors, etc). Some of it comes from our concept of rationality, that all agents can be approximated as perfect utility maximizers with a bunch of nonessential bugs. Some of it is due to our psychological makeup and introversion. Some of it comes from trying to tackle hard problems that aren't well understood anywhere else. And some of it is just the plain old meme of heroism and forging your own way.

(Warning: completely obvious reasoning that I'm only posting because I haven't seen it spelled out anywhere.)

Some people say, expanding on an idea of de Finetti, that Bayesian rational agents should offer two-sided bets based on their beliefs. For example, if you think a coin is fair, you should be willing to offer anyone a 50/50 bet on heads (or tails) for a penny. Jack called it the "will-to-wager assumption" here and I don't know a better name.

In its simplest form the assumption is false, even for perfectly rational agents in a perfectly simple world. For example, I can give you my favorite fair coin so you can flip it and take a peek at the result. Then, even though I still believe the coin is fair, I'd be a fool to offer both sides of the wager to you, because you'd just take whichever side benefits you (since you've seen the result and I haven't). That objection is not just academic: using your sincere beliefs to bet money against better informed people is a bad idea in real world markets as well.

Then the question arises, how can we fix the assumption so it still says something sensible about rationality? I think the right fix should go something like this. If you flip a coin and peek at the result, then offer me a bet at 90:10 odds that the coin came up heads, I must either accept the bet or update toward believing that the coin indeed came up heads, with at least these odds. I don't get to keep my 50:50 beliefs about the coin and refuse the bet at the same time. More generally, a Bayesian rational agent offered a bet (by another agent who might have more information) must either accept the bet or update their beliefs so the bet becomes unprofitable. The old obligation about offering two-sided bets on all your beliefs is obsolete, use this one from now on. It should also come in handy in living room Bayesian scuffles, throwing some money on the table and saying "bet or update!" has a nice ring to it.

What do you think?

There is a TLDR at the bottom

Lots of people really value the lesswrong community but aren't sure how to contribute. The rationalist community can be intimidating. We have a lot of very smart people and the standards can be high. Nonetheless there are lots of concrete ways a normal rationalist can help improve the community. I will focus on two areas - engaging with content and a list of shovel ready projects you can get involved in. I will also briefly mention some more speculative ideas at the end of the post.

1) Engaging with Content:

I have spoken to many people I consider great content creators (ex: Zvi, Putanumonit, tristanm). It’s very common to wish their articles got more comments and engagement. The easiest thing you can do is make a lesswrong account and use the upvote button. Seeing upvotes really does motivate good writers. This only works for lesswrong/reddit but it makes a difference. I can think of several lw articles with less upvotes than people who have personally told me the article was great (ex: norm-one-principle by tristanm [1]).

Good comments tend to be even more appreciated than upvotes, and comments can be left on blog posts. If a post has few comments, then almost any decent quality comment is likely to be appreciated by the author. If you have a question or concern, just ask. Many great authors read all their comments, at least those left in the first few days, and often respond to them. Lots of readers comment very rarely, if at all. 95.1% of people who took the SSC survey comment less than once a month and 73.6% never comment at all [2]. The survey showed that survey takers were a highly engaged group who had read lots of posts. If a blog has very few comments I think you should update heavily towards “it’s a good idea for me to post my comment”.

However, what is most lacking in the rational-sphere is positive engagement with non-controversial content you enjoyed.  Recently the SSC sub-reddit found that about 95% of recent content was either in the culture-war thread or contained in a few threads the community considered low quality (based on vote counts) [3]. You can see a similar effect on lesswrong by considering the Dragon Army post [4]. Most good articles posted recently to lesswrong get around 10 comments or less. The Dragon Army post got over 550. I am explicitly not asking people to avoid posting in controversial threads; doing so would be asking a lot of people. But “engagement” is an important reward mechanism for content creators. I do think we should reward more of the writers we find valuable by responding to them with positive engagement.

It’s often difficult to write a comment on a post that you agree with that isn't just “+1 nice post.” Here are some strategies I have found useful:

- If the post is somewhat theoretical try to apply it in a concrete case. Talk about what difficulties you run into and what seems to work well.

- Talk about how the ideas in the post have helped you personally. For example you can say that never understood concept X until you read the post.

- Connect the post to other articles or essays. It’s usually not optimal to just post a link. Either summarize the other article or include a relevant, possibly extended, quote. Reading articles takes time.

- Speculate a little on how the ideas in the article could be extended further.

It’s not just article writers who enjoy people engaging with their work. People who write comments also appreciate getting good responses. Posting high quality comments, including responses to other comments, encourages other people to engage more. You can personally help get a virtuous cycle going. As a side note I am unsure about the relative values of posting a comment directly on a blog vs reposting the blogpost to lesswrong and commenting there. Currently lesswrong is not that inundated with reposts but it could get more crowded in the future. In addition, I think article authors are less likely to read lesswrong comments about their post, but I am not confident in the effect size.

2) Shovel Ready Projects:

-- Set up an online Lesswrong gaming group/server, ideally for a popular game. I have talked to people and Overwatch seems to have a lot of interest. People seemed to think it would really be a blast to play Overwatch with four other rationalists. Another popular idea is Dungeons and Dragons. I am not a gaming expert and lots of games could probably work but I wanted to share the feedback I got. Notably there is already a factorio server [5].

-- Help 'aggregate' a best of rationalist_tumblr effort posts. Rat_Tumblr is very big and hard to follow. Effort posts are mixed in with lots of random things. One could also include the best responses. There is no need to do this on a daily basis. You could just have a blog that only reblogs high-quality effort posts. I would personally follow this blog and would be willing to cooperate in whatever ways I could. I also think this blog would bring some "equality" to rat_Tumb. The structure of tumblr implies that it’s very hard to get readers unless a popular blog interacts with you. People report getting a "year’s worth of activity in a day" when someone like Eliezer or Ozy signal boosts them. An aggregator would be a useful way for less well known blogs to get attention.

-- Help the lesswrong wiki. Currently a decent fraction of lw-wiki posts are fairly out of date. In general the wiki could be doing some exciting thing such as: a distillation of Lesswrong. Fully indexing the diaspora. A list of communities. Spreading rationalist ideas. Rationalist Research. There is currently a project to modernize the wiki [6]. Even if you don't get involved in the more ambitious parts of the wiki you could re-write an article. Re-writing an article doesn't require much commitment and would provide a concrete benefit to the community. The wiki is prominently linked and the community would get a lot of good PR from a polished wiki.

-- Get involved with effective altruism. The Center for Effective Altruism recent posted a very high quality involvement guide [7]. It’s a huge list of concrete actions you can take to get involved. Every action has a brief description and a link to an article. Each article rates the action on time commitment, duration, familiarity and occupation. Very well put together.

-- Get more involved in your local irl rationalist group. Many group leaders (ex: Vanier) have suggested that it can be very hard to get members to lead things. If you are interested in leadership and have a decent reputation your local community might need your help.

I would be very interested in comments suggesting other projects/activities rationalists can get involved with.

3) Conclusion 

As a brief aside I want to mention that I considered writing about outreach. But I don't have tons of experience at outreach and I couldn't really process the data on effective outreach. The subject seems quite complicated. Perhaps someone else has already worked through the evidence. I will however recommend this old article by Paul Christiano (now at open AI) [8]. Notably the camp discussed in this pos did come eventually come into being. It’s not a comprehensive article but it has some good ideas. This guide to “How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup” [9] is extremely polished and has some interesting material related to outreach and attracting new members.

It’s easy to think your actions can't make a difference in the community, but they can. A surprisingly large number of people see comments on lesswrong or r/SSC. Good comments are highly appreciated. The person you befriend and convince to stick around on lesswrong might be the next Scott Alexander. Unfortunately, a lot of the time gratitude and appreciation never gets expressed; I am personally very guilty on this metric. But we are all in this together and this article only covers a small sample of the ways you can help make the community better.

If you have feedback or want any advice/help and don't want to post in public I would be super happy to get your private messages.

4) TLDR

- Write more comments on blog posts and non-controversial posts on lw and r/SSC

- Especially consider commenting on posts you agree with

- People are more likely to comment if other people are posting high quality comments.

- Projects: Gaming Server, aggregate tumblr effort-posts, improve lesswrong wiki, leadership local rationalist group

5) References: 

[1] http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p3f/mode_collapse_and_the_norm_one_principle/

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6gc7k8/what_can_be_done_to_make_the_culture_war_thread/

[4] http://lesswrong.com/lw/p23/dragon_army_theory_charter_30min_read/

[5] factorio.cypren.net:34197 . Modpack: http://factorio.cypren.net/files/current-modpack.zip

[6] http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p4y/the_rationalistsphere_and_the_less_wrong_wiki/

[7] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/get-involved/

[8] http://lesswrong.com/lw/4v5/effective_rationality_outreach/

[9] http://lesswrong.com/lw/crs/how_to_run_a_successful_less_wrong_meetup/

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Introducing The Ea Involvement Guide by The Center for Effective Altruism (EA forum) - A huge list of concrete actions you can take to get involved. Every action has a brief description and a link to an article. Each article rates the action on time commitment, duration, familiarity and occupation. Very well put together.

Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences - An algorithm learns to backflip with 900 bits of feedback from the human evaluator. "One step towards building safe AI systems is to remove the need for humans to write goal functions, since using a simple proxy for a complex goal, or getting the complex goal a bit wrong, can lead to undesirable and even dangerous behavior. In collaboration with DeepMind’s safety team, we’ve developed an algorithm which can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviors is better."

Build Baby Build by Bryan Caplan - Quote from a paper estimating the high costs of housing restrictions. We should blame the government, especially local government. The top alternate theory is wrong. Which regulations are doing the damage? It's complicated. Functionalists are wrong. State government is our best hope.

The Use And Abuse Of Witchdoctors For Life by Lou (sam[]zdat) - Anti-bullet magic and collective self-defense. Cultural evolution. People don't directly believe in anti-bullet magic, they believe in elders and witch doctors. Seeing like a State. Individual psychology is the foundation. Many psychologically important customs couldn't adapt to the marketplace.

S-risks: Why They Are The Worst Existential Risks by Kaj Sojata (lesswrong) - “S-risk – One where an adverse outcome would bring about severe suffering on a cosmic scale, vastly exceeding all suffering that has existed on Earth so far.” Why we should focus on S-risk. Probability: Artificial sentience, Lack of communication, badly aligned Ai and competitive pressures. Tractability: Relationship with x-risk. Going meta, cooperation. Neglectedness: little attention, people conflate x-risk = s-risk.

Projects Id Like To See by William MacAskill (EA forum) - CEA is giving out £100K grants. General types of applications. EA outreach and Community, Anti-Debates, Prediction Tournaments, Shark Tank Discussions, Research Groups, Specific Skill Building, New Organizations, Writing.

The Battle For Psychology by Jacob Falkovich (Put A Number On It!) - An explanation of 'power' in statistics and why its always good. Low power means that positive results are mostly due to chance. Extremely bad incentives and research practices in psychology. Studying imaginary effects. Several good images.

Identifying Sources Of Cost Disease by Kurt Spindler - Where is the money going: Administration, Increased Utilization, Decreased Risk Tolerance. What market failures are in effect: Unbounded Domains, Signaling and Competitive Pressure (ex: military spending), R&D doesn't cut costs it creates new ways to spend money, individuals don't pay. Some practical strategies to reduce cost disease.

===Scott:

To Understand Polarization Understand The Extent Of Republican Failure by Scott Alexander - Conservative voters voted for “smaller government”, “fewer regulations”, and “less welfare state”. Their reps control most branches of the government. They got more of all three (probably thanks to cost disease).

Against Murderism by Scott Alexander - Three definitions of racism. Why 'Racism as motivation' fits best. The futility of blaming the murder rate in the USA on 'murderism'. Why its often best to focus on motivations other than racism.

Open Thread Comment by John Nerst (SSC) - Bi-weekly public open thread. I am linking to a very interesting comment. The author made a list of the most statistically over-represented words in the SSC comment section.

Some Unsong Guys by Scott Alexander (Scratchpad) - Pictures of Unsong Fan Art.

Silinks Is Golden by Scott Alexander - Standard SSC links post.

What is Depression Anyway: The Synapse Hypothesis - Six seemingly distinct treatments for depression. How at least six can be explained by considering synapse generation rates. Skepticism that this method can be used to explain anything since the body is so inter-connected. Six points that confuse Scott and deserve more research. Very technical.

===Rationalist:

Idea For Lesswrong Video Tutoring by adamzerner (lesswrong) - Community Video Tutoring. Sign up to either give or receive tutoring. Teaching others is a good way to learn and lots of people enjoy teaching. Hopefully enough people want to learn similar things. This could be a great community project and I recommend taking a look.

Regulatory Arbitrage For Medical Research What I Know So Far by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Economics of avoiding the USA/FDA. Lots of research is already conducted in other countries. The USA is too large of a market not to sell to. Investors aren't interested in cheap preliminary trials. Other options: supplements, medical tourism, clinic ships, cryptocurrency.

Responses To Folk Ontologies by Ferocious Truth - Folk ontology: Concepts and categories held by ordinary people with regard to an idea. Especially pre-scientific or unreflective ones. Responses: Transform/Rescue, Deny or Restrict/Recognize. Rescuing free will and failing to rescue personal identity. Rejecting objective morality. Restricting personal identity and moral language. When to use each approach.

The Battle For Psychology by Jacob Falkovich (Put A Number On It!) - An explanation of 'power' in statistics and why its always good. Low power means that positive results are mostly due to chance. Extremely bad incentives and research practices in psychology. Studying imaginary effects. Several good images.

A Tangled Task Future by Robin Hanson - We need to untangle the economy to automate it. What tasks are heavily tangled and which are not. Ems and the human brain as a legacy system. Human brains are well-integrated and good at tangled tasks.

Epistemic Spot Check Update by Aceso Under Glass - Reviewing self-help books. Properties of a good self-help model: As simple as possible but not more so, explained well, testable on a reasonable timescale, seriously handles the fact the techniques might now work, useful. The author would appreciate feedback.

Skin In The Game by Elo (BearLamp) - Armchair activism and philosophy. Questions to ask yourself about your life. Actually do the five minute exercise at the end.

Momentum Reflectiveness Peace by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Rationality requires a reflective mindset; a willingness to change course and consider how things could be very different. Momentum, keeping things as they are except more so, is the opposite of reflectivity. Cultivating reflectiveness: rest, contentment, considering ideas lightly and abstractly. “Turn — slowly.”

The Fallacy Fork Why Its Time To Get Rid Of by theFriendlyDoomer (r/SSC) - "The main thesis of our paper is that each and every fallacy in the traditional list runs afoul of the Fallacy Fork. Either you construe the fallacy in a clear-cut and deductive fashion, which means that your definition has normative bite, but also that you hardly find any instances in real life; or you relax your formal definition, making it defeasible and adding contextual qualifications, but then your definition loses its teeth. Your “fallacy” is no longer a fallacy."

Instrumental Rationality 1 Starting Advice by lifelonglerner (lesswrong) - "This is the first post in the Instrumental Rationality Sequence. This is a collection of four concepts that I think are central to instrumental rationality-caring about the obvious, looking for practical things, practicing in pieces, and realistic expectations."

Concrete Ways You Can Help Make The Community Better by deluks917 (lesswrong) - Write more comments on blog posts and non-controversial posts on lw and r/SSC. Especially consider commenting on posts you agree with. People are more likely to comment if other people are posting high quality comments. Projects: Gaming Server, aggregate tumblr effort-posts, improve lesswrong wiki, leadership in local rationalist group

Daring Greatly by Bayesian Investor - Fairly positive book review, some chapters were valuable and it was an easy read. How to overcome shame and how it differs from guilt. Perfectionism vs healthy striving. If you stop caring about what others think you lose your capacity for connection

A Call To Adventure by Robin Hanson - Meaning in life can be found by joining or starting a grand project. Two possible adventures: Promoting and implementing futarchy (decision making via prediction markets). Getting a real understanding of human motivation.

Thought Experiment Coarsegrained Vr Utopia by cousin_it (lesswrong) - Assume an AI is running a Vr simulation that is hooked up to actual human brains. This means that the AI only has to simulate nature at a coarse grained level. How hard would it be to make that virtual reality a utopia?

[The Rationalist-sphere and the Lesswrong Wiki]](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p4y/the_rationalistsphere_and_the_less_wrong_wiki/) - What's next for the Lesswrong wiki. A distillation of Lesswrong. Fully indexing the diaspora. A list of communities. Spreading rationalist ideas. Rationalist Research.

Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences - An algorithm learns to backflip with 900 bits of feedback from the human evaluator. "One step towards building safe AI systems is to remove the need for humans to write goal functions, since using a simple proxy for a complex goal, or getting the complex goal a bit wrong, can lead to undesirable and even dangerous behavior. In collaboration with DeepMind’s safety team, we’ve developed an algorithm which can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviors is better."

Where Do Hypotheses Come From by c0rw1n (lesswrong) - Link to a 25 page article. "Why are human inferences sometimes remarkably close to the Bayesian ideal and other times systematically biased? In particular, why do humans make near-rational inferences in some natural domains where the candidate hypotheses are explicitly available, whereas tasks in similar domains requiring the self-generation of hypotheses produce systematic deviations from rational inference. We propose that these deviations arise from algorithmic processes approximating Bayes’ rule."

The Precept Of Universalism by H i v e w i r e d - "Universality, the idea that all humans experience life in roughly the same way. Do not put things or ideas above people. Honor and protect all peoples." Eight points expanding on how to put people first and honor everyone.

We Are The Athenians Not The Spartans by wubbles (lesswrong) - "Our values should be Athenian: individualistic, open, trusting, enamored of beauty. When we build social technology, it should not aim to cultivate values that stand against these. High trust, open, societies are the societies where human lives are most improved."

===EA:

Updating My Risk Estimate of Geomagnetic Big One by Open Philosophy - Risk from magnetic storms caused by the sun. "I have raised my best estimate of the chance of a really big storm, like the storied one of 1859, from 0.33% to 0.70% per decade. And I have expanded my 95% confidence interval for this estimate from 0.0–4.0% to 0.0–11.6% per decade."

Links by GiveDirectly - Eight Media articles on Cash Transfers, Basic Income and Effective Altruism.

Are Givewells Top Charities The Best Option For Every Donor by The GiveWell Blog - Why GiveWell recommend charities are a good option for most donors. Which donors have better options: Donors with lots of time, high trust in a particular institution or values different from GiveWell's.

A New President of GWWC by Giving What We Can - Julia Wise is the New president of Giving What We Can.

Angst Ennui And Guilt In Effective Altruism by Gordon (Map and Territory) - Learning about existential risk can cause psychological harm. Guilt about being unable to help solve X-risk. Akrasia. Reasons to not be guilty: comparative advantage, ability is unequally distributed.

S-risks: Why They Are The Worst Existential Risks by Kaj Sojata (lesswrong) - “S-risk – One where an adverse outcome would bring about severe suffering on a cosmic scale, vastly exceeding all suffering that has existed on Earth so far.” Why we should focus on S-risk. Probability: Artificial sentience, Lack of communication, badly aligned Ai and competitive pressures. Tractability: Relationship with x-risk. Going meta, cooperation. Neglectedness: little attention, people conflate x-risk = s-risk.

Update On Sepsis Donations Probably Unnecessary by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Sarah C had asked people to crowdfund a sepsis RCT. The trial will probably get funded by charitable foundations. Diminishing returns. Finding good giving opportunities is hard and talking to people in the know is a good way to find things out.

What Is Valuable About Effective Altruism by Owen_Cotton-Barratt (EA forum) - Why should people join EA? The impersonal and personal perspectives. Tensions and synergies between the two perspectives. Bullet point conclusions for researchers, community leaders and normal members.

QALYs/$ Are More Intuitive Than $/QALYs by ThomasSittler (EA forum) - QALYs/$ are preferable to $/QALYs. visual representations on graphs. Avoiding Small numbers and re-normalizing to QUALs/10K$.

Introducing The Ea Involvement Guide by The Center for Effective Altruism (EA forum) - A huge list of concrete actions you can take to get involved. Every action has a brief description and a link to an article. Each article rates the action on time commitment, duration, familiarity and occupation. Very well put together.

Cash is King by GiveDirectly - Eight media articles about Effective Altruism and Cash transfers.

Separating GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project by The GiveWell Blog - The GiveWell perspective. Context for the sale. Effect on donors who rely on GiveWell. Organization changes at GiveWell. Steps taken to sell Open Phil assets. The new relationship between GiveWell and Open Phil.

Open Philanthropy Project is Now an Independent Organization by Open Philosophy - The evolution of Open Phil. Why should Open Phil split from GiveWell. LLC structure.

Projects Id Like To See by William MacAskill (EA forum) - CEA is giving out £100K grants. General types of applications. EA outreach and Community, Anti-Debates, Prediction Tournaments, Shark Tank Discussions, Research Groups, Specific Skill Building, New Organizations, Writing.

===Politics and Economics:

No Us School Funding Is Actually Somewhat Progressive by Random Critical Analysis - Many people think that wealthy public school districts spend more per pupil. This information is outdated. Within most states spending is higher on disadvantaged students. This is despite the fact that school funding is mostly local. Extremely thorough with loads of graphs.

Build Baby Build by Bryan Caplan - Quote from a paper estimating the high costs of housing restrictions. We should blame the government, especially local government. The top alternate theory is wrong. Which regulations are doing the damage? It's complicated. Functionalists are wrong. State government is our best hope.

Identifying Sources Of Cost Disease by Kurt Spindler - Where is the money going: Administration, Increased Utilization, Decreased Risk Tolerance. What market failures are in effect: Unbounded Domains, Signaling and Competitive Pressure (ex: military spending), R&D doesn't cut costs it creates new ways to spend money, individuals don't pay. Some practical strategies to reduce cost disease.

The Use And Abuse Of Witchdoctors For Life by Lou (sam[]zdat) - Anti-bullet magic and collective self-defense. Cultural evolution. People don't directly believe in anti-bullet magic, they believe in elders and witch doctors. Seeing like a State. Individual psychology is the foundation. Many psychologically important customs couldn't adapt to the marketplace.

Greece Gdp Forecasting by João Eira (Lettuce be Cereal) - Transforming the Data. Evaluating the Model with Exponential Smoothing, Bagged ETS and ARIMA. The regression results and forecast.

Links 9 by Artir (Nintil) - Economics, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and other links.

Amazon Buying Whole Foods by Tyler Cowen - Quotes from Matt Yglesias, Alex Tabarrock, Ross Douthat and Tyler. “Dow opens down 10 points. Amazon jumps 3% after deal to buy Whole Foods. Walmart slumps 7%, Kroger plunges 16%”

Historical Returns Market Portfolio by Tyler Cowen - From 1960 to 2015 the global market portfolio realized a compounded real return of 4.38% with a std of 11.6%. Investors beat savers by 3.24%. Link to the original paper.

Trust And Diver by Bryan Caplan - Robert Putnam's work is often cited as showing the costs of diversity. However Putnam's work shows the negative effect of diversity on trust is rather modest. On the other hand Putnam found multiple variables that are much more correlated with trust (such as home ownership).

Why Optimism is More Rational than Pessimism by TheMoneyIllusion - Splitting 1900-2017 into Good and Bad periods. We learn something from our mistakes. Huge areas where things have improved long term. Top 25 movies of the 21st Century. Artforms in decline.

Is Economics Science by Noah Smith - No one knows what a Science is. Thoeries that work (4 examples). The empirical and credibility revolutions. Why we still need structural models. Ways economics could be more scientific. Data needs to kill bad theories. Slides from Noah's talk are included and worth playing but assume familiarity with the economics profession.

===Misc:

Clojure Concurrency And Blocking With Coreasync by Eli Bendersky - Concurrent applications and blocking operations using core.async. Most of the article compares threads and go-blocks. Lots of code and well presented test results.

Optopt by Ben Kuhn - Startup options are surprisingly valuable once you factor in that you can quit of the startup does badly. A mathematical model of the value of startup options and the optimal time to quit. The ability to quit rose the option value by over 50%. The sensitivity of the analysis with respect to parameters (opportunity cost, volatility, etc).

Epistemic Spot Check: The Demon Under The Microscope by Aceso Under Glass - Biography of the man who invented sulfa drugs, the early anti-bacteria treatments which were replaced by penicillin. Interesting fact checks of various claims.

Sequential Conversion Rates by Chris Stucchio - Estimating success rates when you have noisy reporting. The article is a sketch of how the author handled such a problem in practice.

Set Theory Problem by protokol2020 - Bring down ZFC. Aleph-zero spheres and Aleph-one circles.

Connectome Specific Harmonic Waves On Lsd by Qualia Computing - Transcript and video of a talk on neuroimaging the brain on LSD. "Today thanks to the recent developments in structural neuroimaging techniques such as diffusion tensor imaging, we can trace the long-distance white matter connections in the brain. These long-distance white matter fibers (as you see in the image) connect distant parts of the brain, distant parts of the cortex."

Approval Maximizing Representations by Paul Christiano - Representing images. Manipulation representations. Iterative and compound encodings. Compressed representations. Putting it all together and bootstrapping reinforcement learning.

Travel by Ben Kuhn - Advice for traveling frequently. Sleeping on the plane and taking redeyes. Be robust. Bring extra clothes, medicine, backup chargers and things to read when delayed. Minimize stress. Buy good luggage and travel bags.

Learning To Cooperate, Compete And Communicate by Open Ai - Competitive multi-agent models are a step towards AGI. An algorithm for centralized learning and decentralized execution in multi-agent environment. Initial Research. Next Steps. Lots of visuals demonstrating the algorithm in practice.

Openai Baselines Dqn by Open Ai - "We’re open-sourcing OpenAI Baselines, our internal effort to reproduce reinforcement learning algorithms with performance on par with published results." Best practices we use for correct RL algorithm implementations. First release: DQN and three of its variants, algorithms developed by DeepMind.

Corrigibility by Paul Christiano - Paul defines the sort of AI he wants to build, he refers to such systems as "corrigible". Paul argues that a sufficiently corrigible agent will become more corrigible over time. This implies that friendly AI is not a narrow target but a broad basin of attraction. Corrigible agents prefer to build other agents that share the overseers preferences, not their own. Predicting that the overseer wants me to turn off when he hits the off-button is not complicated relative to being deceitful. Comparison with Eliezer's views.

G Reliant Skills Seem Most Susceptible To Automation by Freddie deBoer - Computers already outperform humans in g-loaded domains such as Go and Chess. Many g-loaded jobs might get automated. Jobs involving soft or people skills are resilient to automation.

Persona 5: Spoiler Free Review - Persona games are long but deeply worthwhile if you enjoy the gameplay and the story. Persona 5 is much more polished but Persona 3 has a more meaningful story and more interesting decisions. Tips for Maximum Enjoyment of Persona 5. Very few spoilers.

Sea Problem by protokol2020 - A fun problem. Measuring sea level rise.

===Podcast:

83 The Politics Of Emergency by Waking Up with Sam Harris - Fareed Zakaria. "His career as a journalist, Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations," political partisanship, Trump, the health of the news media, the connection between Islam and intolerance"

On Risk, Statistics, And Improving The Public Understanding Of Science by 80,000 Hours - A lifetime of communicating science. Early career advice. Getting people to intuitively understand hazards and their effect on life expectancy.

Ed Luce by Tyler Cowen - The Retreat of Western Liberalism "What a future liberalism will look like, to what extent current populism is an Anglo-American phenomenon, Modi’s India, whether Kubrick, Hitchcock, and John Lennon are overrated or underrated, and what it is like to be a speechwriter for Larry Summers."

Thomas Ricks by EconTalk - Thomas Ricks book Churchill and Orwell. Overlapping lives and the fight to preserve individual liberty.

The End Of The World According To Isis by Waking Up with Sam Harris - Graeme Wood. His experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, the theology of ISIS, the quality of their propaganda, the most important American recruit to the organization, the roles of Jesus and the Anti-Christ in Islamic prophecy, free speech and the ongoing threat of jihadism.

Jason Khalipa by Tim Ferriss - "8-time CrossFit Games competitor, a 3-time Team USA CrossFit member, and — among other athletic feats — he has deadlifted 550 pounds, squatted 450 pounds, and performed 64 pullups at a bodyweight of 210 pounds."

Dario Amodei, Paul Christiano & Alex Ray. - 80K hours released a detailed guide to careers in AI policy. " We discuss the main career paths; what to study; where to apply; how to get started; what topics are most in need of research; and what progress has been made in the field so far." Transcript included.

Don Bourdreaux Emergent Order by EconTalk - "Why is it that people in large cities like Paris or New York City people sleep peacefully, unworried about whether there will be enough bread or other necessities available for purchase the next morning? No one is in charge--no bread czar. No flour czar."

Tania Lombrozo On Why We Evolved The Urge To Explain by Rational Speaking - "Research on what purpose explanation serves -- i.e., why it helps us more than our brains just running prediction algorithms. Tania and Julia also discuss whether simple explanations are more likely to be true, and why we're drawn to teleological explanations"

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Skills Most Employable by 80,000 Hours - Metrics: Satisfaction, risk of automation, and breadth of applicability. Leadership and social skills will gain the most in value. The least valuable skills involve manual labor. Tech skills may not be the most employable but they are straightforward to improve at. The most valuable skills are the hardest to automate and useful in the most situations. Data showing a large oversupply of some tech skills, though others are in high demand. A chart of which college majors add the most income.

Something Was Wrong by Zvi Moshowitz - Zvi visits a 'stepford pre-school'. He can't shake the feeling that something is wrong. He decides not to send his son to the place where kid's souls go to die.

Ems Evolve by Bayesian Investor - Will the future we dominated by entities that lack properties we consider important (such as 'have fun' or even 'sentient'). Will agents lacking X-value outcompete other agents. What counter-measures could society take and how effective would they be.

Housing Price Bubble Revisited by Tyler Cowen - "Over the entire 20th century real home prices averaged an index value of about 110 (and were quite close to this value over the the entire 1950-1997 period). Over the entire 20th century, housing prices never once roce above 131, the 1989 peak. But beginning around 2000 house prices seemed to reach for an entirely new equilibrium. In fact, even given the financial crisis, prices since 2000 fell below the 20th century peak for only a few months in late 2011. Real prices today are now back to 2004 levels and rising. As I predicted in 2008, prices never returned to their long-run 20th century levels."

Tyler Cowen On Stubborn Attachments by EconTalk - "Cowen argues that economic growth--properly defined--is the moral key to maintaining civilization and promoting human well-being. Along the way, the conversation also deals with inequality, environmental issues, and education"

===Scott:

Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences by Scott Alexander - "Hyde found moderate or large gender differences in aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills. Perhaps some peeople might think that finding moderate-to-large-differences in mechanical abilities, computer skills, etc supports the idea that gender differences might play a role in gender balance in the tech industry. But because Hyde’s meta-analysis drowns all of this out with stuff about smiling-when-not-observed, Grant is able to make it sound like this proves his point. It’s actually worse than this, because Grant misreports the study findings in various ways."

Links: On The Site Of The Angels by Scott Alexander - Standard SSC links post.

Mildly Condescending Advice by SlateStarScratchpad - Ten mildly condescending but useful pieces of advice Scott recommends.

Communism by SlateStarScratchpad - Scott thinks he would have been a communist in 1910.

What Are The Median Psychiatrists Scores On The by SlateStarScratchpad - Psychiatrists are very mentally well adjusted on average. "I think you get way more illness in the therapists, counselors, etc, especially the ones that are kind of low-status and don’t require a lot of training." Doctor's recovery rates from alcoholism are very good.

Why Not More Excitement About Prediction Aggregation by Scott Alexander - Prediction markets and aggregation methods work. Superforecasters proved some groups can consistently make good predictions. Why isn't there more interest? Wouldn't investors pay for predictions? Do theories about signaling and prestige explain the situation?

Where The Falling Einstein Meets The Rising Mouse by Scott Alexander - Eliezer/Scott's model of intelligence suggests that the gap between 'village idiot' and Einstein is tiny relative to the difference between 'village idiot' and a chimp. This suggests that once AI reaches human levels it will almost immediately pass the best human. This happened in Go. But in other fields progress was gradual throughout the approximately human level skill range. Scott looks at possible explanations.

Stem vs The Humanities by SlateStarScratchpad - A long and intelligent thread about "STEM" vs "The Humanities". What are the natural categories? Should we consider math part of the humanities? Should we groups careful humanities scholars with careful STEM scholars? So-called-autistics. Other topics.

Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes by Scott Alexander - Men and women massively differ in terms of interest in things vs people. Libertarians are about 5% women. r/MRAand the gamergate subreddit have twice this percentage. Trump voters are close to gender parity and the Catholic Church has more women than men. Why this matters.

Is It Possible To Have Coherent Principles Around Free Speech Norms by Scott Alexander - The doctrine of the preferred first speaker. Separating having an opinion, signaling a propensity, and committing a speech act. Self selected communities. "Don’t try to destroy people in order to enforce social norms that only exist in your head"

Book Review Raise A Genius by Scott Alexander - Scott quote-mines Polgar's book on raising genius. Many of the quotes are concerned with the importance of instilling a love of learning in children. Polgar gives some detail on how to do this but not as much as Scott hoped. Summary: "Get those four things right – early start, single-subject focus, 1:1 home schooling, and a great parent/teacher – and the rest is just common-sense advice."

Against Signal Boosting As Doxxing by Scott Alexander - Free speech did not come into existence ex nihilo when the First Amendment was ratified. People need to be free from mobs as well as kings.

Open Djed by Scott Alexander - Bi-Weekly public open thread. Meetup Tab. Updates on rationalist houses in Berkeley. Selected comments on Griggs. A comment on Democratic strategy and Georgia.

Why Is Clozapine So Great by Scott Alexander - Clozapine is a very effect anti-psychotic but it has large serious side effects. NDMA agonists and a proposed mechanism for Clozapine. Maybe you could just give patients a normal anti-psychotic plus glycine.

Djoser Joseph Osiris by Scott Alexander - "The other day a few people (including Ben Hoffman of Compass Rose) tried to convince me that Pharaoh Djoser was the inspiration for the god Osiris and the Biblical Joseph. The short summary is that the connection between Djoser and Osiris is probably meaningless, but there’s a very small chance there might be some tiny distant scrap of a connection to Joseph."

Don't Blame Griggs by Scott Alexander - Griggs vs. Duke Power Co is commonly cited as making it prohibitively hard for companies to use intelligence tests in hiring. Scott argues this doesn't explain the rise in credentialism. You can still ask about SAT scores. Fields with easily available test scores (LSAT, MCAT) are still credentialist. Other countries lack equivalents of Griggs vs Duke.

Highlights From The Comment Thread On Meritocracy by Scott Alexander - Real merit vs credentials. Which merits do we reward? Meritocracy causes high ability people to concentrate into one class. Just rid rid of ruler and structural divisions between people. Scott finds the later idea utopian. " The most salient alternative to meritocracy isn’t perfect equality, it’s cronyism."

===Rationalist:

Why So Few Women In Cs: The Google Memo Is Right by Artir (Nintil) - Sampler: Lots of data and graphs covering multiple countries. "Occupational segregation by gender is stronger in egalitarian countries. This is a fatal blow to the sexism theory." In the 1980s demand for the CS major far outstripped capacity. This lead to severe limits on who could major in CS. These limits occurred at the same time female enrollment percentage dropped.

Double Crux Web App by mindlevelup - Double Crux is a rationalist technique for resolving and understanding disagreements. It involves identifying facts/statements, called cruxes, that would cause you to change your mind if you changed your mind about the crux. The author built software to facilitate double crux during the Google CSSI 3 week web dev camp. Links to the site and an explanation of Double Crux.

Compare Institutions To Institutions Not To Perfection by Robin Hanson - Hanson responds to criticisms of prediction markets. Short term accuracy is always easier to incentivize. Its always easier to find surface as opposed to deep connections.

Thank You For Listening by Ben Hoffman (Compass Rose) - Zvi's post above starts with a reference to a previous Ben Quo post. If you have hurt your child via school you aren't the enemy. Society taught you that you were helping. If you are still sending your child to a harmful system you aren't the enemy either, you are doing what you think is best.

Something Was Wrong by Zvi Moshowitz - Zvi visits a 'stepford pre-school'. He can't shake the feeling that something is wrong. He decides not to send his son to the place where kid's souls go to die.

Inscrutable Ideas by Gordon (Map and Territory) - The author describes 'holonic' thinking and why its hard to explain. Postmodernism as a flawed holonic tradition. Buddhism as a better holonic tradition. Fundamental incompatibility with system-relationship epistemology.

Body Pleasure by Sarah Perry (ribbonfarm) - "As non-human intelligences get more sophisticated, it may be the case that human work remains extremely important; however, it may also be that humans are faced with increasing leisure. If that is the case, the critical problem facing humanity will be how to enjoy ourselves. If that seems silly, consider your favorite dystopian images of the future: only humans who understand how to enjoy themselves can demand living conditions in which they are able to do so."

Erisology Of Self And Will The Need And The Reasons by Everything Studies - "Here in part 6 I discuss the reasons why the traditional view persists when prescientific thinking on other topics often doesn’t."

Confidence And Patience Dont Feel Like Anything In Particular by Kaj Sotala - Being confident doesn't feel like anything. 'Feeling confident' is really just the lack of feeling unconfident.

Foom Justifies Ai Risk Efforts Now by Robin Hanson - Organizations and corporations are already much smarter and more powerful than individuals, yet they remain mostly under control. Despite setbacks (Wars, revolutions, famines) the organization ecosystem is mostly functional. The only reason to be preemptively worried about AI is if AI takeoff will be very fast.

Skills Most Employable by 80,000 Hours - Metrics: Satisfaction, risk of automation, and breadth of applicability. Leadership and social skills will gain the most in value. The least valuable skills involve manual labor. Tech skills may not be the most employable but they are straightforward to improve at. The most valuable skills are the hardest to automate and useful in the most situations. Data showing a large oversupply of some tech skills, though others are in high demand. A chart of which college majors add the most income.

A Tactics by protokol2020 - Why its very hard to argue against the scientific consensus on fields such as Relativity or Quantum Mechanics. The Earth's temperature was hotter when it rotated fast, despite a fainter sun. Many physicists failed to grasp this fact. What does that imply?

Hedonic Model by Jeff Kaufman - "Happiness is having how things are going be closer to how you think things could be going." Some interesting implications including that both inequality and social mobility are bad.

Link Blog: Broadcom Broadpwn Gender Signal by Name and Nature - Links: History of Atheism. Evolution of Trust. Graphics depicting the Fast Fourier Transform. Remotely Compromising Android and iOS via a Bug in Broadcom’s Wi-Fi Chipsets.

Lying On The Ground by mindlevelup - "A rambling look at how rewards, distractions, and attention interact. Starts with the idea of lying on the ground as an interesting break-time activity and goes from there to talk about Saturation and Feeling, two concepts that I’ve been thinking about lately."

Ems Evolve by Bayesian Investor - Will the future we dominated by entities that lack properties we consider important (such as 'have fun' or even 'sentient'). Will agents lacking X-value outcompete other agents. What counter-measures could society take and how effective would they be.

Models Of Human Relationships Tools To Understand People by Elo (BearLamp) - Brief Model descriptions: Crucial Conversations. 4 Difficult Conversations, 4 Behaviors that kill relationships, How to Win Friends and Influence People (Detailed review), Non-Judgmental conversations, Emotional Intelligence. Circling, The Game (PUA), Apologies, Emotional Labor and others.

Inefficiencies In The Social Value Market by Julia Galef - Add liquidity where needed. Solve coordination problems. Pool risks. Provide resource allocation information. Make biases work for you. Remove rent-seeking. Reduce transaction costs.

Erisology Of Self And Will Campbellian Thinking In The Wild by Everything Studies - "In this section I’ll show some examples of casual conversation revealing Campbellian ideas. Comment threads attached to online newspaper articles are excellent sources of such casual conversation. Written down in a neat and accessible form, their existence makes it practical to do this kind of research for the first time."

The Future: Near Zero Growth Rates by The Foundational Research Institute - Moore's law cannot possibly go one for more than ~400 years, we will hit physical limits to computation. At 2.3% growth in energy use we would need to coat the Earth in Solar panels to get enough solar energy in only 400 years. If we captured all the energy from the sun we would run out in 1350 years. The universe can only support so much economic activity. We will in a very unusual part of humanity's timeline in terms of growth rates.

How I Found Fixed The Root Problem Behind My Depression And Anxiety After 20 Years by Kaj Sotala- Finding the root cause: self-concept. How to cultivate lovable self-concepts (ex: bravery). Consider memories where you lived up to the concept of being brave. Also consider cases where you failed. Integrating the positives and negatives into a healthy whole. Positive benefits the author experienced: professional success, emotional landscape improvement, negative emotions disappeared. Expected relationship changes. Lots of personal history details throughout.

Taking Integrity Literally by Ben Hoffman (Compass Rose) - Defending Kant. Fight the murderer or shut the door but don't become the sort of person who considers lying. Honesty is optimal in healthy environments. Thoughts on unhealthy environments. How Ben started to become honest about how late he would be. Not lying to yourself or others.

People Dont Have Beliefs Anymore Than They Have by Bound_up (lesswrong) - Actions are not deduced form goals. Beliefs are not deduced from models of the world. Maybe nerds have real beliefs but most people do not. Less nerdy people will probably interpret in your stated beliefs as social moves and will respond in turn.

Complexity Is Bad by Zvi Moshowitz - People can only think about ~3 things and store ~7 pieces of information in working memory. People will simplify in unexpected ways or fail to engage. Some concepts that help you manage complexity (ex: Resonance, Chunking). A link to the MtG head of R&D's podcast about why complexity is a cost.

Write Down Your Process by Zvi Moshowitz - Writing down your thought process helps you improve. Magic R&D's openness. Zvi's success as a MtG player and writer.

===AI:

July 2017 Newsletter by The MIRI Blog - News and Links: Open AI, Deepmind, AI Impacts, EA global, 80K hours, etc

Yudkowsky And Miri by Jeff Kaufman - Elizier once wrote an extremely embarrassing article called 'So you want to be a Seed AI Programmer'. A ML researcher showed it to Jeff Kaufman and said it implied Elizier was a crank. Elizier wrote it in 2003, when he was 24. What does this imply about MIRI?

===EA:

Medical Research Cancer Is Hugely Overfunded by Sanjay (EA forum) - Chart of disease burden vs research share. Six reasons you might disagree with the conclusion including cause tractability and methodology.

Blood Donation Generally Not That Effective On by Grue_Slinky (EA forum) - Having a supply of blood is very important. However the marginal value of blood donation is too low to recommend it as an efficient intervention.

How We Banned Fur In Berkeley by jayquigly (EA forum) - Fur sales banned. Main strategies: cultivating relationships with sympathetic council members, utilizing a proven template for the bill. Background. Strategy Details. Advice

Links: Our Main Goal is to Learn by GiveDirectly - Eight media links on Give Directly, Basic Income, Cash Transfers and Development Aid.

Funding Constraints For Ea Orgs by Jeff Kaufman - Value of direct work vs donation. Jeff argues EA organizations could make use of more resources. For example EA-Global could hire non-EA professional conference organizers.

===Politics and Economics:

Rise And Fall Of Rawlsianism by Artir (Nintil) - "I will introduce street Rawlsianism, a simplified version of Rawls’s Theory of Justice to get an idea of what this is all about. Then, I will explain how that came to be, including some extra details about Rawls’s justification for his theory. This story itself, the development of Rawls’s own philosophical views, is a good enough criticism of his original theory, but I will add at the end what I think are the strongest critiques I know."

Hazlett's Political Spectrum by Robin Hanson - "Not only would everything have been much better without FCC regulation, it actually was much better before the FCC! Herbert Hoover, who was head of the US Commerce Department at the time, broke the spectrum in order to then “save” it, a move that probably helped him rise to the presidency."

Another Point Of View by Simon Penner (Status 451) - The author was raised working class in semi-rural Canada and moved to Silicon valley. He experienced a ton of culture shock and significant cultural discrimination. This causes him to have less sympathy for people who quit software because of relatively minor pressure saying they don't fit in. The author overcame this stuff and so should other people.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Is Bad Science by Ozy (Thing of Things) - Ozy cites two commonly misinterpreted but good studies about suicide rates among transgender individuals. Ozy then discusses a very shoddy study about people rapidly becoming trans after meeting trans friends. However the study got its information by asking the parents of trans teens and young adults. Ozy explains how and why young adults hide much of their feelings from their parents, especially if they are neurodiverse.

Housing Price Bubble Revisited by Tyler Cowen - "Over the entire 20th century real home prices averaged an index value of about 110 (and were quite close to this value over the the entire 1950-1997 period). Over the entire 20th century, housing prices never once roce above 131, the 1989 peak. But beginning around 2000 house prices seemed to reach for an entirely new equilibrium. In fact, even given the financial crisis, prices since 2000 fell below the 20th century peak for only a few months in late 2011. Real prices today are now back to 2004 levels and rising. As I predicted in 2008, prices never returned to their long-run 20th century levels."

Reinventing The Wheel Of Fortune by sam[]zdat - Two definitions of democracy. A key idea: "Lasch is an external commentary using this rough model. At some point, the combined apparatus of American culture (the state, capital, media, political agitation) tried to make things “better”. To better its citizens required new social controls (paternalism). The taylorism employed makes things more focused on image, and this results in a more warlike society. Happened with “authenticity” last time and also [everything below]. To deal with this invasion, society turns to narcissistic defenses. Narcissism is self-centered, but it’s an expression of dependence on others, and specifically on the others’ validation of the narcissist’s image."

===Misc:

Prime Towers Problem by protokol2020 - Prime height towers. From which tower is the most tower tops visible.

The Unyoga Manifesto by SquirrelInHell - Yoga has a sort of 'competitive' ethos baked in. There is alot of pressure to do the postures 'correctly'. Instead you should listen to your body and follow the natural incentive gradients that lead to maintaining one's body well. Four practical pieces of advice.

Clojure The Perfect Language To Expand Your Brain by Eli Bendersky - Clojure will almost certainly change how you think about programming. Clojure is a fully modern and useable Lisp. The designers of Clojure are extremely pragmatic, building upon decades of industry experience. Sequences and laziness for powerful in-language data processing. Right approach to OOP. Built-in support for concurrency and parallelism.

A Physics Problem Once Again by protokol2020 - Discussion of n-dimensional mating. Approximate the sum of all gravitational forces between pairs of atoms inside the earth.

Meta Contrarian Typography by Tom Bartleby - The author is a self-described meta-contrarian. Supporting two spaces after a period. The three reasons for single spaces and why they don't hold up. Double spaces makes writing easier to skim, periods are over-worked in English.

I Cant Be Your Hero Im Too Busy Being Super by Jim Stone (ribbonfarm) - "But people don’t generally take on the burdens of inauthenticity without good reason. Often it’s because they want to occupy social roles that allow them to get their physical and psychological needs met, and other people won’t let them play those roles unless they are the right kind of person. Sometimes people put on masks simply to secure the role of “community member” or “citizen” or “human being”."

===Podcast:

Physical Training Dating Strategies And Stories From The Early Days by Tim Feriss - Tim answers viewer questions. Physical training, interview prep, the art of networking, education reform, dream guests on the show.

Living With Violence by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "Gavin de Becker about the primacy of human intuition in the prediction and prevention of violence."

Amanda Askell On Pascals Wager And Other Low Risks Wi by Rational Speaking - Pascal's Wager: It's rational to believe in God, because if you're wrong it's no big deal, but if you're right then the payoff is huge. Amanda Askell argues that it's much trickier to rebut Pascal's Wager than most people think. Handling low probability but very high impact possibilities: should you round them down to zero? Does it matter how measurable the risk is? And should you take into account the chance you're being scammed?"

Tyler Cowen On Stubborn Attachments by EconTalk - "Cowen argues that economic growth--properly defined--is the moral key to maintaining civilization and promoting human well-being. Along the way, the conversation also deals with inequality, environmental issues, and education"

40 Making Humans Legible by The Bayesian Conspiracy - Seeing like a State. Scott and Sam[]zdat's posts. Green Revolution. Age of Em. Chemtrails and invasive species. Friendship is Optimal.

Dave Rubin by Tyler Cowen - "Comedy and political correctness, which jokes should not be told, the economics of comedy, comedy in Israel and Saudi Arabia, comedy on campus, George Carlin, and the most underrated Star Wars installment"

Yascha Mounk by The Ezra Klein Show - Trump's illiberalism is catalyzed by his failures. Recently Trump has been more illiberal. Support for Trump remains at around 40 percent. What does this imply about the risk of an illiberal Trump successor with more political competence.

Alex Guarnasche by EconTalk - Food network star. "What it's like to run a restaurant, the challenges of a career in cooking, her favorite dishes, her least favorite dishes, and what she cooked to beat Bobby Flay."

On Becoming A Better Person by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "David Brooks. His book The Road to Character, the importance of words like “sin” and "virtue," self-esteem vs. self-overcoming, the significance of keeping promises, honesty, President Trump."

Julia Galef On How To Argue Better And Change Your Mind More by The Ezra Klein Show - Thinking more clearly and arguing better, Ezra's concerns that the traditional paths toward a better discourse. Signaling is turtles all the way down, motivated reasoning, probabilistic debating, which identities help us find truth, making online arguments less terrible. Julia heavily emphasizes the importance of good epistemic communities. Being too charitable can produce wrong predictions. Seeing like a State.

Possibly of more interest to old school Extropians, you may be aware the defunct Extropy Institute's website is very slow and broken, and certainly inaccessible to newcomers.

Anyhow, I have recently pieced together most of the early publications, 1988 - 1996 of 'Extropy: Vaccine For Future Shock' later, Extropy: Journal of Transhumanist Thought, as a part of mapping the history of Extropianism.

You'll find some really interesting very early articles on neural augmentation, transhumanism, libertarianism, AI (featuring Eliezer), radical economics (featuring Robin Hanson of course) and even decentralised payment systems.

Along with the ExI mailing list which is not yet wikified, it provides a great insight into early radical technological thinking, an era mostly known for the early hacker movement.

Let me know your thoughts/feedback!

https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Extropy_Magazines

I think I've come up with a fun thought experiment about friendly AI. It's pretty obvious in retrospect, but I haven't seen it posted before. 

When thinking about what friendly AI should do, one big source of difficulty is that the inputs are supposed to be human intuitions, based on our coarse-grained and confused world models. While the AI's actions are supposed to be fine-grained actions based on the true nature of the universe, which can turn out very weird. That leads to a messy problem of translating preferences from one domain to another, which crops up everywhere in FAI thinking, Wei's comment and Eliezer's writeup are good places to start.

What I just realized is that you can handwave the problem away, by imagining a universe whose true nature agrees with human intuitions by fiat. Think of it as a coarse-grained virtual reality where everything is built from polygons and textures instead of atoms, and all interactions between objects are explicitly coded. It would contain player avatars, controlled by ordinary human brains sitting outside the simulation (so the simulation doesn't even need to support thought).

The FAI-relevant question is: How hard is it to describe a coarse-grained VR utopia that you would agree to live in?

If describing such a utopia is feasible at all, it involves thinking about only human-scale experiences, not physics or tech. So in theory we could hand it off to human philosophers or some other human-based procedure, thus dealing with "complexity of value" without much risk. Then we could launch a powerful AI aimed at rebuilding reality to match it (more concretely, making the world's conscious experiences match a specific coarse-grained VR utopia, without any extra hidden suffering). That's still a very hard task, because it requires solving decision theory and the problem of consciousness, but it seems more manageable than solving friendliness completely. The resulting world would be suboptimal in many ways, e.g. it wouldn't have much room for science or self-modification, but it might be enough to avert AI disaster (!)

I'm not proposing this as a plan for FAI, because we can probably come up with something better. But what do you think of it as a thought experiment? Is it a useful way to split up the problem, separating the complexity of human values from the complexity of non-human nature?

I've accumulated a lot of small applications and items that make my life incrementally better. Most of these ultimately came from someone else's recommendation, so I thought I'd pay it forward by posting ten of my favorite small improvements.

(I've given credit where I remember who introduced the item into my life. Obviously the biggest part of the credit goes to the creator.)

Video speed

Video Speed Controller lets you speed up HTML 5 video; it gives a nicer interface than the YouTube speed adjustment and works for most videos displayed in a browser (including e.g. netflix/amazon).

(Credit: Stephanie Zolayvar?)

Spectacle

Spectacle on OSX provides keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to any half or third of the screen (or full screen).

Pinned tabs + tab wrangler

I use tab wrangler to automatically close tabs (and save a bookmark) after 10m. I keep gmail and vimflowy pinned so that they don't close. For me, closing tabs after 10m is usually the right behavior.

Aggressive AdBlock

I use AdBlock for anything that grabs attention even if isn't an ad. I usually block "related content," "next stories," the whole youtube sidebar, everything on Medium other than the article, the gmail sidebar, most comment sections, etc. Similarly, I use kill news feed to block my Facebook feed.

Avoiding email inbox

I often need to write or look up emails during the day, which would sometimes lead me to read/respond to new emails and switch contexts. I've mostly fixed the problem by leaving gmail open to my list of starred emails rather than my inbox, ad-blocked the "Inbox (X)" notification, and pin gmail so that I can't see the "Inbox (X)" title.

Christmas lights

I prefer the soft light from christmas lights to white overhead lights or even softer lamps. My favorite are multicolored lights, though soft white lights also seem OK.

(Credit: Ben Hoffman)

Karabiner

Karabiner remaps keys in a very flexible way. (Unfortunately, it only works on OSX pre-Sierra. Would be very interested if there is any similarly flexible software that )

Some changes have helped me a lot:

• While holding s: hjkl move the cursor. (Turn on "Simple Vi Mode v2") I find this way more convenient than the arrow keys.
• While holding d: hjkl move the mouse. (Turn on "Mouse Keys Mode v2") I find this slightly more convenient than a mouse most of the time, but the big win is that I can use my computer when a bluetooth mouse disconnects.
• Other stuff while holding s: (add this gist to your private.xml):
  • While holding s: u/o move to the previous and next word, n is backspace. 
  • While holding s+f: key repeat is 10x faster.
  • While holding s+a: hold shift (so cursor selects whatever it moves over, e.g. I can quickly select last ten words by holding a+s+f and then holding u for 1 second).

I'd definitely pay > a minute a day for these changes.

Keyboard

I find split+tented keyboards much nicer than usual keyboards. I use a Kinesis Freestyle 2 with this to prop it up. I put my touchpad on a raised platform between the keyboard halves. Alternatively, you might prefer the wire cutter's recommendations.

(Credit: Emerald Yang)

Vimflowy

Vimflowy is similar to Workflowy, with a few changes: it lets you "clone" bullets so they appear in multiple places in your document, has marks that you can jump to easily, and has much more flexible motions / macros / etc. I find all of these very helpful. The biggest downside for most people is probably modal editing (keystrokes issue commands rather than inserting text).

The biggest value add for me is the time tracking plugin. I use vimflowy essentially constantly, so this gives me extremely fine-grained time tracking for free.

Running locally (download from github) lets you use vimflowy offline, and using the SQLite backend scales to very large documents (larger than workflowy can handle).

(Credit: Jeff Wu and Zachary Vance.)

ClipMenu [hard to get?]

Keeps a buffer of the last 20 things you've copied, so that you can paste any one of them. Source for OSX is on github here, I'm not sure if it can be easily compiled/installed (binaries used to be available). Would be curious if anyone knows a good alternative or tries to compile it.

(Credit: Jeff Wu.)

Recently, James_Miller posted a conversation between Sam Harris and Scott Adams about Donald Trump. James_Miller titled it "a model rationalist disagreement". While I agree that the tone in which the conversation was conducted was helpful, I think Scott Adams is a top practitioner of the Dark Arts. Indeed, he often prides himself on his persuasion ability. To me, he is very far from a model for a rationalist, and he is the kind of figure we rationalists should know how to fight against.

Here are some techniques that Adams uses:

1. Changing the subject: (a) Harris says Trump is unethical and cites the example of Trump gate-crashing a charity event to falsely get credit for himself. Adams responds by saying that others are equally bad—that all politicians do morally dubious things. When Harris points out that Obama would never do such a thing, Adams says Trump is a very public figure and hence people have lots of dirt on him. (b) When Harris points out that almost all climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and that it is wrong for Trump to have called climate change a hoax, Adams changes the subject to how it is unclear what economic policies one ought to pursue if climate change is true.
2. Motte-and-bailey: When Harris points out that the Trump University scandal and Trump's response to it means Trump is unethical, Adams says that Trump was not responsible for the university because it was only a licensing deal. Then Harris points out that Trump is unethical because he shortchanged his contractors. Adams says that that’s what happens with big construction projects. Harris tries to argue that it’s the entirety of Trump’s behavior that makes it clear that he is unethical—i.e., Trump University, his non-payment to contractors, his charity gate-crashing, and so on. At this points Adams says we ought to stop expecting ethical behavior from our Presidents. This is a classic motte-and-bailey defense. Try to defend an indefensible position (the bailey) for a while, but then once it becomes untenable to defend it, then go to the motte (something much more defensible).
3. Euphemisation: (a) When Harris tells Adams that Trump lies constantly and has a dangerous disregard for the truth, Adams says, I agree that Trump doesn’t pass fact checks. Indeed, throughout the conversation Adams never refers to Trump as lying or as making false statements. Instead, Adams always says, Trump “doesn’t pass the fact checks”. This move essentially makes it sound as if there’s some organization whose arbitrary and biased standards are what Trump doesn’t pass and so downplays the much more important fact that Trump lies. (b) When Harris call Trump's actions morally wrong, Adams makes it seem as if he is agreeing with Harris but then rephrases it as: “he does things that you or I may not do in the same situation”. Indeed, that's Adams's constant euphemism for a morally wrong action. This is a very different statement compared to saying that what Trump did was wrong, and makes it seem as if Trump is just a normal person doing what normal people do. 
4. Diagnosis: Rather than debate the substance of Harris’s claims, Adams will often embark on a diagnosis of Harris’s beliefs or of someone else who has that belief. For example, when Harris says that Trump is not persuasive and does not seem to have any coherent views, Adams says that that's Harris's "tell" and that Harris is "triggered" by Trump's speeches. Adams constantly diagnoses Trump critics as seeing a different movie, or as being hypnotized by the mainstream media. By doing this, he moves away from the substance of the criticisms.
5. Excusing: (a) When Harris says that it is wrong to not condemn, and wrong to support, the intervention of Russia in America’s election, Adams says that the US would extract revenge via its intelligence agencies and we would never know about it. He provides no evidence for the claim that Trump is indeed extracting revenge via the CIA. He also says America interferes in other elections too. (b) When Harris says that Trump degraded democratic institutions by promising to lock up his political opponent after the election, Adams says that was just a joke. (c) When Harris says Trump is using the office of the President for personal gain, Adams tries to spin the narrative as Trump trying to give as much as possible late in his life for his country. 
6. Cherry-picking evidence: (a) When Harris points out that seventeen different intelligence agencies agreed that Russia’s government interfered in the US elections, Adams says that the intelligence agencies have been known to be wrong before. (b) When Harris points out that almost all climate scientists agree on climate change, Adams points to some point in the 1970s where (he claims) climate scientists got something wrong, and therefore we should be skeptical about the claims of climate scientists.

Overall, I think what Adams is doing is wrong. He is an ethical and epistemological relativist: he does not seem to believe in truth or in morality. At the very least, he does not care about what is true and false and what is right and wrong. He exploits his relativism to push his agenda, which is blindingly clear: support Trump.

(Note: I wanted to work on this essay more carefully, and find out all the different ways in which Adams subverts the truth and sound reasoning. I also wanted to cite more clearly the problematic passages from the conversations. But I don't have the time. So I relied on memory and highlighted the Dark Arts moves that struck me immediately. So please, contribute in the comments with your own observations about the Dark Arts involved here.)

[Epistemic status: I assign a 70% chance that this model proves to be useful, 30% chance it describes things we are already trying to do to a large degree, and won't cause us to update much.] 

I'm going to talk about something that's a little weird, because it uses some results from some very recent ML theory to make a metaphor about something seemingly entirely unrelated - norms surrounding discourse. 

I'm also going to reach some conclusions that surprised me when I finally obtained them, because it caused me to update on a few things that I had previously been fairly confident about. This argument basically concludes that we should adopt fairly strict speech norms, and that there could be great benefit to moderating our discourse well. 

I argue that in fact, discourse can be considered an optimization process and can be thought of in the same way that we think of optimizing a large function. As I will argue, thinking of it in this way will allow us to make a very specific set of norms that are easy to think about and easy to enforce. It is partly a proposal for how to solve the problem of dealing with speech that is considered hostile, low-quality, or otherwise harmful. But most importantly, it is a proposal for how to ensure that the discussion always moves in the right direction: Towards better solutions and more accurate models. 

It will also help us avoid something I'm referring to as "mode collapse" (where new ideas generated are non-diverse and are typically characterized by adding more and more details to ideas that have already been tested extensively). It's also highly related to the concepts discussed in the Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor portion of the Sequences. Ideally, we'd like to be able to make sure that we're exploring as much of the hypothesis space as possible, and there's good reason to believe we're probably not doing this very well.  

The challenge: Making sure we're searching for the global optimum in model-space sometimes requires reaching out blindly into the frontiers, the not well-explored regions, which runs the risk of ending up somewhere very low-quality or dangerous. There are also sometimes large gaps between very different regions of model-space where the quality of the model is very low in-between, but very high on each side of the gap. This requires traversing through potentially dangerous territory and being able to survive the whole way through.

(I'll be using terms like "models" and "hypotheses" quite often, and I hope this isn't confusing. I am using them very broadly, to refer to both theoretical understandings of phenomenon and blueprints for practical implementations of ideas). 

We desire to have a set of principles which allows us to do this safely - to think about models of the world that are new and untested, solutions for solving problems that have never been done in a similar way - and they should ensure that, eventually, we can reach the global optimum. 

Before we derive that set of principles, I am going to introduce a topic of interest from the field of Machine Learning. This topic will serve as the main analogy for the rest of this piece, and serve as a model for how the dynamics of discourse should work in the ideal case. 

I. The Analogy: Generative Adversarial Networks

For those of you who are not familiar with the recent developments in deep-learning, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)[intro pdf here] are a new type of generative model class that are ideal for producing high-quality samples from very high-dimensional, complex distributions. They have caused great buzz and hype in the deep-learning community due to how impressive some of the samples they produce are, and how efficient they are at generation.

Put simply, a generator model and a critic (sometimes called a discriminator) model perform a two-player game where the critic is trained to distinguish between samples produced by the generator and the "true" samples taken from the data distribution. In turn, the generator is trained to maximize the critic's loss function. Both models are usually parametrized by deep neural networks and can be trained by taking turns running a gradient descent step on each. The Nash equilibrium of this game is when the generator's distribution matches that of the data distribution perfectly. This is never really borne out in practice, but sometimes it gets so close that we don't mind. 

GANs have one principal failure mode, which is often thought to be due to the instability of the system, which is often called "mode collapse" (a term I'm going to appropriate to refer to a much broader concept). It was often believed that, if a careful balance between the generator and critic could not be maintained, one would eventually overpower the other - leading the critic to provide either useless or overly harsh information to the generator. Useless information will cause the generator to update very slowly or not at all, and overly harsh information will lead the samples to "collapse" to a small region of the data space that are the easiest targets for the generator to hit.  

This problem was essentially solved earlier this year due to a series of papers that propose modifications to the loss functions that GANs use, and, most crucially, add another term to the critic's loss which stabilizes the gradient (with respect to the inputs) to have a norm close to one. It was recognized that we actually desire an extremely powerful critic so that the generator can make the best updates it possibly can, but the updates themselves can't go beyond what the generator is capable of handling. With these changes to the GAN formulation, it became possible to use crazy critic networks such as ultra-deep ResNets and train them as much as desired before updating the generator network.  

The principle behind their operation is rather simple to describe, but unfortunately, it is much more difficult to explain why they work so well. However, I believe that as long as we know how to make one, and know specific implementation details that improve their stability, then I believe their principles can be applied more broadly to achieve success in a wide variety of regimes. 

II. GANs as a Model of Discourse

In order to use GANs as a tool for conceptual understanding of discourse, I propose to model of the dynamics of debate as a collection of hypothesis-generators and hypothesis-critics. This could be likened to the structure of academia - researchers publish papers, they go through peer-review, the work is iterated on and improved - and over time this process converges to more and more accurate models of reality (or so we hope). Most individuals within this process play both roles, but in theory this process would still work even if they didn't. For example, Isaac Newton was a superb hypothesis generator, but he also had some wacky ideas that most of us would consider to be obviously absurd. Nevertheless, calculus and Newtonian physics became a part of our accepted scientific knowledge, and alchemy didn't. The system adopted and iterated on his good ideas while throwing away the bad. 

Our community should be capable of something similar, while doing it more efficiently and not requiring the massive infrastructure of academia. 

A hypothesis-generator is not something that just randomly pulls out a model from model-space. It proposes things that are close modifications of things it already holds to be likely within its model (though I expect this point to be debatable). Humans are both hypothesis-generators and hypothesis-critics. And as I will argue, that distinction is not quite as sharply defined as one would think. 

I think there has always been an underlying assumption within the theory of intelligence that creativity and recognition / distinction are fundamentally different. In other words, one can easily understand Mozart to be a great composer, but it is much more difficult to be a Mozart. Naturally this belief entered it's way into the field of Artificial Intelligence too, and became somewhat of a dogma. Computers might be able to play Chess, they might be able to play Go, but they aren't doing anything fundamentally intelligent. They lack the creative spark, they work on pure brute-force calculation only, with maybe some heuristics and tricks that their human creators bestowed upon them.  

GANs seem to defy this principle. Trained on a dataset of photographs of human faces, a GAN generator learns to produce near-photo-realistic images that nonetheless do not fully match any the faces the critic network saw (one of the reasons why CelebA was such a good choice to test these on), and are therefore in some sense producing things which are genuinely original. It may have once been thought that there was a fundamental distinction between creation and critique, but perhaps that's not really the case. GANs were a surprising discovery, because they showed that it was possible to make impressive "creations" by starting from random nonsense and slowly tweaking it in the direction of "good" until it eventually got there (well okay, that's basically true for the whole of optimization, but it was thought to be especially difficult for generative models).

What does this mean? Could someone become a "Mozart" by beginning a musical composition from random noise and slowly tweaking it until it became a masterpiece?

The above seems to imply "yes, perhaps." However, this is highly contingent on the quality of the "tweaking." It seems possible only as long as the directions to update in are very high quality. What if they aren't very high quality? What if they point nowhere, or in very bad directions?

I think the default distribution of discourse is that it is characterized by a large number of these directionless, low quality contributions. And that it's likely that this is one of the main factors behind mode collapse. This is related to what has been noted before: Too much intolerance for imperfect ideas (or ideas outside of established dogma) in a community prevent useful tasks from being accomplished, and progress from being made. Academia does not seem immune to this problem. Where low-quality or hostile discussion is tolerated is where this risk is greatest.  

Fortunately, making sure we get good "tweaks" seems to be the easy part. Critique is in high abundance. Our community is apparently very good at it. We also don't need to worry much about the ratio of hypothesis-generators to hypothesis-critics, as long as we can establish good principles that allow us to follow GANs as closely as possible. The nice feature of the GAN formulation is that you are allowed to make the critic as powerful as you want. In fact, the critic should be more powerful than the generator (If the generator is too powerful, it just goes directly to the argmax of the critic). 

(In addition, any collection of generators is a generator, and any collection of critics is a critic. So this formulation can be applied to the community setting).

III. The Norm One Principle

So the question then becomes, how do we take an algorithm governing a game between models much simpler than a human, and use the same tweaks which consist of nothing more than a few very simple equations? 

Here what I devise is a strategy for taking the concept of the norm of the critic gradient being as close to one as possible, and using that as a heuristic for how to structure appropriate discourse. 

(This is where my argument gets more speculative and I expect to update this a lot, and where I welcome the most criticism).

What I propose is that we begin modeling the concept of "criticism" based on how useful it is to the idea-generator receiving the criticism. Under this model, I think we should start breaking down criticism into two fundamental attributes:

1. Directionality - does the criticism contain highly useful information, such that the "generator" knows how to update their model / hypothesis / proposal?
2. Magnitude - Is the criticism too harsh, does it point to something completely unlike the original proposal, or otherwise require changes that aren't feasible for the generator to make?

My claim is that any contribution to a discussion should satisfy the "Norm One Principle." In other words, it should have a well-defined direction, and the quantity of change should be feasible to implement.

If a critique can satisfy our requirements for both directionality and magnitude, then it serves a useful purpose. The inverse claim to this is that if we can't follow these requirements, we risk falling into mode collapse, and the ideas commonly proposed are almost indistinguishable from the ones which preceded them, and ideas which deviate too far from the norm are harshly condemned and suppressed. 

I think it's natural to question whether or not restricting criticism to follow certain principles is a form of speech suppression that prevents useful ideas from being considered. But the pattern I'm proposing doesn't restrict the "generation" process, the creative aspect which produces new hypotheses. It doesn't restrict the topics that can be discussed. It only restricts the criticism of those hypotheses, such that they are maximally useful to the source of the hypothesis. 

One of the primary fears behind having too much criticism is that it discourages people from contributing because they want to avoid the negative feedback. But under the Norm One Principle, I think it is useful to distinguish between disagreement and criticism. I think if we're following these norms properly, we won't need to consider criticism to be a negative reward. In fact, criticism can be positive. Agreement could be considered "criticism in the same direction you are moving in." Disagreement would be the opposite. And these norms also eliminate the kind of feedback that tends to be the most discouraging. 

For example, some things which violate "Norm One":

• Ad hominem attacks (typically directionless). 
• Affective Death Spirals (unlimited praise or denunciation is usually directionless, and usually very high magnitude). 
• Signs that cause aversion (things I "don't like", that trigger my System 1 alarms, which probably violates both directionality and magnitude). 
• Lengthy lists of changes to make (norm greater than 1, ideally we want to try to focus on small sets of changes that have the highest priority). 
• Repetition of points that have already been made (norm greater than one). 

One of my strongest hopes is that whomever is playing the part of the "generator" is able to compile the list of critiques easily and use them to update somewhere close to the optimal direction. This would be difficult if the sum of all critiques is either directionless (many critics point in opposite or near-opposite directions) or very high-magnitude (Critics simply say to get as far away from here as possible). 

But let's suppose that each individual criticism satisfies the Norm One principle. We will also assume that the generator is weighing each critique by their respect for whoever produced it, which I think is highly likely. Then the generator should be able to move in a direction unless the sum of the directions completely cancel out. It is unlikely for this to happen - unless there is very strong epistemic disagreement in the community over some fundamental assumptions (in which case the conversation should probably move over to that). 

In addition, it also becomes less likely for the directions to cancel out as the number of inputs increases. Thus, it seems that proposals for new models should be presented to a wide audience, and we should avoid the temptation to keep our proposals hidden to all except for a small set of people we trust.

So I think that in general, this proposed structure should tend to increase the amount of collective trust we have in the community, and that it favors transparency and favors diversity of viewpoints. 

But what of the possible failure modes of this plan? 

This model should fail if the specific details of its implementation either remove too much discussion, or fail to deal with individuals who refuse to follow the norms and refuse to update. Any implementation should allow room for anyone to update. Someone who posts an extremely hostile, directionless comment should be allowed chances to modify their contribution. The only scenario in which the "banhammer" becomes appropriate is when this model fails to apply: The cardinal sin of rationality, the refusal to update. 

IV. Building the Ideal "Generator"

As a final point, I'll note that the above assumes that generators will be able to update their models incrementally. The easy part, as I mentioned, was obtaining the updates, the hard part is accumulating them. This seems difficult with the infrastructure we have in place. What we do have is a good system for posting proposals and receiving feedback (The blog post / comment thread set-up), but this assumes that each "generator" is keeping track of their models by themselves and has to be fully aware of the status of other models on their own. There is no centralized "mixture model" anywhere that contains the full set of models weighted by how much probability they are given by the community. Currently, we do not have a good solution for this problem. 

However, it seems that the first conception of Arbital was centered around finding a solution to this kind of problem:

Arbital has bigger ambitions than even that. We all dream of a world that eliminates the duplication of effort in online argument - a world where, the same way that Wikipedia centralized the recording of definite facts, an argument only needs to happen once, instead of being reduplicated all over the Internet; with all the branches of the argument neatly recorded in the same place, along with some indication of who believes what. A world where 'just check Arbital' had the same status for determining the current state of debates, as 'just check Wikipedia' now has when somebody starts arguing about the population of Melbourne. There's entirely new big subproblems and solutions, not present at all in the current Arbital, that we'd need to tackle that considerably more difficult problem. But to solve 'explaining things' is something of a first step. If you have a single URL that you can point anyone to for 'explaining Bayes', and if you can dispatch people to different pages depending on how much math they know, you're starting to solve some of the key subproblems in removing the redundancy in online arguments.

If my proposed model is accurate, then it suggests that the problem Arbital aims to solve is in fact quite crucial to solve, and that the developers of Arbital should consider working through each obstacle they face without pivoting from this original goal. I feel confident enough that this goal should be high priority that I'd be willing to support its development in whatever way is deemed most helpful and is feasible for me (I am not an investor, but I am a programmer and would also be capable of making small donations, or contributing material). 

The only thing that this model would require for Arbital to do would be to make it as open as possible to contribute, and then perform heavy moderation or filtering of contributed content (but importantly not the other way around, where it is closed to small group of trusted people).

Currently, the incremental changes that would have to be made to LessWrong and related sites like SSC would simply be increased moderation of comment quality. Otherwise, any further progress on the problem would require overcoming much more serious obstacles requiring significant re-design and architecture changes. 

Everything I've written above is also subject to the model I've just outlined, and therefore I expect to make incremental updates as feedback to this post accrues.

My initial prediction for feedback to this post is that the ideas might be considered helpful and offer a useful perspective or a good starting point, but that there are probably many details that I have missed that would be useful to discuss, or points that were not quite well-argued or well thought-out. I will look out for these things in the comments.   

This post will not teach you the models here.  This post is a summary of the models that I carry in my head.  I have written most of the descriptions without looking them up (See Feynman notebook method).  If you have read a book on every one of these points they will make sense, as if you were shaking hands with an old acquaintance.  If you are seeing them for the first time, they won't make very much sense or they will feel like a surface trivial truth.

I can't make you read all the books but maybe I can offer you that the answer to social problems is surprisingly simple.  After reading enough books you start to see the overlap and realise they often are trying to talk about the same thing.  (i.e. NVC + Gottman go together well).

In fact if you were several independent dragon hunters trying to model an invisible beast and all of various people's homemade sensors kept going "ping" at similar events you would probably start to agree you were chasing the same monster.  Models should start to agree when they are talking about the same thing.  The variety of models should make it easier for different minds to connect to different parts of the answer.

All models are wrong, some models are useful.  Try to look at where the models converge.  That's where I find the truth.

1. The book Crucial Confrontations - Kerry Patterson

http://www.wikisummaries.org/wiki/Crucial_Conversations:_Tools_for_Talking_When_Stakes_are_High
(without explaining how) If you can navigate to a place of safety in a conversation you can say pretty much anything.  Which is not to say "here is how to be a jerk" but if you know something is going to come across negative you can first make sure to be in a positive/agreeable/supportive conversation before raising the hard thing.

In the middle of a yelling match is maybe not the best time to bring up something that has bugged you for years.  However a few sentences about growth mindset, supporting people being a better person and trying to help (and getting a feel that the person is ready to hear the thing) and you could tell anyone they are a lazy bum who needs to shape up or ship out.

The conversation needs to be safe.  For example - "I want to help you as a person and I know how hard it can be to get feedback from other people and I want to make you into a better person.  I have an idea for how you might like to improve.  Before I tell you I want to reassure you that even though this might come across abrasive I want to help you grow and be better in the future..."

(some people will be easier than others to navigate a safe conversation and that's where there are no hard and fast rules for how to do this.  Go with your gut)

The crux of this model is "have a model of the other person" [15]

2. The partner book "Difficult conversations"

http://www.peace.ca/difficultconversations.pdf

There are 4 types of difficult conversations around communicating a decision:
a. Consultation (Bob asks Alice for ideas for the decision he is going to make on his own)
b. Collaboration (Bob and Alice make a decision together)
c. Declaration (Bob tells alice the decision he has made)
d. Delegation (Bob tells alice to make the decision)

As someone's boss you may sometimes have to pass on bad news in the form of a declaration.  It's up to you which conversation this is going to be but being clear about what conversation this is will be helpful to a person to understand their place in responding or interacting with you.  It becomes difficult where there is a misunderstanding about what is going on.

It's also important when you are on the receiving end to be on the same page about what conversation this is.  (you don't want to be negotiating in a collaborative manner when they are trying to give you a declaration of their decision, and the same when you are leading the conversation).

Among other details in the book.

3. Getting the 3rd story.

linking back to - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
(from one of those books [1] or [2])

Bob knows what happened from his perspective and Alice knows her version of events.  Where there is a disagreement of what follows from different versions of events it is possible to construct a 3rd person story.  This may be hard to do when you are involved and an actual 3rd person can help but is not crucial in constructing the story.  If you can step outside of your own story and construct a 3rd version together this can resolve misunderstandings.
Something like; "I thought you said we should meet here, even though I said I wanted ice-cream, you thought that meant we should meet at the ice-cream place next door and we each waited 30mins for the other one to turn up to where we were.".  By constructing a 3rd story it's possible that no one was at fault.  It's also possible that it can become clear what went wrong and how to learn from that or what can be done differently.

(cue business management After-Action-Review activities {what did we do well, what could we have done better, what would we do differently}, now SWOT)

4. The Gottman Institute research (and book)

The 4 horsemen of divorce (but just because that's what the research is about doesn't mean we can't apply it elsewhere) (yes Gottman is limited in value because of bad use of statistics we can't be sure the models are accurate, I still find it's a good model at explaining things).

Don't do these things.  When you see these things, recognise them for what they are and don't engage with them.  If necessary acknowledge people are feeling certain angry feelings and let them get them out (not everyone can efficiently drop how they are feeling and get on with talking about it, especially not without practice).

Each one has an antidote, usually in the form of an attitude or strategy that can leave you thinking about the same thing differently and relating to it differently.

I. Criticism
I would rename to "inherent criticism".  Comes in the form of an inherent descriptor like, "you are a lazy person", "you always run late".  "you are the type of person who forgets my birthday"[see 5].  Try to replace inherent criticism with *[6] concrete descriptions of actions.

To counter this - try descriptions like [6a]:  "I can see you are sitting on the couch right now and I would like you to offer help when you can see me cleaning".  "yesterday I saw you try to do a few extra tasks and that caused us to run late", "you forgot my birthday last year".

The important thing about the change here is that an inherent label comes in the form of an unchangeable belief.  It's equivalent to saying, "you are a tall person".  It's fixed in time, space and attitude.  You don't want to give someone a fixed negative trait.  Not in your head and especially not out of your head either to that person or to anyone else.  You set someone up for failure if you do.  As soon as someone is "the lazy one" you give them the ticket to "always be lazy" and if they are half smart they will probably take it.  Besides - you don't change people's actions by using criticism.  You maybe relieve some frustration but then you have created some open frustration and the problem still exists.

II. Defensiveness
Probably easiest to understand by the description of reactive defensiveness.  It usually comes as a reaction to an accusation.  If two people are yelling, chances are neither is listening.  In response to "you are always making us run late", a defensive reaction would be, "I make us run late because you always stress me out".

It does two things:
1. claim to not be responsible
2. make a second accusation (can be irrelevant to the subject at hand).

First of all if you are bringing up several problems at once you are going to confuse matters.  Try to deal with one problem at a time.  It doesn't really matter which so long as you are not yelling about being late while they are yelling about you forgetting the laundry. (and so long as you deal with all the problems)

The second part is that you can't shift blame.  Absorbing some blame does not make you a bad person.  Nor does it make you inherently terrible.  You can have both done a wrong thing and not be a bad person.  After all you had your reasons for doing what you did.

The antidote to defensiveness is to acknowledge [6] what they have said and move forward without reacting.

III. Contempt
This is about an internal state as much as an external state.  Contempt is about the story we tell ourselves about the other person (see NVC) and is a state of negative intent.  I hold you contemptuously.  For example, "a good person would not run late", "if you were smarter you would just...", "I work so hard on this relationship and you just...", Some examples of displays of contempt include when a person uses sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mockery, and hostile humour [see 7 - emotional intelligence about physiological events].  This overlaps with Inherent criticism and makes more sense with [6 NVC].
Contempt has two antidotes, Teacher mindset and curiosity.  Teacher mindset can change an attitude of, "He should know what he did wrong" to, "I need to explain to him how to do it right".  Curiosity [See NVC, also [3] the 3rd story] can take you to a place of trying to understand what is going on and take you away from the place of the stories we tell ourselves.[10]

IV. Stonewalling
This is a physiological state of going silent.  It is used when you are being lectured (for example) and you go silent, possibly start thinking about everything else while you wait for someone to finish.  It's like holding your breath when you go underwater, waiting for it to pass.  If you are doing this what you need to do is take a break from whatever is going on and do something different, for example go for a walk and calm down.
There was a classic joke, they asked a 110 year old why he lived so long and he said, every time I got into an argument with my wife I used to go for a walk.  I went on a lot of walks in my life.
Because this is a physiological state it's so easy to fix so long as you remember to pay attention to your internal state [see NVC what is most alive in you, and 11. what does that look like in practice]

5. How to win friends and influence people

I always recommend this book to people starting the journey because it's a great place to start.  These days I have better models but when I didn't know anything this was a place to begin.  Most of my models are now more complicated applications of the ideas initially presented.  You still need weak models before replacing them with more complicated ones which are more accurate.
The principles and (in brackets) what has superseded them for me:

BECOME A FRIENDLIER PERSON
1. Don't criticize, condemn or complain. (There are places and methods to do this.  Criticism can be done as [1] from a place of safety or in [4] from a teacher/mentor/growth mindset.  Definitely don't do it from a place of criticism.  Condemnation is more about [10] and is an inherent trait.  Progress doesn't usually happen when we use inherent traits, From Saul Alinsky's rules for radicals - don't complain unless you have the right answer - "I have a problem and you have to figure out how to fix it for me" is not a good way to get your problem solved.)
2. Give honest, sincere appreciation. (so long as you are doing this out of the goodness of your heart good.  If you are using it for manipulation you can just not bother.  NVC supersedes this.  By keeping track of what is most alive in you, you can do better than this)
3. Arouse in the other person an eager want. (Work out what people want, work out how to get both your needs met - superceded by NVC.)
4. Become genuinely interested in other people. (depends what for.  Don't bother if you don't want to.  That would not be genuine.  You need to find the genuine interest inside yourself first.)
5. Smile. (um.  Hard to disagree with but a default smiling state is a good one to cultivate - from [7] physiological states are linked two ways.  Smiling will make you happy just as being happy will make you smile)
6. Remember that a person's name is to that person the most important sound in any language. (I don't know about most important but I would say that anyone can remember names with practice.  http://bearlamp.com.au/list-of-techniques-to-help-you-remember-names/)

7. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. (NVC - pay attention to what is most alive in you when you do. Make sure you know about the spectrum of )
8. Talk in terms of the other person's interest. (Sure why not.  Sales are a lot easier when you are selling what people want. See [15] and NVC to supersede how and why this works)
9. Make the other person feel important - and do so sincerely. (I guess?  I don't do this actively.)
10 The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it. ([9] if you are in an argument something already went wrong)
WIN PEOPLE TO YOUR WAY OF THINKING
11. Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, "You're wrong." (NVC, instead of saying no, say what gets in the way.  "here is evidence that says otherwise" can be better than "durr WRONGGG" but I have seen people use "you are wrong" perfectly fine.)
12. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically. (hard to disagree with, but holding onto grudges and guity things is not useful.  [4] gottman talks about defensiveness, avoid defensiveness and acknowledge the fact that someone feels you are at fault first.  It will satisfy the psychological need arising in an offended person [14])
13. Begin in a friendly way. (as opposed to what?  Sure I guess.)
14. Get the other person saying, "Yes, yes" immediately. (Yes ladders are important and valuable.  You see bits of this creeping into Gottman [4], NVC [6], The game [13] and other practices but no one as yet explains it as well as I would like.  The game probably has the best commentary on it, short of business books that escape my memory right now)
15. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking. (not really important who talks so long as you are on the same page and in agreement.  If you want someone else to do the emotional labour [15] for you, then you can let them.  If you want to do it for them you can.  Implications of EL are not yet clear to me in full.  Some places it will be good to do EL for people, other places they need to do it for themselves to feel ownership of the problems and solutions)
16. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers. (sure I guess.  A good idea is it's own champion.  Ideas that are obviously better will win out.  You can't make a turd beat a diamond but you can employ tricks to polish certain diamonds over others.  This technique is battling over little bits.  can be useful but I would not rely on it alone.)
17. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view. (NVC [6] and EL [15] should help do that better.  Imagining that you are that person in a way that is hard to impart in words because it's about having the experience of being that other person (see http://bearlamp.com.au/zen-koans/) and not "just thinking about it". needs a longer description and is an effective technique.)
18. Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires. (NVC supercedes.  Everyone has basic feelings and needs that you can understand, like the need for safety)
19. Appeal to the nobler motives. (giving people a reputation to live up to is a valuable technique that I would say only works for qualified people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation but does not work so well if you put pressure on people who are less skilled.  Probably relates to the things going through our head at the time - see also book - the inner game of tennis, NVC, judgement model)
20. Dramatize your ideas. (I don't know?  Try it.  It could work.  will not work by virtue of it being a good model of things, might work by luck/breaking people out of their habits)
BE A LEADER
21. Throw down a challenge. (can work if people are willing to rise to a challenge can work against you and create cognitive dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance if people are not willing.  Need more information to make it work)
22. Begin with praise and honest appreciation. (Don't give people a shit sandwich - slices of compliments surrounding shit.  That's not respectful of them.  Instead using [1] navigate to a place of safety to talk about things)
23. Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly. (there are correct and incorrect ways to do this.  You can be passive agressive about it.  I don't see a problem with being blunt - in private, in safe conversations [1] - about what is going on)
24. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person. (don't yammer on, but it can help to connect you and them and the problem.  NVC would be better than just this)
25. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. (socratic method, can be a drain, need more advanced skills and [15] EL to know if this is appropriate )
26. Let the other person save face. (better described in http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/ I agree with this, but [15] EL might describe it better)
27. Praise the slightest and every improvement. Be "lavish in your praise." (NVC disagrees, praise only what is relevant, true and valid.  Be a teacher [4] but deliver praise when praise is due.)
28. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to. (This is 19/26 again.  I agree with it.  I could use it more)
29. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct. (agree, solve the "problem" for someone else, make it easy to move forward)
30. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest. (NVC gives a better model of doing what other people want, "with the joy of a small child feeding a hungry duck")

* Giving people a positive reputation to live up to.  "I trust that you won't forget my birthday again".  Don't be silly with this, "I have confidence that you will give me a million dollars" will not actually yield you a million dollars unless you have reason to believe that will work.

6. NVC - Non-Judgemental communication 

I can't yet do justice to NVC but I am putting together the pieces.  Best to watch the youtube talk in the title link but here are some short points.  Also this helps - cnvc.org/Training/feelings-inventory
a. Concrete descriptions - http://bearlamp.com.au/concrete-instructions/
In agreement with Gottman, be concrete and specific -  The objective test of whether the description is concrete is whether the description can be followed by an anonymous person to produce the same experience.  "you are a lazy person" VS "you are sitting on the couch"
b. Acknowledge feelings - http://bearlamp.com.au/feelings-in-the-map/
people have huge psychological needs to be heard and understood.  Anyone can fulfill that need
c. Connect that to a need
See the NVC video.
d.  Making a request
See NVC video.
e. Saying no by passing your goals forward
Instead of saying no, Consider what it is that gets in the way of you saying no and say that instead.  Keep in mind vulnerability [16].  This also allows people to plan around your future intentions.  If someone asks you to buy a new car and you say, "no I plan to save money towards buying a house" they can choose to be mindful of that in the future and they can act accordingly (not offering you a different car for sale next week).
f. Connect with what is most alive in you right now
See video for best description.

7. Emotional intelligence

There is a two way path between physiological states and emotional states.

Try these:
a. Hold a pencil/pen in your mouth and go back and read the joke about the old man [4]. (expect to find it funnier than you did the first time)
b. furrow your brow while reading the first paragraph of this page again (expect to either feel confused or the cognitive dissonance version if you know it very well - "I know this too well")
The two way path means that you can feel better about emotional pain by taking a paracetamol, but more specifically, if you take a break from a situation and come back to it the emotions might have improved.  This can include getting a glass of water, going for a walk, getting some fresh air.  And for more complicated decisions - sleeping on it (among other things).

Everyone can train emotional intelligence, they need practice.  This includes holding an understanding of your own states as well as being able to notice emotional states in other people.

I had an ex who had particularly visible physiological states, it was a very valuable experience to me to see the state changes and it really trained my guessing mind to be able to notice changes.  These days I can usually see when things change but I can't always pick the emotion that has come up.  This is where NVC and curiosity become valuable (also circling).

EI is particularly important when it is particularly deficient.  In the book it talks about anger as a state that (to an untrained person) can cause a reaction before someone knows that they were angry.  Make sure to fix that first before moving to higher levels of emotional management.

8. model of arguments
http://bearlamp.com.au/a-model-of-arguments/

(see also NVC)

If you view disagreements or misunderstandings as a venn diagram of what you know and what the other person knows.  You have full rights to make comment on anything you know but only have limited rights to make comment on what the other person knows.  Instead you can comment on the information they have given you.  "you said 'X', I know Y about what you said 'X'".  To say X is wrong, is not going to yield progress.  Instead to acknowledge that they described 'X' and their description does not make sense to me, or leaves me feeling confused [6].

9. The argument started earlier

From Gavin: "If I ever find myself in a position of saying - well officer, let me explain what happened...", Something already went wrong well and truly before now.
When you start the journey you will start getting to "Aha" moments about where arguments start.  As you get more and more experience you realise the argument started well and truly earlier than you ever first realised.  When you get really good at it, you can stop and say [6] "I am confused"  well and truly before a yelling match.

10. The stories we tell ourselves

NVC based, Judgement model, There is a lot of people who are thinking in stories.  Related - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error.

Their entire existence is the story and narrative they tell about themselves (see also Jordan Peterson - maps of meaning).  The constant narrative about how "the world hates me" is going to give you a particular world experience compared to the constant narrative, "I am a lucky person".  You see this in gamblers who are searching for "the prevailing wind" or "winning streaks".

You also see this in social pressure - when people think and get fixated on, "what will people think of me?", sometimes the social pressure does not even have to be there to cause the thoughts and the actions that would be "social pressure".
Several models of thinking advocate removing the story telling in your head to relieve the psychological pain.  See books, "search inside yourself", NVC, Gateless gatecrashers, some information in the Persistent Non Symbolic Experience Article.

I am not sure what is the best practice, but mindfulness seems to help as well, since these thoughts are all theoretical, grounding yourself in the concrete [6a] and observing those thoughts seems to alleviate the anxieties it can cause.  But this can explain a lot of people's actions (they are telling themselves a particular story in their head).

11. Polling your internal states

bearlamp.com.au/what-does-that-look-like-in-practice/
[related to 6 NVC]. Any time you are disconnected to what is going on, try asking yourself an internal question of "what is going on?" to connect with what is most alive in you right now.  This might be a feeling of boredom.  It could be anything, but if it's not a good and strong connection with what is presently happening you have a chance to fix it.  (See also the book "The Charisma myth")

12. circling (The circling handbook)

[6 built on NVC] is a practice of living in the current and present experience.  You can focus on another person or focus on yourself.  Perpetually answering the question of "what is most alive in you right now?" and sharing that with other people.

Some examples include:I am feeling nervous sharing this experienceI just closed my eyes and put my head back trying to think of a good example.I am distracted by the sound of birds behind me.I can feel air going past my nostrils as I think about this question.

The creators of cicling find it a very connecting experience to either share what is going on inside you or to guess at what is going on inside someone else and ask if that's an accurate guess.  Or to alternate experiences, each sharing one and one.  or each guessing of each other - one and one.

I find it valuable because everyone can understand present experience, and get a glimpse of your current experience in the process of sharing experience with you.  This method can also work as a form of [15] and [7].

13. The game

(From the book The Game) This concept receives equal part condemnation and praise from various parties.

The basic concept of the game is that life is a game.  Specifically social interactions are a game that you can try out.  You can iterate on and repeat until success.  In the book it follows the journey of a pick up artist as he generally disregards other people's agency and works out how to get what he wants (regularly bed people) through some stages of practicing certain methods of interaction, and iterating until he sees a lot of success.

I see a lot of this concept at kegan stage 3[18].  Everything is about social, and the only thing that matters is social relationships.

Most of the condemnations comes from the failure of this model to treat other people as human, worthy of moral weight, thought or anything other than to be used to your own purposes.  If you don't like dehumanising people the book can still teach you a lot about social interaction, and practicing towards incremental improvement.

If you feel uncomfortable with Pick up, you should examine that belief closely, it's probably to do with feeling uncomfortable with people using manipulation to pursue sex.  That's fine, there is a lot to learn about social and a lot of social systems before you turn into "literally the devil" for knowing about it.  There are also other social goals other than sex that you can pursue.

If you are cautious about turning into a jerk - you are probably not likely to ever even get close to actions that paint you as a jerk because your filters will stop you.  It's the people who have no filter on actions that might want to be careful - herein lies dark arts and being a jerk.  And as much as no one will stop you, no one will really enjoy your presence either if you are a jerk.

The biggest problem I have with game and game methodology is that we all play a one-shot version.  With high stakes of failure.  Which means some of the iteration and having to fail while you learn how to not be terrible - will permanently damage your reputation.  There is no perfect "retry" - a reputation will follow you basically to the ends of the earth and back.  As much as game will teach you some things, the other models in this list have better information for you and are going to go further than game.

14. what an apology must do from Aaron Lazare, M.D.- on apology

1. A valid acknowledgement of the offence that makes clear who the offender is and who is the offended. The offender must clearly and completely acknowledge the offence.
2. An effective explanation, which shows an offence was neither intentional nor personal, and is unlikely to recur.
3. Expressions of remorse, shame, and humility, which show that the offender recognises the suffering of the offended.
4. A reparation of some kind, in the form of a real or symbolic compensation for the offender’s transgression.
An effective apology must also satisfy at least one of seven psychological needs of an offended person.
1. The restoration of dignity in the offended person.
2. The affirmation that both parties have shared values and agree that the harm committed was wrong.
3. Validation that the victim was not responsible for the offense.
4. The assurance that the offended party is safe from a repeat offense.
5. Reparative justice, which occurs when the offended sees the offending party suffer through some type of punishment.
6. Reparation, when the victim receives some form of compensation for his pain.
7. A dialogue that allows the offended parties to express their feelings toward the offenders and even grieve over their losses.

These are not my notes from the book but they are particularly valuable when trying to construct an understanding of apologising and making up for misdeeds.  I don't have them in memory but I know when I need to make a serious apology I can look them up.  They fit quite well with [6], but are more specific to apology and not all interactions.

15. Emotional labour

A relatively new concept.  This is roughly the ability to:
I. Model someone else's emotional state
II. Get it right
III. act on their emotional state

For example:
I. I notice my partners eyes are droopy and they do not appear to be concentrating very well.  Is rubbing eyes and checking their watch a lot.
II. I suspect they are sleepy
III. I make them a coffee, or I offer to make them coffee.  (as a downgraded form I mention they look tired and ask if this is the case)

From Erratio:

Emotional labour is essentially a name for a managerial role in a relationship. This takes on a few different concrete forms.

The first is management of the household, appointments, shopping, and other assorted tasks that are generally shared across couples and/or housemates. Sweeping a floor or cooking dinner is not emotional labour, but being the person who makes sure that those things are accomplished is. It doesn't matter whether you get the floor swept by doing it yourself, asking your partner to do it, firing up a Roomba, or hiring a cleaning service; what matters is that you are taking on responsibility for making sure the task is done. This is why people who say that they would be happy to help with the housework if you would just tell them what needs doing are being a lot less helpful than they think. They're taking the physical labour component of the task but explicitly sticking the other person with the emotional labour component.

The second is taking responsibility for the likes, dislikes, feelings, wants and needs of other people who you are in a relationship with (and to be clear, it doesn't have to be a romantic relationship). Stereotypical scenarios that are covered by this kind of emotional labour include: the hysterical girlfriend who demands that her boyfriend drop everything he's doing to comfort her, the husband who comes home tense and moody after a long day at the office and expects to be asked how his day went and listened to and have validating noises made at him, noticing that the other person in a conversation is uncomfortable and steering the conversation to a more pleasant topic without having to be asked, helping a confused friend talk through their feelings about a potential or former partner, reminding your spouse that it's so-and-so's birthday and that so-and-so would appreciate being contacted, remembering birthdays and anniversaries and holidays and contacting people and saying or doing the right things on each of those dates.

This overlaps with [7].  Commentary on this concept suggest that it's a habit that women get into doing more than men.  Mothers are good at paying attention to their kids and their needs (as the major caregiver from early on), and stemming from this wives also take care of their husbands.  While it would not be fair to suggest that all wives do anything I would be willing to concede that these are habits that people get into and are sometimes socially directed by society.

I am not sure of the overall value of this model but it's clear that it has some implications about how people organise themselves - for better or worse.

16. Vulnerability - Brene brown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o
In order to form close connections with people a certain level of vulnerability is necessary.  This means that you need to share about yourself in order to give people something to connect to.  In the other direction people need to be a certain level of vulnerable to you in order to connect.  If you make sure to be open and encouraging and not judge you will enable people to open up to you and connect with you.
Sometimes being vulnerable will get you hurt and you need to be aware of that and not shut down future experiences (continue to be open with people).  I see this particularly in people who "take time" to get over relationships.  Being vulnerable is a skill that can be practiced.  Vulnerability replaced a lot of my ideas about [13 The game].  And would have given me a lot of ideas of how to connect with people, combined with [15] and [12]. (I have not read her books but I expect them to be useful)

17. More Than Two (book)

This is commonly known as the polyamory bible.  It doesn't have to be read as a polyamory book, but in the world of polyamory emotional intelligence and the ability to communicate is the bread and butter of every day interactions.  If you are trying to juggle two or three relationships and you don't know how to talk about hard things then you might as well quit now.  If you don't know how to handle difficult feelings or experiences you might as well quit polyamory now.

Reading about these skills and what you might gain from the insight that polyamorous people have learnt is probably valuable to anyone.

18. Kegan stages of development

https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/

Other people have summarised this model better than me.  I won't do it justice but if I had to be brief about it - there are a number of levels that we pass through as we grow from very small to more mature.  They include the basic kid level where we only notice inputs and outputs.  Shortly after - when we are sad "the whole world is sad" because we are the whole world.  Eventually we grow out of that and recognise other humans and that they have agency.  At around teenager we end up caring a lot about what other people think about us.  classic teenagers are scared of social pressure and say things like, "I would die if she saw me in this outfit" (while probably being hyperbolic, there is a bit of serious concern present).  Eventually we grow out of that and into system thinking (Libertarian, Socialist, among other tribes).  And later above tribalism into more nuanced varieties of tribes.

It's hard to describe and you are better off reading the theories to get a better idea.  I find the model limited in application but I admit I need to read more about the theories to get my head around it better.

I have a lot more books on the topic to read but I am publishing this list because I feel like I have a good handle on the whole "how people work" and, "how relationships work" thing.  It's rare that anyone does any actions that surprise me (socially) any more.  In fact I am getting so good at it that I trust my intuition [11] more than what people will say sometimes.

When something does not make sense I know what question to ask [6] to get answers.  Often enough it happens that people won't answer the first time, this can represent people not feeling Safe [1] enough to be vulnerable [16].  That's okay.  That represents it's my job to get them to a comfortable place to open up if I want to get to the answers.

I particularly like NVC, Gottman, EL, EI, Vulnerability all of them and find myself using them fortnightly.  Most of these represent a book or more of educational material.  Don't think you know them enough to dismiss them if you have not read the books.  If you feel you know them and already employ the model then it's probably not necessary to look into it further, but if you are ready to dismiss any of these models because they "sound bad" or "don't work" then I would encourage you to do your homework and understand them inside and out before you reject them.

The more models I find the more I find them converging on describing reality.  I am finding less and less I can say, "this is completely new to me" and more and more, "oh that's just like [6] and [7]

Meta: this is something around 6000 words and took a day to write ~12 hours.  I did this in one sitting because everything was already in my head.  I am surprised I could sit still for this long.  (I took breaks for food and a nap but most of today was spent at my desk)

Originally posted on my blog: http://bearlamp.com.au/models-of-human-relationships-tools-to-understand-people/

Cross posted to Medium: https://medium.com/@redeliot/models-of-human-relationships-tools-to-understand-people-fd0ac0ad6369

I want people to go forth, but also to return.  Or maybe even to go forth and stay simultaneously, because this is the Internet and we can get away with that sort of thing; I've learned some interesting things on Less Wrong, lately, and if continuing motivation over years is any sort of problem, talking to others (or even seeing that others are also trying) does often help.

But at any rate, if I have affected you at all, then I hope you will go forth and confront challenges, and achieve somewhere beyond your armchair, and create new Art; and then, remembering whence you came, radio back to tell others what you learned.

– Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

– African proverb (possibly just made up)

About a year ago, a secret rationalist group was founded. This is a report of what the group did during that year.

The Purpose

“Rationality, once seen, cannot be unseen,” are words that resonate with all of us. Having glimpsed the general shape of the thing, we feel like we no longer have a choice. I mean, of course we still have an option to think and act in stupid ways, and we probably do it a lot more than we would be okay to admit! We just no longer have an option to do it knowingly without feeling stupid about it. We can stray from the way, but we cannot pretend anymore that it does not exist. And we strongly feel that more is possible, both in our private lives, and for the society in general.

Less Wrong is the website and the community that brought us together. Rationalist meetups are a great place to find smart, interesting, and nice people; awesome people to spend your time with. But feeling good was not enough for us; we also wanted to become stronger. We wanted to live awesome lives, not just to have an awesome afternoon once in a while. But many participants seemed to be there only to enjoy the debate. Or perhaps they were too busy doing important things in their lives. We wanted to achieve something together; not just as individual aspiring rationalists, but as a rationalist group. To make peer pressure a positive force in our lives; to overcome akrasia and become more productive, to provide each other feedback and to hold each other accountable, to support each other. To win, both individually and together.

The Group

We are not super secret really; some people may recognize us by reading this article. (If you are one of them, please keep it to yourself.) We just do not want to be unnecessarily public. We know who we are and what we do, and we are doing it to win at life; trying to impress random people online could easily become a distraction, a lost purpose. (This article, of course, is an exception.) This is not supposed to be about specific individuals, but an inspiration for you.

We started as a group of about ten members, but for various reasons some people soon stopped participating; seven members remained. We feel that the current number is probably optimal for our group dynamic (see Parkinson's law), and we are not recruiting new members. We have a rule “what happens in the group, stays in the group”, which allows us to be more open to each other. We seem to fit together quite well, personality-wise. We desire to protect the status quo, because it seems to work for us.

But we would be happy to see other groups like ours, and to cooperate with them. If you want to have a similar kind of experience, we suggest starting your own group. Being in contact with other rationalists, and holding each other accountable, seems to benefit people a lot. CFAR also tries to keep their alumni in regular contact after the rationality workshops, and some have reported this as a huge added value.

To paint a bit more specific picture of us, here is some summary data:

• Our ages are between 20 and 40, mostly in the middle of the interval.
• Most of us, but not all, are men.
• Most of us, but not all, are childless.
• All of us are of majority ethnicity.
• Most of us speak the majority language as our first language.
• All of us are atheists; most of us come from atheist families.
• Most of us have middle-class family background.
• Most of us are, or were at some moment, software developers.

I guess this is more or less what you could have expected, if you are already familiar with the rationalist community.

We share many core values, but have some different perspectives, which adds value and confronts groupthink. We have entrepreneurs, employees, students, and unemployed bums; the ratio changes quite often. It is probably the combination of all of us having a good sense of epistemology, but different upbringing, education and professions, that makes supporting each other and giving advice more effective (i.e. beyond the usual benefits of the outside view); there have been plenty of situations which were trivial for one, but not for the other.

Some of us knew each other for years before starting the group, even before the local Less Wrong meetups. Some of us met the others at the meetups. And finally, some of us talked to some other members for the first time after joining the group. It is surprising how well we fit, considering that we didn’t apply any membership filter (although we were prepared to); people probably filtered themselves by their own interest, or a lack thereof, to join this kind of a group, specifically with the productivity and accountability requirements.

We live in different cities. About once in a month we meet in person; typically before or after the local Less Wrong meetup. We spend a weekend together. We walk around the city and debate random stuff in the evening. In the morning, we have a “round table” where each of us provides a summary of what they did during the previous month, and what they are planning to do during the following month; about 20 minutes per person. That takes a lot of time, and you have to be careful not to go off-topic too often.

In between meetups, we have a Slack team that we use daily. Various channels for different topics; the most important one is a “daily log”, where members can write briefly what they did during the day, and optionally what they are planning to do. In addition to providing extra visibility and accountability, it helps us feel like we are together, despite the geographical distances.

Besides mutual accountability, we are also fans of various forms of self-tracking. We share tips about tools and techniques, and show each other our data. Journaling, time tracking, exercise logging, step counting, finance tracking...

Even before starting the group, most of us were interested in various productivity systems: Getting Things Done, PJ Eby; one of us even wrote and sold their own productivity software.

We do not share a specific plan or goal, besides “winning” in general. Everyone follows their own plan. Everything is voluntary; there are no obligations nor punishments. Still, some convergent goals have emerged.

Also, good habits seem to be contagious, at least in our group. If a single person was doing some useful thing consistently, eventually the majority of the group seems to pick it up, whether it is related to productivity, exercise, diet, or finance.

Exercise

All of us exercise regularly. Now it seems like obviously the right thing to do. Exercise improves your health and stamina, including mental stamina. For example, the best chess players exercise a lot, because it helps them stay focused and keep thinking for a long time. Exercise increases your expected lifespan, which should be especially important for transhumanists, because it increases your chances to survive until the Singularity. Exercise also makes you more attractive, creating a halo effect that brings many other benefits.

If you don’t consider these benefits worth at least 2 hours of your time a week, we find it difficult to consider you a rational person who takes their ideas seriously. Yes, even if you are busy doing important things; the physical and mental stamina gained from exercising is a multiplier to whatever you are doing in the rest of your time.

Most of us lift weights (see e.g. StrongLifts 5×5, Alan Thrall); some of us even have a power rack and/or treadmill desk at home. Others exercise using their body weight (see Convict Conditioning). Exercising at home saves time, and in long term also money. Muscle mass correlates with longevity, in addition to the effect of exercise itself; and having more muscle allows you to eat more food. Speaking of which...

Diet

Most of us are, mostly or completely, vegetarian or vegan. Ignoring the ethical aspects and focusing only on health benefits, there is a lot of nutrition research summarized in a book How Not to Die and a website NutritionFacts.org. The short version is that whole-food vegan diet seems to work best, but you really should look into details. (Not all vegan food is automatically healthy; there is also vegan junk food. It is important to eat a lot of unprocessed vegetables, fruit, nuts, flax seeds, broccoli, beans. Read the book, seriously. Or download the Daily Dozen app.) We often share tasty recipes when we meet.

We also helped each other research food supplements, and actually find the best and cheapest sources. Most of us take extra B12 to supplement the vegan diet, creatine monohydrate, vitamin D3, and some of us also use Omega3, broccoli sprouts, and a couple of other things that are generally aimed at health and longevity.

Finance

We strategize and brainstorm career decisions or just debug office politics. Most of us are software developers. This year, one member spent nine months learning how to program (using Codecademy, Codewars, and freeCodeCamp at the beginning; reading tutorials and documentation later); as a result their income more than doubled, and they got a job they can do fully remotely.

Recently we started researching cryptocurrencies and investing in them. Some of us started doing P2P lending.

Personal life

Many of us are polyamorous. We openly discuss sex and body image issues in the group. We generally feel comfortable sharing this information with each other; women say they do not feel the typical chilling effects.

Summary

Different members report different benefits from their membership in the group. Some quotes:

“During the first half of the year, my life was more or less the same. I was already very productive before the group, so I kept the same habits, but benefited from sharing research. Recently, my life changed more noticeably. I started training myself to think of more high-leverage moves (inspired by a talk on self-hypnosis). This changed my asset allocation, and my short-term career plans. I realize more and more that I am very much monkey see, monkey do.”

“Before stumbling over the local Less Wrong meetup, I had been longing (and looking) for people who shared, or even just understood, my interest and enthusiasm for global, long-term, and meta thinking (what I now know to be epistemic rationality). After the initial thrill of the discovery had worn off however, I soon felt another type of dissonance creeping up on me: "Wait, didn't we agree that this was ultimately about winning? Where is the second, instrumental half of rationality, that was supposedly part of the package?" Well, it turned out that the solution to erasing this lingering dissatisfaction was to be found in yet a smaller subgroup.

So, like receiving a signal free of interference for the first time, I finally feel like I'm in a "place" where I can truly belong, i.e. a tribe, or at least a precursor to one, because I believe that things hold the potential to be way more awesome still, and that just time alone may already be enough to take us there.

On a practical level, the speed of adoption of healthy habits is truly remarkable. I've always been able to generally stick to any goals and commitments I've settled on, however the process of convergence is just so much faster and easier when you can rely on the judgment of other epistemically trustworthy people. Going at full speed is orders of magnitudes easier when multiple people illuminate the path (i.e. figure out what is truly worth it), while simultaneously sharing the burdens (of research, efficient implementation, trial-and-error, etc.)”

“Now I'm on a whole-food vegan diet and I exercise 2 times a week, and I also improved in introspection and solving my life problems. But most importantly, the group provides me companionship and emotional support; for example, starting a new career is a lot easier in the presence of a group where reinventing yourself is the norm.”

“It usually takes grit and willpower to change if you do it alone; on the other hand, I think it's fairly effortless if you're simply aligning your behavior with a preexisting strong group norm. I used to eat garbage, smoke weed, and have no direction in life. Now I lift weights, eat ~healthy, and I learned programming well enough to land a great job.

The group provides existential mooring; it is a homebase out of which I can explore life. I don't think I'm completely un-lost, but instead of being alone in the middle of a jungle, I'm at a friendly village in the middle of a jungle.”

“I was already weightlifting and eating vegan, but got motivated to get more into raw and whole foods. I get confronted more with math, programming and finance, and can broaden my horizon. Sharing daily tasks in Slack helps me to reflect about my priorities. I already could discuss many current career and personal challenges with the whole group or individuals.”

“I started exercising regularly, and despite remaining an omnivore I eat much more fresh vegetables now than before. People keep telling me that my body shape improved a lot during this year. Other habits did not stick (yet).”

“Finding a tribe of sane people in an insane world was a big deal for me, now I feel more self-assured and less alone. Our tribe has helped me to improve my habits—some more than others (for example, it has inspired me to buy a power-rack for my living room and start weightlifting daily, instead of going to the gym). The friendly bragging we do among our group is our way of celebrating success and inspires me to keep going and growing.”

Random

Despite having met each other thanks to Less Wrong, most of us do not read it anymore, because our impression is that “Less Wrong is dead”. We do read Slate Star Codex.

From other rationalist blogs, we really liked the article about Ra, and we discussed it a lot.

The proposal of a Dragon Army evoked mixed reactions. On one hand, we approve of rationalists living closer to each other, and we want to encourage fellow rationalists to try it. On the other hand, we don’t like the idea of living in a command hierarchy; we are adults, and we all have our own projects. Our preferred model would be living close to each other; optimally in the same apartment building with some shared communal space, but also with a completely self-contained unit for each of us. So far our shared living happened mostly by chance, but it always worked out very well.

Jordan Peterson and his Self-Authoring Suite is very popular with about half of the group.

What next?

Well, we are obviously going to continue doing what we are doing now, hopefully even better than before, because it works for us.

You, dear reader, if you feel serious about becoming stronger and winning at life, but are not yet a member of a productive rationalist group, are encouraged to join one or start one. Geographical distances are annoying, but Slack helps you overcome the intervals between meetups. Talking to other rationalists can be a lot of fun, but accountability can make the difference between productivity and mere talking. Remember: “If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight!”

Even if it’s seemingly small things, such as doing an exercise or adding some fiber to your diet; these things, accumulated over time, can increase your quality of life a lot. The most important habit is the meta-habit of creating and maintaining good habits. And it is always easier when your tribe is doing the same thing.

Any questions? It may take some time for our hive mind to generate an answer, and in case of too many or too complex questions we may have to prioritize. Don’t feel shy, though. We care about helping others.

(This account was created for the purpose of making this post, and after a week or two it will stop being used. It may be resurrected after another year, or maybe not. Please do not send private messages; they will most likely be ignored.)

Related to: Bucket errors, Categorizing Has Consequences, Fallacies of Compression

Followup to: Gears in Understanding

I use a lot of fake frameworks — that is, ways of seeing the world that are probably or obviously wrong in some important way.

I think this is an important skill. There are obvious pitfalls, but I think the advantages are more than worth it. In fact, I think the "pitfalls" can even sometimes be epistemically useful.

Here I want to share why. This is for two reasons:

• I think fake framework use is a wonderful skill. I want it represented more in rationality in practice. Or, I want to know where I'm missing something, and Less Wrong is a great place for that.

• I'm building toward something. This is actually a continuation of Gears in Understanding, although I imagine it won't be at all clear here how. I need a suite of tools in order to describe something. Talking about fake frameworks is a good way to demo tool #2.

With that, let's get started.

So, I've been thinking about prediction markets and why they aren't really catching on as much as I think they should.

My suspicion is that (beside Robin Hanson's signaling explanation, and the amount of work it takes to get to the large numbers of predictors where the quality of results becomes interesting) the basic problem of prediction markets is that they look and feel like gambling. Or at best like the stock market, which for the vast majority of people is no less distasteful.

Only a small minority of people are neither disgusted by nor terrified of gambling. Prediction markets right now are restricted to this small minority.

Poker used to have the same problem.

But over the last few decades Poker players have established that Poker is (also) a sport. They kept repeating that winning isn't purely a matter of luck, they acquired the various trappings of tournaments and leagues, they developed a culture of admiration for the most skillful players that pays in prestige rather than only money and makes it customary for everyone involved to show their names and faces. For Poker, this has worked really well. There are much more Poker players, more really smart people are deciding to get into Poker and I assume the art of game probably improved as well.

So we should consider re-framing prediction the same way.

The calibration game already does this to a degree, but sport needs competition, so results need to be comparable, so everyone needs to make predictions on the same events. You'd need something like standard cards of events that players place their predictions on.

Here's a fantasy of what it could look like.

• Late in the year, a prediction tournament starts with the publication of a list of events in the coming year. Everybody is invited to enter the tournament (and maybe pay a small participation fee) by the end of the year, for a chance to be among the best predictors and win fame and prizes.
• Everyone who enters plays the calibration game on the same list of events. All predictions are made public as soon as the submission period is over and the new year begins. Lots of discussion of each event's distribution of predictions.
• Over the course of the year, events on the list happen or fail to happen. This allows for continually updated scores, a leaderboard and lots of blogging/journalistic opportunities.
• Near the end of the year, as the leaderboard turns into a shortlist of potential winners, tension mounts. Conveniently, this is also when the next tournament starts.
• At new year's, the winner is crowned (and I'm open to having that happen literally) at a big celebration which is also the end of the submission period for the next tournament and the revelation of what everyone is predicting for this next round. This is a big event that happens to be on a holiday, where more people have time for big events.

Update 7/9/17: I propose that Learners individually reach out to Teachers, and set up meetings. It seems like the most practical way of getting started, but I am not sure and am definitely open to other ideas. Other notes:

• There seems to be agreement that the best way to do this is individualized guidance, rather than lectures and curriculums. Eg. the Teacher "debugging" the Learner. Assuming that approach, it is probably best for the amount of Learners in a session to be small.
• Consider that it may make sense for you to act as a Teacher, even if you don't have a super strong grasp of the topic. For example, I know a decent amount about computer science, but don't have a super strong grasp of it. Still, I believe it would be valuable for me to teach computer science to others. I can definitely offer value to people with no CS background. And for people who do have a CS background, there could be value in us taking turns teaching/learning, and debugging each other.
• We may not be perfect at this in the beginning, but let's dive in and see what we can do! I think it'd be a good idea to comment on this post with what did/didn't work for you, so we as a group could learn and improve.
• I pinned http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p69/idea_for_lesswrong_video_tutoring/ to #productivity on the LessWrongers Slack group.

Update 6/28/17: With 14 people currently interested, it does seem that there's enough to get started. However, I'd like to give it a bit more time and see how much overall interest we get.

Idea: we coordinate to teach each other things via video chat.

• We (mostly) all like learning. Whether it be for fun, curiosity, a stepping stone towards our goals.
• My intuition is that there's a lot of us who also enjoy teaching. I do, personally.
• Enjoyment aside, teaching is a good way of solidifying ones knowledge.
• Perhaps there would be positive unintended consequences. Eg. socially.
• Why video? a) I assume that medium is better for education than simply text. b) Social and motivational benefits, maybe. A downside to video is that some may find it intimidating.
• It may be nice to evolve this into a group project where we iteratively figure out how to do a really good job teaching certain topics.
• I see the main value in personalization, as opposed to passive lectures/seminars. Those already exist, and are plentiful for most topics. What isn't easily accessible is personalization. With that said, I figure it'd make sense to have about 5 learners per teacher.

So, this seems like something that would be mutually beneficial. To get started, we'd need:

1. A place to do this. No problem: there's Hangouts, Skype, https://talky.io/, etc.
2. To coordinate topics and times.

Personally, I'm not sure how much I can offer as far as doing the teaching. I worked as a web developer for 1.5 years and have been teaching myself computer science. I could be helpful to those unfamiliar with those fields, but probably not too much help for those already in the field and looking to grow. But I'm interested in learning about lots of things!

Perhaps a good place to start would be to record in some spreadsheet, a) people who want to teach, b) what topics, and c) who is interested in being a Learner. Getting more specific about who wants to learn what may be overkill, as we all seem to have roughly similar interests. Or maybe it isn't.

If you're interested in being a Learner or a Teacher, please add yourself to this spreadsheet.

Starting Advice

[This is the first post in the Instrumental Rationality Sequence. It's a collection of four concepts that I think are central to instrumental rationality—caring about the obvious, looking for practical things, practicing in pieces, and realistic expectations.

Note that these essays are derivative of things I've written here before, so there may not be much new content in this post. (But I wanted to get something out as it'd been about a month since my last update.)

My main goal with this collection was to polish / crystallize past points I've made. If things here are worded poorly, unclear, or don't seem useful, I'd really appreciate feedback to try and improve.]

 

In Defense of the Obvious:

[As advertised.]

A lot of the things I’m going to go over in this sequence are sometimes going to sound obvious, boring, redundant, or downright tautological. This essay is here to convince you that you should try to listen to the advice anyway, even if it sounds stupidly obvious.

First off, our brains don’t always see all the connections at once. Thus, even if some given advice is apparentlyobvious, you still might be learning things.

For example, say someone tells you, “If you want to exercise more, then you should probably exercise more. Once you do that, you’ll become the type of person who exercises more, and then you’ll likely exercise more.”

The above advice might sound pretty silly, but it may still be useful. Often, our mental categories for “exercise” and “personal identity” are in different places. Sure, it’s tautologically true that someone who exercises becomes a person who exercises more. But if you’re not explicitly thinking about how your actions change who you are, then there’s likely still something new to think about.

Humans are often weirdly inconsistent with our mental buckets—things that logically seem like they “should” be lumped together often aren't. By paying attention to even tautological advice like this, you’re able to form new connections in your brain and link new mental categories together, perhaps discovering new insights that you “already knew”.

Secondly, obvious advice tends to be low-hanging fruit. If your brain is pattern-matching something as “boring advice” or “obvious”, you’ve likely heard it before many times before.

For example, you can probably guess the top 5 things on any “How to be Productive” list—make a schedule, remove distractions, take periodic breaks, etc. etc. You can almost feel your brain roll its metaphorical eyes at such dreary, well-worn advice.

But if you’ve heard these things repeated many times before, this is also good reason to suspect that, at least for a lot of people, it works. Meaning that if you aren’t taking such advice already, you can probably get a boost by doing so.

If you just did those top 5 things, you’d probably already be quite the productive person.

The trick, then, is to actually do them. That means doing the obvious thing.

 

Lastly, it can be easy to discount obvious advice when you’ve seen too much of it. When you’re bombarded with boring-seeming advice from all angles, it’s easy to become desensitized.

What I mean is that it’s possible to dismiss obvious advice outright because it sounds way too simple. “This can’t possibly work,” your brain might say, “The secret to getting things done must be more complex!”

There’s something akin to the hedonic treadmill happening here where, after having been exposed to all the “normal” advice, you start to seek out deeper and deeper ideas in search of some sort of mental high. What happens is that you become a kind of self-help junkie.

You can end up craving the bleeding edge of crazy ideas because literally nothing else seems worthwhile. You might end up dismissing normal helpful ideas simply because they’re not paradigm-crushing, mind-blowing, or mentally stimulating enough.

At which point, you’ve adopted quite the contrarian stance—you reject the typical idea of advice on grounds of its obviousness alone.

If this describes, might I tempt you with the meta-contrarian point of view?

Here’s the sell: One of the secrets to winning at life is looking at obvious advice, acknowledging that it’s obvious, and then doing it anyway.

(That’s right, you can join the elite group of people who scoff at those who scoff at the obvious!)

You can both say, “Hey, this is pretty simple stuff I’ve heard a thousand times before,” as well as say, “Hey, this is pretty useful stuff I should shut up and do anyway even if it sounds simple because I’m smart and I recognize the value here.”

At some point, being more sophisticated than the sophisticates means being able the grasp the idea that not all things have to be hyper complex. Oftentimes, the trick to getting something done is simply to get started and start doing it.

Because some things in life really are obvious.

Hunting for Practicality:

[This is about looking for ways to have any advice you read be actually useful, by having it apply to the real world. ]

Imagine someone trying to explain exactly what the mitochondria does in the cell, and contrast that to someone trying to score a point in a game of basketball.

There’s something clearly different about what each person is trying to do, even if we lumped both under the label of “learning” (one is learning about cells and the other is learning about basketball).

In learning, it turns out this  divide is often separated into declarative and procedural knowledge.

Declarative knowledge is like the student trying to puzzle out the ATP question; it’s about what you know.

In contrast, procedural knowledge, like the fledgling basketball player, is about what you do.

I bring up this divide because many of the techniques in instrumental rationality will feel like declarative knowledge, but they’ll really be procedural in nature.

For example, say you’re reading something on motivation, and you learn that “Motivation = Energy to do the thing + a Reminder to do the thing + Time to do the thing = E+R+T”.

What’ll likely happen is that your brain will form a new set of mental nodes that connects “motivation” to “E+R+T”. This would be great if I ended up quizzing you “What does motivation equal?” whereupon you’d correctly answer “E+R+T”.

But that’s not the point here! The point is to have the equation actually cash out into the real world and positively affect your actions. If information isn’t changing you view or act, then you’re probably not extracting all the value you can.

What that means is figuring out the answer to this question: "How do I see myself acting differently in the future as a result of this question?"

With that in mind, say you generate some examples and make a list.

Your list of real-world actions might end up looking like:

1) Remembering to stay hydrated more often (Energy)

2) Using more Post-It notes as memos (Reminder)

3) Start using Google Calendar to block out chunks of time (Time).

The point is to be always on the lookout for ways to see how you can use what you’re learning to inform your actions. Learning about all these things is only useful if you can find ways to apply them. You want to do more than have empty boxes that link concepts together. It’s important to have those boxes linked up to ways you can do better in the real world.

You want to actually put in some effort trying to answer question of practicality.

 

 

 

Actually Practicing:

[This is about knowing the nuances of little steps behind any sort of self-improvement skill you learn, and how those little steps are important when learning the whole.]

So on one level, using knowledge from instrumental rationality is about how you take declarative-seeming information and find ways to actually get real-world actions out of it. That’s important.

But it’s also important to note that the very skill of “Generating Examples”—the thing you did in the above essay to even figure out which actions can fit in the above equation to fill in the blanks of E, R, and T—is itself a mental habit that requires procedural knowledge.

What I mean is that there’s a subtler thing that’s happening inside your head when you try to come up with examples—your brain is doing something—and this “something” is important.  

It’s important, I claim, because if we peer a little more deeply at what it means for your brain to generate examples, we’ll come away with a list of steps that will feel a lot like something a brain can do, a prime example of procedural knowledge.

For example, we can imagine a magician trying to learn a card trick. They go through the steps. First they need to spread the cards. Then comes the secret move. Finally comes the final reveal of the selected card in the magician’s pocket.

What the audience member sees is the full finished product. And indeed, the magician who’s practiced enough will also see the same thing. But it’s not until the magician goes through all the steps and understands how all the steps flow together to form the whole card trick that they’re ready to perform.

The idea here is to describe any mental skill with enough granularity and detail, at the 5 second level, such that you’d both be able to go through the same steps a second time and teach someone else. So being able to take skills and chunk them into smaller pieces is also forms another core part of learning.

 

Realistic Expectations:

[An essay about having realistic expectations and looking past potentially harmful framing effects.]

There’s this tendency to get frustrated with learning mental techniques after just a few days. I think this is because people miss the declarative vs procedural distinction. (But you hopefully won’t fall prey to it because we’ve covered the distinction now!)

Once we liken the analogy to be more like that playing a sport, it becomes much easier to see that any expectation of immediately learning a mental habit is rather silly—no one expects to master tennis in just a week.

So, when it comes to trying to configure your expectations, I suggest that you try to renormalize your expectations by treating learning mental habits more like learning a sport.

Keep that as an analogy, and you’ll likely get fairly well-calibrated expectations for learning all this stuff.

Still, what, then, might be a realistic time frame for learning?

We’ll go over habits in far more detail in a later section, but a rough number for now is approximately two months. You can expect that, on average, it’ll take you about 66 days to ingrain a new habit.

Similarly, instrumental rationality (probably) won’t make you a god. In my experience, studying these areas has been super useful, which is why I’m writing at all. But I would guess that, optimistically, I only about doubled my work output.

Of course your own mileage may vary depending where you are right now, but this serves as the general disclaimer to keep your expectations within the bound of reality.

Here, the main point is that, even though mental habits don’t seem like they should be more similar to playing a sport, they really are. There’s something here about how first impressions can be rather deceiving.

For example, a typical trap I might fall into is missing the distinction between “theoretically possible” and “realistic”. I end up looking at the supposed 24 hours available to me everyday and then beating myself up for not being able to harness all 24 hours to do productive work.

But such a framing of the situation is inaccurate; things like sleep and eating are often very essential to maximizing productivity for the rest of the hours! So when diving in and practicing, try to look a little deeper when setting your expectations.

 

Hi everyone!

For people not acquainted with me, I'm Deku-shrub, often known online for my cybercrime research, as well as fairly heavy involvement in the global transhumanist movement with projects like the UK Transhumanist Party and the H+Pedia wiki.

For almost 2 years year now on and off I have been trying to grok what Less Wrong is about, but I've shirked reading all the sequences end to end, instead focused on the most popular ideas transmitted by Internet cultural osmosis. I'm an amateur sociologist and understanding Less Wrong falls within my wider project of understanding the different trends within the contemporary and historical transhumanist movement.

I'm very keen to pin down today's shape of the rationalistsphere and its critics, and the best place I have found do this is on the wiki. Utilising Cunningham's Law at times, I've been building some key navigational and primer articles on the wiki. However with the very lowest hanging fruit now addressed I ask - what next for the wiki?

Distillation of Less Wrong

There was a historical attempt to summerise all major Less Wrong posts, an interesting but incomplete project. It was also approach without a usefully normalised approach. Ideally, every article would have its own page which could be heavily tagged up with metadata such a themes, importance, length, quality, author and such. Is this the goal of the wiki?

Outreach and communications

Another major project is to fully index the Diaspora across Twitter, Blogs, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook etc and improve the flow of information between the relevant sub communities.

You'll probably want to join one of the chat platforms if you're interested in getting involved. Hell, there are even a few memes and probably more to collect.

Rationalist research

I'll admit I'm ignorant of the goal of Arbital, but I do love me a wiki for research. Cross referencing and citing ideas, merging, splitting, identifying and fully capturing truly interesting and useful ideas from fanciful and fleeting ones is how I've become an expert in a number fields, just by being the first to assemble All The Things.

Certain ideas like the Paper clip maximizer have some popularity beyond just Less Wrong, but Murder Gandhi doesn't - yet. Polishing these ideas with existing and external references (and maybe blogging about them?) is a great way for the community discussion of yore to make its way into the publications of lazy journalists for dissemination. Hell, RationalWiki has been doing it for years now, they're not the only game in town.

If you have any ideas in these areas, or others just a technical, let me know either here, on the Less Wrong Slack group, or on my talk page and maybe we can make Wikis Great Again? ;)

The Peloponnesian War was a war between two empires: the seadwelling Athenians, and the landlubber Spartans. Spartans were devoted to duty and country, living in barracks and drinking the black broth. From birth they trained to be the caste dictators of a slaveowning society, which would annually slay slaves to forestall a rebellion. The most famous Spartan is Leonidas, who died in a heroic last stand delaying the invasion of the Persians. To be a Spartan was to live a life devoted to toughness and duty.

Famous Athenians are Herodotus, inventor of history, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Hippocrates of the oath medical students still take, all the Greek playwrights, etc.  Attic Greek is the Greek we learn in our Classics courses. Athens was a city where the students of the entire known Greek world would come to learn from the masters, a maritime empire with hundreds of resident aliens, where slavery was comparable to that of the Romans. Luxury apartments, planned subdivisions, sexual hedonism, and free trade made up the life of the Athenian elite.

These two cities had deeply incompatible values. Spartans lived in fear that the Helots would rebel and kill them. Deeply suspicious of strangers, they imposed oligarchies upon the cities they conquered. They were described by themselves and others cautious and slow to act. Athenians by contrast prized speed and risk in their enterprises. Foreigners could live freely in Athens and even established their own temples. Master and slave comedies of Athens inspired PG Woodhouse.

All intellectual communities are Athenian in outlook. We remember Sparta for its killing and Athens for its art. If we want the rationalist community to tackle the hard problems, if we support a world that is supportive of human values and beauty, if we yearn to end the plagues of humanity, our values should be Athenian: individualistic, open, trusting, enamoured of beauty. When we build social technology, it should not aim to cultivate values that stand against these.

High trust, open, societies are the societies where human lives are most improved. Beyond merely being refugees for the persecuted they become havens for intellectual discussion and the improvement of human knowledge and practice. It is not a coincidence that one city produced Spinoza, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyke, Huygens, van Leeuwenhoek, and Grotius in a few short decades, while dominating the seas and being open to refugees.

Sadly we seem to have lost sight of this in the rationality community. Increasingly we are losing touch as a community with the outside intellectual world, without the impetus to study what has been done before and what the research lines are in statistics, ML, AI, epistemology, biology, etc. While we express that these things are important, the conversation doesn't seem to center around the actual content of these developments. In some cases (statistics) we're actively hostile to understanding some of the developments and limitations of our approach as a matter of tribal marker.

Some projects seem to me to be likely to worsen this, either because they express Spartan values or because they further physical isolation in ways that will act to create more small-group identification.

What can we do about this? Holiday modifications might help with reminding us of our values, but I don't know how we can change the community's outlook more directly. We should strive to stop merely acting on the meta-level and try to act on the object level more as a community. And lastly, we should notice that our values are real and not universal, and that they need defending.

AI safety is a small field. It has only about 50 researchers, and it’s mostly talent-constrained. I believe this number should be drastically higher.

A: the missing step from zero to hero

I have spoken to many intelligent, self-motivated people that bear a sense of urgency about AI. They are willing to switch careers to doing research, but they are unable to get there. This is understandable: the path up to research-level understanding is lonely, arduous, long, and uncertain. It is like a pilgrimage.

One has to study concepts from the papers in which they first appeared. This is not easy. Such papers are undistilled. Unless one is lucky, there is no one to provide guidance and answer questions. Then should one come out on top, there is no guarantee that the quality of their work will be sufficient for a paycheck or a useful contribution.

Unless one is particularly risk-tolerant or has a perfect safety net, they will not be able to fully take the plunge.
I believe plenty of measures can be made to make getting into AI safety more like an "It's a small world"-ride:

• Let there be a tested path with signposts along the way to make progress clear and measurable.

• Let there be social reinforcement so that we are not hindered but helped by our instinct for conformity.

• Let there be high-quality explanations of the material to speed up and ease the learning process, so that it is cheap.

B: the giant unrelenting research machine that we don’t use

The majority of researchers nowadays build their careers through academia. The typical story is for an academic to become acquainted with various topics during their study, pick one that is particularly interesting, and work on it for the rest of their career.

I have learned through personal experience that AI safety can be very interesting, and the reason it isn’t so popular yet is all about lack of exposure. If students were to be acquainted with the field early on, I believe a sizable amount of them would end up working in it (though this is an assumption that should be checked).

AI safety is in an innovator phase. Innovators are highly risk-tolerant and have a large amount of agency, which allows them to survive an environment with little guidance, polish or supporting infrastructure. Let us not fall for the typical mind fallacy, expecting less risk-tolerant people to move into AI safety all by themselves. Academia can provide that supporting infrastructure that they need.

AASAA adresses both of these issues. It has 2 phases:

A: Distill the field of AI safety into a high-quality MOOC: “Introduction to AI safety”

B: Use the MOOC as a proof of concept to convince universities to teach the field

read more...

We are bottlenecked for volunteers and ideas. If you'd like to help out, even if just by sharing perspective, fill in this form and I will invite you to the slack and get you involved.

===Highly Recommended Articles:

What Is Rationalist Berkleys Community Culture by Zvi Moshowitz - The original rationalist community mission was to save the world, not to be nice to each other. Sarah recently suggested the later is currently the actual goal. Zvi reinterprets this as sounding an alarm. The rationalists should not become just another Berkeley community of bohemians and weirdos.

Cthugha The Living Flame by Exploring Egregores - Rationalists as worshippers of an Eldritch Star God. Valuing knowledge and ideas above all else. Bonobos and transhumanists. Yudkowsky's argument about distributed vs concentrated intellect. The AI box experiment. Nerds as the true extraverts. "What do you think the singularity will actually look like?" The site maps eight other Eldritch Gods to different philosophical dispositions.

Internet Explorers Not Exploiters by Nostalgebraist - Exploit vs explore tradeoffs. Attention spans. How long should you try a math problem before you give up? Exploring new options can be uncomfortable since it might lead nowhere. Addictive games and the internet. Academic research.

Diversity And Team Performance What The Research Says by Eukaryote - Opens with several links about diversity and inclusion in EA. The pros and cons of different types of diversity in terms of group cohesion and information processing. Practical ways to minimize the costs of diversity and magnify the benefits. Lots of references.

The Market Power Story by Noah Smith - Many issues in the American economy are blamed on the increasing market power of a small number of firms. Analysis: Monopolistic competition. Profits. Market Concentration. Output restriction. Three updates. Lots of citations and references to papers.

The Anti Slip Slope by samuelthefifth (Status 451) - An analogy between workplace noise and workplace sexism. How efforts to stamp out 'workplace noise' can get out of control.

Dota 2 by Open Ai - Open AI codes a 1v1 Dota-2 bot that defeaated top players. The bots actions per minute were comparable to many humans. The bot learned the game from scratch by self-play, and does not use imitation learning or tree search. The game involves hidden information and the bot's strategies were complicated.

Stop Caring So Much About Technical Problems by Particular Virtue - Links to an article describing what attributes actually get developers jobs (other than technical skill). Caring about making great products is much more desirable than caring about technical problems. Developer interviews are highly random. Experience matters alot. Enterprise programmers are disliked. Practical advice.

===Scott:

Partial Credit by Scott Alexander - Blotting out the Sun. Short story.

Moral Reflective Equilibrium and the Absurdity Principle by SlateStarScratchpad - A long discussion about the nature of morality. The absurdity heuristic. Reflective equilibrium of moral values. The feedback loop between intuition and logic.

Advertising by SlateStarScratchpad - Nostalgebraist muses about advertising. Scott briefly explains how advertising works on SSC.

Fear And Loathing At Effective Altruism Global 2017 by Scott Alexander - EA Global was well run and impressive. The deep weirdness of EA. The fundamental goodness of effective altruists. The yoke is light and everyone is welcome.

Community History by Scott (r/SSC) - Scott answers: "What happened to Lesswrong? When (and more importantly why) did the spread out to other blogs happen?"

Threado Quia Absurdum by Scott Alexander - Bi-Weekly public open thread. Recommended comments on: how organizations change over time, self-driving car progress, gun laws in the Czech Republic, why comments are closed on some posts here. Scot may be choosing a SSC moderator.

Brief Cautionary Notes On Branded Combination Nootropics by Scott Alexander - Many 'Xbrain' pills contain ineffectively low doses of ingredients. Nootropics, like many drugs, effect people differently; you need to isolate which nootropics work for you. Drug interactions are very poorly understood, even for well studied drugs.

The Lizard People Of Alpha Draconis 1 Decided To Build An Ansible by Scott Alexander - Faster than light communication via negative average preference utilitarianism.

Sparta by SlateStarScratchpad - A historian claims that Sparta's military renown was developed during a period when Sparta's actual military ability was declining. Scott disagrees and cites sources showing that the earliest records all claim Sparta was very powerful.

===Rationalist:

Internal Dialogue About End Of World by Sailor Vulcan - Short Story. Keep living, maybe we will win the lottery.

My Tedtedx Talks by Robin Hanson - Ted talks by Robin about his books "The Age of Em" and "The Elephant in the Brain". Talks are short ~12 minutes.

Paranoia Testing by Elo - Experiments to test if you have paranoia. Costs. Notes and some graphs.

Theres Always Subtext by Robin Hanson - Mostly a quote about subtext in film.

Play In Hard Mode by Zvi Moshowitz - "Hard mode is harder. The reason to Play in Hard Mode is because it is the only known way to become stronger, and to defend against Goodhart’s Law." Zvi revists the eleven examples from 'easy mode' and shows how to approach them from a hard mode perspective.

Play In Easy Mode by Zvi Moshowitz - Eleven examples of 'selling out' and taking the path of least resistance. Interestingly in several examples taking the easy path is quite defensible.

Emotional Labour by Elo - "I wanted to save you the effort of thinking about the thing and so I decided not to tell/ask you before it was resolved." VS "I wanted to not have to withhold a thing from you so I told you as soon as it was bothering me so that I didn’t have to lie/cheat/withhold/deceive you even if I thought it was in your best interest"

Paths Forward On Berkeley Culture Discussion by Zvi Moshowitz - Follow up to Zvi's post on the Berkeley rationalist community. A long sketch of the arguments Zvi would make and the article he would write if he had time to respond in depth.

How Social Is Reason by Robin Hanson - Humans alone have a logical reasoning module. 'Logical Fallacies' evolved because they are adaptive for persuasion. Unschooled populations often cannot solve logical problems. Epistemic learned helplessness. Impressive complex arguments are preferred over simple ones.

Cthugha The Living Flame by Exploring Egregores - Rationalists as worshippers of an Eldritch Star God. Valuing knowledge and ideas above all else. Bonobos and transhumanists. Yudkowsky's argument about distributed vs concentrated intellect. The AI box experiment. Nerds as the true extraverts. "What do you think the singularity will actually look like?" The site maps eight other Eldritch Gods to different philosophical dispositions.

Self Fulfilling Prophecy by Entirely Useless - The author analyzes various edge cases about intention and choice. They discuss how to modify their theories and whether they are on the right track.

Decisions As Predictions by Entirely Useless - "Consider the hypothesis that both intention and choice consist basically in beliefs: intention would consist in the belief that one will in fact obtain a certain end, or at least that one will come as close to it as possible. Choice would consist in the belief that one will take, or that one is currently taking, a certain temporally immediate action for the sake of such an end."

Bathtime by The Unit of Caring - Bath time play with a baby. Things are compelling when they have the right balance of surprise and predictability.

Internet Explorers Not Exploiters by Nostalgebraist - Exploit vs explore tradeoffs. Attention spans. How long should you try a math probem before you give up? Exploring new options can be uncomfortable since it might lead nowhere. Addictive games and the internet. Academic research.

Embracing Metamodernism by Gordon (Map and Territory) - "Metamodernism believes in reconstructing things that have been deconstructed with a view toward reestablishing hope and optimism in the midst of a period (the postmodern period) marked by irony, cynicism, and despair."

Why Ethnicity Ideology by Robin Hanson - "he more life decisions a feature influences, the more those who share this feature may plausibly share desired policies, policies that their coalition could advocate. So you might expect political coalitions to be mostly based on individual features that are very useful for predicting individual behavior. But you’d be wrong."

A Village Is Better Than Group House by Particular Virtue - More private space. Non-shared legal ownership. More people means much more social space and stability.

A Flaw In The Way Smart People Think About Robots And Job Loss by Tom Bartleby - Considering jobs one at a time causes smart people to think no one will lose their job from automation. However small incremental advances reduce the number of needed workers. A history of secretaries. Personal experience of saving time via programming.

More Brain Lies by Aceso Under Glass - "But sometimes it helps to take the gap between is and ought as a sign of how high your standards are, rather than how bad you are at a thing."

Ems In Walkaway by Robin Hanson - A review of the science fiction book 'Walkaway' which features brain emulation. Robin describes what he finds realistic and unrealistic.

Take My Job by Jacob Falkovich - "I want to tell you about the job I’m leaving, why you should think about applying for it, and what it has taught me in the last four years about company culture, diversity, and the makings of a good workplace." Cool jobs have work environments. Keep company identity small if you want real diversity.

The Parliamentary Model As The Correct Ethical Model by Kaj Sotala - An explanation of how the 'parliamentary' model of morality resolves uncertainty around which model of morality is correct. Why the parliamentary model is itself the correct model.

The Problem With Prestige by Robin Hanson - Small fields such as academic disciplines often use prestige to reward people. A mathematical model of how effort is allocated to maximize prestige. Why prestige doesn't scale and what is under-incentivized by prestige.

How I Think About Free Speech Four Categories by Julia Galef - Descriptions of the following categories: No consequences, Individual social consequences, Official social consequences, Legal consequences. Disagreements about categories.

Choices Are Really Bad by Zvi Moshowitz - Exercising willpower is a cost in the short term. Decision fatigue. Reasons why people, including you, WILL choose wrong. People justify their choices. Choices create blame and responsibility. Choices cause paralysis. Choice are communication. Choices require justification. Choices let people defect and destroy cooperation.

What Is Rationalist Berkleys Community Culture by Zvi Moshowitz - The original rationalist community mission was to save the world, not to be nice to each other. Sarah recently suggested the later is currently the actual goal. Zvi reinterprets this as sounding an alarm. The rationalists should not become just another Berkeley community of bohemians and weirdos.

Repairing Anxiety Using Internal And External Locus Of Control Models by Elo - Two variable model. Locus of Control: Internal or External. Feeling: Good or bad. The four combinations. Moving diagonally, for example from internal-bad to external-good.

Social Insight When A Lie Is Not A Lie When A by Bound_Up (lesswrong) - If you merely speak the truth as you see then you will be misunderstood. Example of saying you are an atheist. Many people are incapable of understanding your real arguments.

Multiverse Wide Cooperation Via Correlated Decision Making by The Foundational Research Institute - "If we care about what happens in civilizations located elsewhere in the multiverse, we can superrationally cooperate with some of the their inhabitants. That is, if we take their values into account, this makes it more likely that they do the same for us. In this paper, I attempt to assess the practical implications of this idea"

Questions Are Not Just For Asking by Malcom Ocean (ribbonfarm) - Hazards of asking questions. Hold your Questions. Reveal your questions. Un-ask your questions. Question your questions. Using Questions to Organize Attention. Letting the question ask you; becoming the answer.

Happiness Is Not Coherent Concept by Particular Virtue - A social science concept is 'real' if and only if it represents reality well and you have ruled out alternatives. "If a thing can be measured several different ways, and a causal factor can push one in a direction but not the other, then you start to worry that the thing is not actually one thing, but several things." Why should you care that happiness isn't a single thing.

The Craft Is Not The Community by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - The Berkeley Rationalists are building a true community: Sharehouses, Plans for an unschooling center, etc. However many rationalist companies/projects have failed. Sarah doesn't think it makes sense to tackle 'external facing' projects as a community. Tesla Motors and MIT aren't run as community projects, they are run meriotocratically. Lots of analysis on the meaning of community and what makes organizations effective. Personal.

===AI:

More On Dota 2 by Open Ai - Timeline of the DOTA-bot's rapid improvement. Bot Exploits. Physical Infrastructure. What needs to be done to play 5x5.

Openai Bots Were Defeated At Least 50 Times - People could play against the openAI Dota bot. Several people found strategies to beat the bot. One of the human victors explains their strategy.

Dota 2 by Open Ai - Open AI codes a 1v1 Dota-2 bot that defeaated top players. The bots actions per minute were comparable to many humans. The bot learned the game from scratch by self-play, and does not use imitation learning or tree search. The game involves hidden information and the bot's strategies were complicated.

===EA:

Things I Have Gotten Wrong by Aceso Under Glass - Mistaken evaluations: Animal Charity Evaluators, Raising for Effective Giving, Charity Science, Tostan.

We Have No Idea If There Are Cost Effective Interventions Into Wild Animal Suffering by Ozy - Many people are confident there are no effective ways to reduce wild animal suffering, Ozy disagrees. Ecosystems are complex but we aren't completely uncertain. Wild Animal Suffering is a tiny field staffed by non-experts working part time.

Altruism Is Incomplete by Zvi Moshowitz - "I worry many in EA are looking at life like a game where giving money to charity is how the world scores victory points." Controls in psychology are often motivated by researcher bias. Amazon is the world's most effective charity. Life is about getting things done, often for selfish reasons. Veganism. Zvi doesn't believe the official EA party line.

Let Them Decide by GiveDirectly - Eight media articles about Basic Income, Give Directly, Cash Transfer and Development Aid.

High Time For Drug Policy Reform Part 44 by MichaelPlant (EA forum) - "This is the fourth of four posts on DPR. In this part I provide some simplistic but illustrative cost-effectiveness estimates comparing an imaginary campaign for DPR against current interventions for poverty, physical health and mental health; I also consider what EAs should do next."

High Time For Drug Policy Reform Policy by MichaelPlant (EA forum) - "This is the third of four posts on DPR. In this part I look at what a better approach to drug policy might be and then discuss how neglected and tractable this problem is as cause area of EAs to work on."

Drug Policy Reform 1 by MichaelPlant (EA forum) - 9300 Words. Six Mechanisms for drug reform to do good: Fighting mental illness. Reducing pain. Improving public health. Reducing crime, violence, corruption and instability (including international scale). Raising revenue for governments. Recreational use. Five major objections and the Author's response.

===Politics and Economics:

Diversity And Team Performance What The Research Says by Eukaryote - Opens with several links about diversity and inclusion in EA. The pros and cons of different types of diversity in terms of group cohesion and information processing. Practical ways to minimize the costs of diversity and magnify the benefits. Lots of references.

Unpopular Ideas About Social Norms by Julia Galef - Twenty-four ideas, many with references explaining the ideas. As an example: "Overall it would be a good thing to have a totally transparent society with no privacy"

Unpopular Ideas About Political And Economic Systems by Julia Galef - Twenty-three ideas, many with references explaining the ideas. As an example "Many people have a moral duty not to vote".

The Market Power Story by Noah Smith - Many issues in the American economy are blamed on the increasing market power of a small number of firms. Analysis: Monopolistic competition. Profits. Market Concentration. Output restriction. Three updates. Lots of citations and references to papers.

The Courage To Stand Up And Do The Wrong Thing by Tom Bartleby - According to Supreme Court Justice Black, applying Brown vs Board of Education to DC schools was an unprincipled but correct decision. Have principles. Don't follow them over a cliff. Acknowledge deviations. Charlottesville. Cloduflare suspends service to the daily stormer.

Many Topics by Scott Aaronson - Misc Topics: HTTPS / Kurtz / eclipse / Charlottesville / Blum / P vs. NP

The Muted Signal Hypothesis Of Online Outrage by Kaj Sotala - "People want to feel respected, loved, appreciated, etc. When we interact physically, you can easily experience subtle forms of these feelings... Online, most of these messages are gone: a thousand people might read your message, but if nobody reacts to it, then you don’t get any signal indicating that you were seen... . So if you want to consistently feel anything, you may need to ramp up the intensity of the signals."

Marching Markups by Robin Hanson - "Holding real productivity constant, if firms move up their demand curves to sell less at a higher prices, then total output, and measured GDP, get smaller. Their numerical estimates suggest that, correcting for this effect, there has been no decline in US productivity growth since 1965. That’s a pretty big deal."

Greater Gender Parity Economics Suggests Reform Tenure Systems by Marginal Revolution - Biological clocks conflict with the tenure system timeline. Tyler recommends a much more flexible system with a variety of roles. The leaders in the economics profession have been 'punching down' at an infamous anonymous economics forum.

Moral Precepts And Suicide Pacts by Perfecting Dated Visions - "To be trusted to remain peaceful, you must be the kind of person who remains peaceful. And to be a peaceful person and earn the trust placed in you, you must be peaceful even when you have every right to fight. It’s the same with tolerance. If you want to shut up your argumentative opponents and vigorously retaliate when your opponents show signs of intolerance, you will not be trusted to be tolerant to others who are tolerant, even those who basically agree with you." The constitution, World War 1, Nazi's today.

The Anti Slip Slope by samuelthefifth (Status 451) - An analogy between workplace noise and workplace sexism. How efforts to stamp out 'workplace noise' can get out of control.

Seattle Minimum Wage Study Part 3 Tell Me Why Im Wrong Please by Zvi Moshowitz - Most writers thought the Seattle minimum wage study showed that low wage workers were hurt. Zvi found a fundamental flaw in their analysis. If you correct for raising wages in Seattle then the study seems to show low wage workers weren't hurt or perhaps benefitted.

Theory Vs Data In Statistics by Noah Smith - Theory heavy vs minimal theory models in Economics. Machine learning as the extreme of a "no model required" paradigm.

Thats Amore by sam[]zdat - Epistocracy, democracy with limits on who can vote. Competency and incompetency and pizza. Politics is the strongest identity. Trading power for the image of power. Morlocks and Eloi. Replication crisis. Google guy. The Left's support for the powerful. Nhilism.

Contra Sadedin Varinsky: The Google Memo Is Still Right Again by Artir - Detailed refutation of two criticisms of the google memo. Lots of long quotations and citation of counter evidence.

Indian Feminism And The Role Of The Environment: Why The Google Memo Is Still Right by Artir - A very detailed cross-country look at female enrollment in CS and various technology fields. A focus on countries where women are well represented in tech (many in Asia). Lots of discussion.

Brief Thoughts On The Google Memo by Julia Galef - "So as far as I can see, there are only two intellectually honest ways to respond to the memo: 1. Acknowledge gender differences may play some role, but point out other flaws in his argument (my preference) 2. Say “This topic is harmful to people and we shouldn’t discuss it” (a little draconian maybe, but at least intellectually honest)"

The Kolmogorov Option by Scott Aaronson - Kolmogorov was a brilliant mathematician as well as a sensitive and kind man. However he cooperated with the Soviets. An option for living in a society where many falsehoods are 'official truth': Build a bubble of truth and wait for the right time to take down the Orthodoxy. Don't charge headfirst and get killed. There are no 'good heretics' in the eyes of the Inquisition.

===Misc:

Can Atheists be Jewish by Brute Reason - Reasons MIRI can be an atheist Jew: Judaism is a religion, but being Jewish isn’t necessarily. Belief in god isn’t particularly central in most Jewish communities and practices. Because I fucking said so.

Ten Small Life Improvements by Paul Christiano (lesswrong) - Nine tech tips. Christmas lights all year round.

Extremely Easy Problem by protokol2020 - How much water per second do you need to raise the sea level 6 meters in 100 years.

The Premium Mediocre Life Of Maya Millennial by venkat (ribbonfarm) - Venkat - "Yes, ribbonfarm is totally premium mediocre. We are a cut above the new media mediocrityfests that are Vox and Buzzfeed, and we eschew low-class memeing and listicles. But face it: actually enlightened elite blog readers read Tyler Cowen and Slatestarcodex."

Right And Left Folds Primitive Recursion Patterns In Python And Haskell by Eli Bendersky - "In this article I'll present how left and right folds work and how they map to some fundamental recursive patterns. The article starts with Python, which should be (or at least look) familiar to most programmers. It then switches to Haskell for a discussion of more advanced topics like the connection between folding and laziness, as well as monoids."

Meta Contrarian Typography Part 2 by Tom Bartleby - You should use two spaces after your sentences whn drafting. Why to use a plaintext editor. Why to write a resume in plaintext. Flexibility is power. Two spaces is more much more machine readable.

Stop Caring So Much About Technical Problems by Particular Virtue - Links to an article describing what attributes actually get developers jobs (other than technical skill). Caring about making great products is much more desirable than caring about technical problems. Developer interviews are highly random. Experience matters alot. Enterprise programmers are disliked. Practical advice.

Trip Sitting Tips And Tricks by AellaGirl - Thirteen practical tips for trip sitting someone on a high dose of acid. Focuses on accepting their experiences, treating them similarly to a small child and keeping yourself safe.

Erisology Of Self And Will Closing Thoughts by Everything Studies - "Here in Part 7 I’ll end with a summary and some thoughts on how to deal with the problems described in the series."

===Podcast:

We Are Not Worried Enough About The Next Pandemic by 80,000 Hours - "We spend the first 20 minutes covering his work as a foundation grant-maker, then discuss how bad the pandemic problem is, why it’s probably getting worse, and what can be done about it. In the second half of the interview we go through what you personally could study and where you could work to tackle one of the worst threats facing humanity."

Identity Terror by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "Douglas Murray. Identity politics, the rise of white nationalism, the events in Charlottesville, guilt by association, the sources of western values, the problem of finding meaning in a secular world."

Seth Stephens Davidowitz On What The Internet Can Tell Us by Rational Speaking - "New research gives us into which parts of the USA are more racist, what kinds of strategies reduce racism, whether the internet is making political polarization worse, and the sexual fetishes and insecurities people will only admit to their search engine."

John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language and Words on the Move by EconTalk - "The unplanned ways that English speakers create English, an example of emergent order. Topics discussed include how words get short (but not too short), the demand for vividness in language, and why Shakespeare is so hard to understand."

The Limits Of Persuasion by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers. Free speech on campus, the Scott Adams podcast, the failings of the mainstream media, moral persuasion, moral certainty, the ethics of abortion, Buddhism, the illusion of the self."

Conversation: Comedian Dave Barry by Marginal Revolution - "What makes Florida special, why business writing is so terrible, Eddie Murphy, whether social conservatives can be funny (in public), the weirdness of Peter Pan, how he is so productive, playing guitar with Roger McGuinn, DT, the future of comedy."

Ritual And Spirituality by The Bayesian Conspiracy - Rationalist ritual. Witchcraft. Welcome to Nightvale. Concerts. What makes something ritual? Is rationalist ritual psychologically safe?

Chris Hayes by The Ezra Klein Show - Chris Hayes. Should Trump be removed from office. "Infighting between different factions of the Democratic Party, the signs that congressional Republicans are growing some backbone, and the reports that Trump’s closest aides are conspiring to keep him from doing too much damage to the country."

The Biology Of Good And Evil by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "Robert Sapolsky. His work with baboons, the opposition between reason and emotion, doubt, the evolution of the brain, the civilizing role of the frontal cortex, the illusion of free will, justice and vengeance, brain-machine interface, religion, drugs"

Senator Michael Bennet by The Ezra Klein Show - Senator Michael Bennet. "This is a conversation about why Congress is broken, and what broke it. We discuss money, partisanship, the media, the rules, the leadership, and much more. We talk about what Bennet thinks House of Cards gets right (hint: it’s the sociopathy) and whether President Trump’s antics are creating some hope of institutional renewal."

tl;dr: I read Mathematics for Computer Science (MCS) and found it excellent. I sampled Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications (Rosen)—currently recommended in MIRI's research guide—as well as Concrete Mathematics and Discrete Mathematics with Applications (Epp), which appear to be MCS's competition. Based on these partial readings, I found MCS to be the best overall text. I therefore recommend MIRI change the recommendation in its research guide.

Introduction

MCS is used at MIT for their introductory discrete math course, 6.042, which appears to be taken primarily by second-semester freshman and sophomores. You can find OpenCourseWare archives from 2010 and 2015, although the book is self-contained; I never had occasion to use them throughout my reading. 

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is single-variable calculus. In particular, I noted integration, differentiation, and convergence/infinite sums coming up. That said, I don't remember seeing them coming up in sections that provided a lot of dependencies: with just a first course in algebra, I feel a smart 14-year-old could get through 80–90% of the book, albeit with some help, mostly in places where "do a bunch of algebra" steps are omitted. An extra 4–5 years of practice doing algebraic manipulations makes a difference.

MCS is also an introduction to proofwriting. In my experience, writing mathematical proofs is a skill complex enough to require human feedback to get all the nuances of why something works and why something else doesn't work and why one approach is better than another. If you've never written proofs before and would like a human to give you feedback, please pm me.

Comparison to Other Discrete Math Texts

Rosen

I randomly sampled section 4.3 of Rosen, on primes and greatest common divisors and was very unimpressed. Rosen states the fundamental theorem of arithmetic without a proof. The next theorem had a proof which was twice as long and half as elegant as it could have been. The writing was correct but unmotivating and wordy. For instance, Rosen writes "If n is a composite integer", which is redundant, since all composite numbers are integers, so he could have just said "If n is composite".

In the original Course Recommendations for Friendliness Researchers, Louie responded to Rosen's negative reviews:

people taking my recommendations would be geniuses by-and-large and that the harder book would be better in the long-run for the brightest people who studied from it.

Based on the sample I read, Rosen is significantly dumbed-down relative to MCS. Rosen does not prove the fundamental theorem of arithmetic whereas MCS proves it in section 9.4. For the next theorem, Rosen gives an inelegant proof when a much sleeker—but reasonably evident!—proof exists, making it feel like Rosen expected the reader to not be able to follow the sleeker proof. Rosen's use of "composite integer" instead of "composite" seems like he assumes the reader doesn't understand that the only objects one describes as composite are integers; MCS does not contain the string "composite integer".

In the section I read, Rosen has worked examples for finding gcd(24, 36) and gcd(17, 22), something I remember doing when I was 12. It's almost like Rosen was spoon-feeding how to guess the teacher's password for the student to regurgitate on an exam instead of building insight.

Concrete Mathematics

There are probably individuals who would prefer Concrete Mathematics to MCS. These people are probably into witchcraft.

I explain by way of example. In section 21.1.1, MCS presents a very sleek, but extremely nonobvious, proof of gambler's ruin using a clever argument courtesy of Pascal. In section 21.1.2, MCS gives a proof that doesn't require the reader to be "as ingenuious Pascal [sic]". As an individual who is decidedly not as ingenious as Pascal was, I appreciate this.

More generally, say we want to prove a theorem that looks something like "If A, then B has property C." You start at A and, appealing to the definition of C, show that B has it. There's probably some cleverness involved in doing so, but you start at the obvious place (A), end in the obvious place (B satisfies the definition of C), and don't rely on any crazy, seemingly-unrelated insights. Let's call this sort of proof mundane.

(Note that mundane is far from mechanical. Most of the proofs in Baby Rudin are mundane, but require significant cleverness and work to generate independently.)

There is a virtue in mundane proofs: a smart reader can usually generate them after they read the theorem but before they read its proof. Doing is beneficial, since proof-generating makes the theorem more memorable. It also gives the reader practice building intuition by playing around with the mathematical objects and helps them improve their proofwriting by comparing their output to a maximally refined proof.

On the end of the spectrum opposing mundane is witchcraft. Proofs that use witchcraft typically have a step where you demonstrate you're as ingenious as Pascal by having a seemingly-unrelated insight that makes everything easier. Notice that, even if you are as ingenious as Pascal, you won't necessarily be able to generate these insights quickly enough to get through the text at any reasonable pace.

For the reasons listed above, I prefer mundane proofs. This isn't to say MCS is devoid of witchcraft: sometimes it's the best or only way of getting a proof. The difference is that MCS uses mundane proofs whenever possible whereas Concrete Mathematics invokes witchcraft left and right. This is why I don't recommend it.

Individuals who are readily as ingenious as Pascal, don't want the skill-building benefits of mundane proofs, or prefer the whimsy of witchcraft may prefer Concrete Mathematics.

Epp

I randomly sampled section 12.2 of Epp and found it somewhat dry but wholly unobjectionable. Unlike Rosen, I felt like Epp was writing for an intelligent human being (though I was reading much further along in the book, so maybe Rosen assumed the reader was still struggling with the idea of proof). Unlike Concrete Mathematics, I detected no witchcraft. However, I felt that Epp had inferior motivation and was written less engagingly. Epp is also not licensed under Creative Commons.

Coverage

Epp, Rosen, and MCS are all ~1000 pages long, whereas Concrete Mathematics is ~675. To determine what these books covered that might not be in MCS, I looked through their table of contents' for things I didn't recognize. The former three have the same core coverage, although Epp and Rosen go into material you would find in Computability and Logic or Sipser (also part of the research guide), whereas MCS spends more time developing discrete probability. Based on the samples I read, Epp and MCS have about the same density, whereas Rosen spends little time building insight and a lot of time showing how to do really basic, obvious stuff. I would expect Epp and MCS to have roughly the same amount of content covering mostly (but not entirely) the same stuff and Rosen to offer a mere shadow of the insight of the other two.

Concrete Mathematics seems to contain a subset of MCS's topics, but from the sections I read, I expect the presentation to be wildly different.

Complaints

My only substantial complaint about MCS is that, to my knowledge, the source LaTeX is not available. Contrast this to SICP, which has the HTML available. This resulted in a proliferation of PDFs tailored for different use cases. It'd be nice, for instance, to have a print-friendly version of MCS (perhaps with fewer pages), plus a version that fit nicely onto the small screen of an ereader or mobile device, plus a version with the same aspect ratio as my monitor. This all would be extremely easy to generate given the source. It would also facilitate crowdsourcing proofreading: there are more than a few typos, although they don't preempt comprehension. At the very least, I wish there were somewhere to submit errata.

Some parts of MCS were notation-heavy. To quote what a professor once wrote on a problem set of mine:

I'm not sure all the notation actually serves the goal of clarifying the argument for the reader. Of course, such notation is sometimes needed. But when it is not needed, it can function as a tool with which to bludgeon the reader…

I found myself referring to Wikipedia's glossary of graph theory terms more than a few times when I was making definitions to put into Anki. Not sure if this is measuring a weak section or a really good glossary or something else.

A Note on Printing

A lot of people like printed copies of their books. One benefit of MCS I've put forward is that it's free (as in beer), so I investigated how much printing would cost.

I checked the local print shops and Kinko's online was unable to find printing under $60, a typical price around $70, with the option to burn $85 if I wanted nicer paper. This was more than I had expected and between ⅓ and ½ (ish) the price of Rosen or Epp.

Personally, I think printing is counterproductive, since the PDF has clickable links.

Final Thoughts

Despite sharing first names, I am not Richard Stallman. I prefer the license on MCS to the license on its competitors, but I wouldn't recommend it unless I thought the text itself was superior. I would recommend baby Rudin (nonfree) over French's Introduction to Real Analysis; Hoffman and Kunze's Linear Algebra (nonfree) over Jim Hefferson's Linear Algebra; and Epp over 2010!MCS. The freer the better, but that consideration is trumped by the quality of the text. When you're spending >100 hours working out of a book that provides foundational knowledge for the rest of your life, ~$150 and a loss of freedom is a price many would pay for better quality.

Eliezer writes:

Tell a real educator about how Earth classes are taught in three-month-sized units, and they would’ve sputtered and asked how you can iterate fast enough to learn how to teach that.

Rosen is in its seventh edition. Epp is in its fourth edition and Concrete Mathematics its second. The earliest copy of MCS I've happened across comes from 2004. Near as I can tell, it is improved every time the authors go through the material with their students, which would put it in its 25th edition.

And you know what? It's just going to keep getting better faster than anything else.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Gram Stone for reviewing drafts of this review.

[epistemic status: I was going to do a lot of research for this post, but I decided not to as there are no sources on the internet so I'd have to interview people directly and I'd rather have this post be imperfect than never exist.]

Many words have been written about how LessWrong is now shit. Opinions vary about how shit exactly it is. I refer you to http://lesswrong.com/lw/n0l/lesswrong_20/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5z/on_the_importance_of_less_wrong_or_another_single/ for more comments about LessWrong being shit and the LessWrong diaspora being suboptimal.

However, how to make LessWrong stop being shit seems remarkably simple to me. Here are the steps to resurrect it:

1. Get Eliezer: The lifeblood of LessWrong is Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing. If you don't have that, what's the point of being on this website? Currently Eliezer is posting his writings on Facebook, (https://www.facebook.com/groups/674486385982694/) which I consider foolish, for the same reasons I would consider it foolish to house the Mona Lisa in a run-down motel.

2. Get Scott: Once you have Eliezer back, and you sound the alarm that LW is coming back, I'm fairly certain that Scott "Yvain" Alexander will begin posting on LessWrong again. As far as I can tell he's never wanted to have to moderate a comment section, and the growing pains are stressing his website at the seams. He's even mused publicly about arbitrarily splitting the Slate Star Codex comment section in two (http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/09/ot73-i-lik-the-thred/) which is a crazy idea on its own but completely reasonable in the context of (cross)posting to LW. Once you have Yudkowsky and Yvain, you have about 80% of what made LessWrong not shit.

3. Get Gwern: I don't read many of Gwern's posts; I just like having him around. Luckily for us, he never left!

After this is done, everyone else should wander back in, more or less.

Possible objections, with replies:

Objection: Most SSC articles and Yudkowsky essays are not on the subject of rationality and thus for your plan to work LessWrong's focus would have to subtly shift.

Reply: Shift away, then! It's LessWrong 2! We no longer have to be a community dedicated to reading Rationality: From AI to Zombies as it's written in real time; we can now be a community that takes Rationality: From AI to Zombies as a starting point and discusses whatever we find interesting! Thus the demarcation between 1.0 and 2.0!

Objection: People on LessWrong are mean and I do not like them.

Reply: The influx of new readers from the Yudkowsky-Yvain in-migration should make the tone on this website more upbeat and positive. Failing that, I don't know, ban the problem children, I guess. I don't know if it's poor form to declare this but I'd rather have a LessWrong Principate than a LessWrong Ruins. See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/against_online_pacifism/

Objection: I'd prefer, for various reasons, to just let LessWrong die.

Reply: Then kill it with your own hands! Don't let it lie here on the ground, bleeding out! Make a post called "The discussion thread at the end of the universe" that reads "LessWrong is over, piss off to r/SlateStarCodex", disallow new submissions, and be done with it! Let it end with dignity and bring a close to its history for good.

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Just Saying What You Mean Is Impossible by Zvi Moshowitz - "Humans are automatically doing lightning fast implicit probabilistic analysis on social information in the background of every moment of their lives." This implies there is no way to divorce the content of your communication from its myriad probabilistic social implications. Different phrasings will just send different implications.

In Defense Of Individualist Culture by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - A description of individualist culture. Criticisms of individualist culture: Lacking sympathy, few good defaults. Defenses: Its very hard to change people (psychology research review). A defense of naive personal identity. Traditional culture is fragile. Building a community project is hard in the modern world, prepare for the failure modes. Modernity has big upsides, some people will make better choices than the traditional rules allow.

My Current Thoughts On Miris Highly Reliable by Daniel Dewey (EA forum) - Report by the Open Phil AI safety lead. A basic description of and case for the MIRI program. Conclusion: 10% credence in MIRI's work being highly useful. Reasons: Hard to apply to early agents, few researchers are excited, other approaches seem more promising.

Conversation With Dario Amodei by Jeff Kaufman - "The research that's most valuable from an AI safety perspective also has substantial value from the perspective of solving problems today". Prioritize work on goals. Transparency and adversarial examples are also important.

Cfar Week 1 by mindlevelup - What is working at CFAF actually like. Less rationality research than anticipated. Communication costs scale quadratically. Organization efficiency and group rationality.

The Ladder Of Interventions by mindlevelup - "This is a hierarchy of techniques to use for in-the-moment situations where you need to “convince” yourself to do something." The author uses these methods in practice.

On Dragon Army by Zvi Moshowitz - Long response to many quotes from "Dragon Army Barracks". Duncan't attitude to criticism. Tyler Durden shouldn't appeal to Duncan. Authoritarian group houses haven't been tried. Rationalists undervalue exploration. Loneliness and doing big things. The pendulum model of social progress. Sticking to commitments even when its painful. Saving face when you screw up. True Reliability: The bay is way too unreliable but Duncan goes too far. Trust and power Dynamics. Pragmatic criticism of the charter.

Without Belief In A God But Never Without Belief In A Devil by Lou (sam[]zdat) - The nature of mass movements. The beats and the John Birchers. The taxonomy of the frustrated. Horseshoe theory. The frustrated cannot derive satisfaction from action, something else has to fill the void Poverty, work and meaning. Mass movements need to sow resentment. Hatred is the strongest unifier. Modernity inevitably causes justified resentment. Tocqueville, Polyanai, Hoffer and Scott's theories. Helpful and unhelpful responses.

On The Effects Of Inequality On Economic Growth by Artir (Nintil) - Most of the article tries to explain and analyze the economic consensus on whether inequality harms growth. A very large number of papers are cited and discussed. A conclusion that the effect is at most small.

===Scott:

Two Kinds Of Caution by Scott Alexander - Sometimes boring technologies (ex container ships) wind up being far more important than flashy tech. However Scott argues that often the flashy tech really is important. There is too much contrarianism and not enough meta-contrarianism. AI risk.

Open Road by Scott Alexander - Bi-weekly public open thread. Some messages from Scott Alexander.

To The Great City by Scott Alexander - Scott's Karass is in San Fransisco. He is going home.

Open Thread 78 75 by Scott Alexander - Bi-weekly public open thread.

Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions by Scott Alexander - Scott's community survey showed, with a huge effect size, that transgender individuals are less susceptible to the spinning mask and dancer illusions. Trans suffer from dis-associative disorder at a high rate. Connections between the two phenomena and NDMA. Commentary on the study methodology.

Contra Otium On Individualism by Scott Alexander (Scratchpad) - Eight point summary of Sarah's defense of individualism. Scott is terrified the market place of ideals doesn't work and his own values aren't memetically fit.

Conversation Deliberately Skirts The Border Of Incomprehensibility by Scott Alexander - Communication is often designed to be confusing so as to preserve plausible deniability.

===Rationalist:

Rethinking Reality And Rationality by mindlevelup - Productivity is almost a solved problem. Much current rationalist research is very esoteric. Finally grokking effective altruism. Getting people good enough at rationality that they are self correcting. Pedagogy and making research fields legible.

The Power Of Pettiness by Sarah Perry (ribbonfarm) - "These emotions – pettiness and shame – are the engines driving epistemic progress" Four virtues: Loneliness, ignorance, pettiness and overconfidence.

Irrationality is in the Eye of the Beholder by João Eira (Lettuce be Cereal) - Is eating a chocolate croissant on a diet always irrational? Context, hidden motivations and the curse of knowledge.

The Abyss Of Want by AellaGirl - The infinite regress of 'Asking why'. Taking acid and ego death. You can't imagine the experience of death. Coming back to life. Wanting to want things. Humility and fake enlightenment.

Epistemic Laws Of Motion by SquirrelInHell - Newton's three laws re-interpreted in terms of psychology and people's strategies. A worked example using 'physics' to determine if someone will change their mind. Short and clever.

Against Lone Wolf Selfimprovement by cousin_it (lesswrong) - Lone wolf improvement is hard. Too many rationalists attempt it for cultural and historical reasons. Its often better to take a class or find a group.

Fictional Body Language by Eukaryote - Body language in literature is often very extreme compared to real life. Emojis don't easily map to irl body language. A 'random' sample of how emotion in represented in American Gods, Earth and Lirael. Three strategies: Explicitly describing feelings vs describing actions vs metaphors.

Bayesian Probability Theory As Extended Logic A by ksvanhorn (lesswrong) - Cox's theorem is often cited to support that Bayesian probability is the only valid fundamental method of plausible reasoning. A simplified guide to Cox's theorem. The author their paper that uses weaker assumptions than Cox's theorem. The author's full paper and a more detailed exposition of Cox's theorem are linked.

Steelmanning The Chinese Room Argument by cousin_it (lesswrong) - A short thought experiment about consciousness and inferring knowledge from behavior.

Ideas On A Spectrum by Elo (BearLamp) - Putting ideas like 'selfishness' on a spectrum. Putting yourself and others on the spectrum. People who give you advice might disagree with you about where you fall on the spectrum. Where do you actually stand?

A Post Em Era Hint by Robin Hanson - In past ages there were pairs of innovations that enabled the emulation age without changing the growth rate. Forager: Reasoning and language. Farmer: Writing and math. Industrial: Computers and Digital Communication. What will the em-age equivalents be?

Zen Koans by Elo (BearLamp) - Connections between koans and rationalist ideas. A large number of koans are included at the end of the post. Audio of the associated meetup is included.

Fermi Paradox Resolved by Tyler Cowen - Link to a presentation. Don't just multiply point estimates. Which Drake parameters are uncertain. The Great filter is probably in the past. Lots of interesting graphs and statistics. Social norms and laws. Religion. Eusocial society.

Developmental Psychology In The Age Of Ems by Gordan (Map and Territory) - Brief intro to the Age of Em. Farmer values. Robin's approach to futurism. Psychological implications of most ems being middle aged. Em conservatism and maturity.

Call To Action by Elo (BearLamp) - Culmination of a 21 article series on life improvement and getting things done. A review of the series as a whole and thoughts on moving forward.

Cfar Week 1 by mindlevelup - What is working at CFAF actually like. Less rationality research than anticipated. Communication costs scale quadratically. Organization efficiency and group rationality.

Onemagisterium Bayes by tristanm (lesswrong) - Toolbox-ism is the dominant mode of thinking today. Downsides of toolbox-ism. Desiderata that imply Bayesianism. Major problems: Assigning priors and encountering new hypothesis. Four minor problems. Why the author is still a strong Bayesianism. Strong Bayesians can still use frequentist tools. AI Risk.

Selfconscious Ideology by casebash (lesswrong) - Lesswrong has a self conscious ideology. Self conscious ideologies have major advantages even if any given self-conscious ideology is flawed.

Intellectuals As Artists by Robin Hanson - Many norms function to show off individual impressiveness: Conversations, modern songs, taking positions on diverse subjects. Much intellectualism is not optimized for status gains not finding truth.

Just Saying What You Mean Is Impossible by Zvi Moshowitz - "Humans are automatically doing lightning fast implicit probabilistic analysis on social information in the background of every moment of their lives." This implies there is no way to divorce the content of your communication from its myriad probabilistic social implications. Different phrasings will just send different implications.

In Defense Of Individualist Culture by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - A description of individualist culture. Criticisms of individualist culture: Lacking sympathy, few good defaults. Defenses: Its very hard to change people (psychology research review). A defense of naive personal identity. Traditional culture is fragile. Building a community project is hard in the modern world, prepare for the failure modes. Modernity has big upsides, some people will make better choices than the traditional rules allow.

Forget The Maine by Robin Hanson - Monuments are not optimized for reminding people to do better. Instead they largely serve as vehicles for simplistic ideology.

The Ladder Of Interventions by mindlevelup - "This is a hierarchy of techniques to use for in-the-moment situations where you need to “convince” yourself to do something." The author uses these methods in practice.

On Dragon Army by Zvi Moshowitz - Long response to many quotes from "Dragon Army Barracks". Duncan't attitude to criticism. Tyler Durden shouldn't appeal to Duncan. Authoritarian group houses haven't been tried. Rationalists undervalue exploration. Loneliness and doing big things. The pendulum model of social progress. Sticking to commitments even when its painful. Saving face when you screw up. True Reliability: The bay is way too unreliable but Duncan goes too far. Trust and power Dynamics. Pragmatic criticism of the charter.

===AI:

Updates To The Research Team And A Major Donation by The MIRI Blog - MIRIr received a 1 million dollar donation. Two new full-time researchers. Two researchers leaving. Medium term financial plans.

Conversation With Dario Amodei by Jeff Kaufman - "The research that's most valuable from an AI safety perspective also has substantial value from the perspective of solving problems today". Prioritize work on goals. Transparency and adversarial examples are also important.

Why Don't Ai Researchers Panic by Bayesian Investor - AI researchers predict a 5% chance of "extremely bad" (extinction level) events, why aren't they panicking? Answers: They are thinking of less bad worst cases, optimism about counter-measures, risks will be easy to deal with later, three "star theories" (MIRI, Paul Christiano, GOFAI). More answers: Fatal pessimism and resignation. It would be weird to openly worry. Benefits of AI-safety measures are less than the costs. Risks are distant.

Strategic Implications Of Ai Scenarios by (EA forum) - Questions and topics: Advanced AI timelines. Hard or soft takeoff? Goal alignment? Will advanced AI act as a single entity or a distributed system? Implication for estimating the EV of donating to AI-safety. - Tobias Baumann

Tool Use Intelligence Conversation by The Foundational Research Institute - A dialogue. Comparisons between humans and chimps/lions. The value of intelligence depends on the available tools. Defining intelligence. An addendum on "general intelligence" and factors that make intelligence useful.

Self-modification As A Game Theory Problem by (lesswrong) - "If I'm right, then any good theory for cooperation between AIs will also double as a theory of stable self-modification for a single AI, and vice versa." An article with mathematical details is linked.

Looking Into Ai Risk by Jeff Kaufman - Jeff is trying to decide if AI risk is a serious concern and whether he should consider working in the field. Jeff's AI-risk reading list. A large comment section with interesting arguments.

===EA:

Ea Marketing And A Plea For Moral Inclusivity by MichaelPlant (EA forum) - EA markets itself as being about poverty reduction. Many EAs think other topics are more important (far future, AI, animal welfare, etc). The author suggests becoming both more inclusive and more openly honest.

My Current Thoughts On Miris Highly Reliable by Daniel Dewey (EA forum) - Report by the Open Phil AI safety lead. A basic description of and case for the MIRI program. Conclusion: 10% credence in MIRI's work being highly useful. Reasons: Hard to apply to early agents, few researchers are excited, other approaches seem more promising.

How Can We Best Coordinate As A Community by Benn Todd (EA forum) - 'Replaceability' is a bad reason not to do direct work, lots of positions are very hard to fill. Comparative Advantage and division of labor. Concrete ways to boost productivity: 5 minute favours, Operations roles, Community infrastructure, Sharing knowledge and Specialization. EA Global Video is included.

Deciding Whether to Recommend Fistula Management Charities by The GiveWell Blog - "An obstetric fistula, or gynecologic fistula, is an abnormal opening between the vagina and the bladder or rectum." Fistula management, including surgery. Open questions and uncertainty particularly around costs. Our plans to partner with IDinsight to answer these questions.

Allocating the Capital by GiveDirectly - Eight media links on Give Directly, Basic Income and Cash Transfers.

Testing An Ea Networkbuilding Strategy by remmelt (EA forum) - Pivot from supporting EA charities to cooperating with EA networks. Detailed goals, strategy, assumptions, metrics, collaborators and example actions.

How Long Does It Take To Research And Develop A Vaccine by (EA forum) - How long it takes to make a vaccine. Literature review. Historical data on how long a large number of vaccines took to develop. Conclusions.

Hi Im Luke Muehlhauser Ama About Open by Luke Muelhauser (EA forum) - Animal and computer consciousness. Luke wrote a report for the open philanthropy project on consciousness. Lots of high quality questions have been posted.

Hidden Cost Digital Convenience by Innovations for Poverty - Moving from in person to digital micro-finance can harm saving rates in developing countries. Reduction in group cohesion and visible transaction fees. Linked paper with details.

Projects People And Processes by Open Philosophy - Three approaches used by donors and decision makers: Choose from projects presented by experts, defer near-fully to trusted individuals and establishing systematic criteria. Pros and cons of each. Open Phil's current approach.

Effective Altruism An Idea Repository by Onemorenickname (lesswrong) - Effective altruism is less of a closed organization than the author thought. Building a better platform for effective altruist idea sharing.

Effective Altruism As Costly Signaling by Raemon (EA forum) - " 'a bunch of people saying that rich people should donate to X' is a less credible signal than 'a bunch of people saying X thing is important enough that they are willing to donate to it themselves.' "

The Person Affecting Philanthropists Paradox by MichaelPlant (EA forum) - Population ethics. The value of creating more happy people as opposed to making pre-existing people happy. Application to the question of whether to donate now or invest and donate later.

Oops Prize by Ben Hoffman (Compass Rose) - Positive norms around admitting you were wrong. Charity Science publicly admitted they were wrong about grant writing. Did anyone organization at EA Global admit they made a costly mistake? 1K oops prize.

===Politics and Economics:

Scraps 3 Hoffer And Performance Art by Lou (sam[]zdat) - Growing out of radicalism. Either economic and family instability can cause mass movements. why the left has adopted Freud. The Left's economic platform is popular, its cultural platform is not. Performance art: Marina Abramović's' 'Rhythm 0'. Recognizing and denying your own power.

What Replaces Rights And Discourse by Feddie deBoer - Lots of current leftist discourse is dismissive of rights and open discussion. But what alternative is there? The Soviets had bad justifications and a terrible system but at least it had an explicit philosophical alternative.

Why Do You Hate Elua by H i v e w i r e d - Scott's Elua as an Eldritch Abomination that threatens traditional culture. An extended sci-fi quote about Ra the great computer. "The forces of traditional values remembered an important fact: once you have access to the hardware, it’s over."

Why Did Europe Lose Crusades by Noah Smith - Technological comparison between Europe and the Middle East. Political divisions on both sides. Geographic distance. Lack of motivation.

Econtalk On Generic Medications by Aceso Under Glass - A few egregious ways that big pharma games the patent system. Short.

Data On Campus Free Speech Cases by Ozy (Thing of Things) - Ozy classifies a sample of the cases handled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Ozy classifies 77 cases as conservative, liberal or apolitical censorship. Conservative ideas were censored 52%, liberal 26% and apolitical 22%.

Beware The Moral Spotlight by Robin Hanson - The stated goals of government/business don't much matter compared to the selective pressures on their leadership, don't obsess over which sex has the worse deal overall, don't overate the benefits of democracy and ignore higher impact changes to government.

Reply To Yudkowsky by Bryan Caplan - Caplan quotes and replies to many sections Yudkowsky's response. Points: Yudkowsky's theory is a special case of Caplan's. The left has myriad complaints about markets. Empirically the market actually has consistently provided large benefits in many countries and times.

Without Belief In A God But Never Without Belief In A Devil by Lou (sam[]zdat) - The nature of mass movements. The beats and the John Birchers. The taxonomy of the frustrated. Horseshoe theory. The frustrated cannot derive satisfaction from action, something else has to fill the void Poverty, work and meaning. Mass movements need to sow resentment. Hatred is the strongest unifier. Modernity inevitably causes justified resentment. Tocqueville, Polyanai, Hoffer and Scott's theories. Helpful and unhelpful responses.

Genetic Behaviorism Supports The Influence Of Chance On Life Outcomes by Freddie deBoer - Much of the variance in many traits is non-shared-environment. Much non-shared-environment can be thought of as luck. In addition no one chooses or deserves their genes.

Yudkowsky On My Simpistic Theory of Left and Right by Bryan Caplan - Yudkowsky claims the left holds the market to the same standards as human beings. The market as a ritual holding back a dangerous Alien God. Caplan doesn't respond he just quotes Yudkowsky.

On The Effects Of Inequality On Economic Growth by Artir (Nintil) - Most of the article tries to explain and analyze the economic consensus on whether inequality harms growth. A very large number of papers are cited and discussed. A conclusion that the effect is at most small.

===Misc:

Erisology Of Self And Will Representative Campbell Speaks by Everything Studies - An exposition of the "mainstream" view of the self and free will.

What Is The Ein Sof The Meaning Of Perfection In by arisen (lesswrong) - "Kabbalah is based on the analogy of the soul as a cup and G-d as the light that fills the cup. Ein Sof, nothing ("Ein") can be grasped ("Sof"-limitation)."

Sexualtaboos by AellaGirl - A graph of sexual fetishes. The axes are "taboo-ness" and "reported interest". Taboo correlated negatively with interest (p < 0.01). Lots of fetishes are included and the sample size is pretty large.

Huffman Codes Problem by protokol2020 - Find the possible Huffman Codes for all twenty-six English letters.

If You're In School Try The Curriculum by Freddie deBoer - Ironic detachment "leaves you with the burden of the work but without the emotional support of genuine resolve". Don't be the sort of person who tweets hundreds of thousands of times but pretends they don't care about online.

Media Recommendations by Sailor Vulcan (BYS) - Various Reviews including: Games, Animated TV shows, Rationalist Pokemon. A more detailed review of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Sunday Assorted Links by Tyler Cowen - Variety of Topics. Ethereum Cryptocurrency, NYC Diner decline, Building Chinese Airports, Soccer Images, Drone Wars, Harberger Taxation, Douthat on Heathcare.

Summary Of Reading April June 2017 by Eli Bendersky - Brief reviews. Various topics: Heavy on Economics. Some politics, literature and other topics.

Rescuing The Extropy Magazine Archives by deku_shrub (lesswrong) - "You'll find some really interesting very early articles on neural augmentation, transhumanism, libertarianism, AI (featuring Eliezer), radical economics (featuring Robin Hanson of course) and even decentralized payment systems."

Epistemic Spot Check A Guide To Better Movement Todd Hargrove by Aceso Under Glass - Flexibility and Chronic Pain. Early section on flexibility fails check badly. Section on psychosomatic pain does much better. Model: Simplicity (Good), Explanation (Fantastic), Explicit Predictions (Good), Useful Predictions (Poor), Acknowledge Limits (Poor), Measurability (Poor).

Book Review Barriers by Eukaryote - Even cell culturing is surprisingly hard if you don't know the details. There is not much institutional knowledge left in the field of bioweapons. Forcing labs underground makes bioterrorism even harder. However synthetic biology might make things much more dangerous.

Physics Problem 2 by protokol2020 - Can tidal forces rotate a metal wheel?

Poems by Scott Alexander (Scratchpad) - Violets aren't blue.

Evaluating Employers As Junior Software by Particular Virtue - You need to write alot of code and get detailed feedback to improve as an engineer. Practical suggestions to ensure your first job fulfills both conditions.

===Podcast:

Kyle Maynard Without Limits by Tim Ferriss - "Kyle Maynard is a motivational speaker, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and ESPY award-winning mixed martial arts athlete, known for becoming the first quadruple amputee to reach the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Aconcagua without the aid of prosthetics."

85 Is This The End Of Europe by Waking Up with Sam Harris - Douglas Murray and his book 'The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam'.

Myers Briggs, Diet, Mistakes And Immortality by Tim Ferriss - Ask me anything podcast. Topics beyond the title: Questions to prompt introspection, being a Jack of All Trades, balancing future and present goals, don't follow your passion, 80/20 memory retention, advice to your past selves.

Interview Ro Khanna Regional Development by Tyler Cowen - Bloomberg Podcast. "Technology, jobs and economic lessons from his perspective as Silicon Valley’s congressman."

Avic Roy by The Ezra Klein Show - Better Care Reconciliation Act, broader health care philosophies that fracture the right. Roy’s disagreements with the CBO’s methodology. The many ways he thinks the Senate bill needs to improve. How the GOP has moved left on health care policy. Medicaid, welfare reform, and the needy who are hard to help. The American health care system subsidizes the rich, etc.

Chris Blattman 2 by EconTalk - "Whether it's better to give poor Africans cash or chickens and the role of experiments in helping us figure out the answer. Along the way he discusses the importance of growth vs. smaller interventions and the state of development economics."

Landscapes Of Mind by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "why it’s so hard to predict future technology, the nature of intelligence, the 'singularity', artificial consciousness."

Blake Mycoskie by Tim Ferriss - Early entrepreneurial ventures. The power of journaling. How “the stool analogy” changed Blake’s life. Lessons from Ben Franklin.

Ben Sasse by Tyler Cowen - "Kansas vs. Nebraska, famous Nebraskans, Chaucer and Luther, unicameral legislatures, the decline of small towns, Ben’s prize-winning Yale Ph.d thesis on the origins of conservatism, what he learned as a university president, Stephen Curry, Chevy Chase, Margaret Chase Smith"

Danah Boyd on why Fake News is so Easy to Believe by The Ezra Klein Show - Fake news, digital white flight, how an anthropologist studies social media, machine learning algorithms reflect our prejudices rather than fixing them, what Netflix initially got wrong about their recommendations engine, the value of pretending your audience is only six people, the early utopian visions of the internet.

Robin Feldman by EconTalk - Ways pharmaceutical companies fight generics.

Jason Weeden On Do People Vote Based On Self Interest by Rational Speaking - Do people vote based on personality, their upbringing, blind loyalty or do they follow their self interest? What does self-interest even mean?

Reid Hoffman 2 by Tim Ferriss - The 10 Commandments of Startup Success according to the extremely successful investor Reid Hoffman.

In this post I'll try to show a surprising link between two research topics on LW: game-theoretic cooperation between AIs (quining, Loebian cooperation, modal combat, etc) and stable self-modification of AIs (tiling agents, Loebian obstacle, etc).

When you're trying to cooperate with another AI, you need to ensure that its action will fulfill your utility function. And when doing self-modification, you also need to ensure that the successor AI will fulfill your utility function. In both cases, naive utility maximization doesn't work, because you can't fully understand another agent that's as powerful and complex as you. That's a familiar difficulty in game theory, and in self-modification it's known as the Loebian obstacle (fully understandable successors become weaker and weaker).

In general, any AI will be faced with two kinds of situations. In "single player" situations, you're faced with a choice like eating chocolate or not, where you can figure out the outcome of each action. (Most situations covered by UDT are also "single player", involving identical copies of yourself.) Whereas in "multiplayer" situations your action gets combined with the actions of other agents to determine the outcome. Both cooperation and self-modification are "multiplayer" situations, and are hard for the same reason. When someone proposes a self-modification to you, you might as well evaluate it with the same code that you use for game theory contests.

If I'm right, then any good theory for cooperation between AIs will also double as a theory of stable self-modification for a single AI. That means neither problem can be much easier than the other, and in particular self-modification won't be a special case of utility maximization, as some people seem to hope. But on the plus side, we need to solve one problem instead of two, so creating FAI becomes a little bit easier.

The idea came to me while working on this mathy post on IAFF, which translates some game theory ideas into the self-modification world. For example, Loebian cooperation (from the game theory world) might lead to a solution for the Loebian obstacle (from the self-modification world) - two LW ideas with the same name that people didn't think to combine before!

===Highly Recommended Articles:

Bring Up Genius by Viliam (lesswrong) - An "80/20" translation. Positive motivation. Extreme resistance from the Hungarian government and press. Polgar's five principles. Biting criticism of the school system. Learning in early childhood. Is Genius a gift or curse? Celebrity. Detailed plan for daily instruction. Importance of diversity. Why chess? Teach the chess with love, playfully. Emancipation of women. Polgar's happy family.

The Shouting Class by Noah Smith - The majority of comments come from a tiny minority of commentators. Social media is giving a bullhorn to the people who constantly complain. Negativity is contagious. The level of discord in society is getting genuinely dangerous. The French Revolution. The author criticizes shouters on the Left and Right.

How Givewell Uses Cost Effectiveness Analyses by The GiveWell Blog - GiveWell doesn't take its estimates literally, unless one charity is measured as 2-3x as cost-effective GiveWell is unsure if a difference exists. Cost-effective is however the most important factor in GiveWell's recommendations. GiveWell goes into detail about how it deals with great uncertainty and suboptimal data.

Mode Collapse And The Norm One Principle by tristanm (lesswrong) - Generative Adversarial Networks. Applying the lessons of Machine Learning to discourse. How to make progress when the critical side of discourse is very powerful. "My claim is that any contribution to a discussion should satisfy the "Norm One Principle." In other words, it should have a well-defined direction, and the quantity of change should be feasible to implement."

The Face Of The Ice by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Mountaineering. Survival Mindset vs Sexual-Selection Mindset. War and the Wilderness. Technical Skill.

Bayes: A Kinda Sorta Masterpost by Nostalgebraist - A long and very well thought-out criticism of Bayesianism. Explanation of Bayesian methodology. Comparison with classical statistics. Arguments for Bayes. The problem of ignored hypotheses with known relations. The problem of new ideas. Where do priors come from? Regularization and insights from machine learning.

===Scott:

SSC Journal Club Ai Timelines by Scott Alexander - A new paper surveying what Ai experts think about Ai progress. Contradictory results about when Ai will surpass humans at all tasks. Opinions on Ai risk, experts are taking the arguments seriously.

Terrorism and Involuntary Commitment by Scott Alexander (Scratchpad) - The leader of the terrorist attack in London was in a documentary about jihadists living in Britain. “Being the sort of person who seems likely to commit a crime isn’t illegal.” Involuntary commitment.

Is Pharma Research Worse Than Chance by Scott Alexander - The most promising drugs of the 21st century are MDMA and ketamine (third is psilocybin). These drugs were all found by the drug community. Maybe pharma should look for compounds with large effect sizes instead of searching for drugs with no side-effects.

Open Thread 77- Opium Thread by Scott Alexander - Bi-weekly open thread. Includes some comments of the week and an update on translating "Bringing Up Genius".

Third and Fourth Thoughts on Dragon Army by SlateStarScratchpad. - Scott goes from Anti-Anti-Dragon-Army to Anti-Dragon-Army. He then gets an email from Duncan and updates in favor of the position that Duncan thought things out well.

Hungarian Education III Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Budapestians by Scott Alexander - Lazlo Polgar wanted to prove he could intentionally raise chess geniuses. He raised the number 1,2 and 6 female chess players in the world?

Four Nobel Truths by Scott Alexander - Four Graphs describing facts about Israeli/Askenazi Nobel Prizes.

===Rationalist:

The Precept Of Niceness by H i v e w i r e d - Prisoner's Dilemma's. Even against a truly alien opponent you should still cooperate as long as possible on the iterated prisoner's dilemma, even with fixed round lengths, play tit-for-tat. Niceness is the best strategy.

Epistemology Vs Critical Thinking by Onemorenickname (lesswrong) - Epistemies work. General approaches don't work. Scientific approaches work. Epistemic effort vs Epistemic status. Criticisms of lesswrong Bayesianism.

Tasting Godhood by Agenty Duck - Poetic and personal. Wine tasting. Empathizing with other people. Seeing others as whole people. How to dream about other people. Sci-fi futures. Tasting godhood is the same as tasting other people. Looking for your own godhood.

Bayes: A Kinda Sorta Masterpost by Nostalgebraist - A long and very well thought-out criticism of Bayesianism. Explanation of Bayesian methodology. Comparison with classical statistics. Arguments for Bayes. The problem of ignored hypotheses with known relations. The problem of new ideas. Where do priors come from? Regularization and insights from machine learning.

Dichotomies by mindlevelup - 6 short essays about dichotomies and whats useful about noticing them. Fast vs Slow thinking. Focused vs Diffuse Mode. Clean vs Dirty Thinking. Inside vs Outside View. Object vs Meta level. Generative vs Iterative Mode. Some conclusions about the method.

How Men And Women Perceive Relationships Differently by AellaGirl - Survey Results about Relationship quality over time. Lots of graphs and a link to the raw data. "In summary, time is not kind. Relationships show an almost universal decrease in everything good the longer they go on. Poly is hard, and you have to go all the way to make it work – especially for men. Religion is also great, if you’re a man. Women get more excited and insecure, men feel undesirable."

Summer Programming by Jacob Falkovich (Put A Number On It!) - Jacob's Summer writing plan. Re-writing part of the lesswrong sequences. Ribbonfarm's longform blogging course on refactored perception.

Bet Or Update Fixing The Will to Wager Assumption by cousin_it (lesswrong) - Betting with better informed agents is irrational. Bayesian agents should however update their prior or agree to bet. Good discussion in comments.

Kindness Against The Grain by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Sympathy and forgiveness evolved to follow local incentive gradients. Some details on we sympathize with and who we don't. The difference between a good deal and a sympathetic deal. Smooth emotional gradients and understanding what other people want. Forgiveness as not following the local gradient and why this can be useful.

Bring Up Genius by Viliam (lesswrong) - An "80/20" translation. Positive motivation. Extreme resistance from the Hungarian government and press. Polgar's five principles. Biting criticism of the school system. Learning in early childhood. Is Genius a gift or curse? Celebrity. Detailed plan for daily instruction. Importance of diversity. Why chess? Teach the chess with love, playfully. Emancipation of women. Polgar's happy family.

Deorbiting A Metaphor by H i v e w i r e d - Another post in the origin sequence. Rationalist Myth-making. (note: I am unlikely to keep linking all of these. Follow hivewired’s blog)

Conformity Excuses by Robin Hanson - Human behavior is often explained by pressure to conform. However we consciously experience much less pressure. Robin discusses a list of ways to rationalize conforming.

Becoming A Better Community by Sable (lesswrong) - Lesswrong holds its memebers to a high standard. Intimacy requires unguarded spontaneous interactions. Concrete ideas to add more fun and friendship to lesswrong.

Optimizing For Meta Optimization by H i v e w i r e d - A very long list of human cultural universals and comments on which ones to encourage/discourage: Myths, Language, Cognition, Society. Afterwards some detailed bullet points about an optimal dath ilanian culture.

On Resignation by Small Truths - Artificial intelligence. "It’s an embarrassing lapse, but I did not think much about how the very people who already know all the stuff I’m learning would behave. I wasn’t thinking enough steps ahead. Seen in this context, Neuralink isn’t an exciting new tech venture so much as a desperate hope to mitigate an unavoidable disaster."

Cognitive Sciencepsychology As A Neglected by Kaj Sotala (EA forum) - Ways psychology could benefit AI safety: "The psychology of developing an AI safety culture, Developing better analyses of 'AI takeoff' scenarios, Defining just what it is that human values are, Better understanding multi-level world-models." Lots of interesting links.

Mode Collapse And The Norm One Principle by tristanm (lesswrong) - Generative Adversarial Networks. Applying the lessons of Machine Learning to discourse. How to make progress when the critical side of discourse is very powerful. "My claim is that any contribution to a discussion should satisfy the "Norm One Principle." In other words, it should have a well-defined direction, and the quantity of change should be feasible to implement."

Finite And Infinite by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - "James Carse, in Finite and Infinite Games, sets up a completely different polarity, between infinite game-playing (which is open-ended, playful, and non-competitive) vs. finite game-playing (which is definite, serious, and competitive)." Playfulness, property, and cooperating with people who seriously weird you out.

Script for the rationalist seder is linked by Raemon (lesswrong) - An explanation of Rationalist Seder, a remix of the Passover Seder refocused on liberation in general. A story of two tribes and the power of stories. The full Haggadah/script for the rationalist Seder is linked.

The Personal Growth Cycle by G Gordon Worley (Map and Territory) - Stages of Development. "Development starts from a place of integration, followed by disintegration into confusion, which through active efforts at reintegration in a safe space results in development. If a safe space for reintegration is not available, development may not proceed."

Until We Build Dath Ilan by H i v e w i r e d - Eliezer's Sci-fi utopia Dath Ilan. The nature of the rationalist community. A purpose for the rationality community. Lots of imagery and allusions. A singer is someone who tries to do good.

Do Ai Experts Exist by Bayesian Investor - Some of the numbers from " When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts" don't make sense.

Relinquishment Cultivation by Agenty Duck - Agenty Duck designs meditation to cultivate the attitude of "If X is true I wish to believe X, if X is not true I wish to believe not X". The technique is inspired by 'loving-kindness' meditation.

10 Incredible Weaknesses Of The Mental Health by arunbharatula (lesswrong) - Ten arguments that undermine the credibility of the mental health workforce. Some of the arguments are sourced and argued significantly more thoroughly than other.

Philosophical Parenthood by SquirrelInHell - Updateless Decision theory. Ashkenazi intelligence. "In this post, I will lay out a strong philosophical argument for rational and intelligent people to have children. It's important and not obvious, so listen well."

On Connections Between Brains And Computers by Small Truths - A condensation of Tim Ubran's 36K word article about Neuralink. The astounding benefits of having even a SIRI level Ai responding directly to your thoughts. The existential threat of Ai means that mind-computer links are worth the risks.

Thoughts Concerning Homeschooling by Ozy (Thing of Things) - Evidence that many public school practices are counter-productive. Stats on the academic performance of home-schoolers. Educating 'weird awkward nerds'.

The Face Of The Ice by Sarah Constantin (Otium) - Mountaineering. Survival Mindset vs Sexual-Selection Mindset. War and the Wilderness. Technical Skill.

===EA:

Review Of Ea New Zealands Doing Good Better Book by cafelow (EA forum) - New Zealand EAs gave out 250 copies of "Doing Good Better". 80 of the recipients responded to a follow up survey. The results were extremely encouraging. Survey details and discussion. Possible flaws with the giveaway and survey.

Announcing Effective Altruism Grants by Maxdalton (EA forum) - CEA is giving out £100,000 grants for personal projects. "We believe that providing those people with the resources that they need to realize their potential could be a highly effective use of resources." A list of what projects could get funded, the list is very broad. Evaluation criteria.

A Powerful Weapon in the Arsenal (Links Post) by GiveDirectly - 8 Links on Basic Income, Effective Altruism, Cash Transfers and Donor Advised Funds

A Paradox In The Measurement Of The Value Of Life by klloyd (EA forum) - Eight Thousand words on: “A Health Economics Puzzle: Why are there apparent inconsistencies in the monetary valuation of a statistical life (VSL) and a quality-adjusted life year (QALY$)?”

New Report Consciousness And Moral Patienthood by Open Philosophy - “In short, my tentative conclusions are that I think mammals, birds, and fishes are more likely than not to be conscious, while (e.g.) insects are unlikely to be conscious. However, my probabilities are very “made-up” and difficult to justify, and it’s not clear to us what actions should be taken on the basis of such made-up probabilities.”

Adding New Funds To Ea Funds by the Center for Effective Altruism (EA forum) - The Center for Effective Altruism wants feedback on whether it should add more EA funds. Each question is followed by a detailed list of critical considerations.

How Givewell Uses Cost Effectiveness Analyses by The GiveWell Blog - GiveWell doesn't take its estimates literally, unless one charity is measured as 2-3x as cost-effective GiveWell is unsure if a difference exists. Cost-effective is however the most important factor in GiveWell's recommendations. GiveWell goes into detail about how it deals with great uncertainty and suboptimal data.

The Time Has come to Find Out [Links] by GiveDirectly - 8 media links related to Cash Transfers, Give Directly and Effective Altruism.

Considering Considerateness: Why Communities Of Do Gooders Should Be by The Center for Effective Altruism - Consequentialist reasons to be considerate and trustworthy. Detailed and contains several graphs. Include practical discussions of when not to be considerate and how to handle unreasonable preferences. The conclusion discusses how considerate EAs should be. The bibliography contains many very high quality articles written by the community.

===Politics and Economics:

Summing Up My Thoughts On Macroeconomics by Noah Smith - Slides from Noah's talk at the Norwegian Finance Ministry. Comparison of Industry, Central Bank and Academic Macroeconomics. Overview of important critiques of academic macro. The DGSE standard mode and ways to improve it. What makes a good Macro theory. Go back to the microfoundations.

Why Universities Cant Be The Primary Site Of Political Organizing by Freddie deBoer - Few people on campus. Campus activism is seasonal. Students are an itinerant population. Town and gown conflicts. Students are too busy. First priority is employment. Is activism a place for student growth?. Labor principles.

Some Observations On Cis By Default Identification by Ozy (Thing of Things) - Many 'cis-by-default' people are repressing or not noticing their gender feelings. This effect strongly depends on a person's community.

One Day We Will Make Offensive Jokes by AellaGirl - "This is why I feel suspicious of some groups that strongly oppose offensive jokes – they have the suspicion that every person is like my parents – that every human “actually wants” all the terrible things to happen."

Book Review Weapons Of Math Destruction by Zvi Moshowitz - Extremely long. "What the book is actually mostly about on its surface, alas, is how bad and unfair it is to be a Bayesian. There are two reasons, in her mind, why using algorithms to be a Bayesian is just awful."

A Brief Argument With Apparently Informed Global Warming Denialists by Artir (Nintil) - Details of the back and forth argument. So commentary on practical rationality and speculation about how the skeptic might have felt.

The Shouting Class by Noah Smith - The majority of comments come from a tiny minority of commentators. Social media is giving a bullhorn to the people who constantly complain. Negativity is contagious. The level of discord in society is getting genuinely dangerous. The French Revolution. The author criticizes shouters on the Left and Right.

Population By Country And Region 10K BCE to 2016 CE by Luke Muehlhauser - 204 countries, 27 region. Links to the database used and a forthcoming explanatory paper. From 10K BCE to 0 CE gaps are 1000 years. From 0 CE to 1700 CE gaps are 100 years. After that they are 10 years long.

Regulatory Lags For New Technology 2013 Notes by gwern (lesswrong) - Gwern looks at the history of regulation for high frequency trading, self driving cars and hacking. The post is mostly comprised of long quotes from articles linked by gwern.

Two Economists Ask Teachers To Behave As Irrational Actors by Freddie deBoer - A response to Cowen's interview of Raj Chetty. Standard Education reform rhetoric implies that hundreds of thousands of teachers need to be fired. However teachers don't control most of the important inputs to student performance. You won't get more talented teachers unless you increase compensation.

Company Revenue Per Employee by Tyler Cowen - The energy sector has high revenue per employee. The highest score was attained by a pharmaceutical distributor. Hotels, restaurants and consumer discretionaries do the worst on this metric. Tech has a middling performance.

===Misc:

A Remark On Usury by Entirely Useless - "To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice." Thomas Aquinas is quoted at length explaining the preceding statement. EntirelyUseless argues that Aquinas mixes up the buyer and the seller.

Bike To Work Houston by Mr. Money Mustache - How a lawyer bikes to work in Houston. Bikes are surprisingly fast relative to cars in cities. Houston is massive.

Fuckers Vs Raisers by AellaGirl - Evolutionary psychology. The qualities that are attractive in a guy who sleeps around are also attractive in a guy who wants to settle down.

Reducers Transducers And Coreasync In Clojure by Eli Bendersky - "I find it fascinating how one good idea (reducers) morphed into another (transducers), and ended up mating with yet another, apparently unrelated concept (concurrent pipelines) to produce some really powerful coding abstractions."

Thingness And Thereness by Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm) - The relation between politics, home and frontier. Big Data, deep learning and the blockchain. Liminal spaces and conditions.

Create 2314 by protokol2020 - Find the shortest algorithm to create the number 2314 using a prescribed set of operations.

Text To Speech Speed by Jeff Kaufman - Text to speech has become a very efficient way to interact with computers. Questions about settings. Very short.

Hello World! Stan, Pymc3 and Edward by Bob Carpenter (Gelman's Blog) - Comparison of the three frameworks. Test case of Bayesian linear regression. Extendability and efficiency of the frameworks is discussed.

Computer Science Majors by Tyler Cowen - Tyler links to an article by Dan wang. The author gives 11 reasons why CS majors are rare, none of which he finds convincing. Eventually the author seems to conclude that the 2001 bubble, changing nature of the CS field, power law distribution in developer productivity and lack of job security are important causes.

Beespotting On I-5 by Eukaryote - Drive from San Fran to Seattle. The vast agricultural importance of Bees. Improving Bee quality of life.

===Podcast:

81 Leaving Islam by Waking Up with Sam Harris - "Sarah Haider. Her organization Ex-Muslims of North America, how the political Left is confused about Islam, "rape culture" under Islam, honesty without bigotry, stealth theocracy, immigration, the prospects of reforming Islam"

Newcomers by Venam - A transcript of a discussion about advice for new Unix users. Purpose. Communities. Learning by Yourself. Technical Tips. Venam linked tons of podcast transcripts today. Check them out.

Masha Gessen, Russian-American Journalist by The Ezra Klein Show - Trump and Russia, plausible and sinister explanation. Ways Trump is and isn't like Putin, studying autocracies, the psychology of Jared Kushner

Christy Ford by EconTalk - "A history of how America's health care system came to be dominated by insurance companies or government agencies paying doctors per procedure."

Nick Szabo by Tim Ferriss - "Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer best known for his pioneering research in digital contracts and cryptocurrency."

The Road To Tyranny by Waking Up with Sam Harris - Timothy Snyder. His book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Hans Noel On The Role Of Ideology In Politics by Rational Speaking - "Why the Democrats became the party of liberalism and the Republicans the party of conservatism, whether voters are hypocrites in the way they apply their ostensible ideology, and whether politicians are motivated by ideals or just self-interest."

CFAR is running a free two-week program this September, aimed at increasing participant's ability to do technical research in AI alignment. Like the MIRI Summer Fellows Program which ran the past two years, this will include CFAR course material, plus content on AI alignment research and time to collaborate on research with other participants and researchers such as myself! It will be located in the SF Bay area, September 8-25. See more information and apply here.

Many people, anyway.

There is a common mistake in modeling humans, to think that they have actual goals, and that they deduce their actions from those goals. First there is a goal, then there is an action which is born from the goal. This is wrong.

More accurately, humans have a series of adaptations they execute. A series of behaviors which, under certain circumstances, kinda-sorta-maybe aim at the same-ish thing (like inclusive genetic fitness), but which will be executed regardless of whether or not they actually hit that thing.

Actions are not deduced from goals. The closest thing we have to "goals" are inferred from a messy conglomerate of actions, and are only an approximation of the reality that is there: just a group of behaviors.

-

I've come to see beliefs as very much the same way. Maybe some of us have real beliefs, real models. Some of us may in fact choose our statements about the world by deducing them from a foundational set of beliefs.

The mistake is repeated when we model most humans as having actual beliefs (nerds might be an exception). To suppose that their statements about reality, their propositions about the world, or their answers to questions are deduced from some foundational belief. First there is a belief, then there is a report on that belief, provided if anyone inquires about the belief they're carrying around. This is wrong.

More accurately, humans have a set of social moves/responses that they execute. Some of those moves APPEAR (to the naive nerd such as I) to be statements about how and what reality is. Each of these "statements" was probably vetted and accepted individually, without any consideration for the utterly foreign notion that the moves should be consistent or avoid contradiction. This sounds as tiresome to them as suggesting that their body language, or dance moves should be "consistent," for to them, the body language, dance moves, and "statements about reality" all belong to the same group of social moves, and thinking a social move is "consistent" is like thinking a certain posture/gesture is consistent or a color is tasty.

And missing the point like a nerd and taking things "literally" is exactly the kind of thing that reveals low social acuity.

Statements about individual beliefs are not deduced from a model of the world, just like actions are not deduced from goals. You can choose to interpret "I think we should help poor people" as a statement about the morality of helping poor people, if you want to miss the whole point, of course. We can suppose that "XYZ would be a good president" is a report on their model of someone's ability to fulfill a set of criteria. And if we interpret all their statement as though they were actual, REAL beliefs, we might be able to piece them together into something sort of like a model of the world.

All of which is pointless, missing the point, and counter-productive. Their statements don't add up to a model like ours might, anymore than our behaviors really add up to a goal. The "model" that comes out of aggregating their social learned behaviors will likely be inconsistent, but if you think that'll matter to them, you've fundamentally misunderstood what they're doing. You're trying to find their beliefs, but they don't HAVE any. There IS nothing more. It's just a set of cached responses. (Though you might find, if you interpret their propositions about reality as signals about tribal affiliation and personality traits, that they're quite consistent).

"What do you think about X" is re-interpreted and answered as though you had said "What do good, high-status groups (that you can plausibly be a part of) think about X?"

"I disagree" doesn't mean they think your model is wrong; they probably don't realize you have a model. Just as you interpret their social moves as propositional statements and misunderstand, so they interpret your propositional statements as social moves and misunderstand. If you ask how their model differs from yours, it'll be interpreted as a generic challenge to their tribe/status, and they'll respond like they do to such challenges. You might be confused by their hostility, or by how they change the subject. You think you're talking about X and they've switched to Y. While they'll think you've challenged them, and respond with a similar challenge, the "content" of the sentences need not be considered; the important thing is to parry the social attack and maybe counter-attack. Both perspectives make internal sense.

As far as they're concerned, the entire meaning of your statement was basically equivalent to a snarl, so they snarled back. Beliefs As Body Language.

Despite the obvious exceptions and caveats, this has been extremely useful for me in understanding less nerdy people. I try not to take what to them are just the verbal equivalent of gestures/postures or dance moves, and interpret them as propositional statements about the nature of reality (even though they REALLY sound like they're making propositional statements about the nature of reality), because that misunderstands what they're actually trying to communicate. The content of their sentences is not the point. There is no content. (None about reality, that is. All content is social). They do not HAVE beliefs. There's nothing to report on.

http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-risks/potential-risks-advanced-artificial-intelligence/montreal-institute-learning-algorithms-ai-safety-research

The really good news is that Yoshua Bengio is leading this (he is extremely credible in modern AI/deep learning world), and this is a pretty large change of mind for him. When I spoke to him at a conference 3 years ago he was pretty dismissive of the whole issue; this year's FLI conference seems to have changed his mind (kudos to them)

Of course huge props to OpenPhil for pursuing this

I have a new paper that strengthens the case for strong Bayesianism, a.k.a. One Magisterium Bayes. The paper is entitled "From propositional logic to plausible reasoning: a uniqueness theorem." (The preceding link will be good for a few weeks, after which only the preprint version will be available for free. I couldn't come up with the $2500 that Elsevier makes you pay to make your paper open-access.)

Some background: E. T. Jaynes took the position that (Bayesian) probability theory is an extension of propositional logic to handle degrees of certainty -- and appealed to Cox's Theorem to argue that probability theory is the only viable such extension, "the unique consistent rules for conducting inference (i.e. plausible reasoning) of any kind." This position is sometimes called strong Bayesianism. In a nutshell, frequentist statistics is fine for reasoning about frequencies of repeated events, but that's a very narrow class of questions; most of the time when researchers appeal to statistics, they want to know what they can conclude with what degree of certainty, and that is an epistemic question for which Bayesian statistics is the right tool, according to Cox's Theorem.

You can find a "guided tour" of Cox's Theorem here (see "Constructing a logic of plausible inference"). Here's a very brief summary. We write A | X for "the reasonable credibility" (plausibility) of proposition A when X is known to be true. Here X represents whatever information we have available. We are not at this point assuming that A | X is any sort of probability. A system of plausible reasoning is a set of rules for evaluating A | X. Cox proposed a handful of intuitively-appealing, qualitative requirements for any system of plausible reasoning, and showed that these requirements imply that any such system is just probability theory in disguise. That is, there necessarily exists an order-preserving isomorphism between plausibilities and probabilities such that A | X, after mapping from plausibilities to probabilities, respects the laws of probability.

Here is one (simplified and not 100% accurate) version of the assumptions required to obtain Cox's result:

1. A | X is a real number.
2. (A | X) = (B | X) whenever A and B are logically equivalent; furthermore, (A | X) ≤ (B | X) if B is a tautology (an expression that is logically true, such as (a or not a)).
3. We can obtain (not A | X) from A | X via some non-increasing function S. That is, (not A | X) = S(A | X).
4. We can obtain (A and B | X) from (B | X) and (A | B and X) via some continuous function F that is strictly increasing in both arguments: (A and B | X) = F((A | B and X), B | X).
5. The set of triples (x,y,z) such that x = A|X, y = (B | A and X), and z = (C | A and B and X) for some proposition A, proposition B, proposition C, and state of information X, is dense. Loosely speaking, this means that if you give me any (x',y',z') in the appropriate range, I can find an (x,y,z) of the above form that is arbitrarily close to (x',y',z').

The probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favorable to it, to the number of possible cases, when there is nothing to make us believe that one case should occur rather than any other, so that these cases are, for us, equally possible.

[Epistemic Status: Very partisan / opinionated. Kinda long, kinda rambling.]

In my conversations with members of the rationalist community as well as in my readings of various articles and blog posts produced by them (as well as outside), I’ve noticed a recent trend towards skepticism of Bayesian principles and philosophy (see Nostalgebraist’s recent post for an example), which I have regarded with both surprise and a little bit of dismay, because I think progress within a community tends to be indicated by moving forward to new subjects and problems rather than a return to old ones that have already been extensively argued for and discussed. So the intent of this post is to summarize a few of the claims I’ve seen being put forward and try to point out where I believe these have gone wrong.

It’s also somewhat an odd direction for discussion to be going in, because the academic statistics community has largely moved on from debates between Bayesian and Frequentist theory, and has largely come to accept both the Bayesian and the Frequentist / Fisherian viewpoints as valid. When E.T. Jaynes wrote his famous book, the debate was mostly still raging on, and many questions had yet to be answered. In the 21^st century, statisticians have mostly come to accept a world in which both approaches exist and have their merits.

Because I will be defending the Bayesian side here, there is a risk that this post will come off as being dogmatic. We are a community devoted to free-thought after all, and any argument towards a form of orthodoxy might be perceived as an attempt to stifle dissenting viewpoints. That is not my intent here, and in fact I plan on arguing against Bayesian dogmatism as well. My goal is to argue that having a base framework with which to feel relatively high confidence in is useful to the goals of the community, and that if we feel high enough confidence in it, then spending  extra effort trying to prove it false might be wasting brainpower than can potentially be used on more interesting or useful tasks. There could always be a point we reach where most of us strongly feel that unless we abandon Bayesianism, we can’t make any further progress. I highly doubt that we have reached such a point or that we ever will.

This is also a personal exercise to test my understanding of Bayesian theory and my ability to communicate it. My hope is that if my ideas here are well presented, it should be much easier for both myself and others to find flaws with it and allow me to update.

I will start with an outline of philosophical Bayesianism, also called “Strong Bayesianism”, or what I prefer to call it, “One Magisterium Bayes.” The reason for wanting to refer to it as being a single magisterium will hopefully become clear. The Sequences did argue for this point of view, however, I think the strength of the Sequences had more to do with why you should update your beliefs in the face of new evidence, rather than why Bayes' theorem was the correct way to do this. In contrast, I think the argument for using Bayesian principles as the correct set of reasoning principles was made more strongly by E.T. Jaynes. Unfortunately, I feel like his exposition of the subject tends to get ignored relative to the material presented in the Sequences. Not that the information in the Sequences isn’t highly relevant and important, just that Jaynes' arguments are much more technical, and their strength can be overlooked for this reason. 

The way to start an exposition on one-magisterium rationality is by contrast to multi-magisteria modes of thought. I would go as far as to argue that the multi-magisterium view, or what I sometimes prefer to call tool-boxism, is by far the most dominant way of thinking today. Tool-boxism can be summarized by “There is no one correct way to arrive at the truth. Every model we have today about how to arrive at the correct answer is just that – a model. And there are many, many models. The only way to get better at finding the correct answer is through experience and wisdom, with a lot of insight and luck, just as one would master a trade such as woodworking. There’s nothing that can replace or supersede the magic of human creativity. [Sometimes it will be added:] Also, don’t forget that the models you have about the world are heavily, if not completely, determined by your culture and upbringing, and there’s no reason to favor your culture over anyone else’s.”

As I hope to argue in this post, tool-boxism has many downsides that should push us further towards accepting the one-magisterium view. It also very dramatically differs in how it suggests we should approach the problem of intelligence and cognition, with many corollaries in both rationalism and artificial intelligence. Some of these corollaries are the following:

• If there is no unified theory of intelligence, we are led towards the view that recursive self-improvement is not possible, since an increase in one type of intelligence does not necessarily lead to an improvement in a different type of intelligence.
• With a diversification in different notions of correct reasoning within different domains, it heavily limits what can be done to reach agreement on different topics. In the end we are often forced to agree to disagree, which while preserving social cohesion in different contexts, can be quite unsatisfying from a philosophical standpoint.
• Related to the previous corollary, it may lead to beliefs that are sacred, untouchable, or based on intuition, feeling, or difficult to articulate concepts. This produces a complex web of topics that have to be avoided or tread carefully around, or a heavy emphasis on difficult to articulate reasons for preferring one view over the other.
• Developing AI around a tool-box / multi-magisteria approach, where systems are made up of a wide array of various components, limits generalizability and leads to brittleness. 

One very specific trend I’ve noticed lately in articles that aim to discredit the AGI intelligence explosion hypothesis, is that they tend to take the tool-box approach when discussing intelligence, and use that to argue that recursive self-improvement is likely impossible. So rationalists should be highly interested in this kind of reasoning. One of Eliezer’s primary motivations for writing the Sequences was to make the case for a unified approach to reasoning, because it lends credence to the view of intelligence in which intelligence can be replicated by machines, and where intelligence is potentially unbounded. And also that this was a subtle and tough enough subject that it required hundreds of blog posts to argue for it. So because of the subtle nature of the arguments I’m not particularly surprised by this drift, but I am concerned about it. I would prefer if we didn’t drift.

I’m trying not to sound No-True-Scotsman-y here, but I wonder what it is that could make one a rationalist if they take the tool-box perspective. After all, even if you have a multi-magisterium world-view, there still always is an underlying guiding principle directing the use of the proper tools. Often times, this guiding principle is based on intuition, which is a remarkably hard thing to pin down and describe well. I personally interpret the word ‘rationalism’ as meaning in the weakest and most general sense that there is an explanation for everything – so intelligence isn’t irreducibly based on hand-wavy concepts such as ingenuity and creativity. Rationalists believe that those things have explanations, and once we have those explanations, then there is no further use for tool-boxism.

I’ll repeat the distinction between tool-boxism and one-magisterium Bayes, because I believe it’s that important: Tool-boxism implies that there is no underlying theory that describes the mechanisms of intelligence. And this assumption basically implies that intelligence is either composed of irreducible components (where one component does not necessarily help you understand a different component) or some kind of essential property that cannot be replicated by algorithms or computation.

Why is tool-boxism the dominant paradigm then? Probably because it is the most pragmatically useful position to take in most circumstances when we don’t actually possess an underlying theory. But the fact that we sometimes don’t have an underlying theory or that the theory we do have isn’t developed to the point where it is empirically beating the tool box approach is sometimes taken as evidence that there isn't a unifying theory. This is, in my opinion, the incorrect conclusion to draw from these observations.

Nevertheless, it seems like a startlingly common conclusion to draw. I think the great mystery is why this is so. I don’t have very convincing answers to that question, but I suspect it has something to do with how heavily our priors are biased against a unified theory of reasoning. It may also be due to the subtlety and complexity of the arguments for a unified theory. For that reason, I highly recommend reviewing those arguments (and few people other than E.T. Jaynes and Yudkowsky have made them). So with that said, let’s review a few of those arguments, starting with one of the myths surrounding Bayes theorem I’d like to debunk:

Bayes Theorem is a trivial consequence of the Kolmogorov Axioms, and is therefore not powerful.

This claim usually presented as part of a claim that “Bayesian” probability is just a small part of regular probability theory, and therefore does not give us any more useful information than you’d get from just studying probability theory. And as a consequence of that, if you insist that you’re a “Strong” Bayesian, that means you’re insisting on using only on that small subset of probability theory and associated tools we call Bayesian.

And the part of the statement that says the theorem is a trivial consequence of the Kolmogorov axioms is technically true. It’s the implication typically drawn from this that is false. The reason it’s false has to do with Bayes theorem being a non-trivial consequence of a simpler set of axioms / desiderata. This consequence is usually formalized by Cox’s theorem, which is usually glossed over or not quite appreciated for how far-reaching it actually is.

Recall that the qualitative desiderata for a set of reasoning rules were:

1. Degrees of plausibility are represented by real numbers.
2. Qualitative correspondence with common sense.
3. Consistency. 

You can read the first two chapters of Jaynes’ book, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science if you want more detail into what those desiderata mean. But the important thing to note from them is that they are merely desiderata, not axioms. This means we are not assuming those things are already true, we just want to devise a system that satisfies those properties. The beauty of Cox’s theorem is that it specifies exactly one set of rules that satisfy these properties, of which Bayes Theorem as well as the Kolmogorov Axioms are a consequence of those rules.

The other nice thing about this is that degrees of plausibility can be assigned to any proposition, or any statement that you could possibly assign a truth value to. It does not limit plausibility to “events” that take place in some kind of space of possible events like whether a coin flip comes up heads or tails. What’s typically considered the alternative to Bayesian reasoning is Classical probability, sometimes called Frequentist probability, which only deals with events drawn from a sample space, and is not able to provide methods for probabilistic inference of a set of hypotheses.

For axioms, Cox’s theorem merely requires you to accept Boolean algebra and Calculus to be true, and then you can derive probability theory as extended logic from that. So this should be mindblowing, right? One Magisterium Bayes? QED? Well apparently this set of arguments is not convincing to everyone, and it’s not because people find Boolean logic and calculus hard to accept.

Rather, there are two major and several somewhat minor difficulties encountered within the Bayesian paradigm. The two major ones are as follows:

• The problem of hypothesis generation.
• The problem of assigning priors. 

The list of minor problems are as follows, although like any list of minor issues, this is definitely not exhaustive:

• Should you treat “evidence” for a hypothesis, or “data”, as having probability 1?
• Bayesian methods are often computationally intractable.
• How to update when you discover a “new” hypothesis.
• Divergence in posterior beliefs for different individuals upon the acquisition of new data.

Most Bayesians typically never deny the existence of the first two problems. What some anti-Bayesians conclude from them, though, is that Bayesianism must be fatally flawed due to those problems, and that there is some other way of reasoning that would avoid or provide solutions to those problems. I’m skeptical about this, and the reason I’m skeptical is because if you really had a method for say, hypothesis generation, this would actually imply logical omniscience, and would basically allow us to create full AGI, RIGHT NOW. If you really had the ability to produce a finite list containing the correct hypothesis for any problem, the existence of the other hypotheses in this list is practically a moot point – you have some way of generating the CORRECT hypothesis in a finite, computable algorithm. And that would make you a God.

As far as I know, being able to do this would imply that P = NP is true, and as far as I know, most computer scientists do not think it’s likely to be true (And even if it were true, we might not get a constructive proof from it).  But I would ask: Is this really a strike against Bayesianism? Is the inability of Bayesian theory to provide a method for providing the correct hypothesis evidence that we can’t use it to analyze and update our own beliefs?

I would add that there are plenty of ways to generate hypotheses by other methods. For example, you can try to make the hypothesis space gargantuan, and encode different hypotheses in a vector of parameters, and then use different optimization or search procedures like evolutionary algorithms or gradient descent to find the most likely set of parameters. Not all of these methods are considered “Bayesian” in the sense that you are summarizing a posterior distribution over the parameters (although stochastic gradient descent might be). It seems like a full theory of intelligence might include methods for generating possible hypotheses. I think this is probably true, but I don’t know of any arguments that it would contradict Bayesian theory.

The reason assigning prior probabilities is such a huge concern is that it forces Bayesians to hold “subjective” probabilities, where in most cases, if you’re not an expert in the domain of interest, you don’t really have a good argument for why you should hold one prior over another. Frequentists often contrast this with their methods which do not require priors, and thus hold some measure of objectivity.

E.T. Jaynes never considered to this be a flaw in Bayesian probability, per se. Rather, he considered hypothesis generation, as well as assigning priors, to be outside the scope of “plausible inference” which is what he considered to be the domain of Bayesian probability. He himself argued for using the principle of maximum entropy for creating a prior distribution, and there are also more modern techniques such as Empirical Bayes.

In general, Frequentists often have the advantage that their methods are often simpler and easier to compute, while also having strong guarantees about the results, as long as certain constraints are satisfied. Bayesians have the advantage that their methods are “ideal” in the sense that you’ll get the same answer each time you run an analysis. And this is the most common form of the examples that Bayesians use when they profess the superiority of their approach. They typically show how Frequentist methods can give both “significant” and “non-significant” labels to their results depending on how you perform the analysis, whereas the Bayesian way just gives you the probability of the hypothesis, plain and simple.

I think that in general, once could say that Frequentist methods are a lot more “tool-boxy” and Bayesian methods are more “generally applicable” (if computational tractability wasn’t an issue).  That gets me to the second myth I’d like to debunk:

Being a “Strong Bayesian” means avoiding all techniques not labeled with the stamp of approval from the Bayes Council.

Does this mean that Frequentist methods, because they are tool box approaches, are wrong or somehow bad to use, as some argue that Strong Bayesians claim? Not at all. There’s no reason not to use a specific tool, if it seems like the best way to get what you want, as long as you understand exactly what the results you’re getting mean. Sometimes I just want a prediction, and I don’t care how I get it – I know that a specific algorithm being labeled “Bayesian” doesn’t confer it any magical properties. Any Bayesian may want to know the frequentist properties of their model. It’s easy to forget that different communities of researchers flying the flag of their tribe developed some methods and then labeled them according to their tribal affiliation. That’s ok. The point is, if you really want to have a Strong Bayesian view, then you also have to assign probabilities to various properties of each tool in the toolbox.

Chances are, if you’re a statistics/data science practitioner with a few years of experience applying different techniques to different problems and different data sets, and you have some general intuitions about which techniques apply better to which domains, you’re probably doing this in a Bayesian way. That means, you hold some prior beliefs about whether Bayesian Logistic Regression or Random Forests is more likely to get what you want on this particular problem, you try one, and possibly update your beliefs once you get a result, according to what your models predicted.

Being a Bayesian often requires you to work with “black boxes”, or tools that you know give you a specific result, but you don’t have a full explanation of how it arrives at the result or how it fits in to the grand scheme of things. A Bayesian fundamentalist may refuse to work with any statistical tool like that, not realizing that in their everyday lives they often use tools, objects, or devices that aren’t fully transparent to them. But you can, and in fact do, have models about how those tools can be used and the results you’d get if you used them. The way you handle these models, even if they are held in intuition, probably looks pretty Bayesian upon deeper inspection.

I would suggest that instead of using the term “Fully Bayesian” we use the phrase “Infinitely Bayesian” to refer to using a Bayesian method for literally everything, because it more accurately shows that it would be impossible to actually model every single atom of knowledge probabilistically. It also makes it easier to see that even the Strongest Bayesian you know probably isn’t advocating this.

Let me return to the “minor problems” I mentioned earlier, because they are pretty interesting.  Some epistemologists have a problem with Bayesian updating because it requires you to assume that the “evidence” you receive at any given point is completely true with probability 1. I don’t really understand why it requires this. I’m easily able to handle the case where I’m uncertain about my data. Take the situation where my friend is rolling a six-sided die, and I want to know the probability of it coming up 6. I assume all sides are equally likely, so my prior probability for 6 is 1/6. Let’s say that he rolls it where I can’t see it, and then tells me the die came up even. What do I update p(6) to?

Let’s say that I take my data as saying “the die came up even.” Then p(6 | even) = p(even | 6) * p(6) / p(even) = 1 * (1/6) / (1 / 2) = 1/3. Ok, so I should update p(6) to 1/3 now right? Well, that’s only if I take the evidence of “the die came up even” as being completely true with probability one. But what actually happened is that my friend TOLD ME the die came up even. He could have been lying, maybe he forgot what “even” meant, maybe his glasses were really smudged, or maybe aliens took over his brain at that exact moment and made him say that. So let’s say I give a 90% chance to him telling the truth, or equivalently, a 90% chance that my data is true. What do I update p(6) to now?

It’s pretty simple. I just expand p(6) over “even” as p(6) = p(6 | even) p(even)  + p(6 | odd) p(odd). Before he said anything, p(even) = p(odd) and this formula evaluated to (1/3)(1/2) + (0)(1/2) = 1/6, my prior. After he told me the die came up even, I update p(even) to 0.9, and this formula becomes (1/3)(9/10) + (0)(1/10) = 9/30. A little less than 1/3. Makes sense.

In general, I am able to model anything probabilistically in the Bayesian framework, including my data. So I’m not sure where the objection comes from. It’s true that from a modeling perspective, and a computational one, I have to stop somewhere, and just accept for the sake of pragmatism that probabilities very close to 1 should be treated as if they were 1, and not model those. Not doing that, and just going on forever, would mean being Infinitely Bayesian. But I don’t see why this counts as problem for Bayesianism. Again, I’m not trying to be omniscient. I just want a framework for working with any part of reality, not all of reality at once. The former is what I consider “One Magisterium” to mean, not the latter.

The rest of the minor issues are also related to limitations that any finite intelligence is going to have no matter what. They should all, though, get easier as access to data increases, models get better, and computational ability gets better.

Finally, I’d like to return to an issue that I think is most relevant to the ideas I’ve been discussing here. In AI risk, it is commonly argued that a sufficiently intelligent agent will be able to modify itself to become more intelligent. This premise assumes that an agent will have some theory of intelligence that allows it to understand which updates to itself are more likely to be improvements. Because of that, many who argue against “AI Alarmism” will argue against the premise that there is a unified theory of intelligence. In “Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People”, I think most of the arguments can be reduced to basically saying as much.

From what I can tell, most arguments against AI risk in general will take the form of anecdotes about how really really smart people like Albert Einstein were very bad at certain other tasks, and that this is proof that there is no theory of intelligence that can be used to create a self-improving AI. Well, more accurately, these arguments are worded as “There is no single axis on which to measure intelligence” but what they mean is the former, since even multiple axes of intelligence (such as measure of success on different tasks) would not actually imply that there isn’t one theory of reasoning. What multiple axes of measuring intelligence do imply is that within a given brain, the brain may have devoted more space to better modeling certain tasks than others, and that maybe the brain isn’t quite that elastic, and has a hard time picking up new tasks.

The other direction in which to argue against AI risk is to argue against the proposed theories of reasoning themselves, like Bayesianism. The alternative, it seems, is tool-boxism. I really want to avoid tool-boxism because it makes it difficult to be a rationalist. Even if Bayesianism turns out to be wrong, does this exclude other, possibly undiscovered theories of reasoning? I’ve never seen that touched upon by any of the AI risk deniers. As long as there is a theory of reasoning, then presumably a machine intelligence could come to understand that theory and all of its consequences, and use that to update itself.

I think the simplest summary of my post is this: A Bayesian need not be Bayesian in all things, for reasons of practicality. But a Bayesian can be Bayesian in any given thing, and this is what is meant by “One Magisterium”.

I didn’t get to cover every corollary of tool-boxing or every issue with Bayesian statistics, but this post is already really long, and for the sake of brevity I will probably end it here. Perhaps I can cover those issues more thoroughly in a future post. 

So I've been following Project Hufflepuff, the efforts of the rationalist community to become, rather than better rationalists (per se), but a better community.  I recently read the summary of the recent Project Hufflepuff Unconference, and I had a thought.

The Problem

LessWrong And Guardedness

I can only speak to my own experiences in joining the community, but I have always felt that the rationalist community holds its members to a very high standard.  This isn't a bad thing but it creates, at least in me, a sense of guardedness.  I don't want to be the rationalist who sounds stupid or the one who contributes less to the conversation.

Every post I've made here on LessWrong (not that there have been many), has been reviewed and edited with the same kind of diligence that I normally reserve for graded essays or business documentation.  Other online communities I'm a part of (and meatspace communities) require far less diligence from me as a contributor.  (Note: This isn't a value judgement, rather a description of my experience.)

However, my best experiences in communities and friendships have generally occurred in very unguarded atmospheres.  Not that my friends and I aren't smart or can't be smart, but most of the fun I've had with them happens when we're playing card or board or video games, or just hanging out and talking.  Doing things like going out to eat, playing ping-pong, and talking about bad TV shows have led to some of the strongest relationships in my life.

So Where Is The Fun?

So - where is this in the Rationalist Community?  Now, it is very possible that the fun is there and I'm simply missing it.  I haven't been to any meetups, I don't live in the bay area, and I don't even know any rationalists in meatspace.  But if it is, aside from the occasional meetup, I don't see any evidence of it.

I tried to do some research on how friendships and communities are formed, and there seemed to be little consensus in the field.  A New York Times article on making friendships as an adult mentions three factors: 

As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.

I was unable to find this in an actual paper, but a brief perusal of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's page on friendship at least shows that people who think about the topic seem to agree that there has to be some kind of intimacy involved in a friendship.  And while there are certainly rationalists who are friends, for me becoming a rationalist and joining the community has not yet materialized into any specific friendships.  While that is on my shoulders, I believe it highlights a distinction I want to make.

If what we have in common, as Rationalists, is a shared way of thinking and a shared set of goals (e.g. save the world, improve the rationality waterline, etc.), then the relationship I share with the community strikes me as more as an alliance than a friendship.

Allies want the same goals, and may use similar methodologies to achieve them, but they are not friends.  I wouldn't tell my ally about an embarrassing dream I had, or get drunk with them and make fun of bad movies.

I don't mean to get hung up on meanings - the words themselves aren't important.  But from what I have seen, the community, especially those outside the Bay Area, lack the unguarded intimacy I see in my close friendships, and that I think are a key component of community-building.  I'd be willing to bet that even in meetups, many (>20%) of Rationalists feel the weight of the high standards of the community, and are thus more guarded than they are in relationships with less expectations.

What I'm trying to get at is that I haven't experienced an unguarded interaction with a rationalist, online or in meatspace.  I always want to be at the top of my game, always trying to reason better, and remember all the things I've learned about biases and probability theory.  And I suspect that low-standards unguarded interactions have something to do with growing friendships and communities.

So, for an East-coaster with a computer:

Where is the fun?  Where are the rationalist video game tournaments?  Robot fights?  Words with Friends who are rationalists?

Where is the chilling and watching all the Lord of the Rings movies together?  The absurd Dungeons and Dragons campaigns because everyone is a plotter and there are too many plots?

A Few Suggested Solutions

Everyone in the Rationalist community wants to help.  We want to save the world, and that's great.  But...not everything has to be about saving the world.  If the goal of an activity is community/friendship building, why can't it be otherwise pointless?  Why can't it be silly and inane and utterly irrational?

So, in the interests of Project Hufflepuff, I spent some time thinking about ways to improve/change the situation.

The Hero/Sidekick/Dragon Project

There was a series of posts in 2015 that had to do with different people wanting to take different roles in projects, be it the hero, the sidekick, the dragon, etc.  An effort was made to match people up, but as far as I can tell, it petered out, because I haven't seen anything to do with it since then (I would be happy to be wrong about this).  I'll link the posts here; the first is, in particular, excellent: the issue in general, an attempt at matchmaking, and a discussion of matchmaking methods.

I might suggest an open thread that functions as a classified ad, e.g. Help Wanted, must be able to XYZ, or Sidekick In Need of Hero, must live in X area, etc.

I'd also like to mention that the project in question shouldn't have to be about friendly AI or effective altruism; I think that developing an effective partnership is valuable by itself.

Online Gaming

Is there a reason that members of the community can't game together online?  This post on Overwatch provides at least a small amount of evidence that the community would have enough members interested to form teams, and team-building seems to be one of the goals.

Fun Projects 

I can think of plenty of challenging projects that require a team that I'd love to do, but that have almost nothing to do with world-saving at any scale.  Things like making a robot, or coding a game, or writing a book or play.  Does this happen in the community?  If not, I think it might help.  Again, the goal would be to create an unguarded atmosphere to foster friendships and team-building.

Rationalist Buddy System

I'd like to distinguish this from the Hero/Sidekick idea above.  I know that I could use a rationalist buddy to pair up with.  Many motivational and anti-akrasia techniques require social commitment, and Beeminder can only go so far.  Having a person to talk things through, experiment with anti-akrasi techniques, or just to inspire and be inspired by would be insanely helpful for me, and I suspect for many of us.  I'm vaguely reminded of the 12-step program's sponsors, if only in the way they support people going through the program.

I'm not sure how to execute this, but I think it has the potential to be useful enough to be worth trying.

Rationalist Big/Little Program

One of the things I got out of the Project Hufflepuff Unconference Notes was that making newcomers feel welcome was an issue.  An idea to change this was a "welcoming committee":

Welcoming Committee (Mandy Souza, Tessa Alexanian)

Oftentimes at events you'll see people who are new, or who don't seem comfortable getting involved with the conversation. Many successful communities do a good job of explicitly welcoming those people. Some people at the unconference decided to put together a formal group for making sure this happens more. 

In Conclusion

It seems to me as though the high standards of the Rationalist community promote a guarded atmosphere, which hampers the development of close friendships and the community.  I've outlined a few ways that may help create places within the community where standards can be lowered and guards relaxed without (hopefully) compromising its high standards elsewhere.

I realize that most of this post is based upon my personal observations and experiences, which are anecdotal evidence and thus Not To Be Trusted.  I am prepared to be wrong, and would welcome the correction.

Let me know what you think.