After pondering for a while on why I'm so fixated on making meaningless numbers (such as LW karma or Khan Academy points) go up as a result of my actions, I came up with a hypothesis: the brain uses such numbers as a proxy for societal status. An experimental consequence of this idea is that status-seeking people and low-status people try harder (possibly also for longer periods of time) to achieve video game-style "points".

Just a thought, really. If this experiment has actually been done, it'd be cool to read about it if anyone has a link. I don't have the resources to do it myself. Anyone reading this comment who can do it is certainly free to, but I doubt that's the case.

Came up with the idea while responding to a question on Formspring.

Too bad this isn't part of any sequence else I'd put it up as a rerun:

Can't say no to spending

I'm pretty sure most new posters are not familiar with the data and arguments presented here unless they have started reading LW's sisters site Overcoming Bias (which btw I think more LW users should). In any case an updated discussion of this 4 years later seems appropriate.

Edit: Made a rerun post of this, please discuss it there.

Has Michael Vassar published any essays or articles or general things to read anywhere (other than this)? I get the impression that he's this supreme phenomenon from the people who describe his conversational ability. I've watched his Singularity Summit talk, and it was incredible, so I know it's not just in person that he's formidable.

I catch glimpses of his mighty cleverness in comments with phrases like "I always advocate increased comfort with lying." But there's no link to the Michael Vassar essay on All The Very Convincing Reasons You Should Be Comfortable With Lying. I'm assuming that's because it doesn't exist. That's not fair. I want to read his non-existent work.

More of my research for Luke, this time looking into the polyamory literature.

I read Opening Up and The Ethical Slut; the former was useful, the latter was not. My general impression of the research is that:

1. it's all hard to get as the journals are marginal and relevant academics have bad habits of publishing stuff as book chapters or prefaces or books period

2. the studied polyamorists are distinctly white, educated, urban or coastal, professional, older (how odd) middle/upper-class.

   This means there is zero generalizability to whether polyamory would work in other groups and massive selection biases (few other groups are so well-equipped to leave a community not working for them), and even if a survey finds that polyamorists are 'average' in various dysfunctionals or pathologies, one needs to check that the average is the right average (ie. non-amorous educated professional whites).

   These two points do not seem to be appreciated at all by many advocates (eg. the ones saying STDs are not a problem)

3. the one academic doing good work in the area is Sheffer, who is running a longitudinal survey which may or may not have enough statistical power to rule out particularly dramatic variances in outcomes. (Sheffer mentions the selection bias problem but seems to have the attitude that it's not a problem for her work.)

My notes/bibliography/quotes: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-gwern-polyamory.txt

I've pondered setting up some kind of "Mindkiller discussion mailing list" and trying to recruit people.

The idea would be to try to practice discussing these topics in a private forum without getting mindkilled. For example, we could try to have a sensible conversation about politics.

The main thing stopping me is that I think to work it'd need an excellent moderator who'd probably burn out quickly.

FYI: I quit my day job last Monday and flew to San Francisco to start the program described at devbootcamp.com, which starts in full next Monday. Background.

I've lately been experimenting with taking different amounts of vitamin D. While I have found a definite improvement in mood and energy during the day when taking vitamin D first thing in the morning, I haven't found much impact on my excessive night-owlishness, such that I still don't get enough sleep and mood/energy are not yet optimal. It occurred to me that I might be subverting the effect by spending too much time at the computer in the evenings, since the monitor emits a lot of blue light.

And lo and behold, I've discovered that you can download a free program that regulates the color of the light your monitor emits based on your latitude and the time of day. This seemed cool enough to merit sharing here.

How many people knew that evidential decision theory recommends cooperating in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma where the choices of the two agents playing are highly (positively) correlated?

I apparently just independently invented evidential decision theory while bored in my micro class by thinking "why wouldn't you condition your uncertainty about others' on what you choose? The cooperation between rational players in PDs can clearly happen." This sounded suspiciously like what evidential decision theory should be, and lo and behold, after class I found out that it is.

Social dark arts and plotting are one of the main themes of HPMoR and I think they should have more of a place on LessWrong. "Bad signalling" and negative-from-baseline dark arts failures are often pointed out, but not lost opportunities for manipulation.

What are people's thoughts on this?

There is a new Stack Exchange Q&A site in public beta. It seems quite relevant to our interests.

Cognitive Sciences beta - Stack Exchange

Is programming a bad career to get into? Is it true that you can't work in it more than a couple of decades because all your skills will go obsolete and you'll be replaced by someone younger?

I thought LWers might be interested in the work of Vi Hart (I did a quick search to make sure she hadn't been mentioned before). I think she is a great resource for recruiting people towards rationality. In terms of finding Joy in the Merely Real, she explains natural phenomena rationally, but in a way that literally can bring tears to my eyes.

Here is an example: Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant- Part 3 of 3

This is the final video of a three-parter, but I think most LWers can infer the background knowledge. If you enjoy it, you can go back and watch the first two parts.

A quote that sums up what her vlogs are often all about: "This is why science and mathematics are so much fun; You discover things that seem impossible to be true, and then get to figure out why it's impossible for them NOT to be."

Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done

What are the (reasonably) low-cost high-return lifehacks most people probably haven't heard about?

Spaced repetition comes immediately to mind. So do nootropics.

What about speed-reading? It seems to get bad rap or be dismissed as pseudoscience. So... is it real, and if it is, how useful is it?

These are the three I can think of... Are there any more?

(I seem to remember seeing 'mindfullness meditation' mentioned on LW a few times... No idea what it's actually good for, though.)

[Edited to fix weird propositional slip-up. Dismissed as pseudoscience, not by pseudoscience.]

Feminism and the Disposable Male

Overall this particular video isn't that well made, but I think the basic argument is more or less correct. 7:00 to 8:00 is especially relevant to ethical thinking.

Reading some of Robin Hanson's older writting: If Uploads Come First

What if uploads decide to take over by force, refusing to pay back their loans and grabbing other forms of capital? Well for comparison, consider the question: What if our children take over, refusing to pay back their student loans or to pay for Social Security? Or consider: What if short people revolt tonight, and kill all the tall people?

In general, most societies have many potential subgroups who could plausibly take over by force, if they could coordinate among themselves. But such revolt is rare in practice; short people know that if they kill all the tall folks tonight, all the blond people might go next week, and who knows where it would all end? And short people are highly integrated into society; some of their best friends are tall people.

In contrast, violence is more common between geographic and culturally separated subgroups. Neighboring nations have gone to war, ethnic minorities have revolted against governments run by other ethnicities, and slaves and other sharply segregated economic classes have rebelled.

Thus the best way to keep the peace with uploads would be to allow them as full as possible integration in with the rest of society. Let them live and work with ordinary people, and let them loan and sell to each other through the same institutions they use to deal with ordinary humans. Banning uploads into space, the seas, or the attic so as not to shock other folks might be ill-advised. Imposing especially heavy upload taxes, or treating uploads as property, as just software someone owns or as non-human slaves like dogs, might be especially unwise.

But there is a barrier that is just as vast as any geographical barrier in terms of culture and social contact. Time. Imagine the world was filled with slow and fast people, slower people being just as smart but running at a speed about half that of fast people. Who would you tend to interact with more in your personal life?

Taking his basic Darwinian argument, overall human uploads will run at precisely at the speed at which it is most economical to run them. Which may not be the same depending on their particular profession or personality type. Over time any small initial cultural differences would compound.

Apparently, Fuyuki City (the setting of Fate/stay night) is based on Kobe.

Also, the setting of Haruhi is based on Nishinomiya.

Kobe is here. And Nishinomiya is here.

Wonder if Eliezer's planning any epic fanfics after MoR...

A new science journal recently published a seriously crackpot paper, this has the abstract a link for the pdf. I first heard about it from Derek Lowe, who has also written two follow-up posts. The first has a couple of links discussing how news of the paper spread, while the second includes a link to the journal making excuses for why they published it.

Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors.

I included the links to all of Derek Lowe's posts because they have other interesting links, including in the comments.

After 40 days and 40 nights (plus a few), I've finished my little randomized double-blind placebo-controlled vitamin D sleep experiment: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#vitamin-d

Conclusion: it probably hurts sleep when you take it at night.

Accidental anti-akrasia effect I've recently discovered: I recently set my watch to hourly chime (first time I've used it in over 5 years) so that I could get up at least once an hour and walk around a bit. That's met with some success, but what I've found is that whenever the chime goes off, my sympathetic nervous system takes a jolt, and if I was in the middle of something unproductive, I start to berate myself with statements like "You're going to die someday, what have you got to show for it? Reading your RSS feeds? Writing emails? Come on, ya pansy, do something!" (This didn't start as a conscious decision, so much as a realization that an hour had just gone by without my noticing it, which fed into my death aversion. Maybe that's a small version of what a midlife crisis feels like.) It's not perfect, but it does seem to make me more productive for the first 15 minutes of each hour than I normally am.

Aging and attitudes, the good news: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/thread/4252f4072cd75684#body

I recently learned of the startup Knewton. They're an education company that focuses on developing computer-based courses out of textbooks in a manner that lets each student progress at their own pace and learn with methods that have proven successful for them in the past. This project seems like a good way to grab some low-hanging fruit in the education sphere and to start the process of computer-driven personalization of education, which strikes me as potentially quite powerful.

Some other details: my understanding is that they are creating efficient means to convert entire textbooks into a graph of each piece of knowledge along with knowledge of what pieces are prerequisite for other pieces. Then, a students can progress through the graph at varying speeds based on quiz scores and the system will suggest learning methods which have previously given good results for the students (eg: videos versus traditional text versus 'real world' examples).

Can this be effective? Are other companies doing similar projects? What are the other low-hanging fruit of education that computers can let us pick?

Why I think that the MWI is belief in belief: buy a lottery ticket, suicide if you lose (a version of the quantum suicide/immortality setup), thus creating an outcome pump for the subset of the branches where you survive (the only one that matters). Thus, if you subscribe to the MWI, this is one of the most rational ways to make money. So, if you need money and don't follow this strategy, you are either irrational or don't really believe what you say you do (most likely both).

(I'm not claiming that this is a novel idea, just bringing it up for discussion.)

Possible cop-out: "Oh, but my family will be so unhappy in all those other branches where I die." LCPW: say, no one really cares about you all that much, would you do it?

Our brains are paranoid. The feeling illustrated by this comic is, I must unfortunately admit, pretty familiar.

Intellectual Interests Genetically Predetermined? via FuturePundit.

From personality to neuropsychiatric disorders, individual differences in brain function are known to have a strong heritable component. Here we report that between close relatives, a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders covary strongly with intellectual interests. We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10−6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10−8). Our results suggest that shared genetic (and perhaps environmental) factors may both predispose for heritable neuropsychiatric disorders and influence the development of intellectual interests.

Does anyone know of any studies about the average life expectancy of Native Americans pre-columbus? Or any information at all better than a post on Yahoo Answers.

Hi! This is basically a question about sloppiness. I've recently noticed that I tend not to correct reports I do as part of my work sufficiently, I recently sent one to a coworker/supervisor and he criticised it for having too many careless mistakes. I then remembered that the supervisor for my diploma thesis had the same criticism. It may be connected to overconfidence bias - I noticed that when finishing work, it doesn't occur to me to double-check, I just assume I didn't make any mistakes.

Is there any hack that could help me to consistently remember avoiding this behavior pattern? I think I now know where the problem lies, but I don't know how to apply that knowledge to effectively avoid this behavior - it's usually just in retrospect that I notice I shouldn't have submitted something yet.

In HPMoR chapter 60, at the very end of the chapter Quirrell is about to tell Harry why he thinks he is different but I cannot find the rest of the text in the subsequent context switches. Where does he answer Harry?

HP:MoR is now not merely "fanfic", but an example of deconstruction-by-example:

So where do you go when all avenues explored with character and theme? You start tearing down the previous work. Good Fanfiction is a model for this. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality good example. Responds to the work by telling a new story while analyzing the nature of the old one, in this case by picking apart the nature of Wizard society. Hell, it's what Watchmen did to comics in the first place.