Hadn't heard about this until now. That sounds like a great idea, and thanks / props for putting this up!

Me too! http://www.admonymous.com/philh

Same here: http://www.admonymous.com/hruvulum

Thanks Kaj. This was the nudge I needed to create my own anonymous feedback form.

The CEO of a company I used to work at put up an anonymous feedback form. He was getting a lot of negative feedback, so he removed it.

Problem solved.

I'm not familiar with enactivism in particular, but embodied and situated cognition seem like reasonable paradigms. I don't think they really necessarily contradict computationalism or cognitivism, though.

Does anybody think that there is a cognitivist bias in LessWrong?

Bias is a bad word for core axioms that underly thinking. When discussing on Lesswrong I do accept certain axioms as the basis for the discourse.

There are other occasions where I talk to other people where I use other modes. When I attend a NLP seminar, it can happen that there are four meaningful conversational layers active at the same time. It's highly narrated and things that are said mean thing based on the narrative and context in which they were said.

On of my first 1-on-1 conversation with an NLP trainer was an elevator ride. I drove to the 5th floor to go to the toilet on it. The elevator stopped on the 4th floor and he came in. The 4th floor was the floor in which the seminar was held After assessing the situation he said: "You're intelligent." He was just at the toilet but walked down from the 5th floor to the 4th floor to then drive to the floor, and now I was on the 5th floor again because I drove the elevator there.

On that level the interaction is trivial, but to him I made the appearance of low self esteem nerd, so him as a figure of authority telling telling me me that I'm intelligent was something that was very targeted to what he thought I would need on an emotional level at that moment.

The style of the interaction where meaningful points usually don't get made on the most obvious level of the conversation and depend on context is very different from the kind of intellectual discussion on Lesswrong.

I'm not really able to do both at the same time. Both approaches have there use but I don't it makes much sense to speak in terms of bias. Just different frameworks and mental models with other axioms.

The result of such differences is that a lot of the academic literature on a subject such as hypnosis or NLP is bad because a good NLP trainer has the habit of communicating on a entirely different layer than an academic.

And to be clear, I do consider the NLP paradigm to be a form of enactivism.

The wiki entry you linked is extremely unclear. Can you explain what enactivism is in simple words, using the vocabulary like http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ ?

In the last months I frequently found myself forgetting "'s" after "there" or "ït". It not an issue that I remember being there a year ago.

I like how you do what you describe with the very next word after the description of the problem.

There is what Wikipedia calls interference theory, which is when the act of learning new, similar information throws a wrench into the recall of the old information. For example, I never used to have any trouble with the word iniquitous before I learned the word invidious, but now I get them mixed up.

English is for my a second language

for me

;-)

Assuming the average person's utility function is concave with respect to money and given the current income distribution the simplest and highest utility change is to take a fixed amount from high income people and give it to low income people.

When you consider second order consequences, such as the creation and elimination of certain incentives, the effect of currency transfers on utility is not quite so straightforward. Even without those consequences, it is far from obvious that the statement

This follows from simple economics as the people on the lower end of the distribution know best what it is they need.

holds.

the simplest and highest utility change is to take a fixed amount from high income people and give it to low income people.

Let's add the time dimension to this analysis. What you say might be true within an immediate time frame, but it is true in the one year time frame? ten years? a hundred years?

There is also the issue of side effects. Forcibly equalizing income (or wealth) has been tried. Many times.

I would argue most people's revealed preference of utility wrt money is either incoherent or lumpy enough that describing it with a simple curve isn't really valid.

What skills do you have?

You can play online poker. If you play the numbers you can make a steady profit.

Freelancer.com is worthwhile.

I have a friend who uses http://tutor.com .

It looks like you've already got a list of things you want to answer in the meeting, so you've already done the most important preparation.

I'm unsure as to whether this conversation will be private (me talking to a DSB representative), or if one of my parents will sit in.

This is probably under your control. I expect you have the right to a private meeting, if you ask the DSB rep. If you're worried about how your parents would react to such a request, maybe try framing it as practicing your independence, or something appropriately harmless and fuzzy-sounding?

If you have not dealt with something the DSB before, you're probably drastically overestimating how much mental effort they are willing to expend to help you. (I dealt with a similar agency, the California Department of Rehabilitation, many years ago.)

Although it is of course good for you to try to estimate how much mental effort they are willing to make in real time during the interview, I suggest the plan you go into the meeting with assume it is low. E.g. you might consider just asking for a notetaker over and over again.

Try to appear a little dumber than you actually are.

I would not risk alienating your parents to try for a deeper conversation with DSB staff.

I was absurdly lucky: the counselor I spoke to is new and motivated to put in the necessary effort for everything, and went to high school with my stepmother; it also turns out that the in-state training center has a thirty-day trial period, during which commitment is a non-issue. They also offered to provide any required technology, be it laptops or note takers or whatever. It could start as early as the first week of February, which is early enough that I wouldn't need to worry about security at my property. So on the whole, a surprisingly good day.

RationalWiki?

.#lesswrong IRC is probably closest.

so, lower signal to noise, but also more exploration of the edges of the rationalist memeplex? cud b laff.

reddit.com/r/lesswrong ?

Where is rationalist 4chan?

It is traditional to offer certain images as incentives for answers.

Tits or GTFO! :-D

That seems to depend on a number of assumptions -- your timeline, whether you expect a soft or a hard takeoff, the centrality of raw intelligence vs. cultural effects to research quality, possible nonlinearity of network effects on intellectual output. But I'd bet that the big one is time: if you think (unrealistically, but run with it) that you can improve a test population's intelligence by 50%, that could be very significant if you're expecting a 2100 singularity but likely won't be if you're expecting one before they graduate from college.

Good point. The cutoff is not necessarily the singularity, either - once we have sufficiently awesome genetic engineering, there's no point to eugenics.

This could be generalised to putting any thought into anything. Will the singularity be achieved within one childhood? More smart people may be useful to apply to the problem. If you're smart, make more smart people.

I broadly agree with your opinion, provided certain socioeconomic problems resulting from population contraction could be overcome.

I don't recall downvoting you, but I think that there is a very high chance technology makes the problem moot - either by killing us or by alleviating scarcity until a superintelligence happens.

Well, let's try to be a bit more specific about this.

First, what does the claim that "the world is overpopulated" mean? It implies a metric of some sort to which we can point and say "this is too high", "this is too low", "this is just right". I am not sure what this metric might be.

The simplest metric used in biology is an imminent population crash -- if the current count of some critters in an ecosystem is pretty sure to rapidly contract soon we'd probably speak of overpopulation. That doesn't seem to be the case with respect to humans now.

Second, the overpopulation claim is necessarily conditional on a specific level of technology. It is pretty clear that the XXI technology can successfully sustain more people than, say, the pre-industrial technology. One implication is that future technological progress is likely to change whatever number we consider to be the sustainable carrying capacity of Earth now.

Third, and here things get a bit controversial, it all depends (as usual) on your terminal goals. If your wish is for peace and comfort of Mother Gaia, well, pretty much any number of humans is overpopulation. But let's take a common (though by no means universal) goal of long-term economic wealth. We want to create value and keep on creating more of it for a long time. Given this, you want more humans since that will accelerate the process up until certain limits. Where these limits are is debatable but I haven't seen much evidence that we are facing them right now.

Fourth, overpopulation is pretty local. Taking the simplest possible measure of land area, it's hard to argue that countries like Russia or Canada or Australia are overpopulated.

It's an argument based on false premises. Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there's no particular reason to believe this will change going forward. Every time we think we've hit a wall(running out of wood in the 18th century, whales in the 19th century, food in the 20th century, or oil in the 21st century), we've come up with new technologies to keep going without much trouble(coal, oil, GMOs/agricultural chemistry, and tar sands/fracking respectively). Limitations on space are even less relevant.

Conversely, we've built first-world societies on a governmental safety net that only actually works with an increasing population. If we don't grow, then pension plans will start detonating like someone's carpet-bombing the economy. (Yes, worse than they are already). I think the people who created those pyramid schemes should be taken out behind the woodshed for a posthumous beatdown, but it's a bit late to fix it now.

If you want to know what a negative population growth rate looks like, look at what will happen to China over the next couple decades. It's the biggest demographic time bomb in human history.

Also, if you're bringing sustainability into this, IMO the only truly sustainable option is to advance technology so fast that we can defeat the Second Law somehow. Anything else just delays the inevitable.

Alum here... glad to hear! You should do that :)

The standard advice for starting a physical group is to just pick a timeframe and a nice location, then show up with a good book and stay for the duration. Either other people show up and you've got your meetup, or else you spend a couple hours with a good book.

PM me if you want to talk about founding a group. I ran the Boston community for a while, and it was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

Can you give any concrete examples?

I think you're talking about So8res's recent posts, but I think they're exceptional. Most productivity posts are about avoiding spending time web surfing, particularly during time that has been budgeted for work. They do this partly because fragmenting time is bad and partly because there are better ways to have fun.

how easy is it to spoil somebody's impression of you when you have already known them for a bit?

Spoiling is trivially easy -- just mention that you like to torture kittens in your spare time.

Without such drastic admissions, are you really asking whether someone's opinion of you can radically decrease without you doing anything that seems out of the ordinary to you? I guess, but you also have to keep in mind the difference between what the other person things and what s/he is willing to show.

For example, let's say Alice and Bob meet. Alice doesn't really like Bob but she is polite so she doesn't show it in an obvious fashion plus she hopes that maybe Bob isn't as bad as he looks. After a bit of time Alice's opinion of Bob is still the same but now she sees less reason to be polite and have decided that yes, Bob is as bad as he looks. From the Bob's point of view it looks as if Alice took a sudden dislike to him, but from Alice's point of view she just allowed herself to show her true attitude which didn't change much.

An interesting case is a behavior that makes an initial good impression, but will sour a relationship when continued. Sharp sarcasm or negative joking is the most common example I've observed.

Can you link to your more important sources from you research? They could be useful to others.

I'm interested in this as well, can you send us a link of the research that you found linking potassium supplements to migraines? Thanks!

Interesting, some questions.
1. What is high dose?
2. How was the dosing achieved?
3. What is your sodium and magnesium intake like?

-12 points in the discussion section is a pretty trivial karma hit out o.f the 1132 I see you have at this moment. I'd try to do better next time.

Giving that the post does contain upvoted comments that belong to it deleting it would prevent people from seeing those comments and be bad.

What are you supposed to do when you've nailed up a post that is generally disliked?

Grin and say "Fuck 'em!"

Just leave it. It can serve as lesson to you in the future but in a month no one but you will remember it as it falls off the scroll.

One possible solution would be to edit the article, add "[Deleted]" to the title, remove all text and replace it by an explanation like: "The article was deleted because it received a lot of downvotes, but the discussion seems worth keeping; please don't vote on the article anymore."

if we don't have downvoted topics some of the time it means we are being too conservative about what we judge will be useful to others. Only worry if too large a fraction of your stuff gets downvoted.

Well, I didn't bother to look this time, but if every bad post got just -5 votes max, the noise would probably unbearable. The extra sting is there for you, not to warn other readers.

This must mean that someone saw the title of it at -11 karma and thought "Sounds promising! Reading this now will be a good use of my time." And then they read it and went: "Arrgh! This turned out to be a disappointing post. Less like this, please. I'd better downvote it to warn others."

Not necessarily. Seeing a heavily downvoted post seems to trigger some kind of group-norm-reinforcement instinct in me: I often end up wanting to read it in the hopes of it being just as bad as the downvotes imply, so that I could join in the others in downvoting it. And I actually get pleasure out of being able to downvote it.

I'm not very proud of acting on that impulse, especially since I'm not going to be able to objectively evaluate a post's merit if I start reading it while hoping it to be bad. But sometimes I do act on it regardless. (I didn't do that with your post, though.)

These are group houses where a bunch of rationalists live together. Sometimes they hold events for the wider community or host visiting rationalists from out of town. I know of several that exist in the Bay Area, one in Boston, and one in New York. There are probably others.

Reminds me of my not-quite-awake-dream-state encounters with Q from Star Trek.

Quoting part of an old comment of mine:

I can, though, relay an interesting experience I had in unintentionally constructing some kind of similar mental archetype while dreaming that kind of stuck around in my mind for a while. I didn't reach into any pantheon though, my mind reached to a mythology which has had its claws in my psyche since childhood - star trek. Q is always trolling the crew of the Enterprise for humanity's benefit, in attempts to get them to meet their potential and progress in understanding or test them. He was there, and let's just say I was thoroughly trolled in a dream, in ways that emphasized certain capabilities of mine that I was not using. And just before waking up he specifically told me that he would be watching me with my own eyes since he was actully part of me that normally didn't speak. That sense of part of me watching and making sure I actually did what I was capable of stuck around for over a week.

He touches on that in "Consider Phlebas". Basically there were other technologically advanced civs with different values, not everyone wanted to join the Culture.

Another possible explanation is that the ship Minds controlled immigration in non-obvious ways (memetic weaponry).

Somewhere in the books, I think in Look to Windward, it's pointed out that ambassadors to the Culture end up assimilated and serving unofficially as ambassadors for the Culture instead.

Also, the Culture appears to have trillions of citizens. You could have a large amount of immigration and still not see much of the impact.

StayFocusd

I was using Leech Block for old fashioned reddit-block for some time, but then I switched to Rescue Time (free version) which tracks time you spend on certain internet sites, and found it much more user friendly. It does not block the sites, but it shows you a percentage estimate of how productive you are today (e.g. Today, 1 hour on internet out of which 30min on Less Wrong - so 50% productive).

Being small enough to freeze solid quickly is a nonstarter.

Cells filling themselves up with trehalose (disaccharide that in many organisms including waterbears and my lab yeast serves as both a fast-degrading energy store [faster than glycogen] and protection against denaturing proteins during both desiccation and freezing) under stress is more plausible but runs afoul of the fact that large animals only have so much soluble sugar at any given time and can't make sugars from lipids - in many cases of organisms that use it as a protective feature it becomes like 10% or more of their weight.

Trying to eliminate the inflammatory response to hypoxia? No idea if that's plausible without causing immune system issues.

At one extreme is the weekly sudoku puzzle that is completed for my own enjoyment and I am content with my mastery level. At that extreme I pick A, it is not really a goal to improve my sudoku skill, negative results contribute little.

At the other extreme are your hard coding problems, complex engineering problems, and those little bent steel puzzles that you have to take apart and reassemble in apparently impossible ways; Here the long term goal is not to solve the single problem but to learn and solve the problem type. These problems are either without an A solution, or you want greater mastery of the field so that next time only A or B solutions are on the table instead of the B and C solutions. Eventually your peers start coming to you with their A, B, C dilemmas and you can give them the right answer with 100% confidence. After that you will be known as a guru in your field and reap all the prestige and profit that comes with that (results may vary depending on field).

In short it depends on your goal, A to solve the problem, C to solve the problem type. B is a compromise if you want C but the budget doesn't allow for it.