I know how egoistic this comment risks sounding, but: many different people (at least half a dozen) have independently expressed to me that they find the links that I post on social media to be consistently interesting and valuable, to the point of one person claiming that about 40% of the value that she got out of Facebook was from reading my posts.
Thus, if you're not already doing so, you may be interested in following me on social media, either on Facebook or Google Plus. I'm a little picky about accepting friend requests on FB, but anyone is free to follow me there. If you don't want to be on any of those services, it's apparently also possible to get an RSS feed of the G+ posts. (I also have a Twitter account, but I use that one a lot less.)
On the other hand, if you're procrastination-prone, you may want to avoid following me - I've also had two people mention that they've at least considered unfollowing me because they waste too much time reading my links.
This is awesome.
Here is the abstract of a paper in Neuroscience Letters. The paper is titled "Early sexual experience alters voluntary alcohol intake in adulthood".
And the abstract goes
...Steroid hormones signaling before and after birth sexually differentiates neuronal circuitry. Additionally, steroid hormones released during adolescence can also have long lasting effects on adult behavior and neuronal circuitry. As adolescence is a critical period for the organization of the nervous system by steroid hormones it may also be a sensitive period for the effects of social experience on adult phenotype. Our previous study indicated that early adolescent sexual activity altered mood and prefrontal cortical morphology but to a much smaller extent if the sexual experience happened in late adolescence. In humans, both substance abuse disorders and mood disorders greatly increase during adolescence. An association among both age of first sexual activity and age of puberty with both mood and substance disorders has been reported with alcohol being the most commonly abused drug in this population. The goal of this experiment was do determine whether sexual experience early in adoles
How do you organize your computer files? How do you maintain organization of your computer files? Anyone have any tips or best practices for computer file organization?
I've recently started formalizing my computer file organization. For years my computer file organization would have been best described as ad-hoc and short-sighted. Even now, after trying to clean up the mess, when I look at some directories from 5 or more years ago I have a very hard time telling what separates two different versions of the same directory. I rarely left README like files explaining what's what, mostly because I didn't think about it.
Here are a few things I've learned:
I have a folder that I do my short term work in:
D:/stupid shit that I can't wait to get rid of
This is set to auto-delete everything in it weekly. I had a chronic problem where small files that were useful for some minor task or another from months or years ago would clutter up everything. This was my "elegant" solution to the problem and it's served me well for years, because it gave me an actual incentive to put my finished work in a sensible place.
Although now that I think about it, it would be a better idea for it to only delete files that haven't been touched for a week, rather than wiping everything all at once on a Saturday ..
Being on my way to friends and thinking about living in the city vs. living on the outskirts I had a thought: Though property prices in cities are higher anything else is much closer: Restaurants, shopping, ideally friends, and any public transport. This means that I spend much less time just getting around and commuting. Also I save some amount on heating as single houses necessarily are more difficult to heat.
So on one hand I spend more on rent but on the other hand I save on time, energy and transportation. So the "actual" cost of living in the city is lower than it might seem at first. Has anyone done an estimation of this "actual" cost or should I do it myself as kind of an exercise? I am aware that there are quite some parameters to consider such as personal preferences on having parks nearby, noise levels and my desire to go out.
If you live in a city, you can (and probably should) get away with not owning a car. Not only is it unnecessary to get where you want to go, but due to property prices, parking is a gigantic hassle and expense. Walking works well for anything within a mile, biking for anything within about 5, public transit or a cab for the metro area, and car rentals (or borrowing a friend's) can fill in for anything else that absolutely requires your own vehicle.
Not owning a car saves a significant amount of time and money and makes the math better for living in a more built-up area.
Some time in the past couple hours, I got karmassassinated. Somebody went through and downvoted about 30 or so comments I've made, including utterly uncontroversial entries like this one and this one. It's a trivial hit for me, but I mention it in case anyone is gathering data points to identify the source of the problem.
I don't endorse indiscriminate downvoting, but occasionally point out that fast systematic downvoting can result from fair judgement of a batch of systematically bad comments.
(Prismattic's counterexamples, if indeed from the same set, indicate that it's not the case here.)
Do you take notes when you read non-fiction you want to analyse? If so, how much detail? On the first reading? Just points of disputation, or an effort at a summary?
So... What do we make of this?
Excerpt:
...He is a rationalist who is deeply against living by social norms and just sees them as defaults, and is “non-default” about pretty much everything including work path, values etc., as well as lifestyle including cooking (lives off takeaway so as not to spend time grocery shopping and cooking), cleaning (does not have much of a regular cleaning habit – I broke glass in his kitchen a month ago and he said I shouldn’t have to clean it up and it’s still there), sleeping (he has no regular sleep schedule and sleeps when he wants to. The kind of work that he does is largely from home with long deadlines. He ships a prescription anti-narcolepsy from overseas which allows him to stay awake for long stretches on little sleep – although he plans on giving this up soon). He also takes party drugs and for a while, was taking quite high amounts of MDMA on a weekly basis, which pretty much wiped him out the day or two after. I have always been uncomfortable around drugs, although he did not really know the extent of my discomfort, and I can’t take them myself due to mental health. He dropped back to once a month after I expressed concerns about escalation
That he fails at basic instrumental rationality. I would be very interested in seeing a valid cost-benefit analysis which can justify leaving dangerous broken glass around, eating only take-out, and ignoring the risk of STI...
What I make of it is that "rationalist" is getting to sound cool enough that there are going to be people who claim to be rationalists even though they aren't notably rational.
Lists of "how to identify a real rationalist" will presumably run up against Goodhart's Law, but it still might make sense to start working on them.
also remember: what's rational to do if you're a narcissistic asshole is different than what's rational for a nicer person
there doesn't have to be any connection with us
Comments mention HPMoR, and letter writer says he read it aloud to her. The Modafinil use is also circumstantial evidence.
I got around to watching Her this weekend, and I must say: That movie is fantastic. One of the best movies I've ever watched. It both excels as a movie about relationships, as well as a movie about AI. You could easily watch it with someone who had no experience with LessWrong, or understanding of AI, and use it as an introduction to discussing many topics.
While the movie does not really tackle AI friendliness, it does bring up many relevant topics, such as:
Intelligence Explosion. AIs getting smarter, in a relatively short time, as well as the massive difference in timescales between how fast a physical human can think, and an AI.
What it means to be a person. If you were successful in creating a friendly or close to friendly AI that was very similar to a human, would it be a person? This movie would influence people to answer 'yes' to that question.
Finally, the contrast provided between this show and some other AI movies like Terminator, where AIs are killer robots at war with humanity, could lead to discussions about friendly AI. Why is the AI in Her different from Terminators? Why are they both different from a Paperclip Maximizer? What do we have to do to get something more like the AI in Her? How can we do even better than that? Should we make an AI that is like a person, or not?
I highly recommend this movie to every LessWrong reader. And to everyone else as well, I hope that it will open up some people's minds.
Yes, if you skip to the end, you'll be at the end. So don't. Unless you want to. In which case, do.
Did you have a point?
I've been thinking about whether it's a good idea to quit porn (not masturbation, just porn). Does anyone have anything to add to the below?
Reasons not to quit:
Reasons to quit:
1 and 2 apply to entertainment in general. There's something to be said for cutting back on TV, aimless internet browsing, etc., but it makes more sense to focus on cutting back total time than eliminating one particular form of entertainment in particular.
As for 3, I'm not familiar with that particular study, but in my experience studies of "porn addiction" or "sex addiction" tend to rely on dubious definitions of "addiction." I'd advise against taking worries of porn addiction any more seriously than worries of "internet addiction" or "social media addiction" or "TV addiction" or whatever.
I have just started playing poker online. On Less Wrong Discussion, Poker has been called an exercise in instrumental rationality, and a so-called Rationality Dojo was opened via RationalPoker.com. I have perused this site, but it has been dormant since July 2011. Other sources exist, such as 2 + 2, Pokerology and Play Winning Poker, but none of them have the quality of content or style that I have found on Less Wrong. Is anyone here a serious poker player? Is there any advice for someone who wants to become a winning player themselves?
What is your goal? If you want to earn significantly more than (let's say) $20,000 a year then poker is probably not your best bet. I used to play during 2007-2010 and the game were getting progressively tougher (more regulars, less fish), the same way as they had been in the prior few years before I started playing online. I recently checked how things are going and the trend seems to still be in place. Additionally, the segregation of countries in online poker (americans not being able to play with non-americans for example) is making things worse and this is in fact what drove me away mid-2010.
TL;DR You are several years too late to have a decent chance of making good money with poker.
I'm seeing a lot of things claiming that over the long run, people can't increase their output by working much more than 40 hours per week. It might (so the claim goes) work for a couple weeks of rushing to meet deadline, but if you try to keep up such long hours long-term your hourly productivity will drop to the point that your total output will be no higher than what you'd get working ~40 hour weeks.
There seem to be studies supporting this claim, and I haven't been able to find any studies contradicting it. On the other hand, it seems like something tha...
To those knowledgeable in philosophy, can someone please explain why Wittgenstein is such a big deal? I skimmed the Wikipedia articles on Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations.
I have no idea what's going on in Tractatus.
The points made in Philosophical Investigations---namely that a lot of philosophical problems come down to confusions about language---seems to be interesting and correct to me: but really, did no one before Wittgenstein think about this? I mean, if I read Russell, it seems that he had a similar brand of clear th...
A political question:
Our recently elected minister for finance just did something unexpected. She basically went:
“Last autumn during the election campaign, I said we should do X. After four months of looking at the actual numbers, it turns out that X is a terribad idea, so we are going to do NOT X”
(She used more obfuscating terms, she’s a politician after all.)
The evidence points to her actually changing her mind rather than lying during the election.
The question:
Would you prefer a politician sane enough to change her mind when presented with convincing evidence or one that you (mostly) agree with?
It's at least commonly accepted that alcohol kills brain cells - is there a study that actually links a certain amount of drinking to a certain amount of IQ points lost?
The relationship between alcohol use and cognitive function appears to be nonlinear, and indeed non-monotonic: light drinkers have better cognitive performance than nondrinkers. Reduction in cognitive performance for heavy drinkers is measured more in men than in women.
Source: Rodgers et al (2005), "Non-linear relationships between cognitive function and alcohol consumption in young, middle-aged and older adults: the PATH Through Life Project" — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16128717
Chronic alcoholics do not have reduced numbers of neocortical neurons, but do have reductions in white matter volume.
Source: Jensen and Pakkenberg, "Do alcoholics drink their neurons away?" — http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/014067369392185V
Neither of these studies speaks about the specific measurement you're asking for, IQ, but they do address the general topic.
(Chronic alcoholism is also associated with specific neurological conditions such as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which is caused by thiamine deficiency — someone who's getting most of their calories from booze is not getting enough nutrition.)
Update on the Sean Carroll vs William Lane Craig debate mentioned earlier: Sean Carroll outlines his goal:
...Just so we’re clear: my goal here is not to win the debate. It is to say things that are true and understandable, and establish a reasonable case for naturalism, especially focusing on issues related to cosmology. I will prepare, of course, but I’m not going to watch hours of previous debates, nor buy a small library of books so that I may anticipate all of WLC’s possible responses to my arguments. I have a day job, and frankly I’d rather spend my ti
How much is it worth spending on a computer chair? Is a chair for both work and play (ie video games) practical, or is reclining comfort necessarily opposed to sit-up comfort?
It would be convenient if, when talking about utilitarianism, people would be more explicit about what they mean by it. For example, when saying "I am a utilitarian", does the writer mean "I follow a utility function", "My utility function includes the well-being of other beings", "I believe that moral agents should value the well-being of other beings", or "I believe that moral agents should value all utility equally, regardless of the source or who experiences it"? Traditionally, only the last of these is considered utilitarianism, but on LW I've seen the word used differently.
Right. Many people use the word "utilitarianism" to refer to what is properly named "consequentialism". This annoys me to no end, because I strongly feel that true utilitarianism is a decoherent idea (it doesn't really work mathematically, if anyone wants me to explain further, I'll write a post on it.)
But when these terms are used interchangeably, it gives the impression that consequentialism is tightly bound to utilitarianism, which is strictly false. Consequentialism is a very useful and elegant moral meta-system. It should not be shouldered out by utilitarianism.
After reading this main post, it dawned on me that the scary sounding change terminal goals technique is really similar to just sour grapes reasoning plus substituting them with lower hanging grapes, that would eventually get you to the higher hanging grapes you originally wanted.
I typically refrain from deluding myself to think that I don't want what is hard to attain, because I know I really do want it. With sour grapes reasoning I can pretend to not want my original goal as much as I now want another more instrumental goal. I feel like this helps me c...
"A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality"
Of course people will be drawn to this site: Who does not want to be rational? Skimming around the topics we see that people are concerned with how to make more money, calculating probabilities correctly and to formalise decision making processes in general.
Though there is one thing that bothers me. All skills that are discussed are related to abstract concepts, formal systems, math. Or in general things that are done more easily by people scoring high on g-heavy IQ tests. But the...
Off the top of my head, some good top-level posts touching on this area: How to understand people better (plus isaacschlueter's particularly good comment) and Alicorn's Luminosity sequence. Searching gives maybe a partial match for How to Be Happy, which cites some studies on training empathy and concludes that little is scientifically known about it--still, I think a top-level post on what is known would be welcome. Swimmer963's post on emotional-regulation research is nice.
Mindfulness is something else that comes up pretty regularly. Meditation trains metacognition and Overcoming suffering are pretty good examples.
CFAR also places more explicit emphasis on emotional awareness, and that sometimes comes up in the group rationality diaries.
I think one reason that these topics are relatively neglected is that people seem to develop social skills and emotional awareness in pretty idiosyncratic ways. Still, LW seems to accept more personal accounts, like this post on a variation on the CBT technique of labeling. So it seems worthwhile to post things along those lines.
Who does not want to be rational?
People for whom rationality is an applause light or a club with which to bash enemies, but who balk at actually applying it to themselves.
People who have been taught that rationality is evil.
Someone suggests that planning is bad for success. There is very little research cited, however (there is one study involving CEOs). Is there more confirming / invalidating evidence for this idea somewhere?
Doing early prep work on my scientific review of Transcendence, I came across this amusing anecdote from Lab Coats in Hollywood:
...Marine biologist Mike Graham, for example, was giving a lecture to Finding Nemo’s (2004) animators when the director asked him “if there was one thing that the fi lm might get wrong that would really disturb him.” An account of this meeting in Nature shows how Graham’s answer created a predicament for the animators: “Quick as a fl ash, Graham said the most intolerable outrage would be to see kelp — a type of seaweed that only gr
On LW Wiki editing: in addition to the usual spam, I occasionally see some well-meaning but marginal-quality edits popping up on the side bar. I understand that gwern cleans up the spam, but does anyone have the task of checking bona fide edits for quality?
Does anyone know if there is/are narrative fiction based around the AI Box Experiment? Short stories or anything else?
Anyone care to elaborate on Why a Bayesian is not allowed to look at the residuals?
I got hunches, but don't feel qualified to explain in detail.
I published an article titled The Singularity and Mutational Load in h+ magazine about using eugenics to increase intelligence by reducing harmful mutations. The best way to create friendly AI might be to first engineer super-genius into a few of our children.
I very much hope mankind eagerly embraces eugenics for intelligence enhancement.
Keep in mind that many people will read this as "I hope we start killing inferior people".
(And note that your first use of "eugenics" in the piece is before any sort of discussion about methods, or anything that would rule out coercion.)
Lab mice's brains are noticeably smaller than those of wild mice, primarily because they are horrifically inbred (and need to be for a lot of the genetic experiments to work properly).
There are similar issues with most of the lab organisms. My lab yeast that have been grown continuously in rich media with odd population structure (lots of bottlenecks) since the eighties have about a third the metabolic rate of wild isolates, and male nematodes of the common laboratory strains can hardly mate successfully without help.
What transhumanist and/or rationalist podcast/audiobook do you prefer beside hpmor which I just finished and really liked!!
Recently there were a few posts about using bikes as transportation. This left me curious. Who are the transportation cyclists at LessWrong? I am interested in hearing your reasons for choosing cycling and also about your riding style. Do you use bike infrastructure when available? Do you take the lane? I'm especially interested in justification for these choices, as choices in the vehicular cycling (criticism of vehicular cycling) vs. separate bike infrastructure debate don't seem to always be well justified. (To outsiders, vehicular cyclists might be con...
A RationalWiki article on neoreaction, by the estimable Smerdis of Tlön. Also see his essay. I found this particularly interesting, 'cos if I'd picked anyone to sign up then Smerdis - a classical scholar who considers anything after 1700 dangerously modern - would have been a hot prospect. OTOH, he did write one of the finest obituaries I've ever seen.
Adaptation to environments, including social environments, through natural and sexual selection is the linchpin of evolution. Remembering this means knowing why scientific racism is ridiculous. To argue that races or ethnic groups differ innately in intelligence, however defined, is exactly equal to an assertion that intelligence has proven less adaptive for some people than for others. This at minimum requires an explanation, a specifically evolutionary explanation, beyond mere statistical assertion; without that it can be assumed to be bias or noise. Since most human intelligence is in fact social intelligence -- the main thing the human mind is built for is networking in human societies -- a moment's reflection should demonstrate why this is an unlikely scenario.
(bolded part mine)
Shouldn't this part be uncontroversial? Brains are expensive.
They might have a small point in that evolution assumes that human beings, no more than any other individual animal, are not fungible: they each carry different genes that express as varying traits. The latest euphemism, "human biodiversity", is particularly galling gibberish. Biodiversity has an established meaning that you don't get to usurp. Last time I looked, humans were not facing any obvious genetic bottlenecks. There aren't really many that count as relict cultivars of tomatoes or goats. Efforts to preserve diversity in human genomes seem.... unnecessary. When they go extinct, it won't be for lack of genetic diversity; just that intelligent life is a self-limiting phenomenon.
As with much on rationalwiki, it's just dismissive rather than a logical argument or evidence. We have clear evidence of relatively recent genetic influences on human evolution in Lactose Tolerance and both Tibetan and Andean adaptations for high altitude. Not to mention HBD isn't an attempt to "preserve" the diversity but to actually acknowledge it.
I don't think that knowing someone is an altruist tells you much about his moral framework.
The phrase "in our current situation" is also weird given that there are plenty of readers who are in substantial different situations from each other.
What are your thoughts on AGI data requirements?
It is often cited that one of the reasons for the slow development of an AGI is the amount of computing power and space required to process all the information.
I don't see this as a major roadblock as it would mainly give the AGI a broader understanding of the world, or even make a multi-domain expert system that could appear to be an AGI.
Assuming the construction of an AGI turns out to be an algorithmic one, it should be able to learn domains as it needs them. What sort of data would you use to test a newly built AGI algorithm?
I'm dealing with a bout of what I assume is basically superstition. Over the last 10 years, I've failed disastrously at two careers, and so I've generalized this over everything: I assume I'll fail at any other career I want to pursue, too.
To me, this isn't wholly illogical: these experiences prove to me that I'm just not smart or hard-working enough to do anything more interesting than pushing paper (my current job). Moreover, desirable careers are competitive practically by definition, so failing at every other career I try is an actual possibility.
Theo...
I have a draft post that uses some economics as an example, but I'm not sure I got it right. If you know economics, can I send you the draft?
A few months ago, I came across this discussion about RationalPoker.com. I found it interesting and I stored it away in the back of my mind for a time when I had the money and time to play poker. Last week, I made the jump and deposited $200 into an online poker account. I have been studying up on good online play at (2 + 2)[http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/], Pokerology and Play Winning Poker. Sadly Rational Poker has only a few post before going dormant.
From what I gather, playing poker is an exercise in individual instrumental rationality, and I though...
Some time in the past couple hours, I got karmassassinated. Somebody went through and downvoted about 30 or so comments I've made, including utterly uncontroversial entries like this one and this one. It's a trivial hit for me, but I mention it in case anyone is gathering data points to identify the source of the problem.
The worst possible reaction to this phenomenon is to point it out publicly rather than to quietly report it to whoever cares (currently no one among the site admins), since you noticing it, even occasionally, is enough of a positive reinforcement for the culprit to continue. I also mentioned on occasion that unfairly downvoted comments tend to get upvoted back up over time, so no point sweating it. So I am downvoting your comment to encourage you to silently shrug off karma sniping in the future.