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Open thread, September 15-21, 2014
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Comments (339)
What supplements do people take?
I currently take Vitamin D, fish oil, creatine, lithium, iron, multivitamin and melatonin (at bedtime).
It would be interesting to also know their reasons, and if they notice positive effects.
I take calcium and vitamin D, prescribed for medical reasons. Nothing else. No real way to tell what the effect is short of DEXA scans, but those are x-rays, so you can't do many of them. I'm not breaking any bones now, but I never did.
On what basis do you take Iron?
There is some decent evidence of correlation between iron deficiency and depression and anxiety, which is an issue I have.
I think it would make more sense to get yourself tested for the deficiency. I think the current view is that most people overconsume iron.
Iron.
From an article I'm reading:
It may be hard to tell without the context, but they are suggesting that these revised risk assessments would not be useful. My initial thought is: "If having an estimate is helpful, having a more accurate estimate would be better, and there seems to be a big difference between 1/500 and 1/1000.
Any thoughts?
Full article: https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/ethicalsocialgenomic/DeflatingTheGenomicBubble.pdf
There are common diseases you should worry about and rare diseases you shouldn't worry about. A factor of 2 does not move Crohn's from rare to common. The difference between a 70% chance of dying of heart disease and a 30% chance sounds pretty big, but what would you do differently? Either way, it is a big chunk of likely mortality. A factor of 2 is unlikely to change the cost-benefit analysis of actions that might protect you from heart disease. If such an action is useful, it is useful for most people.
Some rare genes do move diseases from rare to common. A broken BRCA (1 in 10k) moves a woman from a 10% chance of dying of breast cancer to an 80% chance of dying of breast cancer, and dying at a young age. Mammograms are valuable for the second woman and not for the first. Some women have prophylactic mastectomies. But if you ask Myriad to test your BRCA, in addition to this useful information, it will also talk about minor variations with useless effects on the risk.
Thanks for your reply.
Do you think it would be fair to say that for rare diseases (that are not determined by single loci mutations, like Huntington's or BRCA, as you described) it's silly to get a test because a small movement in your risk profile is meaningless in that it wouldn't impact your treatment or behavior in a meaningful way?
Could you explain what you mean by:
Do you work in a related field? You explained this rather concisely, thanks.
Whether they are about rare diseases or common diseases, almost all results that you get out of 23andMe are silly because they don't have rational effects on potential behavior. (They may have irrational effects - if you can use it motivate actions that you ought to be doing anyway, that's great. But there are also bad irrational reactions.)
Depending on your genetics, your chance of dying of heart disease might be as low as 30% or as high as 70%. (I made up those numbers; I suspect the real range evaluable with current genetics is much narrower.) Even the low number, 30% is very high. If you have a 30% of dying of something, you should think about it and react to it. Even in the best case, you still have to think about heart disease.
I just did a tried to do a Fermi calculation on the value of getting a fire-proof, theft resistant document safe, but can't find a good number for the cost of identity theft. Does anyone have one on hand?
I don't, but the cases of identity theft I hear about in the news aren't done by entering someone's home to acquire their papers. What scenarios are you intending to defend against with the safe?
I'm not sure, basically I hear a lot of vague references to it being good to have such a safe, but can't figure out what if anything it is actually important for.
Hi. I'm Portuguese and live near Lisbon. Are there any LWers out there that live nearby?
The latest survey (2013) shows zero people living in Portugal, and so I feel a bit lonely out here, especially when I read the locations for the LW meetups. They seem so close, only not really...
I guess I could make an effort to start my own meetup in Lisbon or something, maybe, I don't know. I am a little shy and I don't think I am capable of starting something like that on my own.
I work in academia, in the field of computer science, and thus am surrounded by people that would find this website appealing. I have in fact introduced this site (sometimes subtly) to some people I know, but haven't seen anyone taking the time to read the Sequences and get in sync with this community. I want to try harder, though.
What would you say is the most effective way of capturing the interest on this site? My tools are Facebook, and the chance to make a presentation about anything I want at the University and getting an audience of at most 30 people.
Getting people to read HPMOR is easier than getting them to read the sequences.
I've had several unexplained jumps in karma over the last few days, amounting to around 80-100 points. Someone else mentioned the same, and I believe it's happened to quite a few people. If that's a side effect of reverting the votes of systematic downvoters, fine, but if we now have a systematic upvoter, I really don't want to see this. It doesn't have the same emotional overtones as downvotes, but it obscures the signal in the same way.
Another possibility is that a new reader, or more than one, is reading through the archives and voting on whatever they feel voteworthy. That's fine as well.
I recall this being the norm before the dark days of Euginiering.
I got this too, but I was probably the worst recipient of downvotes percentage-wise and the upvotes didn't even make up for the downvotes yet in terms of absolute karma value (let alone in ratio, which would require getting many times the upvotes).
I also noticed that my recent upvotes included a fair number of 2s and 3's and higher numbers, and there were some posts that didn't get voted up at all--in other words, they were distributed in a way I would expect if the upvotes came from multiple people. The downvotes from Eugine were not distributed that way, making it a dead giveaway that they all came from one person.
Now I'm listed among the 15 "Top contributors," which is absolutely not possible.
I too have had some unexpected karma-jumps lately, and I feel the same way.
... Aaaand now I just lost about 40 within an hour or two, including downvotes on some obviously unobjectionable comments. Looks like someone's taken a dislike to me. Anyone else had the same?
Given that we just got a new moderator, it might very well be that someone wants to test out the response about what happens when he goes and votes up systematically.
I personally also got similar jumps in my karma.
When speaking about battling ISIS, the alternatives for the West seems to be either air strikes or boots on the ground. Boots on the ground means actual personal. Why isn't there a version of boots on the ground that's completely robot based? Why are human bodies still needed for waging intercity warfare?
Considering that this is the state-of-the-art in animal-like robot movement, I can see why we still use meat-soldiers.
Because warfare is complicated? Are you talking about drone robots?
The word drone refer to something that flies. You could miss flying and non-flying robots.
What's the bottleneck, where robots don't perform?
Noise.
probably a lot more
Prolonged functioning at high energy levels far from usable energy sources.
To what extend are those issue likely to be resolved in 10 to 20 years to an extend that they change the geopolitical situation?
Not very likely. In 10-20 years we might get a self-driving car which is a MUCH easier problem than a battlefield robot.
Google already has self-driving cars. The issue is more about making them safe enough that they don't get sued to the ground when the cars get into accidents. Additionally you need to pass laws that make them legal.
Military technology doesn't suffer from the same hurdle.
On the other hand, they have to drive through terrain that has been intentionally modified to be difficult for their algorithms.
Kinda sorta maybe not really.
Dammit, I've got to pay more attention to those feelings of "really?" Driverless cars at current levels of tech seemed faintly implausible, but I ignored that in favor of "I keep hearing it in the news" and "google=magic".
On the other hand, self-driving cars might make sense for slow-moving traffic jams.
Huh, looks like I've been fooled by journalists again. Thanks!
I'd guess that communications are a problem - you'd need more bandwidth to send enough video back to drive a car remotely than to fly a plane, and it's probably easier to lose contact, too. Not to mention the difficulties of fighting inside a city you don't want to simply destroy: can your robot open a door and go up a flight of stairs?
This is the kind of thing that's being researched by the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex, though.
This is where they've got to (scroll down to the archive link). It isn't yet anywhere near good enough for the task.
For remote rather than automonous operation, there would be major humanitarian applications as well, but the technical problems are still huge. There's latency and reliability of communications, terrain that would be challenging even for people on the spot, dexterity in confined spaces, and the problem of refuelling. None of this is a Simple Matter Of Engineering.
I've never been entirely sure about the whole "it should all add up to normality" thing in regards to MWI. Like, in particular, I worry about the notion of intrusive thoughts. A good 30% of the time I ride the subway I have some sort of weak intrusive thought about jumping in front of the train (I hope it goes without saying that I am very much not suicidal). And since accepting MWI as being reasonably likely to be true, I've worried that just having these intrusive thoughts might increase the measure of those worlds where the intrusive thoughts become reality. And then I worry that having that thought will even further increase the measure of such worlds. And then I worry...well, then it usually tapers off, because I'm pretty good at controlling runaway thought processes. But my point is...I didn't have these kinds of thoughts before I learned about MWI, and that sort of seems like a real difference. How does it all add up to normality, exactly?
You don't see other people doing so, and I can assure you many more people than jump have such thoughts. Any MWI weirdness would only affect what you recall of your OWN actions in this case.
Whatever argument you have in mind about "the measure of those worlds" will go through just the same if you replace it with "the probability of the world being that way". You should be exactly equally concerned with or without MWI.
The question that actually matters to you should be something like: Are people with such intrusive thoughts who aren't generally suicidal more likely to jump in front of trains? I think I remember reading that the answer is no; if it turns out to be yes (or if you find those thoughts disturbing) then you might want to look into CBT or something; but MWI doesn't have anything to do with it except that maybe something about it bothers you psychologically.
Okay, fair enough, forget the whole increasing of measure thing for now. There's still the fact that every time I go to the subway, there's a world where I jump in front of it. That for sure happens. I'm obviously not suggesting anything dumb like avoiding subways, that's not my point at all. It's just...that doesn't seem very "normal" to me, somehow. MWI gives this weird new weight to all counterfactuals that seems like it makes an actual difference (not in terms of any actual predictions, but psychologically - and psychology is all we're talking about when assessing "normality"). Probably though this is all still betraying my lack of understanding of measure - worlds where I jump in front of the train are incredibly low measure, and so they get way less magical reality fluid, I should care about them less, etc. I still can't really grok that though - to me and my naive branch-counting brain, the salient fact is that the world exists at all, not that it has low probability.
I have always taken "it all adds up to normality" to mean not "you should expect everything to feel normal" but "actually, when you work out the physics, all this counterintuitive weird-feeling stuff produces the world you're already used to, and if it feels weird then you should try to adjust your intuitions if possible".
I'm not sure there's much I can say to help -- it's clear from your comments that you understand in theory what's going on, and it's just that your "naive branch-counting brain" is naive and cares about the wrong things :-).
Maybe this will help: Suppose you're visiting a big city. Consider the following two propositions. (1) There is one person in this city who would cheerfully knock you on the head and steal your wallet. (2) Half the people in this city would cheerfully knock you on the head and steal your wallet. I don't know about you, but I would be really scared to learn #2 and totally unsurprised and unmoved by #1. Similarly: "there are branches in which you jump in front of the train" -- well, sure there are, and there are branches where I abruptly decide to declare myself Emperor of the World and get taken off to a mental hospital, and branches where the earth is about to get hit by an asteroid that miraculously got missed by everyone's observations and we all die. But there aren't "a lot" of any of these sorts of branch (i.e., the measure is very small). What would worry me is to find that a substantial fraction of branches (reckoned by measure) have me jumping in front of the train. But what it takes to make that true is exactly the same thing as it takes to make it true that "with high probability, you will jump in front of the train".
A little help communicating some ideas?
Anyone up for beta reading a 2,000 word section of my attempt at an aspiring-rationalist story, S.I.?
I've just finished putting together an initial draft of Bunny pontificating about the ideas discussed in https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2g09xh/bstqrsthsf_factchecking_some_quantum_math/ . I could really use some feedback to make sure I'm having her explain them in a way that's actually comprehensible to the reader. Anyone who'd like to help me with this, I've pasted the initial draft to a GoogleDoc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lOQAAM3fdnF2ew7CgBQqSLtk21_4Foa8n7IB3Ay0ze8/edit?usp=sharing , which is set to allow comments.
Are you operating under Crocker's rules?
Also, if you want strictly writing help, I was recently made aware of the existence of /r/destructivereaders (h/t Punoxysm).
I've claimed to operate under Crocker's rules for some time now - though this might be the first time anyone has invoked that.
I'll take a look at that subreddit; but at the moment, I'm mainly concerned with figuring out how to best communicate the new ideas presented in the draft (the Lottery Oracle, etc) to the reader (keeping in mind that said reader is going to have gone through roughly 120,000 words of my attempt at rationalist fiction to get this far), rather than any particular grammar or style details that don't affect that goal.
I'm afraid that /r/destructivereaders doesn't look like a good place for me. They're set up so they (just about) require submitters to have previously critiqued multiple other submissions, and I'm already trying to come up with clever ways to make sure I spend so much time each day working on my story, instead of being distracted by all the shiny things on the internet.
From what I've looked at so far, it looks like they tend to focus on the basics. I already know that I over-use semicolons, and use sentences that are too long and complicated (and contain multiply nested subclauses (like these)) for many readers' comfort, and that I've been skimping on descriptions which aren't directly plot-relevant. I don't anticipate that being told these facts yet again would be worth the time I'd spend critiquing other posts for my entry fee.
If you know, why don't you solve the issue? Rereading a post and asking yourself for every sentence: "Can I break this down into multiple sentences?" and "Does this sentence really need that many words?" isn't complicated.
Identifying common errors in the writing of other people is good training to then identify the same errors in your own writing.
I also know that I should arrange my diet to have more fruits and vegetables than it currently does. However, after a few decades of doing things one way which isn't optimal, but is good enough to get the job done, simply "deciding" to do things a different way isn't enough to alter all the various unconscious mental sub-units whose interactions lead to the behaviour in question.
I bought a pumpkin pie yesterday instead of a box of cookies. I've started using beta-readers. Neither one is a perfect solution - but each is a single-step improvement over the previous situation, a step that is within the range of behaviours I can get my unconscious processes to actually accomplish, and hopefully, isn't going to be the only step.
While I won't claim that my writing is very good I think I learned to handle the issue of writing sentences that are too long. It just takes a decision to allocate some time to reviewing your own writing and then looking at every sentence.
I don't do that for everyone of my LW posts, but if I would write a blog or fiction I would.
Done. See comments by name Carlos.
Thank you kindly. :)
I've accepted most of your suggestions, and responded to the ones that I haven't.
I should probably update this prediction. Considering Yudkowsky's recent pwnedness and pieces like this becoming common it is at least 10%.
Moldbug in 2008.
I'm not under the impression he was much less pwned in 2007. Are you thinking of something in particular?
Curiously, the anti-immigration movement in the US would be very different than those in Western Europe, and, I would guess, significantly weaker. While economic arguments are somewhat similar in both countries (although e.g. studies differ whether (and what level of) immigration actually increases unemployment levels as in the short run immigrants seem to go to the countries where the unemployment is decreasing), in Western Europe immigrants are vastly overrepresented in crime statistics compared to local population, which is not the case in the US. Nor (it was my impression, I am not from the US) immigrants are often thought as a demographic group whose individuals are the most prone to commit crimes (it must be noted, however, that immigrants aren't a homogeneous group (both in Western Europe and the US) and their effect (and/or the perception thereof) on a country of destination might differ), and as they are not at the top of crime statistics, they are less likely to be a target of blame. Furthermore, it was my impression that due to the long history of immigration, the national identity of the US is not based on ethnicity, while in most European countries it definitely is. As you can see, it is not surprising that Americans are somewhat more likely than Europeans to think that immigration should be increased, and about two thirds of them think that on the whole immigration is a good thing, only in Sweden we find similar support for it.
Nevertheless, even given this unusually positive attitude towards immigration, I would guess that the US population reaching even 600 million (let alone 2 billion, which I believe must have been a hyperbole) by 2038 (U.S. Census Bureau projects approximately 400 millions) has a probability less than 1-2 percent. The reason is that while for a pundit it is often a good strategy to make bold claims about e.g. opening all borders, as it gains him attention (therefore I can believe that we will hear a lot of such claims from people who compete for attention) whether or not the claims about doubling World's GDP are correct (in the long run it may be correct, I do not know), it might not be such a good thing for a politician or a civil servant to do bold actions as it is a risk of losing control of the situation and/or getting fired, and, as a general rule, politicians and civil servants want neither of those, therefore , I would guess, they have to more cautious when they become actual decision makers. Therefore, even if one wants to promote the idea of open borders and free mobility, one could probably try to encourage more Schengen/EU style regional agreements and then gradually "merging" them with new bilateral agreements between those unions, as it seems less risky than simply welcoming all immigrants. And in the far future it may happen that large parts of the world is covered by a Schengen-like agreement making "nobody illegal" in a similar sense that it is relatively easy for a person from one EU country to work in another. But that would probably take much more than 25-30 years. However, I would guess that even then it seems highly unlikely that US population would exceed even 1 billion, let alone 2 billion, since as the economies of the developing countries improve, there will be less incentives for people to leave them for the US. One would expect a huge influx of immigrants only if US government loosens immigration restrictions "faster" than developing countries manage to improve.
Good counter-argument, updated
Though I will point out civil servants in the position to decide such things are practically unfierable and that politicians' public persona are down-stream from public opinion, if the media and academia that are mostly upstream decide open borders really is a moral crime akin to segregation (not hard since it fundamentally is segregation - not that I think this in itself makes it immoral), then public opinion would try to resist by a few populist politicians but would eventually succumb like it has on all other issues where its interests or opinions were pitted against the former.
Is this post just an excuse for an NRxic quote? And what does the "Yudkowsky's recent pwnedness" swipe refer to?
For what it's worth, when I asked Nyan Sandwich and Nydwracu whether they thought Eliezer Yudkowsky was pwned, they cited his support for open borders and his evangelical polyamory as evidence that he was, indeed, pwned.
No. I honestly think the probability of this prediction coming true has increased.
If that's the case why don't you simple update your predictionbook entry?
Trivial inconvenience of forgetting my password, also I wanted to talk about it with other people.
Edit: Predictionbook entry updated.
Software like KeePass really helps for that purpose.
Probably the idea of relocating to a place outside of the US where it's easier to get visas.
I'll bet a thousand 2014 dollars at even odds that it's less than a quarter of that.
(Clarification: I'm talking about the population of the US, as per the PredictionBook entry, not of North America as per Moldbug's quote; the population of the latter is already over 500 million. Should probably stipulate present borders too, just in case. 2 billion isn't credible in any case, though.)
Two billion is a crazy population prediction even if open borders was enacted. Relative quality of life would decline very quickly with open borders, and the immigration level would slow down dramatically.
I also read some estimate that "only" 500 Million people world wide want to immigrate to the US. Overall I expect the quality-of-life gap between USA and the 3rd world to continue declining over the next couple decades.
As a counterpoint look at the rise of anti-immigration movements in Europe and e.g. the success of Marine Le Pen in France.
I'm dubious about borders getting opened that soon, considering how long it's taking to make moderate moves towards drug legalization.
Donation sent. !@#% those !@#&!.
EDIT: Oops, wrong place, this was supposed to go under ITakeBets' post.
In the interest of trying out stuff outside the usual sphere-of-things-that-I'm-doing, I now have a fashion/lifestyle blog.
It's in Finnish, but it has a bunch of pictures of me, which ought to be language-neutral. Also my stuffed animals. (And yes, I know that I need a better camera.)
A friend and I hope to host a MIRIxVancouver workshop in Vancouver, Canada sometime in October. We haven't filed an application with MIRI yet, and we haven't set a date, so there's no schedule yet. So, this is just a shout-out to anyone who might want to get involved in it over a weekend, including if you want to visit from Seattle, or Oregon, or anywhere nearby. Comment below, or send me a PM, if you're interested in attending.
Vancouver has enough of a diversity of people interested in the MIRI who can host their own friends that I believe it will make sense to host multiple different MIRIx workshops. Like, I find the MIRI very interesting, but I want to grasp technically what it's about. Another one of my friends is interested in the philosophy of A.I., and yet another friend is a former MIRI intern who will invite a bunch of his friends from the university math department over. So, I'll likely host workshops at different levels of depth, or with different topics.
I was thinking about anthropics after seeing some posts here about it. I read the series of posts on ADT including http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8aw/anthropic_decision_theory_iv_solving_selfish_and/, and EY's posts http://lesswrong.com/lw/17c/outlawing_anthropics_an_updateless_dilemma/, http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/, and http://lesswrong.com/lw/17d/forcing_anthropics_boltzmann_brains/. I had a few questions about those posts.
First, how is average utilitarian defined in a non-circular way? I'm trying to wrap my head around why I don't agree with the conclusions of the first post I linked, and it seems to come down to not understanding average utilitarians.
More specifically, do they define two levels of utility? Or do they exclude themselves from the calculation? I thought it was just a different way of allocating your own utility, but how do you calculate which way will give you the most utility by giving the world a greater average utility, without knowing the answer of your own utility to plug in?
Second, in http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/ EY ended off with
Has he been officially "impressed" yet? Should I read any specific attempts to solve the trilemma? What reading can I do on anthropics to get an idea of the major ideas in the field?
It seems to me that SIA, in the way it's been applied, is obviously correct, and in general I feel like I have very clear intuitions on these kind of problems. I plan on writing up something eventually, after I understand the argument against my point-of-view to argue coherently.
If you can quantify a proto-utility across some set of moral patients (i.e. some thing that is measurable for each thing/person we care about), then you can then call your utility the average of proto-utility over moral patients. For example, you could define your set of moral patients to be the set of humans, and each human's proto-utility to be the amount of money they have, then average by summing the money and dividing by the number of humans.
I don't necessarily endorse that approach, of course.
I think Eliezer says he's still confused about anthropics.
So far as I know, Nick Bostrom's book is the orthodox foremost work in the field. You can read it immediately for free here. Personally, I would guess that absorbing UDT and updateless thinking is the best marginal thing you can do to make progress on anthropics, but that's probably not even a majority opinion on LW, let alone among anthropics scholars.
According to the efficient market hypothesis index funds should be the best way for the average person to gain a return from investment. Now there is a plethora of indices to invest in. How should one find the 'best' one?
Further, only a relatively small part of return generating assets are captured in publically tradeable assets. What about private equity and real estate, huge parts of the economy?
IIRC real estate prices in the US rise about 1% per year inflation adjusted while stock markets rise about 7 % on average. An average person needs a huge loan to invest in real estate and go all in which means zero spread of risk. Real estate is also relatively illiquid not only because of practical reasons but because the return of investment depends on timing of the transaction. You're shit out of luck if you need money while the price of your house is plummeting.
Depends on your risk tolerance. The bigger the index, the lower the risk and the lower the possible returns, generally. Also bigger index funds are usually more liquid. Transaction costs matter quite a lot unless you have a big lump sum to invest, and even then you should consider dollar cost averaging.
There is also real estate taxes just for holding the asset and upkeep expenses too! But to be fair, asset appreciation isn't the only return on real estate, many investment properties are income producing assets. But then again you can just get that exposure from REITS anyway.
That's not true. It's easy to get exposure to real estate through REITs. For example, through my wealthfront.com portfolio, I'm invested in Vanguard's US REIT ETF, VNQ.
I stand corrected.
YRC. I thought you were forgetting to adjust the stock market returns for inflation, so I went to hunt for more accurate numbers, but apparently 1950-2009 S&P500 inflation-adjusted returns (counting not just price rise, but dividends) averaged to 7% per year.
Thanks. If you care about transaction costs you should probably invest in funds that reinvest dividends automatically.
Funds take a fraction of the earnings out, as management fees, and you want the fund that charges the lowest such fees. The early retirement blogs I read seem to agree on Vanguard being the best choice, at least in the US.
I an efficient market the expected value wouldn't be all that different between options, so base it on your risk management preferences.
I'm posting here on behalf of Brent Dill, known here and elsewhere as ialdabaoth-- you may have enjoyed some of his posts. If you read the comments at SSC, you'll recognize him as a contributor of rare honesty and insight. If you'd had the chance to talk with him as much as I have, you'd know he's an awesome guy: clever, resourceful, incisive and deeply moral. Many of you see him as admirable, most as relatable, some as a friend, and more, I hope, as a member of our community.
He could use some help.
Until last Thursday he was gainfully employed as a web developer for a community college in Idaho. Recently, he voluntarily mentioned to his boss that he was concerned that seasonal affective disorder was harming his job performance, who mentioned it to his boss, who suggested in all good faith that Brent should talk to HR to see if they might help through their Employee Assistance Program. In Brent's words: "Instead, HR asked me a lot of pointed questions about when my performance could turn around and whether I wanted to work there, demanded that I come up with all the solutions (after I admitted that I was already out of brainpower and feeling intimidated), and then directed me to turn in my keys and go home, and that HR would call me on Monday to tell me the status of my employment." Now, at the end of the day Tuesday, they still haven't let him know what's happening, but it doesn't look good.
I think we can agree that this is some of the worst horseshit.
On the other hand, he's been wanting to get out of Idaho and into a city with an active rationalist community for a while, so in a sense this is an opportunity. Ways to help: Brent needs, in order of priority: a job, a place to stay, and funds to cover living and moving expenses-- details below. Signal boosts and messages of support are also helpful and appreciated. Ways NOT to help: Patronizing advice/other-optimizing (useful information is of course welcome), variations on 'cool story bro' (the facts here have been corroborated to my satisfaction with hard-to-fake evidence), disrespect in general.
1. Job: Leads and connections would help more than anything else. He's looking to end up, again, in a good-sized city with an active rationalist community. Candidates include the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Columbus, San Diego, maybe DC or Ann Arbor. He has an excessively complete resume here, but, in short: C#/.NET and SQL developer, also computer game development experience, tabletop board/card game design experience, graphic art and user interface experience, and some team leadership / management experience.
2. Crash space: If you are in one of the above cities, do you have/know of a place for a guy and his cat? How much will it cost, and when will it be available? Probably he'll ultimately want a roommate situation, but if you're willing to put him up for a short time that's also useful information.
3. Funds: Brent is not now in immediate danger of going hungry or homeless, but a couple of months will exhaust his savings, and (although it is hard to know in the current state of things) he has been told that the circumstances constitute "cause" sufficient to keep him from drawing unemployment. Moving will almost certainly cost more than he has on hand. There is a possible future in which he runs out of money stranded in Idaho, which would be not good.
If you feel moved to help, he has set up a gofundme account here. (The goal amount is set at his calculated maximum expenses, but any amount at all would help and be greatly appreciated-- he would have preferred not to set a funding goal at all.) Though Brent has pledged to eventually donate double the amount he raises to Effective Altruist causes, we wouldn't like you to confuse contributing here with charitable giving. Rather, you might want to give in order to show your appreciation for his writing, or to express your solidarity in the struggles and stigma around mental illness, or as a gesture of friendship and community, or just to purchase fuzzies. Also, you can make him do stuff on Youtube, you know, if you want.
Thank you so much for your time and kindness. -Elissa Fleming
I also hope someone can help out with writing a better resume, this one is seriously subpar. A single page of achievements based on http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ might be a start: "describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs".
Yes, thanks, this has been discussed elsewhere. (That said I'll repeat the request to avoid disrespect or patronizingly phrased advice.)
Official update: HR "explored every possible option" but "ultimately we have to move forward with your termination process" after "making certain there was unanimous consensus".
Apparently several people in my now ex-office are upset about this.
That narrative is unambiguously a case of illegal discrimination. Idaho law Defines:
and
I am also very confused as to how actual HR drones in an actual HR department wouldn't be familiar with the law and able to create a suitable enough pretext for termination.
I already mentioned the A.D.A. to Ialdabaoth, but fighting a discrimination case probably takes more money than he's looking to raise to move, as well as being psychologically exhausting.
You might be able to get a lawyer to work on a contingency basis - they only get paid if you win.
Either of those reasons is probably enough to convince a rational person. The spirit of Immanuel Genovese still sits on my shoulder screaming "Passive complicity!" at /me/ every time I contemplate accepting an outcome in which it is normal that this kind of treatment happens.
Me too.
The problem is... this is a complex and delicate situation, as all real-life situations are.
There are co-workers who have gone the extra mile to help me and protect me. They didn't do everything they could, because they have families, and they know that if they rock the boat too hard it will be them, not HR, that get thrown overboard.
They aren't rationalists themselves (although I was slowly working on one of them), but they are caring and intelligent people who are themselves struggling to find meaning and stability in a harsh world.
If I could find a way to laser-lance out the demons of stupidity from my workplace, I would do so in an instant. If I could do so in a way that could add net funds to my own cause, I would already be doing so.
But as it is, I know exactly who would suffer for it.
(That doesn't mean that I have committed to a decision yet; I am still weighing necessary evils.)
I hope this is not patronizing advice but rather useful info. To be clear, I am not pressuring you to do anything, I know there are many reasons not to pursue discrimination claims, but I wanted to make sure you are aware of all your options.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a possibly less costly and less adversarial way of pursuing a discrimination claim. They will investigate independently and try to arrange a settlement if they find discrimination. If settlement is impossible, they may even sue on your behalf. They have won a lot of ADA-related claims. I'm pretty sure they will consult with you for free, so the only initial costs are time and emotional energy.
I'm letting you know about what my shoulder angel/demon is shouting, because if I follow his advice I am not optimizing for giving you good advice.
Is Austin on the list? I work at a not-evil tech startup called SchoolAdmin that does school admissions software for a mix of public/private/charter schools. We're not hiring devs right now, but that might possibly change since we have a product manager coming in October. The company is REALLY not evil; we've had three different people come down with mental or physical health issues, and the president's mantra has been 'your job is to get better' in every case.
I could possibly also offer a place to crash, I've got a futon, a study it could be moved to, and already have cats.
I would recommend Austin as well. There are loads of developer jobs here, though I don't know any particular place that is hiring right now. We have an active, close-knit rationalist community that I think is pretty fantastic. Worth consideration.
I was going to make a plug for Boston, but with SAD, someplace with a sunny winter like Austin sounds like it might be nicer.
Woah, well done everyone who donated so far. I made a small contribution. Moreover, to encourage others and increase the chance the pooled donations reach critical mass, I will top up my donation to 1% of whatever's been donated by others, up to at least $100 total from me. I encourage others to pledge similarly if you're also worrying about making a small donation or worrying the campaign won't reach critical mass.
If 102 people all pledge to donate 1% of everyone else's total, the consequences could be interesting. (Of course it's vanishingly unlikely. But pedantic donors might choose to word their pledges carefully.)
I remember seeing this organization on LW but cannot find it again or remember the name: it was a for-profit school-like entity that does a short training program (might have been 6 six week, maybe 3 months, that range), which is free upfront and takes their payment entirely as a percentage of the salary from the job they place you in afterward. If I remember correctly, it is run in the Bay Area and took a small pool each session, with a school-like application process.
Can anyone point me to this?
That sounds like App Academy or one of its competitors.
App Academy was the one I was thinking of specifically, thanks.
It seems like there are a lot of fan-fiction fans here. Fan-fiction fans, I am curious as to what draws you to the fan-fiction of which you are fans. Is part of it that you're fans of other fan-fiction fans? I guess that depending on the cosplay you could even be a fan of fan-fiction fans' fans.
I cannot parse your question. Can you rephrase?
This is a different question, but I've occasionally wondered why some franchises (like Star Trek, Buffy, or Harry Potter) generate a lot of fanfic and others generate much less. Part of this is raw popularity, of course, but quite a bit isn't; the film Avatar (the one with blue aliens, not the one with kung fu) was far more popular than, say, Pirates of the Caribbean, but the latter spawned a thriving fic community and the former has a smattering of stories mostly intended to illustrate critical points.
I don't think there's any single answer, but a franchise's chances seem to be improved if: it's suitable for episodic storytelling (Pirates is a self-contained story, but it's framed like an entry in a serial); it's got strong and ideally archetypal characters (Kirk, McCoy, Spock: action/emotion/reason, easy to write but easy to give depth to); and it's got an open setting with a lot of depth and unexplored bits (few settings outside spec-fic generate a lot of fanfic, and most of those that do are period pieces or procedurals). We're looking at works as toolkits for storytelling, in other words; tight plotting might actually be detrimental.
Star Trek is a special case because back when it was created, there weren't a lot of geekish series one could write fanfic about unless you resorted to books. There was no anime fandom, comic books were aimed at much younger people, and non-anthology TV genre fiction with enough merit to gain a fanbase was rare.
I have yet to find any thoughts on Effective Altruism that do not assume vast amounts of disposable income on the part of the reader. What I am currently trying to determine are things like 'at what point does it make sense to give away some of your income versus the utility of having decent quality of life yourself and insuring against the risk that you end up consuming charitable resources because something happened and you didn't have an emergency fund'. Does anyone know of any posts or similar that tackle the effective utilitarian use of resources when you don't have a lot of resources to begin with?
Putting money into an emergency fund here it can gather interest doesn't mean that you can't donate the same money 10 years from now.
I don't have a link, but I suspect cutting this fine is not very valuable. That last $10k would be a lot to you, but that wouldn't make it more than any other $10k to a charity. Instead, ask how you could come to have a vast amount of disposable income. Including whether it makes sense to spend some money toward that end. You may be able to get a very high rate of return investing in yourself.
to me EA is more about how to answer the question "how should I be charitable?" than "Should I be charitable and to what extent?"
Most of the EA stuff I've seen doesn't appear to me to assume vast amounts of disposable income; merely enough to be willing to give some away. Then EA is about what to do with your charity budget, whether it's large or small.
How you prioritize helping others versus helping yourself (and your family, if any) is a more or less orthogonal question.
(I might suggest, snarkily, that for someone who requires "vast amounts of disposable income" before being willing to give any away no term with "altruism" in it is very appropriate. But that wouldn't be fair because e.g. your intention might be to secure yourself a reasonably comfortable life and then give away every penny you can earn beyond that, or something.)
That's it, basically; it's about how much of a buffer I'm 'allowed' to give myself on 'reasonably comfortable'; I'm supporting myself and full-time student partner and not in permanent full-time employment so my instinct whenever I have a sniff of an excess is to hoard it against a bad month for getting work rather than do anything charitable with it (or it all goes on things we've put off replacing for monetary reasons, like shoes that are still wearable but worn out enough to no longer be waterproof).
I think Lumifer articulated better than I could what I really wanted to know the answer to, and while there may not be a general answer it does mean that I can at least go looking for things to read now my real question is clearer to me. So thanks!
There are two questions here. The first is how you trade off the value you place on your own welfare vs the value you place on the welfare of distant others. And the second is how having extra cash will benefit your mental health, energy levels, free time, etc. and whether by improving those attributes of yours you'll increase the odds of doing more good for the world in the future.
I consider myself a pretty hardcore EA; I gave $20K to charity last year. But this year I'm saving all my money so my earning-to-give startup will have a bigger cash buffer. And I spend about $100/month on random stuff from Amazon that I think will make my life better (a weighted jump rope for exercising with, an acupressure mat for relaxing more effectively, nootropics, Larry Gonick's cartoon guides to the history of the universe so I can relax & educate myself away from my computer, etc.)
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is you don't even have to deal with the first values question if you decide that investing in yourself is a good investment from a long-run EA perspective. Don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish... your mental energy is limited and if you find wet feet at all stressful, it's worth considering replacing your shoes even before personal welfare gets added in to the equation.
In other words, I personally am more optimistic about you spending all of your money on yourself and spending some of your time and energy on a credible plan for significantly increasing your future EA impact than I am about you donating spare cash to charity and not spending any time and energy and such a credible plan. (In general, I suspect that the potential EA impact of time and energy is underrated; this article gives a good explanation.)
Thanks for the link; very helpful and interesting.
I don't think "allowed" is the right way to think about it (and your quotation marks suggest that probably you don't either). If you mean something like "what position do other reasonable people take?" or "what is the range of options that won't make other people who think of themselves as EAs disapprove of me?", I have no information on anyone else's positions but my own is something like this:
Thanks gjm, that's a really helpful comment. (And yes, quotation marks indicate 'this is the word I can think of but it is not necessarily the right word.)
I think points number 1 and 3 are especially relevant for me right now, and I have found talking it through on here to be very helpful in defeating an entirely non-useful lingering sense of guilt for not giving more when I really can't afford to, yet.
How do you think saving (in the standard financial sense) and giving should be balanced?
Um. With careful consideration?
Seriously: I don't have any very strong opinions on this, nor any reason to think that anyone should care what my opinions are. In my own family's case, we save substantially more than we give (very crudely, about 50% of income versus about 10%) but I'm not at all sure that if I thought about it longer and harder I wouldn't conclude that we should be weighting global welfare higher relative to our own financial security.
:-) Don't mean to pick on you, but the impression I get from EAs on LW is that your free cash flow is supposed to go save the world and I got curious about the apparent/potential disconnect from the general meme that people are supposed to save more so as not to be a drag on the society if something happens to them or when they retire...
The idea that your free cash flow should all go to save the world is generally based on a pretty straightforward utilitarian calculation, and it seems pretty clear that the same calculation would put saving lives in poor countries ahead of the small adverse consequences of drawing more on one's own country's social safety net. So I don't think there's much "disconnect" there.
In practice, very few people are quite so heroically altruistic as to reduce themselves to (what locally passes for) poverty so as to give everything to help the global poor. I bet the few who are are already largely neglecting saving; the rest of us, I think, first decide how much we want to give away and then how we want to balance saving and consumption. So a tradeoff between saving and giving, as such, doesn't arise.
For the avoidance of doubt, i very much don't think of myself as any sort of heroic or expert altruist (effective or otherwise). My only role here is Some Guy Who Got Into A Thread About Effective Altruism :-).
Do you have a link? I'm just not sure that it's that obvious that pumping my (hypothetical) money overseas is a utilitarian good if I end up costing my own society more than I give away (which is pretty likely - to use a US example, hypothetical-me might end up costing orders of magnitude more to treat in an emergency room when I get sick because I didn't spend my own money on preventative healthcare).
Obviously the money hypothetical-I save the government isn't automatically going to go to good causes, but by doing my bit to make the society poorer, am I reducing people's overall tendency to have extra money to give away?
I dunno, probably need an economist and a lot of time to properly answer that question...
Nope. Just a lot of handwaving. Sorry.
But, e.g., if you get old and sick and it costs $100k to cure you in the USA, then the utilitarian optimum is probably to let you die and send the money to save 20 or more lives in sub-Saharan Africa. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that you should endorse that policy; but if you bite the bullet that says you should send all your spare money to Oxfam or GiveDirectly or whoever, then I think you should probably also be biting the bullet that says you should be prepared to give up and die if you get sick and curing you would be too expensive.
On the other hand, if you're young and get similarly sick, it might (on the same assumptions) be worth curing you so that you can carry on earning money and pumping it to the desperately needy. In which case it might indeed be worth spending some money first to stop that happening. But I'll hazard a guess that the amount you need to spend to make it rather unlikely that you lose a lot of income because of ill health isn't terribly large.
I suggest that unless you're seriously inclined to really heroic charitable giving, you would do better not to worry about such things, and take decent care of yourself as I'm sure you would rather do, and give generously without impoverishing yourself. Especially at present -- if you don't have a lot of money, the difference between heroism and ordinary giving is going to be pretty small. Once you're in a better situation financially, you can reconsider how much of a hero you want to be.
I am not sure this is the case. Saving and giving are kinda fungible without any immediate impact on you -- that's got to be tempting...
I don't think there is a general answer to the question "How much should I consume?"
Is this a thing we should be asking if someone who is an expert on Effective Altruism and economics and similar could have a go at answering?
You can ask, but why the answer would be anything else other than someone's personal opinion?
It's a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it's a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?
It's a straightforward question about personal values. Do you think it's a good idea to have experts in EA or economics tell you what your values should be?
No, but they might know things like the scale of diminishing returns in terms of spending money on yourself, or at what minimum level of wealth do an acceptable majority of people (in x culture or x country) report being satisfied with their lives?
They might have a personal anecdote about how they earn a million dollars a year and live in a ditch and have never been happier, and they might know the psychological reasoning why some people are happy to do that and some people aren't.
I mean, yes, it's true that their answer is not going to be everybody's. But an attempt to answer the question seems very likely to turn up useful information that could help people make their own decisions.
I have a notion that an FAI will be able to create better friends and lovers for you than actual humans could be. Family would be a more complex case if you value the history as well as the current experience.
I'm not talking about catgirls-- if some difficulties in relationships are part of making relationships better in the long haul, then the FAI will supply difficulties.
If people eventually have relationships with FAI-created humans rather than humans generated by other means, is this a problem?
Depends on what the machine has optimized for. I'm not convinced that many definitions of better friends or lovers are vital optimization goals, or even good ones, in themselves. It's quite easy to imagine a set of relationships that trigger every desirable stimuli trigger an individual enjoys, complete with short-term difficulties if necessary, but leaves the victim trapped in a situation where his or her preferences remain at a local optima or are otherwise Not Correct by some grander standard.
Interaction with external minds and external situations not built toward you seem like very important parts of jostling folk out from such environments. Better optimization goals might do that, but it's not an assumption you can easily take.
I'd argue that non-catgirl created beings are people (tautologically), and while relationships with artificially-produced people is fine itself, there are also some possible ethical issues with creating minds optimized for better relationships for certain people, as well, though they're likely outside the scope of this thread (energy efficiency compared to sorting existing minds, harmful desires, House Elves).
What's a catgirl?
An indistinguishable-from-live sex toy.
With cat-ears.
See also EYs Failed Utopia #4-2
I'm not sure we can extrapolate this currently. If we knew more, thought faster... maybe.
For me this means that one contraint on FAI is that it may not perform changes arbitrarily fast. Too fast for humans to react and adapt. There must be a 'smooth' trajectory. Surely not the abrupt change suggested in Failed Utopia.
I say it's not a problem, but my views are outside the LW mainstream on this.
I thought that was already part of catgirls?
Let's first separate sexual aspects from the need for other companionship. Suppose everyone gets their sexual needs, if any satisfied by catgirls+ (+ for the upgrade which includes relationship problems if necessary). If you have a crush on your coworker (or your sibling, ew!), just add a catgirl copy of them to your harem.
Further suppose that the reproduction aspect is also taken care of.
Now you have a race of essentially asexual humans, as far as human-to-human interactions go.
The question is, does it make sense to have friendbots? What, if anything, is lost when you switch from socializing with meat humans to socializing with simulated ones?
This strikes me as superstimulating. In particular, the more cat girls you have, the more and kinkier cat girls you want.
Not necessarily, Plenty of people are happy with vanilla sex (or without). I suspect that even the kinkiest ones out there also have their limit. If not, let's talk about those who do.
That's because vanilla sex isn't as stimulating. The more superstimulating something is, the more experiencing it causes you to want more of it.
For people who are into one or another variety of kink, or would be if only they knew about it / were prepared to try it. I don't think it's obvious that that's everyone.
That doesn't seem to be the case, see e.g. yummy food.
I think you're confusing "stimulating" and "addictive".
That "explanation" is easily falsified. There are plenty of people who tried kinkier sex, enjoyed it, but reverted back to vanilla. There are plenty of people who tried roller-coasters once or twice but decided it's too much "stimulation".
Different people have different thresholds. If I remember the study correctly, none of the rats that tried directly stimulating their pleasure center ever went back.
Rats != people...
Yes, well it would be unethical to repeat that experiment with people.
Well, there have been experiments on humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center#Human_experiments
People, however, (as shminux said) do try kink all the time. It would not be unethical to do a study on people who are already kinky and see if they get kinkier over time.
Anecdotally, they start doing kink, they either decide it isn't for them and stop, or they do get kinkier for a while - because they're exploring what they like and it makes sense to start at the less extreme end of things.
Then they figure out what they like, which is often a range of things at differing levels of 'kinkiness/extremeness', and do that.
I mean, it's almost trivially obvious that compared to the size of the kink community, there is an almost negligible amount of people doing the human equivalent of directly stimulating their pleasure centres to the exclusion of everything else. They tend to make the news. The moderately kinky majority do not.
It's not self-evident to me that they are separable.
When my heterosexual male friends tell me companionship isn't about sex I ask them how many male companions they've had. Not many, I've gathered from the silence.
Ah, but it's quite likely that they're heteroromantic as well as heterosexual.
Perhaps, but why haven't I come across any homoromantic heterosexuals or heteroromantic homosexuals?
AFAIK people with mismatched romantic and sexual orientations, though very much existent, are quite rare and the -romantic terms are most often used by asexual spectrum people to describe their romantic preferences.
Asexuals with romantic orientations came across my mind too. I can't imagine romantic and sexual orientations as separate, but the stakes aren't high enough for me to commit the typical mind fallacy so I'll keep my mind open to the possibility :)
For hetero males the usual term for male companions is "close friends". I bet the great majority have some.
But go ask some hetero women whether they think sex and companionship are well-separable :-/
Also I get the feeling 21th century Americans have fewer close friends than the historical human norm.
I don't know what the "historical human norm" is and I suspect there is a lot of variation there.
Try reading literature written before the past 50 years and preferably before the 20th century. That will give you an idea.
I am afraid Victorian England is not all that representative of the historical human norm.
I wasn't primarily thinking of Victorian England. Also "before the 20th century" isn't just the 19th century.
In Finnish the connotations of "companion" are more obviously sexual I see, at least in my circles.
It's probably a language issue, in standard English the word "companion" has no sexual overtones.
More to the point, this subthread is explicitly about separating sex from companionship.
You've asked that before.
I don't have any new thoughts on this question, so I'll just quote my answer from there:
This looks to be wireheading lite and if you got there I don't see why you wouldn't make the next step as well -- the FAI will create the entire world for you to enjoy inside your head.
I thought wireheading meant stable high pleasure without content rather than an enjoyable simulated world. What do other people think wireheading means?
Well, technically the term "wireheading" comes from experiments which involved inserting an electrode (a "wire") into a rat's pleasure center and giving the rat a pedal to apply electric current to this wire. So yes, in the narrow sense wireheading is just the direct stimulation of the pleasure center.
However I use "wireheading" in the wide sense as well and there it means, essentially, the focus on deriving pleasure from externally caused but internal experiences and the lack of interest in or concern with the outside world. Wireheading in the wide sense is, basically, purified addiction.
If we're living inside an FAI, "outside world" might be getting a little vague. This might even be true if we're still living in our DNA-based bodies.
Do you think an FAI would let people have access to anything it isn't at least monitoring, and more likely controlling?
Uploads/ems are a bit of a different case.
I don't know, but in such a case I probably would not consider it a FAI.
How? Why does it matter in what substrate the information pattern called you resides in this case? I doubt the meat brain will have any connectibility issues once we have uploads.
I am not an information pattern having, for example, a considerable somatic component :-D
Depends. You could have a robotic somatic component, or a human body grown in a vat.
I don't see much difference between a human body grown in a vat and one grown in a womb.
But, generally speaking, in the context of wireheading the somatic component matters.
It Ain't Necessarily So: Why Much of the Medical Literature Is Wrong
Some of the material will be familiar, but there are examples I hadn't seen before of how really hard it is to be sure you've asked the right question and squeezed out the sources of error in the answer.
What follows is what I consider to be a good parts summary-- if you want more theory, you should read the article.
....
I guessed at a seasonal effect, but Gemini and Libra aren't adjacent signs.
I didn't realize that the false negative effect (not seeing a relationship when there actually is one) is higher than the false positive rate. This might mean that a lot of useful medical tools get eliminated before they'can be explored.
Also (credit given to Seth Roberts), if a minority of people respond very well to a treatment being tested, this is very unlikely to be explored because the experiment is structured to see whether the treatment is good for people in general (actually, people in general in the group being tested). This wasn't in the NEJM piece.
....
::::
An interesting type of information bias is the ecological fallacy. The ecological fallacy is the mistaken belief that population-level exposures can be used to draw conclusions about individual patient risks.[4] A recent example of the ecological fallacy, was a tongue-in-cheek NEJM study by Messerli[19} showing that countries with high chocolate consumption won more Nobel prizes. The problem with country-level data is that countries don't eat chocolate, and countries don't win Nobel prizes. People eat chocolate, and people win Nobel prizes. This study, while amusing to read, did not establish the fundamental point that the individuals who won the Nobel prizes were the ones actually eating the chocolate.[20]
On the other hand, if you want to improve the odds of your children winning a Nobel, maybe you should move to a chocolate-eating country.
.....
Remembering that humans aren't especially compliant is hard.
From reading Guinea Pig Zero: The Journal for Human Research Subjects-- human beings are not necessarily going to comply with onerous food regimes. I expect that most who don't simply don't want to, but the magazine had the argument of not wanting to comply because the someone who's a human research subject is never going to be able to afford treatment based on the results of the research.
An interesting paper. The abstract says:
I was this moment moved to search for the origin of a certain quote, and the process described in that paper seems to apply quite well to the promulgation of wrong citations. Here's a history of the idea of "three stages of truth". Actually, the situation for citations is even worse. The doctors in the example of the paper are observing their own outcomes as well as copying their predecessors' decisions, but someone copying a citation may make no observation of its accuracy.
More generally, memetic propagation.
Ungated version?
Learn to use google scholar
I don't know of one.
We managed to reduce performance on any number of tests to essentially a single number, g, together with a couple more for domain-specific skill. We managed to reduce the huge variation in personalities to five numbers, the OCEAN dimensions. I even recall reading that there is quite some correlation between those five numbers and that they might be reduced to a single one but I can't find the source any more.
Can we construct a whole host of other, similar numbers, like "math skills" and thus measure the impact of education and aging?
Another number I have in mind is, can we construct three numbers general health gh, mental health mh and physical health ph, and measure their correlations? I have the vague observation that medical issues tend to cluster, that is people with mental issues tend to not only exhibit any one of ADHD, depression, OCD and so on, but more than one of them. Similarly I have the impression that people tend to complain of many physical symptoms at once.
I seem to recall that BMI and/or WHR tend to be excellent predictors of physical health. Together with a couple of more measures these predictions can further be improved. The advantage of having a single number would be for research purposes on population health and it is easier to have a single mumber for personal assesment.
Not quite reduce. We managed to develop certain approximations which, albeit crude, work sufficiently well for some purposes. Of course, not all purposes.
I seem to recall they tend not. In particular, BMI is a flawed indicator as it has a pronounced bias for short and tall people.
Which "these predictions" -- what are you forecasting?
And muscular people. What's wrong with WHR?
A high pressure is a good predictor for someone being unhealthy. On the other hand statins that reduce blood pressure don't provide the returns that people hoped for.
Goodhard's law applies very much.
Before dying with a heart attack Seth Roberts had a year where he improvement on the score that's the best predictor for heart attacks, while most people don't improve on the score as they age.
Using metrics like BMI and WHR seems to me very primitive. We should have no problem running a 3D scan of the whole body. I would estimate that obesitey[3D scan + complex algorithm] is a much better metric than obesity[BMI], obseity[WHR] or obesitey[BMI/WHR].
That's to be further improved by not only going for the visible light spectrum but adding infrared to get information about temperature. And you can follow it up by giving the person a west with hundreds of electrodes and measuring the conductance.
The tricoder xprice is also interesting.
As quantified self devices get cheaper it will also be possible to use their data to develop new metrics. A nursing home could decide to give every member a device that tracks heart rate 24/7. After a few years time the can give the data to some university bioinformatics folks who try to get good prediction algorithms.
Math skills can mean multiple things to different people. Some people take it to mean the ability to calculate 34*61 in a short amount of time and without mistakes. Other people take it to mean doing mathematical proofs.
We might even find something more sophisticated than fat percentage. Not all fat people are ill/heading towards illness. Not all thin people are healthy.
Accumulation of fat to vital organs like the liver could be a better predictor. Fatty liver can be diagnosed via ultrasound, which is cheap.
Being fat is a risk even if you get sick for other reasons. Rehabilitation suffers.
Cite?
Fatty liver predicts the risk for cardiovascular events in middle-aged population: a population-based cohort study
Obesity and Inpatient Rehabilitation Outcomes Following Knee Arthroplasty: A Multicenter Study
Yes, we have to try many different metrics and see which ones work best and for what purposes.
A medical issue is a problem if the patient recognises it as one. If a patient suffers from something that is not recognised as medical problem we call it hypochondria. Is there the concept of something we see as medical problem but the patient does not realise as one e.g. because they don't know that their condition is not normal?
Terminology regarding missing symptom awareness depends on what is thought to be the cause. Anosognosia and other agnosias would be used for neurological disorders where self-monitoring is specifically impaired while denial, delusions and hallucinations would be used for psychiatric disorders. Denial could also be a psychiatric symptom concerning a somatic disorder. I'm not sure if other somatic fields than neurology have special terminology.
Not really. For example grief is not recognized as a medical problem, people suffer from it and we don't call it hypochondria.
Hypochondria is excessive worry about having a serious illness.
ETA: I think that whatever we choose to call a medical problem largely depends on our values and mere diversion from the biological norm does not a medical problem make. So the hypothetical patient could also simply disagree with others about what constitutes a medical problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosodiaphoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
I think the standard terminology is "undiagnosed illness".
Since 23andme has been prohibited from giving health-related genetic reports, is there anyone else (outside the FDA's jurisdiction) who provides similar services?
Edit: I have found Promethease, which works with 23andme's raw data. I'm still interested in additional options.
Edit2: This page lists various 23andme competitors, although it was last updated in early 2013. More recent information is appreciated.
You can download your raw SNP-call data from them and run it through a plethora of third-party programs. Won't have the slick interface or the collation of multiple SNPs that affect the same trait but definitely tells you what you want to know about Mendelian diseases and you can sift through the rest.
See http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty for some of the tools.
Thanks a lot!
If you liked Scott Alexander's essay, Meditations on Moloch, you might like this typographic poster-meme I made. It was a minor success on Facebook.
(If you haven't read Scott Alexander's essay, Meditations on Moloch, then you might want to check it out. As Stuart Armstrong said, it's a beautiful, disturbing, poetical look at the future.)
I don't understand... The point of the essay is that one should not anthropomorhize Moloch, and your meme does exactly that.
There is the line "thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent" so I see what you mean. But I think that just means that there's no sane agent to deal with, no law of the universe that says we can appease Moloch in exchange for something.
But anthropomorphizing Moloch, perhaps poetically, is different, and there's plenty of anthropomorphizing Moloch in the essay:
"But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours."
"We will break our back lifting Moloch to Heaven, but unless something changes it will be his victory and not ours."
"In the very near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it is on our side, it can kill Moloch dead."
"Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of Carthage. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war. He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I will grant you power. As long as the offer is open, it will be irresistable. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him."
My frail human mind is more motivated by war on a hated enemy than by abstractly maximizing utility, so I like the idea of frustrating a raging Moloch.
I like the notion of the Superintelligence reading group: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw4/superintelligence_reading_group/. But the topic of AI doesn't really interest me much.
A reading group on some other topic that is more along CFAR's lines than MIRI's would. For example, reading recent studies of cognitive bias would be interesting to me. Discussion on how practically to combat them might evolve from discussing the studies.
Max L.
I would be up for it.
Here are two bookmarklets that have really helped my article-reading workflow. I named the bookmark for #1 "Clean" and #2 "Squirt":
#1 is a nice, simple frontend for the Readability API. Just enter the URL of a page with something you want to read on it, and it extracts the content without any sidebars, ads, or other junk and gives it to you in an easy-to-read format.
#2 is Squirt, a speed-reading application that takes the text of any webpage and displays it to you one word at an adjustable speed. The default is 450wpm I think, but after you make an adjustment, it remembers what speed you want for next time. If you need to read a part more carefully or go back because you missed something, that's easy. Hit the spacebar to pause and it will show the context, then use the left and right arrows to move around. Hit the spacebar again to resume speed reading. Another awesome feature is that it tells you exactly how long it will take to finish if you don't stop, so you can decide if it's worth your time or not.
The two work really well together, as squirt alone will sometimes grab text you don't want. What I do is "Clean" a page by clicking on the bookmarklet, and then sometimes hit "Squirt" to speed read it.
Try it out and let me know what you think!