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Comments (317)
We're considering Meetup.com for the Tel Aviv LW group. (Also, the question was asked here.) It costs money, but we'd pay if it's worthwhile. I note that there are only 5 LessWrong groups at Meetup of which 2-3 are active. I'll appreciate feedback on the usefulness of Meetup.
It's an appealing and easy enough hack that I'll plug my recent LessWrong discussion post Shop for Charity: how to earn proven charities 5% of your Amazon spending in commission. Especially now that Black Friday week has started on Amazon.
On the same topic, Gunnar_Zarncke recently started a LessWrong Financial Effectiveness Repository
That is a neat hack - who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?
This isn't necessarily- if you have to think about using that link as charity while shopping, it could decrease your likelihood of doing other charitable things (which is why you should set up a redirect so you don't have to think about it, and you always use it every time!)
Amazon already does that for you -- if you go to buy something without using that link, it'll ask you if you want to.
Has anyone been prompted to study or read anything thanks to MIRI's new research guide?
This week's writing lesson: If your motivation for writing is almost entirely internal, then you should write what you enjoy writing, not what you think you should write.
(I lost a few days' worth of productivity getting that one knocked into my skull, though hopefully I'm back to snuff.)
Markus Ramikin's Semimonthly Dumb Question time. Since we seem to have both experts on physics and on editing wikipedia:
What do you think of the quality of the current Wikipedia article on heat death? Is it a fair treatment?
I keep seeing intelligent people talk about this concept like it's obviously useful and relevant, and to my layman mind it is, but the article sounds a little like it's basically bunk now, with the opening summary ending this way:
The style, and the way these words are repeated verbatim down the page, makes me suspect the work of a single editor with strong opinions, and so I wonder. Just because of definition problems?
(I'll admit my proximate reason for asking is kinda trivial: the claim sometimes comes up in Madoka fandom that appreciating Kyubey's agenda requires trusting his civilisation's greater understanding of physics, and I wanna say that no, the show isn't making it up, that life ultimately running out of fuel is an idea that we humans have been considering seriously. But if I should mention "heat death" to someone who doesn't know what it is, and they look it up and see that, the first thing they'll say is "well this is disproven and there's nothing to worry about").
The fact that Max Planck is a respected authority can't be easily disproved and he's cited.
On the other hand he did write that more than 100 years ago.
The introductory section doesn't contain any modern physics but 19th century views. If you would gather more modern sources, you might use them to update the article.
There is no reason, other than happy cultural accident, for any given Wikipedia article on a technical topic to be good. Technical subjects I know something about are generally treated very poorly. Wikipedia has no incentives in place for experts to correct things, and for non-experts to shut up.
When did you get this impression? I'm only asking because I'm given to believe that the situation on wikipedia with regards to experts and specialized subjects has improved substantially starting in about 2008 or so(?), at least in the humanities but possibly in other fields.
This was in fact prior to 2008 (my advisor asked me to change something in the Bayesian network article, and I got into a slight edit war with the resident bridge troll who knew a lot less than me, but had more time and whose first reflex was to just blindly undo any edits. These sorts of issues with Wikipedia are very well documented).
The horrible article on confounders is another good example. I brought it up before here, and got the "that's like, your opinion" kind of reply. At least they cite Tyler's paper with me now! Of course, this particular case might be more widespread than just Wikipedia, and might be a general confusion in statistics as a field. I went to a talk last week where someone just got this wrong in their talk (and presumably in their research).
I don't doubt that there are isolated communities within Wikipedia that generate good content. For example, I know there are Wikipedia articles for some areas of mathematics of shockingly high quality. My point is, when this happens it is a sort of happy cultural accident that is happening in spite of, not because of, the Wikipedia editing model.
There has been quite a bit of experimentation online to incentivize experts to talk and non-experts to shut up, recently. I think that's great!
What does your inner Quirrellmort tell you?
Has your internal model of the most competent person you can imagine ever given you an insight you wouldn't have thought of with more traditional methods?
Do you have more than one such useful sub-personality?
Does your main mode of thinking bring anything to the table that your useful mental models of others don't? If so, what?
He mostly tells me to kill annoying people.
No, but I'm working on them. I've found my inner Hufflepuff to be particularly helpful in actually getting things done.
Incidentally, is there a name for the "sub-personality technique?"
'Deliberately induced dissociative identity disorder'?
'Cultivation of tulpas'?
'Acting'?
Internal Family Systems is the analogous therapy technique, I think.
What would Jesus do?
Adopting a hero.
Short Duration Personal Saviour.
Method acting.
This already refers to a similar, but much dicier, technique.
I've often considered producing such a personality, after observing a previous LW discussion about tulpas, but never even got past the stage of which character to use - I don't know who the "most competent person I can imagine" would be.
I unfortunately haven't developed a quirrellmort yet (the concept is on my to-do list though, along with a number of other personifications). I do have two loose internal models though, for very specific tasks.
The first is called "The Alien" or just "Alien". I created it in my mid-teens after reading the last samurai (not the movie), although my use of The Alien is not the same as the book's. The Alien is the voice in my head that says the pointlessly stupid or cruel things (generally about people) for no reason other than being able to. They aren't things I actually believe or feel, so I just tell The Alien to shut up. By doing this, I can create a divide between myself and these thoughts, not feel guilty about them occuring, and more quickly put them out of my mind.
The second I created very recently based off this thread. It is for the prevention of ego depletion when it comes to either starting big tasks or taking care of long lists of little tasks. Rather than think "Ok time to (make myself) do this" I defer the choice to an internal, slightly more rational model of myself that doesn't suffer from decision fatigue. The outcome is very predictable ("Do the goddarn task already"), but does seem to work very well for me. It's still quite new, and I probably don't use it as much as I should.
I have plans to make a number of other internal models to create an internal 'parliment' that can discuss and debate major decisions, or act on their own for specific required benefits. Other models that might be included include a cynic/pessimist (to help me be more pessimistic in my planning), an altruist (to consider if my actions are actually beneficial), a highly motivated being (to help renew my resolve), and some kind of quirrellmort. These are probably very liable to change as I try to implement them.
Many Interacting Worlds: Boffo or Bunk?
From my blogfeed: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-many-interacting-worlds-hypothesis/ , which links to http://www.nature.com/news/a-quantum-world-arising-from-many-ordinary-ones-1.16213 , which links to http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041013 .
Does anyone with a better understanding of Schrodinger's Equation(s) than I know if any of the above is worth paying attention to?
Sure, it's doable. It may even be trivial - one can recast partial time derivatives of a wave function as total time derivatives of a distribution of particles with velocities.
Unfortunately this seems doable an infinite number of ways, and in general probably isn't useful.
It's interesting, but I wouldn't be much concerned with models that "reproduce some generic quantum phoenomena".
Thanks to categorical quantum mechanics, we already know that many finite toy models do that: heck, you can have quantum phoenomena in databases.
This doesn't seem to give a straightforward explanation for whether it could reproduce the expected Bell-type experiments, especially a CHSH experiment, and from a glance I don't see how they'll get that correct without forcing some sort of completely ad-hoc rule for how the universes interact.
I've long been convinced that donating all the income I can is the morally right thing to do. However, so far this has only taken the form of reduced consumption to save for donations down the road. Now that I have a level of savings I feel comfortable with and expect to start making more money next year, I no longer feel I have any excuse; I aim to start donating by the end of this year.
I’m increasingly convinced that existential risk reduction carries the largest expected value; however, I don’t feel like I have a good sense of where my donations would have the greatest impact. From what I have read, I am leaning towards movement building as the best instrumental goal, but I am far from sure. I’ll also mention that at this point I’m a bit skeptical that human ethics can be solved and then programmed into an FAI, but I also may be misunderstanding MIRI’s approach. I would hope that by increasing the focus on the existential risks of AI in elite/academic circles, more researchers could eventually begin pursuing a variety of possibilities for reducing AI risk.
At this point, I am primarily considering donating to FHI, CSER, MIRI or FLI, since they are ER focused. However, I am open to alternatives. What are others’ thoughts? Thanks a lot for the advice.
An upper bound on the loss incured by waiting another year before you donate your savings to an organization is the interest they would have to pay on a loan of your saving's size in that time. If you estimate the chance that you will regret your choice of donation target in a year highly enough, that means waiting may be prudent. Just a thought.
(The cost might be increased by their reduced capacity for planning with the budget provided by you in mind; but with enough people acting like you, the impact of this factor should disappear in the law of large numbers)
Certainly that is an important point to consider. I could always place funds in a donor advised fund for now. However, if an organization that I donated to thought the funds would be best spent later, they could invest the funds. Considering this, my current thinking is that I should donate to an organization if they share the goal of reducing existential risk and I think they would be better at deciding on the best course of action than I would. Considering I am not currently an expert in areas which would prove useful to reducing existential risk, I'm leaning towards donating. Does this seem like a sensible course of action?
An idea I've been toying with in my head, and discussed slightly at LW London yesterday: a sort of Snopes for "has person X professed opinion Y?"
Has Scott Alexander endorsed GamerGate? Did Eric Raymond say that hackers tend to be libertarian (or neoconservative, depending who you ask)? Did Eliezer say the singularity was too close to bother getting a degree?
I'll put further thoughts in replies to this comment.
The answers to questions like this aren't necessarily "yes" or "no". But it could still be valuable to say things like "the source for this seems to be this article from 2004, in which he is quoted as saying ...." Or, "he was quoted as saying this in this article. He encouraged people to read the article, but years later, he said that that line was a misquote."
The fact that I recommend people to read an article in which I'm cited doesn't imply that I believe that the article is 100% factually correct.
In general journalists do simply the positions of the people they quote. Depending on the context I might be okay with a slight alteration of my position in the article as long as the main points I want to make appear in the article. If the quote then gets lifted into another context, I might have a problem.
That's pretty much how TakeOnIt works already.
That seems pretty similar to what I'm envisioning, but transposed. They want to look at positions, and ask "whose opinions on this position are notable?" where notability is based on whether they're likely to have a clue. I'm going for looking at people, and asking "which of this person's positions are notable?" where notability is based on (something like) whether people are talking about it being their position.
That's just the default view. You can click on the name of any "expert" and bring up a nice report where all of their positions are listed and compared with other experts'.
And "notability" is viewed quite generally anyway. As long as the person has something genuinely worthwhile to say, you can add their opinion on all sorts of stuff.
I'm envisioning this as a mediawiki, where a given person will have a page, and that page lists claims about things they have said. Edit wars can hopefully be fixed by having a number of editors who know how to be impartial, and being trigger-happy on locking pages so that only they can edit. The talk page can be used for discussion, and for the person themselves to weigh in.
There are a lot of true claims of the form "person X said thing Y". It would be a mistake to only include false claims, because then a claim which isn't listed may be considered true by default. But including every claim would make it impossible to find the one someone is interested in. I'm not sure what notability guidelines would look like.
I'd be wary of making a thing like that. Even ignoring the EU's bizarre "Right to be forgotten" law, people should be allowed to change their opinion, and such a website would incentivise consistency only. Not truth; consistency.
Are you sure that's what you want?
:My idea version of the wiki would include a history of the person's ideas.
There still might be be problems with people (I'm thinking of Moldbug) whose ideas are hard to parse.
That wouldn't prevent selective quoting, and all the other typical human behaviour which would, still, incentivise consistency.
Mm, good point.
One of the things which inspired this idea was this thread: "okay, yes, it seems that Eliezer might well have said something like that, back in 2001". Eliezer already doesn't get to be forgotten. But if people are attacking him for things he said back in 2001, it seems like an improvement if we make it obvious that he said them back in 2001.
But for other people, I can see how this could be a bad thing to have. I'd like to be able to write "they said this in 2001, but in 2010 they said the opposite" and have people accept "okay, they changed their mind", but that doesn't seem entirely realistic.
I've updated from "probably good idea, unsure how valuable" to "possibly good idea, high variance".
Ideally it would have "he said it", "he did not say it", and "he has since retracted it". As is, you could find where someone originally said something, and have no way of knowing if it has ever been retracted.
What is your intention? If you hope to espouse truth then I doubt it helps. People have lots of opinions - many of them uninformed or guesswork. And such a site has the risk of additionally weighing the prominent voices too much.
But assuming there is a sensible purpose then I think care must be taken to balance against prominence. User pages are prone to become hubs and mouthpieces of prominent people. Same for popular topics.
I think wikipedias approach of mentioning popular backers for claims is a good balance. Maybe this could be realized as an add-on to existing sites like Wikipedia. "What did X say about Wikipediapage Y?"
I'm not hoping to espouse truth in general - I don't think this is a good way to give people correct opinions about, say, neoreaction. I'm hoping to espouse truth about what people actually think, and I'm hoping that this will help to quell bullshit rumours.
So if someone starts a rumour that Eliezer is neoreactionary, someone else could add a section "Eliezer on neoreaction" saying things like: this rumour might be triggered by Eliezer's associations with Mike Anissimov and LW; Eliezer has never publicly endorsed neoreaction; in fact he has publicly disclaimed it in a comment on this article, and hasn't said much else on the subject.
(A lot of this has the implied qualification "as far as the editor knows". I'm not sure how explicit this should be.)
And then anyone who sees the rumour will have an easy way to find out whether or not it's true, instead of googling for "Eliezer Yudkowsky neoreaction" which by then could be a self-citing tumblr-storm, and will not show up anything by Eliezer on neoreaction because he hasn't actually said all that much about it.
There's an unavoidable disconnect between "what people actually think" and "what people report about what they think".
As a matter of good faith, I think people should be taken at their word and deed for what they say they think. Others disagree, and will ascribe all manner of beliefs to a person, regardless of that person's protestations. Eliezer might not say he's neoreactionary, but they can read between the lines. They can probably put together a plausible post-hoc justification for it as well.
If someone's motivated enough to believe Eliezer is a neoreactionary, I don't think your site stops that. I don't think Eliezer getting a "Seriously, Fuck NRx" tattoo stops that. It just gives them a new venue to try and make their case.
There are also people who would believe that Eliezer is a neoreactionary if they were told it, but would also believe that Eliezer is not a neoreactionary if they were told that.
I guess I'm hoping that if this question comes up on a public forum, most people won't really know or care about Eliezer. The narrative in my head is along the lines of: someone says Eliezer is NRx, and someone else looks it up and says, no, Eliezer is not NRx, it says so right here. Then if the first person wants to convince anyone, their arguments become complicated and boring and nobody reads them.
As far as famous/notable people go, skeptics.stackexchange works perfectly well for those questions.
In general however focusing on "he said, she said" is bad. I might argue I wide arrange of positions depending on the context. Sometimes I play devils advocate to make points.
Focusing on actual content instead of focusing on what someone said in a single instance if often better.
I like this idea a lot. I honestly think it would be a useful resource, should it be well researched and accurate.
I assume you're talking about internet figures in the greater LW-memeplex. If so, I think this is a bad idea.
Tidy reasons this may have low-to-moderate value:
Messy reasons this might have negative value:
I'm not intending it to be LW-focused at all (except perhaps by accident of userbase). Other public figures I recall seeing misrepresented include Eric S Raymond, Orson Scott Card and Larry Summers.
I've read enough ESR that when RationalWiki says
I know that the blog post in question suggests that they really did perform a ritual for that purpose, and that the ritual had a significant effect on the mental state of the participants, but ESR does not believe that the ritual was effective in summoning any kind of god. The blog post doesn't make that last part explicit, but if pressed I could find a slashdot comment where he does say so explicitly.
I don't think it's easy to do this.
(The RW line could be considered not-completely-false, because one can summon a god without the god answering. And it might even be honest, if the writer didn't understand where ESR was coming from. But to the extent that people read it and think that ESR believes that Ogun was successfully summoned, that line isn't true.)
I'm also not interested in arguing over whether or not that ritual ever took place. I don't think anyone's particularly interested in that. I think some people are interested in making fun of ESR, and I'm interested in making it as easy as possible to debunk those people when they say things that aren't true. So I don't need to present ESR's arguments, I just want to say "no, you're misrepresenting his conclusions".
The list of misrepresented public figures is the list of public figures.
I am considering deleting all of my comments on Less Wrong (or, for comments I can't delete because they've been replied to, editing them to replace their text with a full stop and retracting them) and then deleting my account. Is there an easier way of doing that than by hand?
(In case you're wondering, that's because thanks to Randall Munroe the probability that any given person I know in meatspace will read my comments on Less Wrong just jumped up by orders of magnitude.)
Why not use your real name and own what you write?
I would own much but not all of what I've written on LW, and selectively deleting only the things I wouldn't own would take infeasibly long.
How badly do you want to delete everything? There might be easier options, but if there aren't I can certainly cook up a mass-deletion script. Just, I don't want to test it on my own account so you'd need to let me access yours.
(Yes, I could make a test account for the purpose. That would be more work.)
EDIT: I got a little way into implementing this before [deleted] bade me stop, thus the spate of retracted comments. Hopefully ve'll change ver mind, as some of those comments were quite interesting; however, this has gotten me thinking. The site has a comment deletion option, but not if you're deleting your account entirely; should it have that? If we don't want people to do use it, but still leave the scripting option open, am I expected not to use that option?
As of now, after both you and lfghjkl suggested me not to delete valuable comments, I'm leaning towards just deleting my account. (I've already removed my location from it as per ChristianKl's suggestion.) If I was in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber I'd delete all comments excepts those with positive karma which I wouldn't mind anybody I know reading, but...
(BTW FWIW I'm a “he”.)
I'm not going to remember that. My memory for people isn't small, but it's mostly taken up by fictional ones.
Use this to find your comments that have negative karma (you do not have that many of those, it will not be that time-consuming to delete them manually) and/or contain certain keywords. Then you can delete them without having to delete everything.
This certainly isn't a safe option for everyone.
?! But your name seems even less tractable to yourself than mine is, and I don't worry about that!
(also, if you take into account the probability that they will link those comments to you, and that they will think badly of you because of it, no?)
I account hop a lot, and also would like to know if anyone knows.
Will you be making a new account that will be even less tied to you, or will you stop posting on LW?
I probably will. I might also create an account under my full name which I will only use for things I'm (100 - epsilon)% sure I wouldn't mind anyone reading.
Do you really think that who you are in meatspace is possible to identify from reading a few LW posts?
I think if you are worried I would simply remove references to your location.
I would also think that it's likely that you overrate the cost of people knowing you participate on LW.
Suppose that identification through writing habits gets a lot cheaper and easier.
The cost might be fairly low among people who are even vaguely reasonable. The risk of attracting a mob is low, but the cost is non-trivial.
The cost very much depends on whether you are employed in a antifragile way or a fragile way.
There's more to life than one's employment-- some mobs also go after their target's relatives.
Also, a fairly high proportion of people get highly distracted and upset by violent threats even if the likelihood of physical attacks has been low so far.
I'm not really aware of that happening as a result of internet disputes.
A high proportion of people also don't draw mobs.
I know one person who did and he has no issue dealing with it.
Given that you are a woman I can understand that it's a more reasonable risk for you. Unfortunately online women get attacked more easily and more nasty than a lot of men.
Still you have chosen to be quite open.
I've chosen to be open because it feels like the right thing for me to do. I have no idea whether I'm taking an excessive risk.
How many of said threats are not bluffs? I mean, I know that some of them aren't, but I can't get myself to alieve it.
So far as I know, these threats are quite common, but I haven't heard of any physical action being taken on them.
If you haven't been on the receiving end of such threats, you may be underestimating the way you'd react to them.
One thing people report is that they get frightened because there are people putting in a notable amount of effort to make them feel bad.
My username is formed by a shortening (though not one I often go by) of my real first name and my real birth year, and I've used it elsewhere, including in my main non-work e-mail address; so anyone who knows my e-mail would at least suspect that this LW account is mine.
(I first picked this username when I was 14 and kept using it everywhere out of habit.)
afaic, 99% of the people you meet in meat space don't read very much, let alone go through archives of anonymous forums. Internet trolls, on the other hand..
The percentage of people in meatspace who would throw an email handle into Google is rather large.
A Google search for his username has his LW account as the third hit (after the two Wikipedia hits).
Google searches aren't ideal for this sort of thing, because your google results are tailored to you personally. Using DuckDuckGo, which shows the same search results to everyone, is probably a bit more reliable for these purposes (although in this case it gets the same results).
Not in my case. I take countermeasures to Google tracking.
Why are you concerned about this?
I've written things about other people without their consent, figuring there would be a negligible chance anybody could guess who they were. But now I think that chance, while still not huge, is no longer that negligible.
(I've also written certain politically incorrect things, but as someone working in a non-humanities field over 4000 miles away from Harvard, and who isn't going to apply for a job in the US any time soon, and likely not anywhere else in the Anglosphere either, I'm not terribly worried about that.)
Could you just delete those things?
It'd be a hell of a lot of work to find all of them.
Searching Google for your username leads to a Wikipedia account with fairly detailed information which should be easily identifiable to people who know you personally, so if someone suspected your identity they could probably easily verify it.
Keep in mind that you can delete posts from LW, but you can't delete things from internet archives.
I'm mostly worried about people stumbling upon LW e.g. from the title text of that comic, starting browsing the site, reading my comments, and recognizing my username from elsewhere. Granted, someone motivated to doxx me enough to overcome trivial inconveniences could still do so, but I don't think that's likely to happen enough for me to worry about it.
At a guess, I'd say that the chances of there being:
...is too low to motivate precipitous action. XKCD's pretty popular, but it's not so popular that I'd expect this to lead to a very big spike in long-term readership; at most you might want to remove your location tag (which I see you've already done) and maybe lurk for a while.
The easiest solution is to just delete your current account and start a new one. None of your meatspace friends could then know which posts from [deleted] was from you or even that any of them came from you in the first place (unless they are an LW admin, but then I don't think you should be worried about them knowing you post here).
This solution also has the benefit of not removing valuable comments in old threads (which looking at your karma I assume there are many of).
You can still tell who wrote such comments by following the permalink and looking at the title of the page.
Wow, you're right. Someone should probably fix that.
At least deleting your account will make it very hard to track down any of your old posts unless they already know which comments to look for, so if they aren't already aware of LW you'd probably be safe.
You could try changing your username. I am not sure whether it would change the username that appears on all your past comments, but I suspect it would. You could email and ask.
I have been convinced that deleting my comments would be overkill, so I'm going to just delete my account, which will anonymize my comments, and hope that the permalink page title bug will be fixed.
I might come back here with a different username later.
Thanks to Baughn for their offered help.
Have a nice day.
Suddenly, I know the relative sizes of the planets!
HT Andrew Gelman.
ETA: Pluto isn't in the picture, but it would be a coriander seed, half the diameter of Mercury. For the Sun, imagine a spherical elephant.
That's either one huge grapefruit...or one tiny watermelon.
The radius of the sun is only about ten times the radius of jupiter. I feel like a spherical elephant has considerably more than ten times the radius of a watermelon.
...is what I was about to say until I did research, and apparently it's pretty accurate. A watermelon can exceed 60cm diameter, and wolfram alpha gives an elephant's length between 5.4 and 7.5 metres.
I thought this article about coaching in pickup techniques kind of misses the point:
I Took A Class on How to Pick Up Women—But I Learned More About Male Anxiety
http://www.alternet.org/culture/i-took-class-how-pick-women-i-learned-more-about-male-anxiety
I posted in response:
BTW, in case someone brings up the P-word, I'd like to know how seeing a prostitute will help a young man develop the skills he needs to get into sexual relationships through dating - because I just don't see the connection.
More along these lines by Dr. Helen Smith, the wife of blogger Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit:
Geeks on Strike?
http://pjmedia.com/drhelen/2014/11/20/geeks-on-strike/
She references Vox Day's observations about how many young men these days find themselves alienated from young women, hence their willingness not to pull their punches when female social justice warriors start to mess with their gaming activities. What can these young women really do to these guys to punish them - withhold sex? They've already done that. Rejections have consequences.
Gamers aren't "pulling their punches" online because SJW don't pull their punches either. It's all random Internet fun anyway until people actually get doxxed (or 'swatted', or worse).
I believe that it is a factor, it is far from being the only factor, probably not even the most important one. But it points in an interesting direction.
Okay, some political stuff here, because the topic is inherently political, and I even want to go one step more meta, which is deeper in politics:
Feminists have been complaining for a long time about traditional power structures in our society. Which is a legitimate complaint in my opinion, but I disagree with their choice of the word "patriarchy", because it has the unfortunate connotation that the traditional power structures are merely about something that (all? most? some?) men do to women, and so it makes us blind about things that some women do to men to maintain the traditional power structures. Suggesting that women as a group even have some kind of social power probably already is a heresy.
The list of the techniques women are traditionally allowed to use against men is here. They are mostly ad-homined arguments that a woman (for more powerful impact: a group of young women; but also their male defenders) can use against a man who tries to step out of the line.
"You are bitter!" "You hate women!" Because everyone is already primed to see men as dangerous and hateful. "You are afraid!" "Man up!" When convenient, the stereotypes of masculinity become a useful tool to shame men. "You are immature!" Grow up!" Again a reminder of failing the traditional role. "Stop whining!" "Your fragile male ego!" People have less empathy towards men, so remind them to not expect any. "You just can't get laid!" "You probably have a small penis!" Even this kind of argument is relatively accepted against men. It doesn't prove anything, it just suggests that the man is somehow defective, therefore low-status, therefore his opinions don't matter.
Each of these critiques makes more or less sense separately, but when we take them together, it becomes apparent that as a set they can be used in any situation. A man can be shamed for following his traditional gender role and for deviating from it. Maybe even both at the same time. Neither power nor weakness is acceptable. Perhaps, as a rule of thumb, a man should follow all his traditional obligations (get a job, make a lot of money, move all the heavy objects) but should not expect any traditional advantages (because that would be sexist). Even having a hobby is suspicious, unless the man can explain how the hobby will help him make more money in the future. In our culture, men have instrumental value; only women have terminal value. (Unless the man is really high-status, in which case different rules apply.)
So, in a way, if feminists complain about the traditional gender roles, they should celebrate gamers as allies, because those break the male stereotypes, and they do it on their own, no education or propaganda or change of laws necessary. But of course there is a difference between being a feminist in a sense "trying to change the traditional power structures (patriarchy)" and in a sense "cheering for the 'team women'". It's situations like this when the difference becomes visible; when weakening "patriarchy" also removes some systemic power from the "team women".
Equality comes at a price. The price is that you don't have servants anymore. If you complain about it, you probably didn't want equality in the near mode, only as a far-mode slogan.
From a proper point of view, gamers' resistance towards patriarchal shaming technuiques is an important victory of feminism. However, I would not be surprised if most self-identified feminists don't get it.
And what about women in gaming? Or gays, or asexuals? (Or course the official party line is that they don't exist.) All these people are now considered equal and respected members of the society... which includes the right to not give a fuck about what some young ladies are telling them to do.
Again, the true equality works both ways.
People underestimate the effect of the worst behaved people on their own side.
This being said, unless I've missed something (quite possible), feminists don't have a comparable history of doxing and violent threats.
Feminists do have a long history of doxing. My impression is that they don't make the same level of violent threats, but they certainly aren't rare. For example, Chloe Madeley.
Details about the history of doxxing?
You mean feminists in general, or just recent events?
EDIT: By the way, in the second link, the victim is a feminist, too.
Yeah, and you could throw in Erin Pizzey having been threatened for saying that a bit more than half the women in her domestic violence shelter were violent themselves.
Still, the list so far isn't comparable to the number of women who've been threatened just over GamerGate.
I'm at a huge risk of motivated thinking here, but I want to make a few points:
1) Not all forms of "threatening" are equal. For example killing someone's dog is much worse than sending someone a tweet "i hope you die". If we put these things in the same category, by such metric the latest tumblr debate may seem more violent than WW2. Also, the threats of blacklisting in an industry seem to me less serious, but also more credible than the threats of physical violence.
2) We have selective reporting here, often without verification. Journalists have a natural advantage at presenting their points of view in journals. Also, one side makes harrassment their central topic (and sometimes a source of income), while for the other side complaining about being harrassed is tangential to their goals. I haven't examimed the evidence, but seems to me there are almost no cases, on either side, where the threat is (a) documented, and (b) credibly linked to the opposing side, as opposed to a random troll, or some other unrelated conflict.
3) Lest we forget the parallel NotYourShield campaign, threats against gamers and game developers are technically also threats against women, and there are quite possibly more women in gamergate than in gaming journalism. Women are women even when they are not marching under the banner of feminism.
Yeah, I'd say motivated thinking.
Not all forms of threatening are equal, but "I'm having extremely violent fantasies about you and I know where you (and your children) live" isn't a tiny thing, and it goes rather beyond "I hope you die". (Is there a name for the rhetorical trick of choosing, not just a non-central example, but a minimized non-central example?)
Part of the point is that women are sometimes the target of harassment campaigns online. Some of the attackers may have an interest in the ostensible issue, some may be pure trolls. It seems as though a lot of the attackers are male.
I doubt that there are a number of women who left their homes because of nothing in particular.
When I mentioned above that people underestimate the effect of the worst people on their own side, I meant that just as I tend to underestimate the way feminism can add up, I think you're underestimating the number and forcefulness of the vicious people on your side.
I'm still incredibly angry at the way Kathy Sierra was driven out of public life.
<this is a political comment, usual mindkill caveats apply>
Here is a problem with an interest group:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/03/05/3362801/nra-ivory-elephants-guns/
It's easy to hate the NRA if you come from certain parts. But the NRA is not very unusual in this respect. Interest groups, by their nature are unable to have the overview to know when to throw their cause under the bus for the "greater good." This is a general problem for all interest groups, regardless of whether their cause is noble or not.
The real question is how do we fight Moloch by a different method than competing interest groups (which will follow the usual "behavior physics" of interest groups, which feminism is not exempt from, regardless of how noble its goal is).
</political comment>
I don't see a problem. Or, rather, I see a problem with the blanket prohibition on the sale of <100-year-old ivory as it looks unreasonable to me.
Do you see a problem with the dwindling elephant population too? If so, are you able to judge which is the greater problem? If so, what is your judgement?
Yes, of course.
You are engaging in a classic false dilemma fallacy.
Do tell, how the prohibition on selling 50-year-old ivory helps the dwindling elephant population?
Lots of existing ivory becomes illegal, leading to a local drop in value, leading to lots of US ivory being traded to countries where it isn't illegal. Right?
So that first of all that sets up excellent opportunities for police sting operations. But it also drives down prices (at least for a few years), making elephant poaching less lucrative.
In parallel to that, the US is setting an example. A lot of countries copy US criminal laws rather than thinking them up from scratch (the War on Drugs being the textbook example), and since almost everyone loves elephants and the ivory trade is a huge and growing threat to them, there'll be a particularly low threshold to copying this one.
Sigh. Wrong. Why don't you at least look at the original link to the article about the ban? Notably, it says (emphasis mine):
I neither said nor meant it was going to be exported legally. It'll be black market trade, but it'll still respond to market forces, just like drug trafficking does.
Like Lumifer, I think the NRA is doing the right thing here - even strictly from a conservationist perspective. If we all stopped eating eggs, would there be more chickens? Of course not. When I mentioned similar logic here at least the vegetarians were honest that they wanted to drastically reduce the chicken population. But if using fewer chicken products leads to fewer chickens, how will using fewer elephant products lead to more elephants? And note that these two contradictory answers are frequently pushed by the very same people.
If you really wanted to preserve elephant populations, you'd make it easier for people to farm them for their ivory, which would go, in part, into making gun handles. But because the NRA are culturally alien to you, you'd like to throw their cause under the bus "for the greater good," for the very slightest reason.
So yeah, we all want causes we don't care about to shut up and get out of our way. It's a good thing that we can't make them. After all, NRA members aren't just gun enthusiasts, they are also citizens in every other way. If NRA policy interferes too much with (say) economic wellbeing in the eyes of its members, then the NRA will lose force as an interest group.
I think maybe you do not realize how poor the institutions are here. There isn't some actor with long term overview maximizing ivory profits (and incidentally ensuring elephants continue as a species). Commercial overexploitation of resources in the biosphere is extremely common, and requires coordination to solve properly (see for example cod stocks collapse in the Atlantic for one example historically important for Europe). Collapse (the book) gave some examples where coordinating a long term exploitation of the environment was solved properly and examples where it wasn't.
But my point isn't about the NRA, or environmentalists specifically, I just used them as an example. My point is about a general problem with interest group ecosystems. If an interest group advocates a bridge to nowhere it is not going to lose force, it is doing precisely what it is meant to do.
I would like to add here that I have been very very careful not to discuss my actual politics. Most of your assumptions about my culture or my politics are false. (So I guess I passed the ideological Turing test?)
Back when I had long hair, I was once accosted by a dude trolling for Obama votes who said: "you have long hair, you must be an Obama supporter!" What you are doing is basically this. Filling a hole with a pigeon is going to be very frustrating for you in this case.
Not necessarily. An effective solution to the tragedy of the commons is property rights. While at the moment there may not be an actor with a long-term commercial interest in elephants, this kind of legislation is making sure that there never will be one.
Property rights do not magically enforce themselves, you need a government to enforce it for you. Everyone agreeing to a government's monopoly on force is yet another coordination problem. This is not so easy in places where elephant poaching happens. That aside, Collapse had examples where property rights were not sufficient in themselves. You should read it, I enjoyed it a lot!
Again, not necessarily. A private security force works fine -- especially in places where the government isn't... particularly effective. Such governments aren't all that good at coordination, either, by the way.
But the argument boiled down to its core is just incentives. It's much better to have incentives for private people to have herds of elephants roam on their ranches than depend on government bureaucrats who, frankly, don't care that much.
An international ban on ivory trading by itself wont' save the elephants -- the locals will just hunt them down for meat and because they destroy crops.
I think you just chose a bad example. Your underlying point that special-interest groups have tunnel vision and are constitutionally incapable of deviating from their charter is certainly valid.
I don't understand what this is about anymore (I think you just like to argue?)
(a) There aren't "private security forces" replacing governments making Africa a kind of modern day Snowcrash universe. Governments are mostly weak and corrupt, and there are warlords running around killing folks and each other, and taking their loot.
(b) The way the NRA makes its decisions has nothing to do with the political situation in Africa, the state of elephant herds in Africa, the long term fate of the African elephant species, or anything like that. They consult relevant gun makers, and decide based on that. This is contrary to the original claim that the NRA was making the correct decision even from a conservational point of view. They aren't in this case, but if we did the math and found out they did, it would certainly be by accident, because they surely didn't do the math.
(c) Do you actually know how many elephants are killed in Africa for non-ivory reasons?
Yeah, that article has a weirdly dismissive tone. It reads like pickup is all about helping these 'painfully shy', inexperienced guys boost their self-confidence, and there's nothing more to it than that. But ISTM that folks who sign up for a random intro bootcamp are quite likely to be a lot shier and more intraverted than average. There's quite a bit of innovative stuff in pickup, but people probably come across it on internet forums, or perhaps through proprietary guides/videos or in the most 'elite', costly workshops/bootcamps.
I've noticed a similar lack of understanding in other men who had their sexual debuts at developmentally appropriate ages. It becomes a kind of cognitive barrier separating sexually experienced men from the inexperienced ones.
I also notice a lack of curiosity about this phenomenon in professional sex researchers. I have three different college textbooks of the Human Sexuality 101 sort, and none of them has a section on adult virgins, much less adult male virgins.
That's the thing that bugs me the most. Why can't we just have quality research on the subject?
Another post I made to this AlterNet piece:
I think most pickup coaches would object to this point of view, and it might make some of them quite unhappy. PUAs teach strategies that they believe will increase your attractiveness to the opposite sex. But it's silly to see attraction as a "weakness" or "vulnerability". Many people (women included, of course) want to feel attracted in the first place, especially to someone with other good qualities - they just don't get to make that choice most of the time! That's the one sense in which 'reduced agency' could be said to be relevant - but it doesn't negate the fact that agency really is quite heavily involved in any kind of pickup.
There are a lot of quick success schemes sold with the same marketing that PUA products are sold. The fact that people are willing to pay money for a dream of quick success doesn't mean that they can deliver on the promise.
PUA is a quite complex topic.
Male anxiety is an issue, and I don't think that an expensive 3 to 4 day bootcamp normally fixes it. Neither does watching a 24 DVD set sold for 499$.
If I could either send a 18 year old to a tantra seminar or to a PUA seminar, I'm not sure that the PUA seminar is the one that gives the higher return as far as improving his success with the opposite sex.
The fact that you believe that might be the problem and illustrate lack of ability of dealing with women.
Irrationality is an issue, and I don't think that reading the Sequences normally fixes it. Neither does a 3-day rationality seminar for $3900.
Still, for some people it's a good option.
I would expect different things working for different people.
The interesting thing is that the tantra seminar would not motivate people to write similar articles. Even if there is also no guarantee that it is something more than just someone's strategy to make money quickly.
Tantra isn't really new-age exotic sex practices.
Wikipedia has little influence on what's practiced in a seminar with the headline tantra. At the same time of course it's not simply about the stereotype it has.
One element of tantra is for example strong eye contact. You can go to a PUA seminar and hear a lecture by a guy about holding eye contact. That often leads to guys going out and being uncalibrated. If you on the other hand learn eye contact in a tantra seminar the resulting behavior is likely much better calibrated.
I feel we are using the word "tantra" in entirely different meanings.
I speak about the kind of event that's titled a tantra seminar and take my knowledge of what happens there from people I meet in meatspace who took part in such events.
Well, what happens there?
That's a fair demand, but I don't want to go in too much detail on that point. There a lot of inferential distance in talking about New Age practices on LW and Tantra isn't a subject I studied deeply enough to be confident that I fully understand it's theory base.
I wouldn't be too much concerned. The article is a lot less dismissive of PUA than what is usually put forward, even on this site. Plus, it's not that La Ruina isn't another little Mystery clone.
Based on what I know of my culture (US or other European countries might differ), not even 17 yo boys who do get girls know better. They usually get them because of a combination of some better looks, wider social circle, inferior opinions on women.
Those who apply for a PUA seminar are the ones who are trying to optimize their understanding of females, letting aside the fact that you cannot will yourself into being non-anxious. My opinion is that if they could be at ease around the opposite sex, they would wind up with a better sexual life than their "natural" peers.
Seeing sex as less "magical" could help reduce tension with trying to get sex.
(By the way, the whole article seems to me like: "Look, some people have less social skills -- let's make fun of them! Oh, they are trying to overcome their weakness -- wow, that's even funnier!" The elephant in the room is that in our culture it is taboo to express empathy towards men and boys.)
Really? I do that all the time and literally nobody has ever tried to stop me or punish me for it. Do your actual personal experiences differ?
FWIW, there are contexts in which I've seen this criticized.
Usually, the context is that someone has started a discussion about some situation in which men or boys have caused suffering or otherwise behaved badly, and someone else has responded by expressing empathy towards the men or boys in question, and the person who started the discussion has criticized the attempt to switch the conversation focus from empathy towards the objects of the behavior, to empathy for the agents of it. (The jargon term for this is "derailing" in many contexts.)
Of course, this is only a subset of the general category of expressing empathy towards men and boys, but it's one that gets a lot of attention.
This is hardly unique to situations involving gender.
For instance, sometimes this sort of thing happens —
That's derailing: Person A changing the subject from "A hurt B, and B wants it fixed" to "A's life is so hard and people are being so harsh to A" in order to avoid talking about fixing the situation for B, the injured party.
Let's pick an example to make things more concrete. Person B owns a field, and Person A runs trains on a nearby railroad that throw dangerous sparks onto the field. Person B demands that Person A either stop the trains from passing near his property, or else fit them with a mechanism that will prevent sparks. Now Person A complains that the trains are used by low-income commuters who will be forced to pay unreasonably high prices in order to cover these additional costs. Is Person A "derailing the conversation", or is this a valid point? Extra credit: What might influence your answer to this question?
Yes, I agree that it's not unique to situations involving gender.
Dating and sex are related skills. I assume we agree a prostitute could give a good intro to sex. So why shouldn't she be a good dating coach too? The young man won't need to fear rejection from her, nor fear being talked about later, so they can role-play in emotional safety. She can still tell him what's going to cause rejection when he's not a customer, and what's going to work better. Best of all, she can lead all the way, past exchanging numbers and kissing all the way to sex etiquette.
Of course there's the drawback of possible shame over having visited a prostitute - but virginity can be a source of shame too. So I figure that for the median male adult virgin, seeing a prostitute would be net plus, especially if he manages to specifically ask for dating and first time sex roleplay.
(Posted using the anonymous community account; username and password are
Usernameandpassword)I hear that prostitutes who do that charge a lot -- more than typical 17-year-olds can easily afford, and low-end prostitutes basically just let you masturbate with their bodies.
Prostutites don't need a statutory rape charge any more than anybody else, so obviously I'm not talking about 17-year-olds. I mean guys of legal age.
Concerning economics, it's hard to compare. Here in Germany, prostitution is legal, the market is efficient, and there are lots of sex workers competent and professional enough to pull off what I described, available for 100-200 euros per hour. I imagine that in places where prostitution is illegal, the situation would be very different - especially if due to the threat of prosecution, potential customers can't simply email their needs and budget to a couple of providers to get a good offer...
(posted by another user using this account)
I'm not sure whether this is really a neutral coaching situation. For really independent sex-workers maybe. But I hear that many still work for a pimp, are highly motivated the extract high amounts from the yongster and wouldn't necessarily provide a neutral emotionally safe environment. This is from the source with significant (but possibly somewhat out-dated) work-experience in this field.
A song about self-awareness:
The year is 1800. You want to reduce existential-risk. What do you do?
Are you a time-traveler or a native?
A native (but optionally a very insightful and visionary native).
EDIT: I said native, but all that I really want to avoid is an answer like "I would use all my detailed 21-st century scientific knowledge to do something that a native couldn't possibly do".
Well, being concerned about existential risk in 1800 probably means you were very much impressed by Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population (published in 1798) and were focused on population issues.
Of course, if you were a proper Christian you wouldn't worry too much about X-risk anyway -- first, it's God's will, and second, God already promised an end to this whole life: the Judgement Day.
Still true today.
Sure, but the percentage of fully believing Christians was much higher in 1800.
How about "I would use all my detailed 21-st century scientific knowledge to be concerned about something that a native couldn't possibly be concerned about"?
Sure, if it leads to an interesting point.
For example, if you were trying to avoid suffering: "I would kill 12 year old Hitler" isn't very interesting, but "I would do BLAH to improve European relations" or "There's nothing I could do" are interesting.
Did you mean 1800 or 1900?
I didn't mean that example to refer to original question; I just wanted to demonstrate a vague but somewhat intuitive difference between "fair" and "unfair" use of future knowledge.
Vaccination for everyone! Aqueduct (AND toilets) for everyone!
Make good publicity for Mr. Volta's new chemical battery, and convince everyone of how ugly the world is when tainted by coal smoke. This has a dual purpose: ease the way for early development of electric cars, thus fighting global warming, and delay Western meddling in the Middle East for oil extraction purposes, which contributed largely to the mess the region is now.
Find Mr. Heinrich Marx at his law practice in Trier and quietly castrate him.
Popularize DIY production of blue cheese and thus increase the chances that someone playing with Penicillium fungi will get creative.
Recruit would-be Temperance Leagues and redirect their strength to strangle the tobacco industry in its crib.
Edited to add: only massive distribution of aqueducts and toilets would be obvious to a true native of 1800.
Uranium was discovered in 1789 in Saxony. What's the minimal technological path from there to reasonably-safe reactors? I would imagine it involves not only the obvious physics, but photography (to detect radiation) and significant advances in metallurgy (to refine ores) ....
Batteries still mean that you need electricity and that means burning coal.
Start an insurance company with a focus on risk mitigation.
(Amass resources, collect information, you get the idea.)
I give Napoleon a hand, on the basis that he was one of the more scientifically-minded world leaders, and the theory that a strong France makes our future more multipolar. For the same reason I try to spread the notion of the limited-liability corporation in the islamic world (no idea how to do that though). I might try to convince nations of the (AIUI genuine) non-profitability of colonialism.
Development aid is really hard.
A project that works well in one place or for a little while may not scale. Focus on administrative costs may make charities less competent.
Nonetheless, some useful help does happen, it's just important to not chase after the Big Ideas.
One of the charities mentioned in the article, Deworm the World, is actually a Givewell top charity, due to "the strong evidence for deworming having lasting impact on childhood development". The article, on the other hand, claims that the evidence is weak, citing three studies in the British Medical Journal, which Givewell doesn't appear to mention in their review of the effectiveness of deworming.
Givewell's review of deworming
Might be worth looking into more.
Something that should have occurred to me-- the deworming experiment was done in the late 90s, which means that the effect on lifetime income is an estimate.
It seems that, in order to accomplish anything, one needs some combination of conscientiousness, charisma, and/or money*. It seems that each of the three can strengthen the others:
If someone lacks all of these resources severely enough, is there any way to correct that? It rather seems like the answer is "no, but most people can't imagine someone with that much of a deficit in all three at the same time".
* Yes, I could have gone for alliteration with "cash", "credit", or "capital". Money seems different enough that the dissonance seemed like a better idea at the time.
This is not exactly a reply to your question, but I think your question is fits this dynamic:
Miller's Iron Law of Iniquity
In principle, there is an evolutionary trade-off between any two positive traits. But in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait.
http://edge.org/response-detail/11314
All of those things can be mitigated by other traits. Connections can be useful even without very much charisma. Cleverness can lead to pretty good earning potential even with relatively little conscientiousness, and may help one think of ways to improve charisma and conscientiousness. At any given level of earning potential, being cheap ("frugal" would be a better word but begins with the wrong letter) eases the transition from gradually sliding into debt to gradually accumulating savings. Other aspects of character besides conscientiousness make a difference -- e.g., a reputation for honesty may be helpful.
Given a bad enough deficit in everything that matters, it's certainly possible to be so screwed that recovery is unlikely. It's also possible to overestimate those deficits and the resulting screwage, e.g. on account of depression. There's probably a nasty positive feedback loop where doing so makes getting unscrewed harder.
Don't start with the resources you lack. Start with the resources you have and then look how can you utilize them to achieve your aims.
... bearing in mind that "ability to discover new resources" is itself a resource, too.
TLDR: Requesting articles/papers/books that feature detailed/explicit "how-to" sections for bio-feedback/visualization/mental training for improving performance (mostly mental, but perhaps cognitive as well)
Years ago I saw an interview with Michael Phelps' (Olympic swimmer) coach in which he claims that most Olympic-finalist caliber swimmers have nearly indistinguishable physical capabilities, Phelps' ability to focus and visualize success is what set him apart.
I also saw a program about free divers (staying underwater for minutes) who slow their heart-rates through meditation.
I also read that elite military units visualize to remain calm and carry out complex tasks despite incredible stress (for instance, bomb squad members with heart rates lower in the presence of a bomb than on an average afternoon at the base). Unfortunately I didn't record the sources of these various pieces, so I can't link to them
Has anyone read any specific how-to books on the topic, i.e., here are step-by-step instructions for visualizations, lowering heart rate, mental clarity, etc?
The book On Combat by Dave Grossman discusses some of these things. I haven't read it yet, but have read reviews and listened to a podcast by two people I consider highly evidence-based and reputable (here). In particular, the book discusses a method of physiologically lowering your heart rate he calls "Combat Breathing". This entails 4 phases, each for the durations of a count of 4 (no unit specified, I do approx 4 seconds):
Breathe in
Hold in
Breathe out
Hold out
It sounds very simple, but I have heard multiple recommendations of it from both the armed-forces and medical worlds. I can also add a data point confirming it works well for me (mostly only for reducing heart rate to below 100, not all the way down to resting rate).
The first step of how to of biofeedback means getting a biofeedback device.
Direct heart rate is no good goal. Doing biofeedback on heart rate variance is better.
I'm not sure whether you want a bomb squad to have a heart rate that's lower than normal.
Step-by-step instructions are not how you achieve the kind of results of Phelps or the bomb squat. Both are done through the guidance of coaches.
To the extend that the main way I meditate has steps it has three: 1. Listen to the silence 2. Be still 3. Close your eyes.
Among those (3) is obvious in meaning. (1) takes getting used to and is probably not accessible by mere reading. Understanding the meaning of (2) takes months.
Thanks for your reply.
Can you point me to any articles/sites about biofeedback devices? Have you done biofeedback yourself?
Perhaps you're right about the bomb squad heart rate, maybe a moderately raised rate would be a proxy for optimal/peak arousal levels. However, I'd guess that a little too much calm is better than overwhelming panic, which would probably be a more typical reaction to approaching a bomb that's about to explode.
I agree that a coach would be better, but a book is a more practical option at the moment.
(this may sound snarky, but isn't) Did you learn meditation from a teacher, or from a step-by-step book? The steps you give seem are simple (not easy), and a good starting point. I think a meditation coach would help you flesh these out, but those kinds of precise instruction are what I'm looking for.
Yes, and people at LW are in generally very bad at simple. People here have the skills for dealing with complex intellectual subjects.
The problem with "be still" is that it leaves you with question like: "4 minutes in the meditation I feel the desire to adjust my position, what do I do?" It doesn't give you a easy criteria to decide when moving to change your position violates "be still" and when it doesn't.
Doing biofeedback is still on my todo list.
My device knowledge might be 1-2 years out of date. Before that point the situation was that emWave2 and wilddivine were the good non-EGG based solutions. Good EGG based solutions are more expensive. See also a QS-forum article on neurofeedback. Even through the QS forum is very low in terms of posts, posting a question there on topics like this is still a good idea (Bias disclosure: I'm a mod at the QS-Forum).
Among those two emWave2 basically only goes over heart rate variance (HRV) and WildDevine also measures skin conductance level (SCL) with is a proxy for the amount that you sweat. WildDevine also has a patent for doing biofeedback with HRV + SCL. emWave2 is with 149$ at the moment AFAIK the cheapest choice for a good device that comes with a good explanation of how to do training with it and that you can just use as is.
I started with learning meditation from a book by Aikido master Koichi Tohei ten years ago. I have roughly three years of in person training. I also have NLP/Hypnosis training since that time. If I would switch out an emotional response of the bomb swat, then hypnosis is probably the tool of choice. With biofeedback I would see no reason for overcompensation. Switching out an emotional response via hypnosis on the other hand can lead to such effects. Hearing an alarm of an ambulance might also lower my heart rate ;)
There are also safety issues. I don't like the idea of people messing themselves up and are faced with experiences that they can't handle because they don't have proper supervision.
Stuart Russell contributes a response to the Edge.org article from earlier this month.
Finally some common sense. I was seriously disappointed in statements made by people I usually admire (Pinker, Schremer). It just shows how much we still have to go in communicating AI risk to the general public when even the smartest intellectuals dismiss this idea before any rational analysis.
I'm really looking forward to Elon Musk's comment.
The header for this page says "You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet.". It's inaccurate because Discussion doesn't include the posts which were started in Main.
In business, almost all executive decisions (headcount and budget allocation, which unproven products to push ahead with aggressively, translating forecasts for macroeconomic risks into business-specific policies, who to promote to other executive level positions, etc.) are made with substantial uncertainty. Or to put it another way, any executive-level decision-maker would be paralyzed without strong priors. This is especially true in fast-changing or competitive markets, where the only way to collect more evidence without direct risk is to let your competitors jump in the water first.
In other words, the kind of certainty we hold out for (often vainly) in science is almost unknown in many aspects of business, and the most critical decisions are often the most uncertain.
It's very "Black Swan" (in the sense of Taleb's whole, not just tail risk).
Thoughts?
I don't think you understand what the term means. It's unknown unknowns and not known unknowns. Whether or not an unproven product will succeed is a question about a known unknown.
I don't think that's true. There are various forms of doing market research that simply involve money but not additional risk.
I use "Black Swan" in the context of the whole book. That is, we build narratives after-the-fact to explain correct priors as skill and judgment. Also, the greater impact of more uncertain decisions, in a way that ties uncertainty to the impact, is exactly the nature of unknown-unknown black swans (which I'd say the launching of a substantially new product category fits into, in a mild form. The iPod/iTunes was not a black swan for Apple, though they took considerable risks with it. It was a black swan for the music industry.).
Market research is better than nothing, but still has many problems. Most of it wouldn't pass peer review, and we know peer review makes plenty of mistakes. So when taking it into account, decision-makers must apply strong priors.
And on the occasions that market research really is that good, it's a no-brainer; your competitors will do it too.
I don't think that's necessarily true, just having a high risk tolerance works as well. I also think you underestimate the amount of evidence present -- e.g. in most organizations the next-year budget is a variation on the previous year's budget.
Yes, of course. That's why, for example, risk management is an important part of doing business but is not normally a big part of doing science...
Risk tolerance is a good, possibly more correct, way of looking at it. Actually most executives probably have a mixture of risk tolerance and strong priors.
Some businesses can get away with only relatively low-risk, safe decisions and focus on efficient operations. However, I think the majority of businesses, especially newer and growing ones, can't get away with this consistently or for a long time. And most businesses simply don't have that long a life, period.
Setting a budget based off last years' when your revenue is growing 50%+ YoY won't work well.
What I was thinking of more specifically is that something like setting a budget can be defined as a rigorous optimization problem, but with highly uncertain parameters (marginal return on investment from various units of the business). Any decision made implies a combination of prior over those values and risk tolerance.
If you treat budgeting as an optimization problem, you need forecasts, not priors.
I would also suspect that real-life business budgets will be hard to set as "rigorous optimization problems" because in reality you have discontinuities, nonlinear responses, and all kinds of funky dependencies between different parts of the budget.
Weird fictional theoritical scenario. Comments solicited.
In the future, mankind has become super successful. We have overcome our base instincts and have basically got our shit together. We are no longer in thrall to Azathoth (Evolution) or Mammon (Capitalism).
We meet an alien race, who are way more powerful than us and they show their values and see ours. We seek to cooperate on the prisoner's dilemma, but they defect. In our dying gasps, one of us asks them "We thought you were rational. WHY?..."
They reply " We follow a version of your meta-golden rule. Treat your inferiors as you would like to be treated by your superiors. In your treatment of super intelligences that were alive amongst you, the ones you call Azathoth and Mammon, we see that you really crushed them. I mean, you smashed them to the ground and then ran a road roller, twice. I am pretty certain you cooperated with us only because you were afraid. We do to you what you did to them"
What do we do if we could anticipate this scenario? Is it too absurd? Is the idea of extending our "empathy" to the impersonal forces that govern our life too much? What if the aliens simply don't see it that way?
Deification of natural forces is a standard human culture trait. A large proportion of early gods just personified natural phenomena.
Shinto is a contemporary religion that still does that a lot.
Evolution is powerful, but that doesn't make it an intelligence, certainly not a superintelligence. We're not defecting against evolution, evolution just doesn't/can't play PD in the first place. But I'm also not sure how important the PD game is to this scenario, as opposed to the aliens just crushing us directly.
And as long as we're personifying evolution, an argument could be made that the triumph of human civilization would still be a win for evolution's "values", like survival and unlimited reproduction.
I don't understand how this rule leads to the described behavior. As written, it suggests that the aliens would like to be crushed by their superiors...?
The whole scenario depends on a reification fallacy. You don't negotiate with, or engage in prediction theory games with, impersonal forces (and calling capitalism a force of nature seems a stretch to me).
That's not how TDT works.
Is TDT accurately described by "CDT + acausal comunication through mutual emulation"?
Communication isn't enough. CDT agents can't cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma if you put them in the same room and let them talk to each other. They aren't going to be able to cooperate in analogous trades across time no matter how much acausal 'communicaiton' they have.
Similar "problem"(?): Acausal trade with Azathoth
I think there may people here that can benefit from this.
http://www.nerdfitness.com/
We shouldn't select our fitness gurus for whether they're of our tribe, we should select our fitness gurus for the effectiveness and truth of what they teach.
On that basis, do you have any reasons beyond "it's nerdy!" for recommending this website over any number of other ones, many of which are very good? If it's the gimmicky motivational approaches, I think LessWrong has that down pat - loads of us play HabitRPG and I'm pretty sure Beeminder's founders were some of our own.
Edit: For some reason my links ate themselves and the text between them so I took them out.
Today I read a post by Bryan Caplan aimed toward effective altruists:
For context, Argentina essentially allows immigration by anybody who can get an employer to sponsor them.
what could a faltering, medium-trust country like argentina need more than millions of poor, low-trust immigrants
I'm looking for an old post. Something about an extinct species of primate that may once have been nearly as smart as humans, but evolved over time to be much dumber, apparently because the energy costs of intelligence were maladaptive in its environment.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8bl/link_back_to_the_trees/
This is really worrying. Hubris and irrational geopolitical competition may create existential risks sooner then expected. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-the-pentagons-skynet-would-automate-war
The Wikipedia article on the Ferguson crisis says,
"the population is only one-third white and about two-thirds black"
and then says,
"Ferguson police were twice as likely to arrest African Americans during traffic stops as they were whites"
which only appears anomalous if you ignore the base rate of finding a black driver vs. a white one. (Edited to add: other factors, like how many people in each group own/drive cars, may be relevant.)
There are many valid reasons to worry about racial tensions in that town (e.g. 48/53 police members are white), but the arrest rates is not one of them.