Stupid Questions December 2014
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
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Is it a LessWrongian faux pas to comment only to agree with someone? Here's the context:
I was going to say that I agree and that I had not considered my observation as an effect of survivorship bias.
I guess I thought it might be useful to explicitly relate what he said to a bias. Maybe that's just stating the obvious here? Maybe I should do it anyway because it might help someone?
I'd also like to know about this in less specific contexts.
What prerequisite knowledge is necessary to read and understand Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence?
These aren't so much "stupid" questions but ones which have no clear answer, and I'm curious what people here feel have to say about this.
-Why should (or shouldn't) one aspire to be "good" in the sense of prosocial, altruistic etc.?
-Why should (or shouldn't) one attempt to be as honest as possible in their day to day lives?
I have strong altruistic inclinations because that's how I'm predisposed to be and often because coincides with my values; other people's suffering upsets me and I would prefer to live a world in which people are kind and supportive of each other. I want to be nice, but I don't want to want to be nice; I can't find strong rational reasons to be altruistic.
I'm honest with people I voluntarily interact with, but ambivalent about lying in general. For example, I'm currently on sort of intermittent fasting regimen and if someone I'm not particularly familiar with offers food, I tend to say "I've already ate" rather than giving my real reason for abstaining from. I've seen it argued that lying to others will make you more likely to lie to yourself, but I'm unconvinced this is the case.
I have a vague notion from reading science fiction stories that black holes may be extremely useful for highly advanced (as in, post-singularity/space-faring) civilizations. For example, IIRC, in John C. Wright's Golden Age series, a colony formed near a black hole became fantastically wealthy.
I did some googling, but all I found was that they would be great at cooling computer systems in space. That seems useful, but I was expecting something more dramatic. Am I missing something?
When you're sufficiently advanced, cooling your systems, technically disposing of entropy, is one of the main limiting constraint on your system. Also if you throw matter into a black hole just right you can get its equivalent (or half its equivalent I forgot which) out in energy.
Edit: thinking about it, it is half the mass.
Not in useful energy, if you're thinking of using Hawking radiation; it comes out in very high-entropy form. I was so sad when I realized that the "Hawking reactor" I'd invented in fifth grade would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I wasn't talking about Hawkings radiation. If I throw matter in a black hole just right, I can get half the mass to come out in low-entropy photons. That's why the brightest objects in the universe are black holes that are currently eating something.
Ah, cool! Forgot about how quasars are hypothesized to work.
It is useable if you use small blackholes. You don't need to be able to use all of the energy for lots of purposes since a tiny bit of mass leads to so much energy.
They make awesome garbage disposal units :-)
Here I be, looking at a decade old Kurzweil book, and I want to know whether the trends he's graphing hold up after in later years. I have no inkling of where on earth one GETs these kinds of factoids, except by some mystical voodoo powers of Research bestowed by Higher Education. It's not just guesstimation... probably.
Bits per Second per Dollar for wireless devices? Smallest DRAM Half Pitches? Rates of adoption for pre-industrial inventions? From whence do all these numbers come and how does one get more recent collections of numbers?
LW user Stuart Armstrong did a number of posts assessing Kurzweil's predictions: Here, here, here, and here.
Mostly just out of curiosity:
What happens karma-wise when you submit a post to Discussion, it gets some up/downvotes, you resubmit it to Main, and it gets up/downvotes there? Does the post's score transfer, or does it start from 0?
The post's score transfers, but I think that the votes that were applied when it was in Discussion don't get the x10 karma multiplier that posts in Main otherwise do.
Thanks!
Ok I have one meta-level super-stupid question . Would it be possible to improve some aspects of the LessWrong webpage? Like making it more readable for mobile devices? Every time I read LW in the tram while going to work I go insane trying to hit super-small links on the website. As I work in Web development/UI design, I would volunteer to work on this. I think in general that the LW website is a bit outdated in terms of both design and functionality, but I presume that this is not considered a priority. However a better readability on mobile screens would be a positive contribution to its purpose.
[Meta]
In the last 'stupid questions' thread, I posed the suggestion that I write a post called "Non-Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", which would be a summary post with a list of the most popular stupid questions asked, or stupid questions with popular answers. That is, I'm taking how many upvotes each pair of questions and answers got as an indicator of how many people care about them, or how many people at least thought the answer to a question was a good one. I'm doing this so there will be a single spot where interesting answers can be found, rather than members of LessWrong having to dig through hundreds of comments on multiple threads to discover useful answers to simple questions.
I'll publish this post at the end of December, or beginning of January, when this thread is complete. It could be updated in the future, but, by that point, it will include questions asked from ten separate threads over the course of more than a year, which is a lot. It will include this thread, which will be the most recent.
My question is: how should I organize it? Should I sort questions by topic? By how popular the question was? By how popular the answer was? By some other means? Leave your feedback below.
Back in 2010, Will Newsome posted this as a joke:
But isn't it actually true?
What would I do differently if I believed it was true, or wasn't?
What expectations about future events would I have in one case, that I wouldn't have in the other?
What beliefs about past events would I have in one case, that I wouldn't have in the other?
I understand that this has no decision-making value. I'm only interested in the philosophical meaning of this point.
Hm.
Can you say more about what you're trying to convey by "philosophical meaning"?
For example, what is the philosophical meaning of your question?
That if we are to be completely intellectually honest and rigorous, we must accept complete skepticism.
Hm.
OK. Thanks for replying, tapping out here.
Maybe we could honestly accept than impossible demands of rigor are indeed impossible. And focus on what is possible.
You can't convince a rock to agree with you on something. There is still some chance with humans.
This appears to be a circular argument.
This is why I wrote this:
It means you should learn to like learning other languages/ways of thinking.
How do I improve my ability to simulate/guess other people's internal states and future behaviors? I can, just barely, read emotions, but I make the average human look like a telepath.
It's trial and error mostly, paying attention to other people doing well or making mistakes, getting honest feedback from a skilled and trusted friend. Learning social skills is like learning to ride a bike, reading about it doesn't give you much of an advantage.
The younger you are the less it costs to make mistakes. I think a social job is a good way to learn because customers are way less forgiving than other people you randomly meet. You could volunteer for some social tasks too.
If your native hardware is somehow socially limited then you might benefit from reading a little bit more and you might have to develop workarounds to use what you've got to read people. It's difficult to learn from mistakes if you don't know you're making them.
One thing I've learned about the average human looking like a telepath is that most people are way too certain about their particular assumption when there are actually multiple possible ways to understand a situation. People generally aren't as great at reading each other as they think that are.
My native hardware is definitely limited - I'm autistic.
The standard quick-and-dirty method of predicting others seems to be "model them as slightly modified versions of you", but when other people's minds are more similar to each other than they are to you, the method works far better for them than it does for you.
My realtime modeling isn't that much worse than other people's, but other people can do a lot more with a couple of minutes and no distractions than I can.
Thanks a bunch for the suggestions!
It certainly doesn't feel that way to me, but I might have inherited some autistic characteristics since there are a couple of autistic people in my extended family. Now that I've worked with people more, it's more like I have several basic models of people like "rational", "emotional", "aggressive", "submissive", "assertive", "polite", "stupid", "smart", and then modify those first impressions according to additional information.
I definitely try not to model other people based on my own preferences since they're pretty unusual, and I hate it when other people try to model me based on their own preferences especially if they're emotional and extroverted. I find that kind of empathy very limited, and these days I think I can model a wider variety of people than many natural extroverts can, in the limited types of situations where I need to.
Thanks! Your personality archetypes/stereotypes sound like a quick-and-dirty modeling system that I can actually use, but one that I shouldn't explain to the people who know me by my true name.
That probably explains why I hadn't heard about it already: if it were less offensive-sounding, then someone would have told me about it. Instead, we get the really-nice-sounding but not very practical suggestions about putting yourself in other peoples' shoes, which is better for basic* morality than it is for prediction.
*By "basic", I mean "stuff all currently used ethical systems would agree on", like 'don't hit someone in order to acquire their toys.'
Is "how do I get better at sex?" a solved problem?
Is it just a matter of getting a partner who will given you feedback and practicing?
I think "how do you get better", mostly yes, but "how do you get to be very very good", mostly no.
Ok. Is there a trick to that one or do you just need to have gotten the lucky genes?
"No", as in "not a solved problem" implies that no one knows :-)
Whether you need lucky genes is hard to tell. Maybe all you need is lack of unlucky ones :-/
Is it a problem that anyone has put significant effort into? What's the state of the evidence?
Now that I think about it, I'm a little surprised there isn't a subculture of people trying to excel at sex, sort of the way pickup artist try an excel at getting sex.
Is this because there is no technique for for doing sex well? Because most people think there's no technique for for doing sex well? Because sex is good enough already? Because sex is actually more about status than pleasure? Because such a subculture exits and I'm ignorant of it?
Data suggest that a fair number of woman don't get orgasms during sex but the literature suggest that they could given the proper environment. Squirting in women seems to happen seldom enough that the UK bans it in their porn for being abnormal. But of course sex is about more than just orgasm length and intensity ;)
Yes. In general one of the think that distinguish the pickup artist community is that it's full of people who rather sit in front of their computer to talk about techniques than interact face to face. That means you find a lot of information about it on the internet. Many of the people who are very kinesthetic don't spend much time on the net.
But that doesn't mean there no information available on the internet.
Getting ideas about how sex is supposed to work from porn is very bad. Porn is created to please the viewer, not the actors. Porn producers have to worry about issues like camera angles. Sensual touch can create feelings without looking good on the camera. Porn often ignores the state of mind of the actors.
Books on the other hand do provide some knowledge, even when they alone aren't enough. Tim Ferriss has in it's "The 4-Hour Body" book two chapters about the subject, including the basic anatomy lesson of how the g-spot works. Apart from that I'm not familiar with English literature on the subject but Tim Ferriss suggests among others http://www.tinynibbles.com/ for further reading.
The community in which I would expect the most knowledge are polyamorous people who speak very openly with each other.
Using our cherished rationality skills we can start to break the skill down into subareas:
1) Everybody is different. Don't assume that every men or woman wants the same thing.
2) Consent: Don't do something that your partner doesn't want you to do to him. When in doubt, ask.
3) Mindset: Inconfidence and feeling pressure to perform can get in the way of being present. Various forms of "sex is bad"-beliefs can reduce enjoyment.
Authentic expression and doing in every moment what feels right, is a good frame. If you need something to occupy your mind, think in terms of investigation. Be curious about effects of your own actions. What happens in your own body? What happens in the body of your partner? How does it feel? Be always open for the present.
If you want to learn to be in that frame, classes in "Movement Science" (in dance studios) or contact improvisation can teach you to access that state of mind. In Berlin where I live that community also overlaps with the poly crowd.
4) Dominance Higher testosterone and the behavior that it produces means better sex.
5) Open Communication Creating a space where desires can be expressed without any fear of judgement is a skill that most people don't have.
6) Fine control over your own body. There are many ways to train those skills.
7) Perceptions of the partner.
I'm sure there is, but I don't think it would want to be very... public about it. For one thing, I wouldn't be surprised if competent professionals were very good (and very expensive).
Given Christianity's prudishness (thank you, St.Augustine), you may also want to search outside of the Western world -- Asia, including India, sound promising.
But as usual, one of the first questions is what do you want to optimize for. And don't forget that men and women start from quite different positions.
I don't know what you mean by this.
The physiology of men and women is significantly different.
Assuming for a moment that Everett's interpretation is correct, there will eventually be a way to very confidently deduce this (and time, identity and consciousness work pretty much like described by Drescher IIRC - there is no continuation of consciousness, just memories, and nothing meaningful separates your identity from your copies):
Should beings/societies/systems clever enough to figure this out (and with something like preferences or values) just seek to self-destruct if they find themselves in a sufficiently suboptimal branch, suffering or otherwise worse off than they plausibly could be? Committing to give up in case things go awry would lessen the impact of setbacks and increase the proportion of branches where everything is stellar, just due to good luck. Keep the best worlds, discard the rest, avoid a lot of hassle.
This is obviously not applicable to e.g. humanity as it is, where self-destruction on any level is inconvenient, if at all possible, and generally not a nice thing to do. But would it theoretically make sense for intelligences like this to develop, and maybe even have an overwhelming tendency to develop in the long term? What if this is one of the vast amount of branches where everyone in the observable universe pretty much failed to have a good enough time and a bright enough future and just offed themselves before interstellar travel etc., because a sufficiently advanced civilization sees it's just not a big deal in an Everett multiverse?
(There's probably a lot that I've missed here as I have no deep knowledge regarding the MWI, and my reading history so far only touches on this kind of stuff in general, but yay stupid questions thread.)
Not really. If you're in a suboptimal branch, but still doing better than if you didn't exist at all, then you aren't making the world better off by self-destructing regardless of whether other branches exist.
It would not increase the proportion (technically, you want to be talking about measure here, but the distinction isn't important for this particular discussion) of branches where everything is stellar - just the proportion of branches where everything is stellar out of the total proportion of branches where you are alive, which isn't so important. To see this, imagine you have two branches, one where things are going poorly and one where things are going great. The proportion of branches where things are going stellar is 1/2. Now suppose that the being/society/system that is going poorly self-destructs. The proportion of branches where things are going stellar is still 1/2, but now you have a branch where instead of having a being/society/system that is going poorly, you have no being/society/system at all.
Thanks! Ah, I'm probably just typical-minding like there's no tomorrow, but I find it inconceivable to place much value on the amount of branches you exist in. The perceived continuation of your consciousness will still go on as long as there are beings with your memories in some branch: in general, it seems to me that if you say you "want to keep living", you mean you want there to be copies of you in some or the possible futures, waking up the next morning doing stuff present-you would have done, recalling what present-you thought yesterday, and so on (in addition you will probably want a low probability for this future to include significant suffering). Likewise, if you say you "want to see humanity flourish indefinitely", you want a future that includes your biological or cultural peers and offspring colonizing space and all that, remembering and cherishing many of the values you once had (sans significant suffering). To me it seems impossible to assign value to the amount of MWI-copies of you, not least because there is no way you could even conceive their number, or usually make meaningful ethical decisions where you weigh their amounts.* Instead, what matters overwhelmingly more is the probability of any given copy living a high quality life.
Yes, this is obvious of course. What I meant was exactly this, because from the point of view of a set of observers, eliminating the set of observers from a branch <=> rendering the branch irrelevant, pretty much.
To me it did feel like this is obviously what's important, and the branches where you don't exist simply don't matter - there's no one there to observe anything after all, or judge the lack of you to be a loss or morally bad (again, not applicable to individual humans).
If I learned today that I have a 1% chance to develop a maybe-terminal, certainly suffering-causing cancer tomorrow, and I could press a button to just eliminate the branches where that happens, I would not have thought I am committing a moral atrocy. I would not feel like I am killing myself just because part of my future copies never get to exist, nor would I feel bad for the copies of the rest of all people - no one would ever notice anything, vast amounts of future copies of current people would wake up just like they thought they would the next morning, and carry on with their lives and aspirations. But this is certainly something I should learn to understand better before anyone gives me a world-destroying cancer cure button.
*Which is one main difference when comparing this to regular old population ethics, I suppose.
As it happens, you totally can (it's called the Born measure, and it's the same number as what people used to think was the probabilities of different branches occurring), and agents that satisfy sane decision-theoretic criteria weight branches by their Born measure - see this paper for the details.
This is a good place to strengthen intuition, since if you replace "killing myself" with "torturing myself", it's still true that none of your future selves who remain alive/untortured "would ever notice anything, vast amounts of future copies of [yourself] would wake up just like they thought they would the nloext morning, and carry on with their lives and aspirations". If you arrange for yourself to be tortured in some branches and not others, you wake up just as normal and live an ordinary, fulfilling life - but you also wake up and get tortured. Similarly, if you arrange for yourself to be killed in some branches and not others, you wake up just as normal and live an ordinary, fulfilling life - but you also get killed (which is presumably a bad thing even or especially if everybody else also dies).
One way to intuitively see that this way of thinking is going to get you in trouble is to note that your preferences, as stated, aren't continuous as a function of reality. You're saying that universes where (1-x) proportion of branches feature you being dead and x proportion of branches feature you being alive are all equally fine for all x > 0, but that a universe where you are dead with proportion 1 and alive with proportion 0 would be awful (well, you didn't actually say that, but otherwise you would be fine with killing some of your possible future selves in a classical universe). However, there is basically no difference between a universe where (1-epsilon) proportion of branches feature you being dead and epsilon proportion of branches feature you being alive, and a universe where 1 proportion of branches feature you being dead and 0 proportion of branches feature you being alive (since don't forget, MWI looks like a superposition of waves, not a collection of separate universes). This is the sort of thing which is liable to lead to crazy behaviour.
I'm sorry, but "sort of thing which is liable to lead to crazy behaviour" won't cut it. Could you give an example of crazy behaviour with this preference ordering? I still think this approach (not counting measure as long as some of me exists) feels right and is what I want. I'm not too worried about discontinuity at only x=0 (and if you look at larger multiverses, x probably never equals 0.)
To argue over a specific example: if I set up something that chooses a number randomly with quantum noise, then buys a lottery ticket, then kills me (in my sleep) only if the ticket doesn't win, then I assign positive utility to turning the machine on. (Assuming I don't give a damn about the rest of the world who will have to manage without me.) Can you turn this into either an incoherent preference, or an obviously wrong preference?
(Personally, I've thought about the TDT argument for not doing that; because you don't want everyone else to do it and create worlds in which only 1 person who would do it is left in each, but I'm not convinced that there are a significant number of people who would follow my decision on this. If I ever meet someone like that, I might team up with them to ensure we'd both end up in the same world. I haven't seen any analysis of TDT/anthropics applied to this problem, perhaps because other people care more about the world?)
Another way to look at it is this: imagine you wake up after the bet, and don't yet know whether you are going to quickly be killed or whether you are about to recieve a large cash prize. It turns out that your subjective credence for which branch you are in is given by the Born measure. Therefore, (assuming that not taking the bet maximises expected utility in the single-world case), you're going to wish that you hadn't taken the bet immediately after taking it, without learning anything new or changing your mind about anything. Thus, your preferences as stated either involve weird time inconsistencies, or care about whether there's a tiny sliver of time between the worlds branching off and being killed. At any rate, in any practical situation, that tiny sliver of time is going to exist, so if you don't want to immediately regret your decision, you should maximise expected utility with respect to the Born measure, and not discount worlds where you die.
Your preference already feels "obviously wrong" to me, and I'll try to explain why. If we imagine that only one world exists, but we don't know how it will evolve, I wouldn't take the analogue of your lottery ticket example, and I suspect that you wouldn't either. The reason that I wouldn't do this is because I care about the possible future worlds where I would die, despite the fact that I wouldn't exist there (after very long). I'm not sure what other reason there would be to reject this bet in the single-world case. However, you are saying that you don't care about the actual future worlds where you die in the many-worlds case, which seems bizarre and inconsistent with what I imagine your preferences would be in the single-world case. It's possible that I'm wrong about what your preferences would be in the single-world case, but then you're acting according to the Born rule anyway, and whether the MWI is true doesn't enter into it.
(EDIT: that last sentence is wrong, you aren't acting according to the Born rule anyway.)
In regards to my point about discontinuity, it's worth knowing that to know whether x = 0 or x > 0, you need infinitely precise knowledge of the wave function. It strikes me as unreasonable and off-putting that no finite amount of information about the state of the universe can discern between one universe which you think is totally fantastic and another universe which you think is terrible and awful. That being said, I can imagine someone being unpersuaded by this argument. If you are willing to accept discontinuity, then you get a theory where you are still maximising expected utility with respect to the Born rule, but your utilities can be infinite or infinitesimal.
On a slightly different note, I would highly recommend reading the paper which I linked (most of which I think is comprehensible without a huge amount of technical background), which motivates the axioms you need for the Born rule to work, and dismotivates other decision rules.
EDIT: Also, I'm sorry about the "sort of thing which is liable to lead to crazy behaviour" thing, it was a long comment and my computer had already crashed once in the middle of composing it, so I really didn't want to write more.
I downloaded the paper you linked to and will read it shortly. I'm totally sympathetic to the "didn't want to make a long comment longer" excuse, having felt that way many times myself.
I agree in the single-world case, I wouldn't want to do it. That's not because I care about the single world without me per se (as in caring for the people in the world), but because I care about myself who would not exist with ~1 probability. In a multiverse, I still exist with ~1 probability. You can argue that I can't know for sure that I live in a multiverse, which is one of the reasons I'm still alive in your world (the main reason being it's not practical for me right now, and I'm not really confident enough to bother researching and setting something like that up.) However, you also don't know that anything you do is safe, by which I mean things like driving, walking outside, etc. (I'd say those things are far more rational in a multiverse, anyway, but even people who believe in single world still do these things.)
Another reason I don't have a problem with discontinuity is that the whole problem seems only to arise when you have an infinite number of worlds, and I just don't feel like that argument is convincing.
I don't think you need infinite knowledge to know whether x=0 or x>0, especially if you give some probability to higher level multiverses. You don't need to know for sure that x>0 (as you can't know anyway), but you can have 99.9% confidence that x>0 rather easily, conditional on MWI being true. As I explained, that is enough to take risks.
If I wake up after, in my case that I laid out, that would mean that I won, as I specified I would be killed while asleep. I could even specify that the entire lotto picking,noise generation, and checking is done while I sleep, so I don't have to worry about it. That said, I don't think the question of my subjective expectation of no longer existing is well-defined, because I don't have a subjective experience if I no longer exist. If am cloned, then told one of me is going to be vaporized without any further notice, and it happens fast enough not to have them feel anything, then my subjective expectation is 100% to survive. That's different from the torture case you mentioned above, where I expect to survive, and have subjective experiences. I think we do have some more fundamental disagreement about anthropics, which I don't want to argue over until I hash out my viewpoint more. (Incidentally, it seemed to me that Eliezer agrees with me at least partly, from what he writes in http://lesswrong.com/lw/14h/the_hero_with_a_thousand_chances/:
I interpreted that as saying that you can only rely on the anthropic principle (and super quantum psychic powers), if you die without pain.)
I'm actually planning to write a post about Big Worlds, anthropics, and some other topics, but I've got other things and am continuously putting it off. Eventually. I'd ideally like to finish some anthropics books and papers, including Bostrom's, first.
Another, more concise way of putting my troubles with discontinuity: I think that your utility function over universes should be a computable function, and the computable functions are continuous.
Also - what, you have better things to do with your time than read long academic papers about philosophy of physics right now because an internet stranger told you to?!
Here's the thing: you obviously think that you dying is a bad thing. You apparently like living. Even if the probability were 20-80 of you dying, I imagine you still wouldn't take the bet (in the single-world case) if the reward were only a few dollars, even though you would likely survive. This indicates that you care about possible futures where you don't exist - not in the sense that you care about people in those futures, but that you count those futures in your decision algorithm, and weigh them negatively. By analogy, I think you should care about branches where you die - not in the sense that you care about the welfare of the people in them, but that you should take those branches into account in your decision algorithm, and weigh them negatively.
I'm not sure what you can mean by this comment, especially "the whole problem". My arguments against discontinuity still apply even if you only have a superposition of two worlds, one with amplitude sqrt(x) and another with amplitude sqrt(1-x).
... I promise that you aren't going to be able to perform a test on a qubit
that you can expect to tell you with 100% certainty that
, even if you have multiple identical qubits.
This wasn't my point. My point was that your preferences make huge value distinctions between universes that are almost identical (and in fact arbitrarily close to identical). Even though your value function is technically a function of the physical state of the universe, it's like it may as well not be, because arbitrary amounts of knowledge about the physical state of the universe still can't distinguish between types of universes which you value very different amounts. This intuitively seems irrational and crazy to me in and of itself, but YMMV.
I find it highly implausible that this should make a difference for your decision algorithm. Imagine that you could extend your life in all branches by a few seconds in which you are totally blissful. I imagine that this would be a pleasant change, and therefore preferable. You can then contemplate what will happen next in your pleasant state, and if my arguments go through, this would mean that your original decision was bad. So, we have a situation where you used to prefer taking the bet to not taking the bet, but when we made the bet sweeter, you know prefer not taking the bet. This seems irrational.
I think it is actually well-defined? Right now, even if I were told that no multiverse exists, I would be pretty sure that I would continue living, even though I wouldn't be having experiences if I were dead. I think the problem here is that you are confusing my invocation of subjective probabilities (while you're pondering what will happen next in your branch) of what will objectively happen next with a statement about subjective experiences later.
I would be interested in reading your viewpoints about anthropics, should you publish them. That being said, given that you don't take the suicide bet in the single-world case, I think that we probably don't.
In dietary and health articles they often speak about "processed food". What exactly is processed food and what is unprocessed food?
Definitions will vary depending on the purity obsession of the speaker :-) but as a rough guide, most things in cans, jars, boxes, bottles, and cartons will be processed. Things that are, more or less, just raw plants and animals (or parts of them) will be unprocessed.
There are boundary cases about which people argue -- e.g. is pasteurized milk a processed food? -- but for most things in a food store it's pretty clear what's what.
Thanks! That does make sense.
Anything that you could have picked from the plant yourself (a pear, a carrot, a berry) AND has not been sprinkled with conservants/pesticides/shiny gloss is unprocessed. If it comes in a package and looks nothing like what nature gives (noodles, cookies, jell-o), it's been processed.
Raw milk also counts as unprocessed, but in the 21st century there's no excuse to be drinking raw milk.
That's debatable -- some people believe raw milk to be very beneficial.
Absolutely not worth the risk.
Do you have any sources that quantify the risk?
Oh, I'm sure the government wants you to believe raw milk is the devil :-)
In reality I think it depends, in particular on how good your immune system is. If you're immunocompromised, it's probably wise to avoid raw milk (as well as, say, raw lettuce in salads). On the other hand, if your immune system is capable, I've seen no data that raw milk presents an unacceptable risk -- of course how much risk is unacceptable varies by person.
More relevant may be your supply chain. If you have given your cow all required shots and drink the milk within a day -- and without mixing it with the milk of dozens of other cows -- you are going to be a lot better off than if you stop off at a random roadside stand and buy a gallon of raw milk.
So, it doesn't make sense to talk about processed meats, if you can't pick them from plants?
If I roast my carrot, does it become processed?
I'm assuming you value your health and thus don't eat any raw meat, so all of it is going to be processed---if only at your own kitchen.
By the same standard, a roasted carrot is, technically speaking, "processed." However, what food geeks usually think of when they say "processed" involves a massive industrial plant where your food is filled with additives to compensate for all the vitamins it loses after being crushed and dehydrated. Too often it ends up with an inhuman amount of salt and/or sugar added to it, too.
It seems like we suck at using scales "from one to ten". Video game reviews nearly always give a 7-10 rating. Competitions with scores from judges seem to always give numbers between eight and ten, unless you crash or fall, and get a five or six. If I tell someone my mood is a 5/10, they seem to think I'm having a bad day. That is, we seem to compress things into the last few numbers of the scale. Does anybody know why this happens? Possible explanations that come to mind include:
People are scoring with reference to the high end, where "nothing is wrong", and they do not want to label things as more than two or three points worse than perfect
People are thinking in terms of grades, where 75% is a C. People think most things are not worse than a C grade (or maybe this is just another example of the pattern I'm seeing)
I'm succumbing to confirmation bias and this isn't a real pattern
That's not an explanation, just a symptom of the problem. People of mediocre talent and high talent both get A - that's part of the reason why we have to use standardized tests with a higher ceiling.
My intuition is that the top few notches are satisficing, whereas all lower ratings are varying degrees of non-satisficing. The degree to which everything tends to cluster at the top represents the degree to which everything is satisfactory for practical purposes. In situations where the majority of the rated things are not satisfactory (like the Putnam - nothing less than a correct proof is truly satisfactory), the ratings will cluster near the bottom.
For example, compare motels to hotels. Motels always have fewer stars, because motels in general are worse. Whereas, say, video games will tend to cluster at the top because video games in general are satisfactorily fun.
Or, think Humanities vs. Engineering grades. Humanities students in general satisfy the requirements to be historians and writers or liberal-arts-educated-white-collar workers more than Engineering students satisfy the requirements to be engineers.
This is what I was trying to convey when I said it might be another example of the problem.
I think it's reasonable, in many contexts, to say that achieving 75% of the highest possible score on an exam should earn you what most people think of as a C grade (that is, good enough to proceed with the next part of your education, but not good enough to be competitive).
I would say that games are different. There is not, as far as I know, a quantitative rubric for scoring a game. A 6/10 rating on a game does not indicate that the game meets 60% of the requirements for a perfect game. It really just means that it's similar in quality to other games that have received the same score, and usually a 6/10 game is pretty lousy. I found a histogram of scores on metacritic:
http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/dry_carton/blog/metacritic-score-distribution-graphs/82409/
The peak of the distributions seems to be around 80%, while I'd eyeball the median to be around 70-75%. There is a long tail of bad games. You may be right that this distribution does, in some sense, reflect the actual distribution of game quality. My complaint is that this scoring system is good at resolving bad games from truly awful games from comically terrible games, but it is bad at resolving a good game from a mediocre game.
What I think it should be is a percentile-based score, like Lumifer describes:
Then again, maybe it's difficult to discern a difference in quality between a 60th percentile game and an 80th percentile game.
Oh right, I didn't read carefully sorry.
In medicine we try to make people rate their symptoms, like pain, from one to ten. It's pretty much never under 5. Of course there's a selection effect and people don't like to look like whiners but I'm not convinced these fully explain the situation.
In Finland the lowest grade you can get from primary education to high school is 4 so that probably affects the situation too.
How do you then interpret their responses? Do you compare only the responses of the same person at different times, or between persons (or to guide initial treatment)? Do you have a reference scale that translates self-reported pain to something with an objective referent?
Yes. There's too much variation between persons. I also think there's variation between types of pain and variation depending on whether there are other symptoms. There are no objective specific referents but people who are in actual serious pain usually look like it, are tachycardic, hypertensive, aggressive, sweating, writhing or very still depending on what type of pain were talking about. Real pain is also aggravated by relevant manual examinations.
This is actually what initially got me thinking about this. I read a half-satire thing about people misusing pain scales. Since my only source for the claim that people do this was a somewhat satirical article, I didn't bring it up initially.
I was surprised when I heard that people do this, because I figured most people getting asked that question aren't in near as much pain as they could be, and they don't have much to gain by inflating their answer. When I've been asked to give an answer on the pain scale, I've almost always felt like I'm much closer to no pain than to "the worst pain I can imagine" (which is what I was told a ten is), and I can imagine being in such awful pain that I can't answer the question. I think I answered seven one time when I had a bone sticking through my skin (which actually hurt less than I might have thought).
Maybe they think that by inflating their answer they gain, on the margin, better / more intensive / more prompt medical service. Especially in an ER setting where they may intuit themselves to be competing against other patients being triaged and asked the same question, they might perceive themselves (consciously or not) to be in an arms race where the person who claims to be experiencing the most pain gets treated first.
This is exactly why in my family we use +2/-2. 0 really does feel like average in a way 5-6/10 or 3/5 doesn't.
Well here is an article by Megan McArdle that talking about how insider-outsider dynamics can lead to this kind of rank inflation.
I've noticed the same thing. Part of it might be that reviewers are reluctant to alienate fans of [thing being reviewed]. Another explanation is that they are intuitively norming against a wider degree of things than they actually review. For example, I was buying a smartphone recently, and a lot of lower-end devices I was considering had few reviews, but famous high-end brands (like iPhone Galaxy S, etc.) are reviewed by pretty much everyone.
Playing devil's advocate, it might be that there are more perceivable degrees of badness/more ways to fail than there are of goodness, so we need a wider range of numbers to describe and fairly rank the failures.
I tried to change out the 10 rating for a z-score rating in my own conversations. It failed due to my social circles not being familiar with the normal bell curve.
If you wanted to maximize the informational content of your ratings, wouldn't you try to mimick a uniform distribution?
Quite often the difference between the top 10 percent is higher than the difference of the people between 45% and 55%.
IQ scales have more people in the middle than on the edges.
As far as I remember, IQs are normalized ranks so to answer the question which 10% is "wider" you need to define by which measure.
The intent was to communicate one piece of information without confusion: where on the measurement spectrum the item fits relative to others in its group. As opposed to delivering as much information as possible, for which there are more nuanced systems.
Most things I am rating do not have a uniform distribution, I tried to follow a normal distribution because it would fit the greater majority of cases. We lose information and make assumptions when we measure data on the wrong distribution, did you fit to uniform by volume or by value? It was another source of confusion.
As mentioned, this method did fail. I changed my methods to saying 'better than 90% of the items in its grouping' and had moderate success. While solving the uniform/normal/Chi-squared distribution problem it is still too long winded for my tastes.
The distribution of your ratings does not need to follow the distribution of what you are rating. For maximum information your (integer) rating should point to a quantile -- e.g. if you're rating on a 1-10 scale your rating should match the decile into which the thing being rated falls. And if your ratings correspond to quantiles, the ratings themselves are uniformly distributed.
We have different goals. I want to my rating to reflect the items relative position in its group, you want a rating to reflect the items value independent of the group.
Is this accurate?
Doesn't seem so. If you rate by quintiles your rating effectively indicates the rank of the bucket to which the thing-being-rated belongs. This reflects "the item's relative position in its group".
If you want your rating to reflect not a rank but something external, you can set up a variety of systems, but I would expect that for max information your rating would have to point a quintile of that external measure of the "value independent of the group".
Trying to stab at the heart of the issue: I want the distribution of the ratings to follow the distribution of the rated because when looking at the group this provides an additional piece of information.
Well, at this point the issue becomes who's looking at your rating. This "additional piece of information" exists only for people who have a sufficiently large sample of your previous ratings so they understand where the latest rating fits in the overall shape of all your ratings.
Consider this example: I come up to you and ask "So, how was the movie?". You answer "I give it a 6 out of 10". Fine. I have some vague idea of what you mean. Now we wave a magic wand and bifurcate reality.
In branch 1 you then add "The distribution of my ratings follows the distribution of movie quality, savvy?" and let's say I'm sufficiently statistically savvy to understand that. But... does it help me? I don't know the distribution of movie quality. it's probably bell-shaped, maybe, but not quite normal if only because it has to be bounded, I have no idea if its skewed, etc.
In branch 2 you then add "The rating of 6 means I rate the movie to be in the sixth decile". Ah, that's much better. I now know that out of 10 movies that you've seen five were probably worse and three were probably better. That, to me, is a more useful piece of information.
I understand and concede to the better logic. This provides greater insight on why the original attempt to use these ratings failed.
RottenTomatoes has much broader ratings. The current box office hits range from 7% to 94%. This is because they aggregate binary "positive" and "negative" reviews. As jaime2000 notes, Youtube has switched to a similar rating system and it seems to keep things very sensitive.
I think it's the C thing. I have no evidence for this.
You may find the work of the authors of http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2369332 interesting.
Math competitions often have the opposite problem. The Putnam competition, for example, often has a median score of 0 or 1 out of 120.
I'm not sure this is a good thing. Participating in a math competition and getting 0 points is pretty discouraging, in a field where self-esteem is already an issue.
Interestingly enough, the scores on individual questions are extremely bimodal. They're theoretically out of 10 but the numbers between 3 and 7 are never used.
Partial explanation: we interpret these scales as going from worst possible to best possible, and
One reason why this is only a partial explanation is that "possible" obviously really means something like "at least semi-plausible" and what's at least semi-plausible depends on context and whim. But, e.g., suppose we take it to mean something like: take past history, discard outliers at both ends, and expand the range slightly. Then I bet what you find is that
so that in order for a scale to be able to cover (say) 99% of cases it needs to extend quite a bit further downward than upward relative to the median case.
Think about it in therms of probability space. If somthign is basically functional, then there are a near- infinite number of ways for it to be worse, but a finite number of ways for it to get better.
http://xkcd.com/883/
I don't think it's this. Belgium doesn't use letter-grading and still succumbs to the problem you mentioned in areas outside the classroom.
What do they use instead?
Points out of a maximum. The teacher is supposed to decide in advance how much points a test will be worth (5, 10, 20 and 25 being common options, but I've also had tests where I scored 17,26/27) and then decides how much points a question will be worth. You need to get half of the maximum or more for a passing grade.
That's in high school. In university everything is scored out of a maximum of 20 points.
No, this is definitely a real pattern. YouTube switched from a 5-star rating system to a like/dislike system when they noticed, and videogames are notorious for rank inflation.
A question about Lob's theorem: assume not provable(X). Then, by rules of If-then statements, if provable(X) then X is provable But then, by Lob's theorem, provable(X), which is a contradiction. What am I missing here?
I'm not sure how you're getting from not provable(X) to provable(provable(X) -> X), and I think you might be mixing meta levels. If you could prove not provable(X), then I think you could prove (provable(X) ->X), which then gives you provable(X). Perhaps the solution is that you can never prove not provable(X)? I'm not sure about this though.
I forget the formal name for the theorem, but isn't (if X then Y) iff (not-x or Y) provable in PA? Because I was pretty sure that's a fundamental theorem in first order logic. Your solution is the one that looked best, but it still feels wrong. Here's why: Say P is provable. Then not-P is provably false. Then not(provable(not-P)) is provable. Not being able to prove not(provable(x)) means nothing is provable.
You're right that (if X then Y) is just fancy notation for (not(X) or Y). However, I think you're mixing up levels of where things are being proved. For the purposes of the rest of this comment, I'll use provable(X) to mean that PA or whatever proves X, and not that we can prove X. Now, suppose provable(P). Then provable(not(not(P))) is derivable in PA. You then claim that not(provable(not(P))) follows in PA, that is to say, that provable(not(Q)) -> not(provable(Q)). However, this is precisely the statement that PA is consistent, which is not provable in PA. Therefore, even though we can go on to prove not(provable(not(P))), PA can't, so that last step doesn't work.
Wait. Not(provable(consistency)) is provable in PA? Then run that through the above.
I'm not sure that this is true. I can't find anything that says either way, but there's a section on Godel's second incompleteness theorem in the book "Set theory and the continuum hypothesis" by Paul Cohen that implies that the theorem is not provable in the theory that it applies to.
I'll rephrase it this way:
For all C: Either provable(C) or not(provable(C)) If provable(C), then provable(C) If not provable(C), then use the above logic to prove provable C. Therefore all C are provable.
Which "above logic" are you referring to? If you mean your OP, I don't think that the logic holds, for reasons that I've explained in my replies.
Your reasons were that not(provable(c)) isn't provable in PA, right? If so, then I will rebut thusly: the setup in my comment immediately above(I.e. either provable(c) or not provable(c)) gets rid of that.
I'm not claiming that there is no proposition C such that not(provable(C)), I'm saying that there is no proposition C such that provable(not(provable(C))) (again, where all of these 'provable's are with respect to PA, not our whole ability to prove things). I'm not seeing how you're getting from not(provable(not(provable(C)))) to provable(C), unless you're commuting 'not's and 'provable's, which I don't think you can do for reasons that I've stated in an ancestor to this comment.
Ok, thanks for clearing that up.
If the Bay Area has such a high concentration of rationalists, shouldn't it have more-rational-than-average housing, transportation and legislation?
Sadly, I know the stupid answers to this stupid questions. I just want to vent a bit.
Should start with toothpaste first.
The Bay Area has a high concentration of rationalists compared to most places, but I don't think it's very high compared to the local population. How many rationalists are we talking about?
Are rationalists more or less likely than non-rationalists to participate in local government?
It is mostly rational for generating advantage to people with political pull and power.
True, false, or neither?: It is currently an open/controversial/speculative question in physics whether time is discretized.
Many things in our best models of physics are discrete, but as far as I know, our coordinates (time, space, or four-dimensional space-time coordinates) are never discrete. Even something like quantum field theory, which treats things in a non-intuitively discrete way does not do this. For example, we might view the process of an electron scattering off another electron as an exchange of many discrete photons between the two electrons, but it is all written in terms of integrals or derivatives, rather than differences or sums.
The Wikipedia article on Planck time says:
However, the article on Chronon says:
So, if I understand this rightly-
Any two events must take place at least one Plank time apart. But so long as they do, it can be any number of plank times -- even, say, pi. Right?
Maneki Neko is a short story about an AI that manages a kind of gift economy. It's an enjoyable read.
I've been curious about this 'class' of systems for a while now, but I don't think I know enough about economics to ask the questions well. For example- the story supplies a superintelligence to function as a competent central manager, but could such a gift network theoretically exist without being centrally managed (and without trivially reducing to modern forms of currency exchange)? Could a variant of Watson be used to automate the distribution of capital in the same way that it makes a medical dignosis? And so on.
In particular, I'm looking for the intellectual tools that would be used to ask these questions in a more rigorous way; it would be great if I had better ways of figuring out which of these questions are obviously stupid and which are not. Specific disciplines in economics or game theory, perhaps. Things along the lines of LW's Mechanism Design sequence would be fantastic. Can anyone give me a few pointers?
The field of study that deals with this is called economics. Any reason an intro textbook won't suit you?
My intuition is every good allocation system will use prices somewhere, whether the users see them or not. The main perk of the story's economy is getting things you need without having to explicitly decide to buy them (ie the down-on-his-luck guy unexpectedly gifted his favorite coffee), and that could be implemented through individual AI agents rather than a central AI.
Fleshing out how this might play out, if I'm feeling sick, my AI agent notices and broadcasts a bid for hot soup. The agents of people nearby respond with offers. The lowest offer might come from someone already in a soup shop who lives next door to me since they'll hardly have to go out of their way. Their agent would notify them to buy something extra and deliver it to me. Once the task is fulfilled, my agent would send the agreed-upon payment. As long as the agents are well-calibrated to our needs and costs, it'd feel like a great gift even if there are auctions and payments behind the scenes.
For pointers, general equilibrium theory studies how to allocate all the goods in an economy. Depending on how you squint at the model, it could be studying centralized or decentralized markets based on money or pure exchange. A Toolbox for Economic Design is fairly accessible texbook on mechanism design that covers lots of allocation topics.
This looks very useful. Thanks!
Another one of those interesting questions is whether the pricing system must be equivalent to currency exchange. To what extent are the traditional modes of transaction a legacy of the limitations behind physical coinage, and what degrees of freedom are offered by ubiquitous computation and connectivity? Etc. (I have a lot of questions.)
Results like the Second Welfare Theorem (every efficient allocation can be implemented via competitive equilibrium after some lump-sum transfers) suggests it must be equivalent in theory.
Eric Budish has done some interesting work changing the course allocation system at Wharton to use general equilibrium theory behind the scenes. In the previous system, courses were allocated via a fake money auction where students had to actually make bids. In the new system, students submit preferences and the allocation is computed as the equilibrium starting from "equal incomes".
What benefits do you think a different system might provide, or what problems does monetary exchange have that you're trying to avoid? Extra computation and connectivity should just open opportunities for new markets and dynamic pricing, rather than suggest we need something new.
The stock market has a lot of capable AIs that manage capital allocation.
Fair point. It's my understanding that this is limited to rapid day trades, with implications for the price of a stock but not cash-on-hand for the actual company. I was imagining something more like a helper algorithm for venture capital or angel investors, comparable to the PGMs underpinning the insurance industry.
Is there a causal link between being relatively lonely and isolated during school years and (higher chance of) ending up a more intelligent, less shallow, more successful adult?
Imagine that you have a pre-school child who has socialization problems, finds it difficult to do anything in a group of other kids, to acquire friends, etc., but cognitively the kid's fine. If nothing changes, the kid is looking at being shunned or mocked as weird throughout school. You work hard on overcoming the social issues, maybe you go with the kid to a therapist, you arrange play-dates, you play-act social scenarios with them..
Then your friend comes up to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. Look, your friend says. You were a nerd at school. I was a nerd at school. We each had one or two friends at best and never hung out with popular kids. We were never part of any crowd. Instead we read books under our desks during lessons and read SF novels during the breaks and read science encyclopedias during dinner at home, and started programming at 10, and and and. Now you're working so hard to give your kid a full social life. You barely had any, are you sure now you'd rather you had it otherwise? Let me be frank. You have a smart kid. It's normal for a smart kid to be kind of lonely throughout school, and never hang out with lots of other kids, and read books instead. It builds substance. Having a lousy social life is not the failure scenario. The failure scenario is to have a very full and happy school experience and end up a ditzy adolescent. You should worry about that much much more, and distribute your efforts accordingly.
Is your friend completely asinine, or do they have a point?
I think I remember reading that famous inventors were likely to be isolated due to illness as children. I think it's unlikely that intelligence is decreased by being well-socialized, but it seems possible to me that people who are very well-socialized might find themselves thinking of fewer original ideas.
Here is Paul Graham's essay on the subject.
Seems to me that very high intelligence can cause problems with socialization: you are different from your peers, so it is more difficult for you to model them, and for them to model you. You see each other as "weird". (Similar problem for very low intelligence.) Intelligence causes loneliness, not the other way round.
But this depends on the environment. If you are highly intelligent person surrounded by enough highly intelligent people, then you do have a company of intellectual peers, and you will not feel alone.
I am not sure about the relation between reading many books and being "less shallow". Do intelligent kids surrounded by intelligent kids also read a lot?
All of this is very true (for me, anyway--typical mind fallacy and all that). High intelligence does seem to cause social isolation in most situations. However, I also agree with this:
High intelligence does not intrinsically have a negative effect on your social skills. Rather, I feel that it's the lack of peers that does that. Lack of peers leads to lack of relatability leads to lack of socialization leads to lack of practice leads to (eventually) poor social skills. Worse yet, eventually that starts feeling like the norm to you; it no longer feels strange to be the only one without any real friends. When you do find a suitable social group, on the other hand, I can testify from experience that the feeling is absolutely exhilarating. That's pretty much the main reason I'm glad I found Less Wrong.
It is not true that people cannot - or do not - interact successfully with people that are less intelligent than they are. Many children get along well with their younger siblings. Many adults love being kindergarten teachers... Or feel highly engaged working in the dementia wing of the rest home. Many people of all intelligence levels love having very dumb pets. These are not people (or beings) that you relate to because of their 'relatability' in the sense that they are like you, but because they are meaningful to you. And interacting with people build social skills appropriate to those people -- which may not be very generalizable when you are practicing interacting with kindergarten students, but is certainly a useful skill when you are interacting with average people.
I personally would think that the problem under discussion is not related to intelligence, but in trying to help an introvert identify the most fulfilling interpersonal bonds without making them more social in a general sense. However, I don't know the kid in question, so I can't say.
My friend isn't obviously-to-me wrong, but their argument is unconvincing to me.
It's normal for a smart kid to be kind of lonely - if true, that's sad, and by default we should try to fix it.
It builds substance - citation neded. It seems like it could just as easily build insecurity, resentment, etc.
Lousy social life - this is a failure mode. It might not be the worst one, but it seems like the most likely one, so deserving of attention.
Ditzy adolescent - how likely is this?
FWIW, I'm an adult who was kind of lonely as a kid, and on the margin I think that having a more active social life then would have had positive effects on me now.
True, but it may be one of those problems that's just not fixable without seriously restructuring the school system, especially if something like Villiam_Bur's theory is true.
Speaking from experience, I can tell you that I know a lot more than any of my peers (I'm 16), and practically all of that is due to the reading I did and am still doing. That reading was a direct result of my isolation and would likely not have occurred had I been more socially accepted. I should add that I have never once felt resentment or insecurity due to this, though I have developed a slight sense of superiority. (That last part is something I am working to fix.)
I suppose this one depends on how you define a "failure mode". I have never viewed my lack of social life as a bad thing or even a hindrance, and it doesn't seem like it will have many long-term effects either--it's not like I'll be regularly interacting with my current peers for the rest of my life.
Again, this depends on how you define "ditzy". Based on my observations of a typical high school student at my age, I would not hesitate to classify over 90% of them as "ditzy", if by "ditzy" you mean "playing social status games that will have little impact later on in life". I shudder at the thought of ever becoming like that, which to me sounds like a much worse prospect than not having much of a social life.
I see. Well, to each his own. I myself cannot imagine growing up with anything other than the childhood I did, but that may just be lack of imagination on my part. Who knows; maybe I would have turned out better than I did if I had had more social interaction during childhood. Then again, I might not have. Without concrete data, it's really hard to say.
Reading a ton as a teen was very helpful to me also, but I think I would have still done it if I had a rich social life of people who were also smart and enjoyed reading. Ultimately being around peers who challenge me is more motivating than being isolated; I don't want to be the one dragging behind.
I do feel that I had to learn a fair amount of basic social skills through deliberately watching and taking apart, rather than just learning through doing--making me somewhat the social equivalent of someone who has learned a foreign language through study rather than by growing up a native speaker; I have the pattern of strengths and weaknesses associated with the different approach.
There may be a choice between a lot of time thinking/learning vs. a lot of time socializing.
It seems to me that a lot of famous creative people were childhood invalids, though I haven't heard of any such from recent decades. It may be that the right level of invalidism isn't common any more.
I have a constant impression that everyone around me is more competent than me at everything. Does it actually mean that I am, or is there some sort of strong psychological effect that can create that impression, even if it is not actually true? If there is, is it a problem you should see your therapist about?
Look up the imposter syndrome. And try not to automatically say; "I don't have it because I never did anything of noteworthyness"
---Oh dang; someone else got to it first.
How did you go with your opinions of imposter syndrome now?
I sometimes have a similar experience, and when I do, it is almost always simply an effect of my own standards of competence being higher than those around me.
Imagine, some sort of problem arises in the presence of a small group. The members of that group look at each other, and whoever signals the most confidence gets first crack at the problem. But this more-confident person then does not reveal any knowledge or skill that the others do not possess, because said confidence was entirely do to higher willingness to potentially make the problem worse through trial and error.
So, in this scenario, feeling less competent does not mean you are less competent; it means you are more risk-adverse. Do you have a generalized paralyzing fear of making the problem worse? If so, welcome to the club. If not, nevermind.
I personally am a fan of talking therapy. If you are thinking something is worth asking a therapist about, it is worth asking a therapist about. But beyond the generalities, thinking you are not good enough is absolutely right in the targets of the kinds of things it can be helpful to discuss with a therapist.
Consider the propositions: 1) everyone is more competent than you at everything and 2) you can carry on a coherent conversation on lesswrong I am pretty sure that these are mutually exclusive propositions. I'm pretty sure just from reading some of your comments that you are more competent than plenty of other people at a reasonable range of intellectual pursuits.
Anything you can talk to a therapist about you can talk to your friends about. Do they think you are less competent than everybody else? They might point out to you in a discussion some fairly obvious evidence for or against this proposition that you are overlooking.
I asked my friends around. Most were unable to point out a single thing I am good at, except speaking English very well for a foreign language, and having a good willpower. One said "hmmm, maybe math?" (as it turned out, he was fast-talked by the math babble that was auraing around me for some time after having read Godel, Escher, Bach), and several pointed out that I am handsome (while a nice perk, I don't what that to be my defining proficiency).
Originally you expressed concern that all other people were better than you at all the things you might do.
But here you find out from your friends that for each thing you do there are other people around you who do it better.
In a world with 6 billion people, essentially every one of us can find people who are better at what we are good at than we are. So join the club. What works is to take some pleasure in doing things.
Only you can improve your understanding of the world, for instance. No one in the world is better at increasing your understanding of the world than you are. I read comments here and post "answers" here to increase my understanding of the world. It doesn't matter that other people here are better at answering these questions, or that other people here have a better understanding of the world than I do. I want to increase my understanding of the world and I am the only person in the world who can do that.
I also wish to understand taking pleasure and joy from the world and work to increase my pleasure and joy in the world. No one can do that for me better than I can. You might take more joy than me in kissing that girl over there. Still, I will kiss her if I can because having you kiss her gives me much less joy and pleasure than kissing her myself, even if I am getting less joy from kissing here than you would get for yourself if you kissed her .
The concern you express to only participate in things where you are better than everybody else is just a result of your evolution as a human being. The genes that make you think being better than others around you have, in the past, caused your ancestors to find effective and capable mates, able to keep their children alive and able to produce children who would find effective and capable mates. But your genes are just your genes they are not the "truth of the world." You can make the choice to do things because you want the experience of doing them, and you will find you are better than anybody else in the world by far at giving yourself experiences.
Is that basically a self-confidence problem?
Is it? I don't know.
Well, does it impact what you are willing to do or try? Or it's just an abstract "I wish I were as cool" feeling?
If you imagine yourself lacking that perception (e.g. imagine everyone's IQ -- except yours -- dropping by 20 points), would the things you do in life change?
Guesses here. I would be taking up more risks in areas where success depends on competition. I would become less conforming, more arrogant and cynical. I would care less about producing good art, and good things in general. I would try less to improve my social skills, empathy and networking, and focus more on self-sufficiency. I wouldn't have asked this question here, on LW.
I think people are quick to challenge this type of impression because it pattern matches to known cognitive distortions involved in things like depression, or known insecurities in certain competitive situations.
For example, consider that most everyone will structure their lives such that their weaknesses are downplayed and their positive features are more prominent. This can happen either by choice of activity (e.g. the stereotypical geek avoids social games) or by more overt communication filtering (e.g. most people don't talk about their anger problems). Accordingly, it's never hard to find information that confirms your own relative incompetence, if there's some emotional tendency to look for it.
Aside from that, a great question is "to what ends am I making this comparison?" I find it unlikely that you have a purely academic interest in the question of your relative competence.
First, it can often be useful to know your relative competence in a specific competitive domain. But even here, this information is only one part of your decision process: You may be okay with e.g. choosing a lower expected rank in one career over a higher rank in another because you enjoy the work more, or find it more compatible with your values, or because it pays betters, or leaves more time for you family, or you're risk averse, or it's more altruistic, etc. But knowing your likely rank along some dimension will tell you a bit about the likely pay-offs of competing along that dimension.
But what is the use of making an across-the-board self-comparison?
Suppose you constructed some general measure of competence across all domains. Suppose you found out you were below average (or even above average). Then what? It seems you're in still in the same situation as before: You still must choose how to spend your time. The general self-comparison measure is nothing more than the aggregate of your expected relative ranks on specific sub-domains, which are more relevant to any specific choice. And as I said above, your expected rank in some area is far from the only bit of information you care about.
As an aside, a positive use for a self-comparison is to provide a role-model. If you find yourself unfavorably compared to almost everyone, consider yourself lucky that you have so many role-models to choose from! Since you are probably like other people in most respects, you can expect to find low-hanging fruit in many areas where you have poor relative performance.
But if you find (as many people will) that you've hit the point of diminishing returns regarding the time you spend comparing yourself to others, perhaps you can simply recognize this and realize that it's neither cowardly nor avoidant to spend your mental energy elsewhere.
Reminds me of something Scott said once:
See also: The Illusion of Winning by Scott Adams (h/t Kaj_Sotala)
This reminds me of my criteria for learning: "You have understood something when it appears to be easy." The mathematicians call this state 'trivial'. It has become easy because you trained the topic until the key aspects became part of your unconscious competence. Then it appears to yourself as easy - because you no longer need to think about it.
There are two separate issues: morale management and being calibrated about your own abilities.
I think the best way to be well-calibrated is to approximate pagerank -- to get a sense of your competence, don't ask yourself, average the extracted opinion of others that are considered competent and have no incentives to mislead you (this last bit is tricky, also the extracting process may have to be slightly indirect).
Morale is hard, and person specific. My experience is that in long term projects/goals, morale becomes a serious problem long before the situation actually becomes bad. I think having "wolverine morale" ("You know what Mr. Grizzly? You look like a wuss, I can totally take you!") is a huge chunk of success, bigger than raw ability.
Is Zuckerberg's "Move fast, break things" similar/related?
Possible, but unlikely. We're all just winging it and as others have pointed out, impostor syndrome is a thing.
I frequently feel similar and I haven't found a good way to deal with those feelings, but it's implausible that everyone around you is more competent at everything. Some things to take into account:
Long shot: Do you think you might have ADHD? (pdf warning) Alternatively, go over the diagnostic criteria
Peers.
It being unlikely and still seeming to happen is the reason I asked this question.
Maybe. And everyone else did, thus denying me of competitive advantage?
Your link is broken because it has parentheses in the URL. Escape them with backslashes to unbreak it.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome!
Impostor syndrome:
Err, that's not it. I am no more successful than them. Or, at least, I kinda feel that everyone else is more successful than me as well.
Consider that maybe you might be wrong about the imposter syndrome. As a person without it - its hard to know how you think/feel and how you concluded that you couldn't have it. But maybe its worth asking - How would someone convince you to change your mind on this topic?
By entering some important situation where my and his comparative advantage in some sort of competence comes into play, and losing.
what if you developed a few bad heuristics about how other successful people were not inherently more successful but just got lucky (or some other external granting of success) as they went along; whereas your hard-earned successes were due to successful personal skills... Hard earned, personally achieved success.
its probably possible to see a therapist about it; but I would suggest you can work your own way around it (consider it a challenge that can be overcome with the correct growth mindset)
Possibly parallel-- I've had a feeling for a long time that something bad was about to happen. Relatively recently, I've come to believe that this isn't necessarily an accurate intuition about the world, it's muscle tightness in my abdomen. It's probably part of a larger pattern, since just letting go in the area where I feel it doesn't make much difference.
I believe that patterns of muscle tension and emotions are related and tend to maintain each other.
It's extremely unlikely that everyone is more competent than you at everything. If nothing else, your writing is better than that of a high proportion of people on the internet. Also, a lot of people have painful mental habits and have no idea that they have a problem.
More generally, you could explore the idea of everyone being more competent than you at everything. Is there evidence for this? Evidence against it? Is it likely that you're at the bottom of ability at everything?
This sounds to me like something worth taking to a therapist, bearing in mind that you may have to try more than one therapist to find one that's a good fit.
I believe there's strong psychological effect which can create that impression-- growing up around people who expect you to be incompetent. Now that I think about it, there may be genetic vulnerability involved, too.
Possibly worth exploring: free monthly Feldenkrais exercise-- this are patterns of gentle movement which produce deep relaxation and easier movement. The reason I think you can get some evidence about your situation by trying Feldenkrais is that, if you find your belief about other people being more competent at everything goes away, even briefly, than you have some evidence that the belief is habitual.
Nancy, I believe you are describing anxiety. That you are anxious, that if you went to a psychologist for therapy and you were covered by insurance that they would list your diagnosis on the reimbursement form as "generalized anxiety disorder."
I say this not as a psychologist but as someone who was anxious much of his life. For me it was worth doing regular talking therapy and (it seems to me) hacking my anxiety levels slowly downward through directed introspection. I am still more timid than I would like in situations where, for example, I might be very direct telling a woman (of the appropriate sex) I love her, or putting my own ideas forward forcefully at work. But all of these things I do better now than I did in the past, and I don't consider my self-adjustment to be finished yet.
Anyway, If you haven't named what is happening to you as "anxiety," it might be helpful to consider that some of what has been learned about anxiety over time might be interesting to you, that people who are discussing anxiety may often be discussing something relevant to you.
Do you know me?
I find a lot of evidence for it, but I am not sure I am not being selective. For example, I am the only one in my peer group that never did any extra-curricular activities at school. While everyone had something like sports or hobbies, I seemed to only study at school an waste all my other time surfing the internet and playing the same video games over and over.
Having a background belief that you're worse than everyone at everything probably lowered your initiative.
The idea that playing an instrument is a hobby while playing a video game isn't is completely cultural. It says something about values but little about competence.
One important difference is that video games are optimized to be fun while musical instruments aren't. Therefore, playing an instrument can signal discipline in a way that playing a game can't.
I'm not sure that's true. There's selection pressure on musical instruments to make them fun to use. Most of the corresponding training also mostly isn't optimised for learning but for fun.
There's also selection pressure on instruments to make them pleasant to listen to. There's no corresponding constraint on video games.
In an age of eSports I'm not sure that's true. Quite a lot of games are not balanced to make them fun for the average player but balanced for high level tournament play.
Obvious question: Are you better at those games than other people? (On average, don't compare yourself to the elite.)
How easy did studying come to you?
At THOSE games? Yes. I can complete about half of American McGee's Alice blindfolded. Other games? General gaming? No. Or, okay, I am better than non-gamers, but my kinda-gamer peers are crub-stomping me at multiplayer in every game.
Studying - very easy. Now, when I am a university student - quite hard.
Seems like you fell prey to the classic scenario of "being intelligent enough to breeze through high school and all I ended up with is a crappy work ethic."
University is as good of a place as any to fix this problem. First of all, I encourage you to do all the things people tell you you should do, but most people don't: Read up before classes, review after classes, read the extra material, ask your professors questions or help, schedule periodic review sessions of the stuff you're supposed to know... You'll regret not doing those things when you get your degree but don't feel very competent about your knowledge. Try to make a habit out of this and it'll get easier in other aspects of your life.
And try new things. This is probably a cliché in the LW-sphere by now, but really try a lot of new things.
Thanks. Still, should I take it as "yes, you are less competent than people around you"?
Maybe just less disciplined than you need to be. "Less competent" is too confusingly relative to mean anything solid.
Well, here's a confusing part. I didn't tell the whole truth in parent post, there are actually two areas that I am probably more competent than peers, in which others openly envy me instead of the other way around. One is the ability to speak English (a foreign language, most my peers wouldn't be able to ask this question here), another is discipline. Everyone actually envies me for almost never procrastinating, never forgetting anything, etc. Are we talking about different disciplines here?
If you already have discipline, what exactly is the difficulty you're finding to study now as compared to previous years?
I don't think I know you, but I'm not that great at remembering people. I made the claim about your writing because I've spent a lot of time online.
I'm sure you're being selective about the people you're comparing yourself to.
I suppose that the problem emerged only because you communicate only with people of your sort and level of awareness, try to go on a trip to some rural village or start conversations with taxists, dishwashers, janitors, cooks, security guards etc.
Would it be possible to slow down or stop the rise of sea level (due to global warming) by pumping water out of the oceans and onto the continents?
This should be a what if question. I'd like to see what Randall would do with it.
I don't know what you mean. Who is Randal?
Randal is Randall Munroe who makes xkcd and, notably, answers what-if questions.
Randall Munroe Is the person who draws XKCD. He also has a blog where he give in depth answers to unusual questions.
I recommend googling "geoengineering global warming" and reading some of the top hits. There are numerous proposals for reducing or reversing global warming which are astoundingly less expensive than reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and also much more likely to be effective.
To your direct question about storing more water on land, this would be a geoengineering project. Some straightforward approaches to doing it:
Use rainfall as your "pump" in order to save having to build massive energy using water pumps. Without any effort on our part, nature natually lifts water a km or more above sea level and then drops it, much of it dropped onto land. That water generally is funneled back to the ocean in rivers. With just the constructino of walls, some rivers might be prevented from draining into the ocean. Large areas would be flooded by the river, storing water other than in the ocean.
Use gravity as your pump. THere are many large locations on earth than are below sea level. Aquifers that took no net energy to do pumping could be built that would essentially gravity-feed ocean water into these areas. These areas can be hundreds of meters below sea level, so if even 1% of the earth's surface is 100 m below sea level, then the ocean's could be lowered by a bit more than 1 m by filling these depressions with ocean water.
Of course either one of these approaches will cause massive other changes, although probably in a positive direction as far as climate is concerned. More water surface on the planet should mean more evaporation of water which reates more clouds which reflects more energy from the sun, lowering the heating of the earth. But of course a non-trivial analysis might yield a rich detail of effects worth pondering.
In the past features like the Salton sea and the Dead sea have been filled by fresh-water rivers, essentially meaning that rain was used as the pump to fill them. The demand for fresh water has stopped these features from being filled. It seems to me that an aquifer to refill these features with salt water from the ocean would be relatively benign in impact, since in nature these features have been fuller of salt water in the past, and so the impact of that water might be blessed by humanity as "natural" instead of cursed by humanity as "man made."
One possibility would be to replace the ice caps by hand. Run a heated pipeline from the ocean to the icecaps, pump water there, and let it freeze on its own. I don't know how well that would work, and I suspect you're better off just letting sea levels rise. If you need the land that bad, just make floating platforms.
Edit: Replace "ice caps" with "Antartica". Adding ice to the northern icecap, or even the southern one out where it's floating, won't alter the sea level since floating objects displace their mass in water.
We could really use a new Aral sea, but intuitively I'd expected that this would be a tiny dent in the depth of the oceans. So, to the maths:
Wikipedia claims that from 1960 to 1998 the volume of the Aral sea dropped from its 1960 amount of 1,100 km^3 by 80%.
I'm going to give that another 5% for more loss since then, as the South Aral Sea has now lost its eastern half enitrely.
This gives ~1100 * .85 = 935km^3 of water that we're looking to replace.
The Earth is ~500m km^2 in surface area, approx. 70% of which is water = 350m km^2 in water.
935 km^3 over an area of 350m km^2 comes to a depth of 2.6 mm.
This is massively larger that I would have predicted, and it gets better. The current salinity of the Aral Sea is 100g/l which is way higher than that of seawater at 35g/l, so we could pretty much pump the water straight in still with net environmental gain. Infact this is a solution to the crisis that has been previously proposed, although it looks like most people would rather dilute the seawater first.
To acheive the desired result of 1 inch drop in sea level, we only need to find 9 equivalent projects around the world. Sadly, the only other one I know of is Lake Chad, which is significantly smaller than the Aral Sea. However, since the loss of the Aral Sea is due to over-intensive use of the water for farming, the gives us an idea of how much water can be contained onland in plants: I would expect that we might be able to get this amount again if we undertook a desalination/irrigation program in the Sahara.
Isn't it more of an indication of how much water can be contained in the Aral Sea basin? The plants don't need to contain all of the missing Aral Sea water at once, they just need to be watered faster than the Sea is being refilled by rainfall. How much water does rainfall supply every year, as a percentage of the Sea's total volume?
Dead Sea and Salton Sea leap to mind as good projects.
Also could we store more water in the atmosphere? If we just poured water into a desert like the Sahara, most of it would evaporate before it flowed back to the sea. This would seem to raise the average moisture content of the atmosphere. Sure eventually it gets rained back down, but this would seem to be a feature more than a bug for a world that keeps looking for more fresh water. Indeed my mind is currently inventing interesting methods for moving the water around using purely the heat from the sun as an energy source.
Well, this is not pumping, but it might be much more efficient: As I understand, the polar ice caps are in an equilibrium between snowfall and runoff. If you could somehow wall in a large portion of polar ice, such that it cannot flow away, it might rise to a much higher level and sequester enough water to make a difference in sea levels. A super-large version of a hydroelectric dam, in effect, for ice.
It might also help to have a very high wall around the patch to keep air from circulating, keeping the cold polar air where it is and reduce evaporation/sublimation.
Where does the water go? Assuming you want to reduce sea level by a 1/2 inch using this mechanism, you have to do the equivalent of covering the entire ETA: land area of earth in a full inch of water (what's worse, seawater; you'd want to desalinate it). Even assuming you can find room on land for all this water and the pump capacity to displace it all, what's to stop it from washing right back out to sea? Some of it can be used to refill aquifers, but the capacity of those is trivial next to that of the oceans. Some of it can be stored as ice and snow, but global warming will reduce (actually, has already quite visibly reduced) land glaciation; even if you can somehow induce the water to freeze, that heat you extract from it will have to go somewhere and unless you can dump it out of the atmosphere entirely it will just contribute to the warming. The rest of the water will just flood the existing rivers in its mad rush to do what nearly all continental water is always doing anyhow: flowing to sea.
Clearly, the solution is to build a space elevator and ship water into orbit. We lower the sea levels, the water is there if we need it later, and in the meantime we get to enjoy the pretty rings.
(No, I'm not serious.)
Now I'm curious how much energy it would take to set up a stable ring orbit made of ice crystals for Earth, or if that would be impossible without stationkeeping corrections.
How long will ice survive in Earth's orbit, anyway?
I think it would depend on the orbit? Obviously it would need to be in an orbit that does not collide with our artificial satellites, and it would need to be high enough to make atmospheric drag negligible, but that leave a lot of potential orbits. I don't think of any reason ice would go away with any particular haste from any of them, but I'm not an expert in this area.
Orbital decay aside, why might ice (once placed into an at-the-time stable orbit) not survive?
Sun.
Solar radiation at 1 AU is about 1.3KW/sq.m. Ice that is not permanently in the shade will disappear rather rapidly, I would think.
I would think it would lose heat to space fast enough, but maybe not. I know heat dissipation is a major concern for spacecraft, but those are usually generating their own heat rather than just trying to dump what they pick up from the sun. What would happen to the ice / water? It's not like it can just evaporate into the atmosphere...
Vapour doesn't need an atmosphere to take it up. Empty space does just as well.
So, how long would a snowball in high orbit last? Sounds like a question for xkcd. A brief attempt at a lower bound that is probably a substantial underestimate:
How much energy has to be pumped in per kilogram to turn ice at whatever the "temperature" is in orbit into water vapour? Call that E. Let S be the solar insolation of 1.3 kW/m^2. Imagine the ice is a spherical cow, er, a rectangular block directly facing the sun. According to Wikipedia the albedo of sea ice is in the range 0.5 to 0.7. Take that as 0.6, so the fraction of energy retained is A = 0.4. The density of ice is D = 916.7 kg/m^3. Ignore radiative cooling, conduction to the cold side of the iceberg, and time spent in the Earth's shadow, and assume that the water vapour instantly vanishes. Then the surface will ablate at a rate of SA/ED m/s. Equivalently, ED/86400SA days per metre.
For simplicity I'll take the ice to be at freezing point. Then:
E = 334 kJ/kg to melt + 420 kJ/kg to reach boiling point + 2260 kJ/kg to boil = 3014 kJ/kg.
For a lower starting temperature, increase E accordingly.
3014 * 916.7 / (86400 * 1.3 * 0.4) = 61 days per metre. Not all that long, but meanwhile, you've created a hazard for space flight and for the skyhook.
I suspect that ignoring radiative cooling will be the largest source of error here, but this isn't a black body, so I don't know how closely the Stefan-Boltzmann law will apply, and I haven't calculated the results if it did. (ETA: The black body temperature of the Moon is just under freezing.)
(ETA: fixed an error in the calculation of E, whereby I had 4200 instead of 420 kJ/kg to reach boiling point. Also, pasting in all the significant figures from the sources doesn't mean this is claimed to be anything more than a rough estimate.)
This is vacuum -- all liquid water will boil immediately, at zero Celsius. Besides I'm sure there will be some sublimation of ice directly to water vapor.
In fact, looking at water's phase diagram, in high vacuum liquid water just doesn't exist so I think ice will simply sublimate without the intermediate liquid stage.
Are there any good trust, value, or reputation metrics in the open source space? I've recently established a small internal-use Discourse forum and been rather appalled by the limitations of what is intended to be a next-generation system (status flag, number of posts, tagging), and from a quick overview most competitors don't seem to be much stronger. Even fairly specialist fora only seem marginally more capable.
This is obviously a really hard problem and conflux of many other hard problems, but it seems odd that there are so many obvious improvements available.
((Inspired somewhat by my frustration with Karma, but I'm honestly more interested in its relevance for outside situations.))
You may be interested in the new system called Dissent
The first problem is defining what do you want to measure. "Trust" and "reputation" are two-argument functions and "value" is notoriously vague.