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Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015

3 Post author: Gondolinian 20 April 2015 12:02AM

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.


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Comments (350)

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Comment author: dhoe 20 April 2015 08:09:34AM 6 points [-]

I have this half-baked idea that trying to be rational by oneself is a slightly pathological condition. Humans are naturally social, and it would make sense to distribute cognition over several processors, so to speak. It would explain the tendencies I notice in relationships to polarize behavior - if my partner adopts the position that we should go on vacations as much as possible, I almost automatically tend to assume the role worrying about money, for example, and we then work out a balanced solution together. If each of us were to decide on our own, our opinions would be much less polarized.

I could totally see how it would make sense in groups that some members adopt some low probability beliefs, and that it would benefit the group overall.

Is there any merit to this idea? Considering the well known failures in group rationality, I wonder if this is something that has long been disproved.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 23 April 2015 12:30:44PM *  2 points [-]

Mercier & Sperber made a similar argument, commenting that e.g. things that seem like biases in the context of a single individual (such as confirmation bias) are actually beneficial for the decision-making of a group. An excerpt:

... the idea that the confirmation bias is a normal feature of reasoning that plays a role in the production of arguments may seem surprising in light of the poor outcomes it has been claimed to cause. Conservatism in science is one example (see Nickerson 1998 and references therein). Another is the related phenomenon of groupthink, which has been held responsible for many disasters, from the Bay of Pigs fiasco (Janis 1982) to the tragedy of the Challenger shuttle (Esser & Lindoerfer 1989; Moorhead et al. 1991) (for review, see Esser 1998). In such cases, reasoning tends not to be used in its normal context: that is, the resolution of a disagreement through discussion. When one is alone or with people who hold similar views, one’s arguments will not be critically evaluated. This is when the confirmation bias is most likely to lead to poor outcomes. However, when reasoning is used in a more felicitous context – that is, in arguments among people who disagree but have a common interest in the truth – the confirmation bias contributes to an effi- cient form of division of cognitive labor.

When a group has to solve a problem, it is much more efficient if each individual looks mostly for arguments supporting a given solution. They can then present these arguments to the group, to be tested by the other members. This method will work as long as people can be swayed by good arguments, and the results reviewed in section 2 show that this is generally the case. This joint dialogic approach is much more efficient than one where each individual on his or her own has to examine all possible solutions carefully.8 The advantages of the confirmation bias are even more obvious given that each participant in a discussion is often in a better position to look for arguments in favor of his or her favored solution (situations of asymmetrical information). So group discussions provide a much more effi- cient way of holding the confirmation bias in check. By contrast, the teaching of critical thinking skills, which is supposed to help us overcome the bias on a purely individual basis, does not seem to yield very good results (Ritchart & Perkins 2005; Willingham 2008).

For the confirmation bias to play an optimal role in discussions and group performance, it should be active only in the production of arguments and not in their evaluation. Of course, in the back-and-forth of a discussion, the production of one’s own arguments and the evaluation of those of the interlocutor may interfere with each other, making it hard to properly assess the two processes independently. Still, the evidence reviewed in section 2.1 on the understanding of arguments strongly suggests that people tend to be more objective in evaluation than in production. If this were not the case, the success of group reasoning reviewed in section 2.3 would be very hard to explain.

Comment author: passive_fist 21 April 2015 04:01:07AM 1 point [-]

That's a powerful idea and it actually goes deeper than you may think. We are divided even internally inside ourselves. There is reason to think that your internal rational decision-making processes consist of multiple sub-processes that combine and compare various points of view. Each sub-process has the same level of interaction with other sub-processes as you would have when speaking to another person. Your mental sub-processes may not even distinguish between thoughts and ideas coming from another part of your brain and coming from another person.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 20 April 2015 07:41:00PM 7 points [-]

There are studies that compared performance of couples with randomly assigned pairs (from the same group) and found that couples perform better than random assignment. This suggests that couple specialize and at the same time rely on the specialization of the other part ("I knew you'd make the appointment").

The other side of the coin this breaking-up: You feel like a part of your brain has been ripped off - namely the part you outsourced to your partner.

Comment author: Username 20 April 2015 11:34:24PM 4 points [-]

You feel like a part of your brain has been ripped off - namely the part you outsourced to your partner.

Just like when the internet goes out and you can't get to google/Wikipedia/etc! But more traumatic considering how much more bandwidth is exchanged between people in physical and emotional space.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 10:25:16AM *  2 points [-]

Yes, it is difficult to maintain balance when the other person is pushing in some direction. You feel the instinct to push the other way, as if to provide a balance on average. The problem is, balance on the average means imbalance in your head, if the other person is unbalanced.

It's like when we have a debate about how much is 2+2, and the other person insists that it is 3, then when I say 4, there is a risk that in the future we will achieve a compromise value of 3.5, which I already perceive as wrong. So people have the social instinct to say at least 5, so that the future compromise value may be 4. Even if they originally did not really believe it was 5.

One possible solution would be to make everyone write their opinion before hearing the opinions of others. But that can be done in artificial settings, not in real life -- we usually already heard the opinions of some people. Also, if we have iterated debates about the same topic (e.g. the vacations), we can already predict what our partner will say.

To me it simply means that to have a rational debate, it is better to exclude the people who are strongly mindkilled about something. (Obviously, deciding who they are, is a problem on a higher level.) Maintaining balance is difficult on its own, and almost impossible when someone keeps pushing you on one side: you either fall on the side you are pushed, or you tilt to the opposite direction and fall down later when you are alone. We should not overestimate our own ability to be reasonable in difficult situations.

I could totally see how it would make sense in groups that some members adopt some low probability beliefs, and that it would benefit the group overall.

I can imagine a debate where you flip a coin and you either present your true opinion, or you role-play a selected opinion. Problem is, how would you create the set of the role-played opinions?

What if you forget to include something important? What if most of the supposedly "random" opinions are actually variants of one side (which is already overrepresented in the sincere part of debate), and the other side is underrepresented (and some third side is completely absent). That would be quite likely if people who prepare the "random" options are from the same population as the sincerely debating ones: they would add many minor variants of their own opinion, because those would sound meaningful; and then a few obvious strawmen of their enemies, to create a feeling of a fulfilled duty.

Comment author: DanielLC 21 April 2015 09:24:48PM 7 points [-]

I've come up with an interesting thought experiment I call oracle mugging.

An oracle comes up to you and tells you that either you will give them a thousand dollars or you will die in the next week. They refuse to tell you which. They have done this many times, and everyone has either given them money or died. The oracle isn't threatening you. They just go around and find people who will either give them money or die in the near future, and tell them that.

Should you pay the oracle? Why or why not?

Comment author: nshepperd 22 July 2015 04:00:14AM *  0 points [-]

This is essentially just another version of the smoking lesion problem, in that there is no connection, causal or otherwise, beween the thing you care about and the action you take. Your decision theory has no specific effect on your likelyhood of dying, that being determined entirely by environmental factors that do not even attempt to predict you. All you are paying for is to determine whether or not you get a visit from the oracle.

ETA: Here's a UDT game tree (see here for an explanation of the format) of this problem, under the assumption that oracle visits everyone meeting his criteria, and uses exclusive-or:

ETA2: More explanation: the colours are states of knowledge. Blue = oracle asks for money, Orange = they leave you alone. Let's say the odds of being healthy are α. If you Pay the expected reward is α(-1000) + (1-α) DEATH; if you Don't Pay the expected reward is α 0 + (1-α) DEATH. Clearly (under UDT) paying is worse by a term of -1000α.

Comment author: Lumifer 22 April 2015 12:15:10AM *  3 points [-]

It's just a version of the Newcomb's problem with negative outcomes instead of positive.

Presumably the oracle makes its offer only to people from two classes: (1) Those who will die next week AND will not pay $1000; and (2) Those who will pay $1000 AND not die next week. Since it's the oracle it can identify these people and make its offer only to them. If you got this offer, you are in one of the above classes but you "don't know" in which.

Comment author: shminux 26 April 2015 06:19:24AM 1 point [-]

Clearly you give them money, since otherwise you are almost certain to die. It's just one-boxing in disguise.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 22 April 2015 05:00:24PM 2 points [-]

So, as in most such problems, there's an important difference between the epistemological question ("should I pay, given what I know?") and the more fundamental question ("should I pay, supposing this description is accurate?"). Between expected value and actual value, in other words.

It's easy to get those confused, and my intuitions about one muddy my thinking about the other, so I like to think about them separately.

WRT the epistemological question, that's hard to answer without a lot of information about how likely I consider accurate oracular ability, how confident I am that the examples of accurate prediction I'm aware of are a representative sample, etc. etc. etc., all of which I think is both uncontroversial and uninteresting. Vaguely approximating all of that stuff I conclude that I shouldn't pay the oracle, because I'm not justified in being more confident that the situation really is as the oracle describes it, than that the oracle is misrepresenting the situation in some important way. My expected value of this deal in the real world is negative.

WRT the fundamental question... of course, you leave a lot of details unspecified, but I don't want to fight the hypothetical here, so I'm assuming that the "overall jist" of your description applies: I'm paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle's offer. That's a good deal for me; I'm inclined to take it. (Though I might try to negotiate the price down.)

The knock-on effect is that I encourage the oracle to keep making this offer... but that's good too; I want the oracle to keep making the offer. QALYs for everyone!

So, yes, I should pay the oracle, though I should also implement decision procedures that will lead me to not pay the oracle.

Comment author: Vaniver 22 April 2015 06:16:58PM *  3 points [-]

The knock-on effect is that I encourage the oracle to keep making this offer... but that's good too; I want the oracle to keep making the offer. QALYs for everyone!

I think a key part of the question, as I see it, is to formalize the difference between treatment effects and selection effects (in the context where your actions might reflect a selection effect, and we can't make the normally reasonable assumption that our actions result in treatment effects). An oracle could look into the future, find a list of people who will die in the next week, and a list of people who would pay them $1000 if presented with this prompt, and present the prompt to the exclusive or of those two lists. This doesn't give anyone QALYs they wouldn't have had otherwise.

And so I find my intuitions are guided mostly by the identification of the prompter as an "oracle" instead of a "wizard" or "witch." Oracle implies selection effect; wizard or witch implies treatment effect.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 22 April 2015 07:55:20PM 1 point [-]

Leaving aside lexical questions about the connotations of the word "oracle", I certainly agree that if the entity's accuracy represents a selection effect, then my reasoning doesn't hold.

Indeed, I at least intended to say as much explicitly (_"I don't want to fight the hypothetical here, so I'm assuming that the "overall jist" of your description applies: I'm paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle's offer." _ ) in my comment.

That said, it's entirely possible that I misread what the point of DanielLC's hypothetical was.

Comment author: cousin_it 23 April 2015 09:23:10AM 1 point [-]

DanielLC said:

They just go around and find people who will either give them money or die in the near future, and tell them that.

I interpreted that as a selection effect, so my answer recommended not paying. Now I realize that it may not be entirely a selection effect. Maybe the oracle is also finding people whose life would be saved by making them $1000 poorer, for various exotic reasons. But if the probability of that is small enough, my answer stays the same.

Comment author: tut 22 April 2015 12:38:35PM 1 point [-]

Pay iff you would pay $1000 to avoid learning of your death the last week of your life. If you don't pay the oracle only shows up when you are about to die anyway.

Comment author: cousin_it 22 April 2015 11:01:06AM *  10 points [-]

I wouldn't pay. Let's convert it to a mundane psychological experiment, by replacing precognition with precommitment (which is the right approach according to UDT):

1) Ten participants sign up for the experiment.

2) One participant is randomly chosen to be the "loser". We know who the "loser" is, but don't tell the participants.

3) Also, each participant tells us in private whether they are a "payer" or "non-payer".

4) Each "payer" who is not a "loser" pays $10 (this corresponds to paying the oracle and staying alive). The "loser" pays $100 (this corresponds to dying). Everyone else pays nothing.

It seems obvious that you should choose to be a "non-payer", right?

In terms of the original problem, if you're the kind of person who would pay the oracle if you were approached, you're causing the oracle to approach you, so you're paying for nothing.

Comment author: Jiro 26 April 2015 05:55:39PM 0 points [-]

Variation on this:

An oracle comes up to you and tells you that you will give it a thousand dollars. This oracle has done this many times and every time it has told people this the people have given the oracle a thousand dollars. This oracle, like the other one, isn''t threatening you. It just goes around finding people who will give it money. Should you give the oracle money?

Comment author: advancedatheist 20 April 2015 02:11:49AM *  9 points [-]

The big cryonics story of the week, about the Thai toddler Matheryn Naovaratpong:

The Girl Who Would Live Forever

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-girl-who-would-live-forever

Two-year-old cryogenically frozen by parents

http://www.cnet.com/news/two-year-old-cryogenically-frozen-by-parents/

The girl who could come back from the dead: Toddler who died from a brain tumour is FROZEN by parents who hope she can one day be revived by medical advances

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3043272/The-girl-come-dead-Toddler-died-brain-tumour-FROZEN-parents-hope-one-day-revived-medical-advances.html#ixzz3XoNKDW00

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

How to live forever

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 20 April 2015 07:35:21PM 6 points [-]

PZ Myers:

I also wonder what a future civilization would do if they inherited tanks of liquid nitrogen containing extracted blobs of diseased brains and decapitated heads. Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?

Here's a fun topic of conversation - if I happen across PZ Myers, and he's having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?

Comment author: dxu 21 April 2015 03:23:43AM 5 points [-]

I get that Myers' article pisses a lot of people here off (myself included), but let's try to refrain from mean-spirited-ness, neh? Mind-killing happens readily enough by itself without people helping the process along.

Comment author: skeptical_lurker 21 April 2015 07:54:14AM 8 points [-]

Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I'm going to make an exception.

Comment author: ChristianKl 21 April 2015 11:57:03AM 2 points [-]

Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I'm going to make an exception.

The fact that his behavior emotionally triggers you is no reason to engage in bad and unproductive behavior yourself. Even if it's "justified".

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2015 05:17:05PM 5 points [-]

I think you are greatly missing the point. If you want to be effective in the world, sometimes that involves being politically smart. And sometimes the politically smart thing to do is a show of force. You should not jump from emotion straight to action. But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.

Comment author: ChristianKl 21 April 2015 09:30:29PM 3 points [-]

But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.

I have nothing against calculated actions that shows force. Against a blogger who in the business of getting page views by stirring up controversy being mean-spirited isn't showing force.

Comment author: advancedatheist 21 April 2015 12:02:19AM *  7 points [-]

Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?

Yes, if they have cryonics or its successor technologies for themselves and they can reason about consequences carefully. If you have an injury or pathology in the 24th Century that the health care providers don't know how to treat, you could go into brain preservation to see if the health care providers in, say, the 26th Century would know how to help you. Some of those health care professionals active in the 26th Century might have been born in the 20th or 21st Centuries and have gone through a round or two of brain preservation themselves, and they entered the practice of medicine in the 26th Century as one of their new careers. "Hey, I know this guy. He helped to resuscitate me in 2327. I owe him so I'll return the favor."

Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 April 2015 08:21:56PM 1 point [-]

He's not saying in that quote that they shouldn't feel an obligation, he's making a point focusing on doubting whether they'd want to resurrect them. I think they very likely would, and PZ is ignoring the entire first-in/last-out which cryonics plans on using to further encourage people to resurrect, but it helps to actually focus on what his criticism is.

Comment author: dxu 21 April 2015 03:10:13AM *  5 points [-]

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/

Lots of people employing the weirdness heuristic, as expected. Oh, and of course David Gerard's over there too.

sigh

Comment author: RowanE 21 April 2015 02:46:26AM 7 points [-]

Well, hats off to /u/DataPacRat for fighting the good fight in that comment section. I suspect most of the thread is people who just came in to post their little dig at the weird meat-popsicle cultists and then move on, so I'm not sure if he's achieving much, but if nothing else he's stopped me from feeling I need to go in there and join the fray to say what he ended up saying, except less well.

Comment author: witness 21 April 2015 01:59:47AM -2 points [-]

You know what he does for a living don't you?

Comment author: advancedatheist 21 April 2015 03:07:17AM *  8 points [-]

"Evolutionary developmental biology," which means Myers tries to understand biology that happens on its own. The cryonics idea, by contrast, involves trying to get human biology, and specifically the human brain, to do something it didn't evolve to do, namely, enter a state of preservation through vitrification. Basically Myers doesn't think about cryonics as an engineering challenge because he doesn't have experience or talent with that sort of practical problem solving.

Myers invokes his credentials as a neuroscientist to criticize cryonics; but then another neuroscientist, Kenneth Hayworth, started the Brain Preservation Foundation because he thinks that cryonics deserves a second look due to advances in organ vitrification. I would like to see these two go head to head (yeah, I see the pun potential there) in a debate.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 08:44:08AM 12 points [-]

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

I am oscillating between "calm down, politics is the mindkiller" and "if the iron is hot, I want to believe it is hot".

Is there any hope that if we bite our collective tongues and not feed the trolls, they will get bored and find a new victim? I am afraid that when the troll has sufficient power and allies in online media, the old advice of not feeding it is just not available anymore; whatever you do, someone else on the planet will feed the troll anyway.

It almost makes me think these guys are maximizing evil, but then I realize they are simply maximizing money, and the laws of the universe say that you generate most screaming when you poke in the place it hurts. It is nothing personal; it's just that your tears are an important component in paperclip production. The Clippy does not hate you, it just calmly explores the places where your density of sensory receptors is highest. It could just as well try to make you laugh, but that is a less productive thing to do with humans.

Comment author: dxu 21 April 2015 03:18:06AM *  6 points [-]

"calm down, politics is the mindkiller"

Agreed. Of course, calming down is hard enough by itself without people seemingly actively trying to prevent you from calming down--people like, say, the commenters in that particular blog post. (Major kudos to DataPacRat for managing to stay calm while he/she was being accused of believing in "godbots"; I would not have been able to do the same.) I'm inclined to apply the principle of charity here along with Hanlon's Razor to conclude that they're not actually deliberately trying to piss you off... but God, it sure feels like it sometimes.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 09:40:07AM *  11 points [-]

Money? I think PZ types are mainly looking for narcissistic supply. Also, there was an article either here on on SSC about how people sometimes don't want to be high status just feel high status, cannot find it anymore, but seems relevant.

EDIT found it I think this is what is going on here, not really money.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 01:03:39PM *  5 points [-]

Yes, the link explains why some people may be obsessed by some ideas -- because they generate feeling of status in their heads. Now other question is why this idea instead of some other idea. For example, you are looking for a "bad guy" whose reputation you can smash online, thus generating heroic feelings in yourself... so, from all the available options, why choose cryonics?

Well, I guess it is somehow similar to the previous "bad guys", so whatever enemy-detection algorithm chose them, it also chose cryonics.

atheists... video game fans... cryonicists... -- complete the pattern

What do these have in common?

  • They are groups of people considered weird by most of the society.
  • They are predominantly male groups (which may be merely a consequence of the previous fact, but it takes 0.1 second to spin it as sexism).
  • Those people care about their group strongly, but outsiders do not empathise with them.

For a clickbait website, this is a perfect target. All they have to do is write: "Your way of life makes you hate women, therefore your way of life should be regulated by well-meaning outsiders. What is our proof for this? We have found this one women who feels uncomfortable with you. And since you have a minority of women, it must be a general rule. Now stop resisting and start obeying your new overlords!"

Well, for me the interesting question here is who are the next likely targets. Who else fits this pattern? Can we recognize them before they are attacked? And assuming we care about them, can we use this knowledge to somehow protect them?

My suspicion is that "rationalist" and "effective altruists" do fit this pattern; they were just not given sufficiently high priority yet. It may depend on how large wave of hate the attack on cryonicists can generate. (There is always a risk of choosing too weird group, so the outsiders will be too indifferent to join the wave.)

Of course there is always the chance that I am pattern-matching here too much. My only defense is that we could use this model to generate predictions about who will be attacked next, and then see whether those predictions were right. (On the other hand, it also feels like doing homework for PZ Myers, so maybe this is not a good topic for a public debate.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 April 2015 09:41:51PM 11 points [-]

I don't think this is what is going here at all. The pattern match that is going on is cryonics and fringe science or pseudoscientific ideas that sound like they are promising things they cannot deliver. This much more about PZ thinking of himself as a skeptic and having just enough biology background to think he can comment on any biology related issue.

Comment author: satt 25 April 2015 02:07:35AM 1 point [-]

Yeah. The parent & sibling comments here got me curious about exactly what PZ wrote, and whether it'd be a transparently politically motivated fulmination against cryonicists.

But the post, as far as I can see, is just an unfavourable comparison of cryonics to ancient mummification, and Myers calling cryonicists frauds who practice "ritual" & "psuedo-scientific alteration of [a] corpse", frauds sometimes defended with "the transhumanist technofetishist version of Pascal’s Wager". Strong stuff, but I don't see anything in the post about partisan politics, race, nerd culture (unless one counts "transhumanist technofetishist" as a dog-whistle meant to slam nerds in general...?), or sexism or feminism or gender (well, except the reference to the frozen girl as a "girl").

Ctrl-F-ing for "Myers" doesn't reveal anything along those lines either.

I see several comments in the political categories I mentioned but they weren't posted by PZ or cheered by PZ, so I'm a bit surprised by the comments here focusing on PZ to impute political motives to him and psychoanalyze him.

PZ's post all but says he's slamming cryonicists because (to his mind) they're crooks & quacks. (Based on the reference to "tortur[ing] cadavers", maybe there's a purity-violation ick-reaction too. That's still pretty distant from the motivations people are speculating about here.) I don't understand why I'd need a special explanation for that, over & above the more common reasons why people tend to scoff at cryonics (absurdity heuristic, plus scepticism about future technological trends w.r.t. brain preservation & re-instantiation, plus over-generalization from everyday experience of how freezing affects food and the like).

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 03:46:07PM 3 points [-]

The funny part is PZ being a nerdy white male atheist scientist so basically the perfect target for this. Could this partially be a preventive action i.e. if I shoot at my group, perhaps people don't notice I am one of them?

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 10:01:41PM *  2 points [-]

In debates I read about similar people, "projection" is a word mentioned repeatedly. I would also suspect "reaction formation" (known as "the lady doth protest too much" outside of psychoanalysis) to play an important role.

That means, I think there is more than merely strategically shooting at one's own phenotype to draw attention away from one's own person. If drawing attention away would be the only goal, it would make more sense to try draw attention away towards some other group, also an easy target, but not including me. For example, white male nerds could shoot at white male jocks, since it is only being white and male that is considered a bad thing in certain circles. Similarly, white male atheists could shoot at white male Christians. So there must be some additional explanation.

(Not everyone is like this. There are also people who do not shoot at their own group, but at a different group, or at least at a much larger supergroup so that their own group gets a smaller fraction of attention. For example white male non-nerds shooting at white male nerds, or rich white people putting huge emphasis on whiteness and maleness and maybe also cissexuality but never ever mentioning class privilege. (Which is rather ironic, considering that the whole privileged/oppressed framwork was stolen from Marx. Here, Marx would be an example of a rich white male shooting at rich white males.))

So I guess in a way these people are trying to shoot at themselves -- on some metaphorical level. It's like they perceive something undesirable in themselves... then use typical mind fallacy to generalize it to their whole group (because being a member of a sinful group is less painful than being a sinful individual in otherwise mostly healthy group) ... and then try to atone for their sins by attacking all the other members of their group (because it is less painful than trying to improve oneself). That is, on some level they are sincerely fighting against something they consider evil. They just completely lost control over the huge biases that govern their evil-detection mechanisms.

Here is an experimental prediction: Find a sample of über-politically-correct white men publicly shooting at their own group (not just a similar group or a huge superset). Explore their background, and the background of typical members of such group. I predict that among these online warriors you will find a higher percent than in general population of racists, rapists, etc. (Where by "racists" I don't mean scoring non-zero on an implicit association test, but like actual neo-Nazis; etc.)

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2015 07:05:07AM 14 points [-]

I retract my Great Filter hypothesis: I realized this predicts an ever smaller population of ever smarter hominids, who still have a good quality of life, making up in smarts what they miss in numbers. But the simple fact is, hominid populations were not dwindling. They were pretty steadily taking over the planet, migrating out of Africa and all that.

Well, unless it happened before and caused the mitochondrial Eve bottleneck and then things turned different after that, but that is adding too much detail and courting a conjunction bias, so I don't propose that until more evidence is unearthed.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 21 April 2015 12:10:03PM 6 points [-]

Upvoted for updating.

Comment author: knb 26 April 2015 12:21:09AM *  2 points [-]

The Wall Street Journal has an article up claiming that the world economy is currently experiencing an excess of capital, labor, and commodities, and that this is potentially a cause of serious problems.

Could anyone explain to me how it is possible to have an excess of capital and an excess of labor?

ETA: You can get around the paywall by googling the title of the article and clicking the first link.

Comment author: solipsist 26 April 2015 04:18:27PM 0 points [-]

With a 1,000 square kilometer industrial complex for the manufacture of slinkys and a million trained botanists.

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 10:36:53PM *  0 points [-]

Send them to me! slinkys that is! it's time to change the world for the better!

Comment author: Romashka 26 April 2015 04:45:02PM 0 points [-]

Send them to me. Botanists, that is. It's time to change the world for the better.

Comment author: knb 28 April 2015 06:22:38AM 0 points [-]

The article makes it pretty clear they are not describing a mismatch scenario. In a mismatch you have simultaneous shortages and gluts, but the article never talks about shortages of X while there is a surplus of Y, only gluts.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 26 April 2015 02:07:26AM -1 points [-]

According to Marx, in capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of "reserve army of labour" and of “poverty in the midst of plenty”, or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.

— Wikipedia, "Overproduction"

Comment author: RichardKennaway 26 April 2015 09:10:35AM 2 points [-]

Has anyone made a mathematical model of that? I don't know what most of the words in it mean, in concrete terms.

It sounds like "we can make more than we want with less labour than we can supply." Is that accurate?

In scarcity, which has been all of history up to the present, everyone's strategy has been to get as much work as they can, make as much stuff as they can, and sell as much stuff as they can, in order to get as much stuff as they can in exchange. I can imagine that when half the workforce can make twice as much stuff as everyone wants, that may not work so well. But that's just a verbal story, and I don't trust those.

Comment author: ChristianKl 26 April 2015 10:34:30PM 0 points [-]

There are not enough people with great ideas to produce new products starting companies that don't take away the market of existing companies.

Comment author: advancedatheist 25 April 2015 11:39:46PM 3 points [-]

Sigh. Another dead transhumanist. I never met Dan Fredinburg, but I gather from his friends' posts on Facebook that he wanted to upload his mind some day.

And what an unlikely way to die. You put your life at risk by trying to climb Everest under normal conditions. Fredinburg just happened to attempt that when a catastrophic earthquake struck Nepal.

Comment author: Romashka 25 April 2015 04:16:02PM 1 point [-]

Are there people who would be interested in a (virtual) reading group for Pearl's Causality?

Comment author: CurtisSerVaas 25 April 2015 02:21:24PM 1 point [-]

I've edited the LW-wiki to make a list of LWers interested in making debate tools..

In general, I think it'd be useful to make a post similar to the "What are you working on threads", so that people with similar interest can find each other. What do people think of a "People working on X repository" post?

Comment author: Lumifer 23 April 2015 07:39:40PM 4 points [-]

A paper with some empirical results on tools and techniques for fighting procrastination and distractions (in the context of taking online courses).

Comment author: Lumifer 23 April 2015 05:37:30PM 5 points [-]

An interesting complete-disillusionment-with-academia letter from a Ph.D. student.

Comment author: Epictetus 23 April 2015 07:47:56PM 4 points [-]

People have been complaining about academia for a very long time. Then again, every other human organization has burned-out/disillusioned people writing similar complaints.

As for me, I definitely don't have what it takes to stick around in academia and plan to leave as soon as I get my degree.

Comment author: adamzerner 22 April 2015 08:37:34PM 2 points [-]

I remember hearing a quote somewhere on LW saying something like "pain/discomfort is what you feel when you level up". Does anyone know what the actual quote is? Where it was said?

Comment author: moreati 24 April 2015 09:43:53AM 3 points [-]

There's also "Pain is weakness leaving the body", which is less specific but probably pre-dates Eliezer's quote.

Comment author: jam_brand 23 April 2015 12:53:11AM *  6 points [-]

Eliezer said it in http://lesswrong.com/lw/ul/my_bayesian_enlightenment : "That scream of horror and embarrassment is the sound that rationalists make when they level up."

Comment author: adamzerner 23 April 2015 01:08:05AM 1 point [-]

THANK YOU!

Comment author: advancedatheist 22 April 2015 03:53:57PM *  4 points [-]

The story of Matheryn Naovaratpong's cryopreservation has gotten quite a bit of coverage in English-language websites in Southeast Asia:

Father of cryonically preserved Thai girl: I will just hug her if we meet again

http://www.straitstimes.com/news/asia/south-east-asia/story/father-cryonically-preserved-thai-girl-i-will-just-hug-her-if-we-mee#xtor=CS1-10

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 April 2015 01:48:49AM 3 points [-]

That's very interesting. I'd be interested to see if this actually leads to an uptick of interest in Southeast Asia.

Comment author: advancedatheist 23 April 2015 02:26:05AM 4 points [-]

That region's newly emergent middle class people and wealthy people might lack Westerners' prejudices which have made cryonics such a hard idea to sell in our parts of the world.

For one thing, they have witnessed rapid economic progress in their own societies in their own generation, so they wouldn't understand the appeal of Western pessimism about apocalyptic and dystopian futures.

Comment author: ChristianKl 23 April 2015 11:32:23AM 2 points [-]

They likely don't have the same prejudices as Westerners but that doesn't mean that they don't have other prejudices.

Without understanding the local culture a lot more than most of of Westerners do it's hard to make this kind of prediction.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 April 2015 02:48:27AM 2 points [-]

That's an interesting hypothesis. Is there any way to test it? Also is there any way to take advantage of it? That suggests that the window for cryonics there may not be very long, possibly on the order of 20 years or so.

Comment author: advancedatheist 23 April 2015 03:00:38AM 3 points [-]

I don't know how to test it, though I suspect the relative absence of christian beliefs in those countries would make a difference. And why would such a "window" even exist there? If these countries can figure out how to keep economic progress going indefinitely without the dysfunctions in Western societies identified by, say, Peter Thiel, then these countries could very well take the lead in becoming increasingly "futuristic" on their own, without having to look to the West for models and guidance.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 23 April 2015 05:14:06PM 1 point [-]

By window I meant the following: you said that " they have witnessed rapid economic progress in their own societies in their own generation, so they wouldn't understand the appeal of Western pessimism about apocalyptic and dystopian futures." If that is what is going on, then the next generation may not see that as much. If so, we have around a generation. I agree that if the economic progress continues at a fast pace that may not end up with some of the issues we have here, but in general developing countries have as they've neared parity with the developed countries had their improvement rates by many metrics slow down and come more or less into alignment with Western growth rates. Look at for example infant mortality levels and expected lifespan.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 23 April 2015 10:35:43AM 3 points [-]

I would be interesting to find out what the public reaction is in Thailand, and also to see what their science fiction is like.

Comment author: GuySrinivasan 22 April 2015 06:58:10AM 3 points [-]

Does anyone have software or procedures they have found useful for evaluating large, hard, inference problems? I don't know what the right class of problem is. Mine is that I have several years and lots and lots of notes of symptoms a family member has exhibited, including subjective recollections all the way to MRIs, and I'd like to organize my thoughts and inferences around what common cause(s) might be, priors, weight of evidence, etc.

I plan to improvise, but I'd like to steal first.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 23 April 2015 09:39:13AM 1 point [-]

Not sure what you mean.

BUGS maybe?

Comment author: satt 25 April 2015 02:49:42AM 1 point [-]

I think what GuySrinivasan's asking is closer to "how do I organize a mass of evidence & ideas about a topic so I can better reason about it" than "how do I grind numerical statistical inferences out of a formal Bayesian model"?

Comment author: SanguineEmpiricist 21 April 2015 07:10:12PM 10 points [-]

If any one has sleep apnea with or without snoring or even a hint of being too tired during the day please fix it. My life is profoundly better and I have access to a life i did not know was possible, no more sadness or depression whatsoever.

My life is 20-40x better I feel like I have woken up in another world that was shut off from me for the first 20ish years of my lifespan.

Comment author: passive_fist 22 April 2015 12:45:51AM 6 points [-]

On that note, I've heard a lot about how addressing sleep apnea is great but how do you check if you have it in the first place (or, at least, to the extent that would warrant seeing a doctor about it)? 'Being tired during the day' doesn't seem like a strong self-diagnostic criterion.

Comment author: SanguineEmpiricist 22 April 2015 02:50:21AM *  1 point [-]

sleeping on my side worked for me, if i am not disciplined i mess it up, the expectation is so large that perhaps a mouthguard or machine is worth it. If you wake up at night but cannot remember or remember falling then I now that is a good sign.

google sleep apnea/shallow breathing while sleeping. I'm afraid I cannot do too much more to help with my current knowledge.

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 10:07:04PM 0 points [-]

I tried a lot of sleep tracking with apps and wearables. (fitbit, basis, sleep as android)

I currently use both fitbit and basis, fitbit visualises long term sleep better, basis visualises a single night better.

These devices showed me what my sleep looks like, and further what my "normal sleep pattern" looks like. while I have good sleep now; if I stop having good sleep; I will have the graphs to prove it.

Comment author: DataPacRat 21 April 2015 02:35:05PM 3 points [-]

Seeking writing advice: how to keep writing

I've been having some shoulder pain for the past couple of weeks, which I've seen a doctor for. I've also noticed that I haven't actually written anything new for my novel, "S.I.", for almost that long, and have just been posting chapters from my buffer to the forum I post them in.

Given my previous attempt at writing long fiction ("Myou've Gotta Be Kidding Me"), I anticipate two likely courses. One, pain sucks, and when it goes away, my writing motivation will return, and I'll get back into the swing of things. Or two, my writing engine has run out of motivation-fuel for this story generally. In the latter case, I think I can avoid leaving the story entirely unfinished, though there would still be all sorts of dangling plot threads and unsolved mysteries; I should be able to muster up enough typing to have my protagonist finally feel overwhelmed by everything she's facing, retreat to Elliot Lake, and jump to my intended finale. It's far from a perfect solution, but seems better than putting the story on permanent hiatus (or more formally cancelling it) without any finish at all, as I ended up doing with "Myou've".

I'm hoping it's the first course. What I don't know... is if there's any way I can tweak the odds to /favour/ the first course.

Any ideas?

Comment author: jam_brand 22 April 2015 09:04:05AM *  1 point [-]

I have no direct experience with this myself, but have heard good things about http://zhealth.net. A quick search turns up Will Eden once recommending it here on LW and apparently a practitioner was brought in for a lecture at one of the first rationality camps so perhaps CFAR staff or one of the alums listed at http://rationalitybootcamp.blogspot.com could say more about it.

Comment author: Emily 21 April 2015 04:04:02PM 1 point [-]

Is your keyboard / workstation set up correctly to minimise strain or whatever on your shoulder? I think an optimally positioned desk, keyboard, chair, screen etc should avoid much (any?) shoulder movement at all. You don't say whether typing exacerbates the shoulder pain or if it's just a background level of pain that's bothering you while writing, though.

Comment author: DataPacRat 21 April 2015 04:18:44PM 2 points [-]

Typing doesn't increase the shoulder pain. (As of the latest doctor's visit, he thinks it's actually more of a neck problem.) It's more the general background level of pain that's keeping me from being able to spend any time coming up with plot-stuff I want to write.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 21 April 2015 05:49:43PM 3 points [-]

Sometimes the connection between pain and its cause aren't obvious. I was having fairly severe random knee pains, and it turned out that getting my bike lubricated made them go away, even though the pain wasn't happening when I was riding my bike or soon after riding it.

You might want to check on the ergonomics of everything you usually do.

Comment author: ciphergoth 21 April 2015 06:54:08AM 2 points [-]

If utility is logarithmic in wealth, the Kelly Criterion tells me the right size of stake to put on a given bet, given the odds offered, my subjective probability and my wealth. In practice, in the real world, what's the right number to plug into the "wealth" part of the equation? My current savings? My yearly salary? The value of my home minus the money owing on it?

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:05:43PM -1 points [-]

If utility is logarithmic in wealth, the Kelly Criterion tells me the right size of stake to put on a given bet

This is true, but incomplete. If utility is monotonically increasing with wealth, the Kelly Criterion tells you how to size your bets.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 22 April 2015 02:29:08AM -1 points [-]

That is only true if you are making lots of bets and expect them to be your main source of income. But that assumes away Ciphergoth's question.

Comment author: Epictetus 22 April 2015 01:31:14PM 2 points [-]

The "wealth" part of the equation is the total amount you're willing to gamble with. If you have money set aside for frivolities like food, then that wouldn't be part of your wealth as far as the Kelly Criterion is concerned.

The general principle with gambling is never to bet more than you're willing to lose. Kelly betting is optimal in the sense that over the long run, no other system will outperform it. In the short run, it's quite volatile and you can get very low.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 April 2015 06:35:05PM 2 points [-]

In practice, in the real world, what's the right number to plug into the "wealth" part of the equation?

The amount which you can afford to lose.

Comment author: tut 21 April 2015 08:10:40AM 0 points [-]

The same thing that you want to maximize in the long run.

Comment author: CBHacking 21 April 2015 08:20:25AM 1 point [-]

Not so much in response to your specific question, but when trying to figure out what I can afford, I actually take a pretty simple approach: my liquid assets (mostly in the bank) plus things I could easily liquidate (stocks, etc.) minus a "rainy day fund" (this has varied in size over the years, but tends to sit at between 2 and 10 thousand USD, based on how hard I think it would be to get a job or find housing in the event that I lost one or both). Things like 401K and HSA are omitted; they're already earmarked for specific things and mean I don't have to worry about keeping other funds back for those purposes. Assets that are technically resalable but either not worth the effort or of high utility to my daily life (my computer, my car, etc.) are also omitted, though in a pinch I would of course sell them too.

The result is the money I can afford to spend. I can use it on video games, or vacations, or gifts for people, or a new car (at which point I would sell the old one), or fighting malaria. I can trickle it away on living expenses if I decide to quit my job and pursue hobbies or whatever (I would start looking for a new one once I got within "expected job hunt time * cash outflow rate" distance of the bottom of this wealth, though I could dip into the rainy day fund if needed).

I can also invest it into riskier things than a savings account, like stocks... or into any other kind of betting.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2015 06:15:30PM 8 points [-]

I'm inclined to think that policy towards illegal immigration is a result of incoherent moral standards-- some combination of "discourage strangers from showing up in large numbers" and "rescue harmless people who are close to death".

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:10:03PM 4 points [-]

I don't think policy is a result of incoherent moral standards. I think it is a result of different people having different moral ideas that they consider important. So some subset of people are concerned enough to be active in discouraging strangers from showing up, and some other subset of people are concerned with rescuing people who are close to death, and the political/legislative system cobbles these things together into something which can pass a vote.

I suspect CEV is unlikely. That is, if one were to extrapolate volition from bunches of different people, the result would not be coherent, it would be incoherent. Because people have different and inconsistent volitions.

Comment author: passive_fist 21 April 2015 03:54:03AM *  1 point [-]

Probably but I'm not sure why that should be surprising; most moral standards we hold are inconsistent. So what would distinguish policy towards illegal immigration from other policies?

In a previous open thread, I brought up the theory of right-wing authoritarianism, which purports that conservative attitudes may be partially a defensive response to perception of threat. That offers one way of looking at policy towards illegal immigration: Maybe some people really do view immigrants as a threat to their way of living. So from that perspective they would not view them as harmless.

It may be simpler than that, though. Maybe 'rescue harmless people who are close to death' is not a strong value (or a value at all) for some. Certainly we know that psychopaths do not hold this as a value, and may even consider it an anti-value -- they would enjoy increasing the number of harmless people who are close to death. I'm sure this is not true for the majority of human beings, however.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 10:31:59PM *  21 points [-]

It reminds me of a thought experiment I have read somewhere. Imagine that there are many people in the world who are dying from starvation. They would happily agree to be your slaves, if you feed them. There is too many of them and they are not qualified for modern economy; if you would give them more than a minimum, there wouldn't be enough for you to have a decent life. Imagine you only have the following three options:

A) Share everything with them. Everyone will live, but everyone will be rather poor.
B) Accept them as your slaves, in exchange for food and shelter. Everyone will live, you will keep your quality of life, but there will be a huge inequality.
C) Refuse to interact with them. You will keep your quality of life, but they will die from starvation.

If we order these options by altruism, which is how those poor people would see them, we get A > B > C. It would be best to make those poor people our equals, but even helping them survive as slaves is better than letting them die.

If we order these options by pure egoism, we get B > C > A. Having slaves would be a cool improvement, keeping status quo is acceptable.

But in the typical decision process, we refuse B to signal that we are not complete egoists, and refuse A because we are not really that much altruistic. Thus what remains is the option C... which paradoxically both altruists and egoists consider to be worse than B (and the altruists also worse than A).

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2015 05:05:21PM 9 points [-]

Slavery is a non sequitur here. Under the circumstances you might suggest "I will pay you below minimum wage" or "I will pay you nothing, but provide housing on my plantation where you work." But so long as they have the right to walk away at any time its not slavery, and there's nothing in the setup that justifies that loss of liberty. Your hypothetical situation is an argument against the minimum wage, not pro-slavery.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2015 11:38:25PM 13 points [-]

The thing is, I don't think a lot of illegal immigrants are unqualified for a modern economy. If they were unqualified, there wouldn't be so many laws trying to keep them from working.

Comment author: DanielLC 21 April 2015 09:28:00PM 1 point [-]

Even without that, there's a lot of issues about giving them welfare. We could allow them entry as second-class citizens who have no minimum wage or access to welfare but still need to pay taxes. We'll avoid having to give them welfare, but we'll need to admit that we have second-class citizens, which is something we pretend to be against.

Comment author: ChristianKl 21 April 2015 10:06:26PM 1 point [-]

It also means that the people who are currently working at minimum wage jobs are likely to lose their jobs to the cheaper competition.

Comment author: Viliam 21 April 2015 09:05:08AM *  4 points [-]

Great point!

Although hypotetically here could be two independent interests that just happen to be strategically aligned. Some people want to stop unqualified immigrants, other people want to stop qualified immigrants who would compete with them on the job market.

Also there are of course concerns other than economical, such as people bringing with them some nasty habits from their cultures. These were not included in the thought experiment, which perhaps makes it irrelevant for real-world situations.

Also having slaves has the risk of those slaves rebelling later.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 21 April 2015 12:08:15PM 4 points [-]

I wasn't kidding when I said one of the motivations was a desire to not live with large numbers of strangers. One issue might be cognitive load-- the strangers have unfamiliar customs (is a sincere apology accompanied by a smile or a serious expression?) and possibly an unfamiliar language.

As far as I can tell, the economic side of not wanting immigrants is a sort of merchantilism-- a belief that all that matters is where the money is, so that new people showing up and getting paid for work just seems like money getting drained away. Weirdly, rich people who show up and spend money without working locally may be disliked, but they don't seem to be as hated as poor people who do useful work. I don't think it's just about competition for jobs.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 25 April 2015 10:40:06AM 2 points [-]

https://hbr.org/2015/04/emotional-intelligence-doesnt-translate-across-borders

A few examples of people from different cultures misreading each other.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 20 April 2015 09:39:39PM 2 points [-]

I'd say inconsistent rather than incoherent moral standards, or different moral standards at tension.

Honestly, this seems like a "well, duh" sort of thing. One just needs to read the rhetoric from say both sides of the US immigration debate, or both sides of the discussions in Europe about refugees from North Africa to see this pretty clearly.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 20 April 2015 04:14:20PM 11 points [-]

I've noticed a lot of disciplines, particularly ones that sometimes have to justify their value, often make a similar claim:

"[subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: it teaches you how to think"

This raises some interesting questions:

  • I can believe, for example, that Art History instils in its students some useful habits of thought, but I suspect they're less general than those from a discipline with an explicit problem-solving focus. What kind of scheme could one construct to score the meta-cognitive skills learned from a particular subject?

  • Are there any subjects which are particularly unlikely to make this claim? Are any subjects just composed of procedural knowledge without any overarching theory, cross-domain applicability, or necessary transferable skills?

  • Are there particularly potent combinations of skills, or particularly useless ones? It seems that a Physics degree and a Maths degree would have similar "coverage" in terms of thinking habits they instil, but a Physics degree and a Law degree would have much broader coverage. "I have technical skills, but I also have people-skills" is a fairly standard contemporary idea. Do Physics and Law have strikingly different coverages because Physics Lawyers don't really need to exist?

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 21 April 2015 02:05:46PM 1 point [-]

"[subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: it teaches you how to think"

Most (~70%) of the times it is a euphemism for "it's useless, but we like it so we still want to use taxpayers' money to teach it".

(If people really cared about teaching people how to think, they'd teach cognitive psychology, probability and statistics, game theory, and the like, not stuff like Latin.)

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 23 April 2015 12:19:17PM *  3 points [-]

(If people really cared about teaching people how to think, they'd teach cognitive psychology, probability and statistics, game theory, and the like, not stuff like Latin.)

I expect you're typical-minding here. I know enough linguistics enthusiasts who feel that learning new languages makes you think in new ways that I believe that to be their genuine experience. Also because I personally find a slight difference in the way I think in different languages, though not as pronounced as those people.

Presumably they, being familiar with the thought-changing effects of Latin but not having felt the language-changing effects of cognitive psychology etc. (either because of not having studied those topics enough, or because of not having a mind whose thought patterns would be strongly affected by the study of them), would likewise say "if people really cared about teaching people how to think, they'd teach Latin and not stuff like cognitive psychology". Just like you say what you say, either because of not having studied Latin enough, or because of not having a mind whose thought patterns would be strongly affected by the study of languages.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 24 April 2015 09:02:09AM *  2 points [-]

I know enough linguistics enthusiasts who feel that learning new languages makes you think in new ways that I believe that to be their genuine experience. Also because I personally find a slight difference in the way I think in different languages, though not as pronounced as those people.

Sure, but the same happens with living languages as well.

not having studied Latin enough

I studied Latin for five years. Sure, it is possible that if I had studied it longer it would have changed my thought patterns more, but surely there are cheaper ways of doing that. (Even the first couple months of studying linear algebra affected me more, but I don't expect that to apply to everybody so I didn't list it upthread.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 21 April 2015 02:28:10PM *  2 points [-]

A while ago I read that a betting firm rather hires physics or math people than people with degrees in statistics because the statistics folks to often think that real world data is supposed to follow a normal distribution like the textbook example they faced in university.

Outside of specific statistics programs a lot of times statistics classes lead to students simply memorizing recipes and not really developing a good statistical intuition.

Teaching statistics sounds often much better in the abstract than in practice.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 21 April 2015 04:27:27PM -2 points [-]

I read that Germans are often anti-semites, is it true?

Comment author: Lumifer 21 April 2015 03:46:00PM 0 points [-]

because the statistics folks to often think that real world data is supposed to follow a normal distribution like the textbook example they faced in university.

That is, ahem, bullshit. Stupid undergrads might think so for a short while, "statistics folks" do not.

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:19:25PM *  3 points [-]

Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund that lost billions of dollars because its founders, including nobel prize winners, assumed 1) things that have been uncorrelated for a while will remain uncorrelated, and 2) ridiculously low probabilities of failure calculated from assumptions that events are distributed normally actually apply to analyzing the likelihood of various disastrous investment strategies failing. That is, LTCM reported results as if something which is seen from data to be normal between +/- 2*sigma will be reliably normal out to 3, 4, 5, and 6 sigma.

Yes, there WERE people who knew LTCM were morons. But there were plenty who didn't, including nobel prize winners with PhDs. It really happened and it still really happens.

Comment author: Lumifer 22 April 2015 12:04:09AM *  4 points [-]

I am familiar with LTCM and how it crashed and burned. I don't think that people who ran it were morons or that they assumed returns will be normally distributed. LTCM's blowup is a prime example of "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" (which should be an interesting lesson for LW people who are convinced markets are efficient).

LTCM failed when its convergence trades (which did NOT assume things will be uncorrelated or that returns will be Gaussian) diverged instead and LTCM could not meet margin calls.

Hindsight vision makes everything easy. Perhaps you'd like to point out today some obvious to you morons who didn't blow up yet but certainly will?

Comment author: mwengler 23 April 2015 01:38:49AM 2 points [-]

I don't think that people who ran it were morons or that they assumed returns will be normally distributed.

An LTCM investor letter, quoted here, says

"…only one year in fifty should it lose at least 20% of its portfolio."

And of course, it proceeded to lose essentially all of its portfolio after operating for just a handful of years. Now if in fact you are correct and the LTCM'ers did understand things might be correlated and that tail probabilities would not be gaussian, how do you imagine they even made a calculation like that?

Comment author: Lumifer 23 April 2015 01:52:07AM 0 points [-]

Can we get a bit more specific than waving around marketing materials?

Precisely which things turned out to be correlated that LTCM people assumed to be uncorrelated and precisely the returns on which positions the LTCM people assumed to be Gaussian when in fact they were not?

Or are you critiquing the VAR approach to risk management in general? There is a lot to critique, certainly, but would you care to suggest some adequate replacements?

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 21 April 2015 04:17:53PM 1 point [-]

"Statisticians think everything is normally distributed" seems to be one of those weirdly enduring myths. I'd love to know how it gets propagated.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 April 2015 06:37:09PM 1 point [-]

Someone was overly impressed by the Central Limit Theorem... X-)

Comment author: gjm 21 April 2015 04:40:49PM 8 points [-]

I strongly suspect that a large part of its recent popularity is because in the recent CDO-driven crash it suited the interests of the (influential) people whose decisions were actually responsible to spread the idea that the problem was that those silly geeky quants didn't understand that everything isn't uncorrelated Gaussians, ha ha ha.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 22 April 2015 05:02:24PM *  3 points [-]

That's a good point, but on the other hand, even thinking that everything is a Gaussian would be a vast improvement over thinking that everything is a Dirac delta and it is therefore not ludicrous to speculate about why some politician's approval rating went down from 42.8% last week to 42.3% today when both figures come from surveys with a sample size of 1600.

Comment author: ChristianKl 22 April 2015 05:15:17PM 1 point [-]

A well trained mathematician or physicist who never took a formal course on statistics likely isn't going to make that error, just as a well trained statistician isn't going to make that error.

I would think that the mathematician is more likely to get this right than the medical doctor who got statistics lessons at med school.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 10:08:07PM 11 points [-]

I would interpret that claim as: "we may be practically useless, but we are still fucking high-status!" :D

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 21 April 2015 10:42:20AM 5 points [-]

The claim isn't just made with arguably useless disciplines, though. Many people argue (quite rightly, IMO) that programming doesn't just teach you to command machines to do your bidding, but also instils powerful thinking tools. So even if kids don't grow up to be software developers, it's still valuable for them to learn programming. Similar arguments could be made for law or finance.

Comment author: JQuinton 21 April 2015 05:49:26PM 3 points [-]

Slightly off topic, but I both program and play guitar and for the longest time I was wondering why I was getting an overwhelming feeling of the two bleeding into each other. While playing guitar, it would "feel" like I was also coding. Eventually I figured out that the common thread is probably the general task of algorithm optimization.

There's no way for me to tell if programming made me a better guitar player or vice versa.

Comment author: James_Ernest 21 April 2015 09:17:08AM 8 points [-]

Physics lawyers definitely need to exist. I would strongly like to get an injunction against the laws of thermodynamics.

Comment author: Lumifer 20 April 2015 04:25:48PM 5 points [-]

Seems to me that "teaches you how to think" does not necessarily imply instilling habits of thought. I would interpret that (say, in the context of Art History) as:

  • Supplying you with some maps of unknown to you territory
  • Giving you some tools to explore and map the territory further
  • Pointing you towards some well-worn tracks as "default" ways of thinking about the issues involved

The habits of thought are not involved in all of this -- it's more of a broadening-your-horizons exercise.

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 10:03:10PM 0 points [-]

I suspect that with "mastery of a skill" comes an ability to understand "mastery", in that - on a variation of man-with-a-hammer syndrome; holding the mastery of one area will help you better understand the direction to head in when mastering other areas, and learning in other areas.

to me the line now reads; "mastery of [subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: mastery teaches you how to think"

where <subject> can vary; the significance of what people are trying to convey is maybe not in the <subect> but in the experience of learning.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 12:06:02PM 5 points [-]

Thought experiment. You are doing a really boring job you dislike like data entry, but so well paid you don't want to leave it. You cannot automate it. You cannot work from home. You sit in the office 8 hours Thankfully it does not take 8 hours, you can do it in 5 and then browse the web or something.

What do you do? Trying to spend the other 3 meaningfully like studying with Anki, and trying to find challenging games in the actual job part are two obvious ones, what else? E.g. would you listen to ebooks while doing it? What else?

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:26:48PM 2 points [-]

Post to lesswrong.com.

Comment author: shminux 20 April 2015 11:03:56PM 2 points [-]

Tried something like that. Was unable to do anything productive after 5 hours without a real deadline.

Comment author: Viliam 21 April 2015 09:10:11AM *  2 points [-]

Could you hire a cheap online personal assistant that would give you the deadlines? Like, you would make a plans for the whole week in advance, give those plans to the assistant, and then during the week the assistant would role-play being your manager. (Using another person as proxy for your planning self.)

Comment author: shminux 21 April 2015 04:25:39PM 2 points [-]

If it doesn't feel real, it's easy to ignore.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 08:31:27PM *  1 point [-]

I would start programming mobile games, and would hope to make money from them. If I don't succeed, at least I had a hobby, and maybe can use the experience to get a more interesting job later. If I do succeed, then I do not have to solve the problem of boring job anymore.

That would require sufficient freedom to spend those 3 hours not just programming, but also painting pictures, editing 3D models, editing levels, and testing the game on the phone. Okay, hypothetically that is not necessary; there can be some parts that I have to do at home. But it would be much more convenient if I could do whatever is necessary for the game immediately when I need it.

Or, if I wouldn't have a specific plan, I would just learn random stuff from online universities. I enjoy learning, so I wouldn't necessarily care about how useful are those lessons. I would imagine that some part of that would be useful somehow later, if nothing else, then for impressing people.

Someone who is a buddhist could use those three hours to meditate daily, and achieve nirvana in a few years, while keeping a well-paying job. Also, being a buddhist could help with the feelings of boredom from the job. ;)

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 April 2015 09:35:53PM 4 points [-]

Someone who is a buddhist could use those three hours to meditate daily, and achieve nirvana in a few years, while keeping a well-paying job.

That's not how it works.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 10:54:25PM 5 points [-]

You are right, Buddha himself had to quit his job before he could achieve enlightenment.

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 10:24:14PM 0 points [-]

upvoted for the determined, "thats not how nirvana works".

Comment author: wadavis 20 April 2015 02:28:50PM 8 points [-]

Plan A: Change your environment; spend three hours a day preparing a proposal for management/ownership to work as a contractor paid by entry opposed to an employee paid by the hour. Find the relevant tax and overhead savings to make this a mutually beneficial arrangement. Find out who in management/ownership can approve your proposal and who it just creates headaches for, buy beer for both.

I understand that goes against the spirit of your question, that your work environment may be to rigid, management that could approve the proposal are out of reach of the data entry staff, or one of many other arguments, but 60 hours a month is a large amount of time, it is shocking what could be done.

Plan B: Now on to things I've actually done in that situation; spend 60 hours preparing a bulletproof argument/presentation for a raise, spend 60 hours learning how to create better resumes, spend 60 hours learning how to job hunt without a resume (handshakes and recommendations), spend 60 hours job hunting, and last on the list spend the time on entertainment so that you are mentally recharged to make the most of your personal time.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 20 April 2015 01:32:02PM 3 points [-]

I can't concentrate if the words I'm hearing are not the ones I'm typing. Ebooks would be a terrible distraction for me during data entry. Music without lyrics would be better.

During blank minutes at a call center I used to work at, I made slow progress at writing a novel. It was made more enjoyable by the quirk that my writing flows better with pen and paper.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 11:44:18AM *  -2 points [-]

Simple proposal for Great Filter: when human intelligence evolved, it also had negative effects: bigger infant head -> more dangerous, more painful childbirth, also human children are prematurely born compared to other animals, develop slow, require a lot of care. Hence human intelligence directly caused high maternal risk and high maternal investment, and could it be the cause of the runaway intelligence arms race inside the species? Making it more important for men to compete for women since you could easier lose your mate during birth or she is too tied up in maternal care for another one and so on, so more intelligence means more maternal care / risk means more competition means more use for intelligence and more chance of intelligent genes spreading etc. Hominid women running a risk gamble when hooking up with smart men - more chance you die during labor, but if you win, your son may spread your genes effectively.

My point is: perhaps without intelligence having drawbacks i.e. without having to push that big infant brain through a vagina, there is no runaway arms race of intelligence. A species that does not have this danger of intelligence does have intelligence leading to more sexual competition means it does not develop further intelligence.

Was this considered?

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 April 2015 02:39:52PM *  4 points [-]

Dinosaurs had bigger heads than humans. Even bears can have bigger heads than humans. It seems unlikely that head size is the limiting factor for a Great filter. There seems also no reason why a brain has to be located in the head and not in the torso.

Comment author: Romashka 20 April 2015 06:33:35PM 1 point [-]

Interesting. 1 compared to what animals? 2 what does your theory predict regarding infanticide/cannibalism in intelligent species? 3 at what level of reproduction effort would childbearing remain viable, given a lifespan of twenty max and high children mortality? 4 ...genes effectively - in what way? Polygamy?

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 02:22:02PM 1 point [-]

"more intelligence means ... means more competition means more use for intelligence"

Seems to me there is always enough competition in the nature. It's not like without difficult childbirth our species would have become completely lazy and its evolution would stop.

Sorry, this is how I parsed your argument. I am not sure what exactly are you saying is the bad thing that could happen to species that would be similar to humans, only would have no problem giving childbirth to children with huge heads.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 April 2015 02:11:58PM *  3 points [-]

Simple proposal for Great Filter

This is not a possible explanation for the Great Filter.

Hence human intelligence directly caused high maternal risk and high maternal investment, and could it be the cause of the runaway intelligence arms race inside the species?

more chance of intelligent genes spreading

perhaps without intelligence having drawbacks i.e. without having to push that big infant brain through a vagina, there is no runaway arms race of intelligence.

You have this exactly backwards. If intelligence has negative side effects, this means you would expect less intelligence, for basic differential equation reasons. If large-headed women are more likely to give birth to large-headed babies (which die or kill them because of birthing difficulties), then small-headed babies are evolutionarily favored over large-headed babies. (This is why human babies are born so prematurely; that's the trick that lets you have a big adult head and still survive childbirth. If this trick were not possible, we probably would not be as intelligent as we are.) The selective advantage of intelligence goes down--instead of producing 1.05 times as many children, a smarter person might produce only 1.02 times as many children. In the first case, we obviously get intelligent life faster.

A possible explanation for the Great Filter is that there are planets where smarter animals only produce 0.98 as many children--and thus there are no animals smart enough to significantly alter their environment or make it to space.

But that would need to be a geographic / environmental claim about the planet, and it would need to hold everywhere. On Earth, it seems like one narrow location produced intelligent enough animals. From the unique geographical features of that location, one might suspect that the Cognitive Revolution was a significant filter--but, as with most filter-related things, this is hard to estimate. Was that location only slightly better than other locations, such that other places would have allowed evolution of civilization-creating animals a bit later in geological time (which is immensely later in historical time)? Are locations like that rare on random planets, or could Earth actually have surprisingly few locations that allow the evolution of civilization-creating animals, and that doesn't matter because you only need one?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 03:35:21PM 1 point [-]

The point I am trying to make is what if it is a bit more complicated than negatives or positives. Imagine any trait that increases your chance to find a mate but decreases the chance your mate survives into having another kid. A possible parallel would be having spikes on the back that look very sexy but do awful things to the mothers insides during birth.

The important thing is not to calculate if it is a net positive or net negative, but rather what happens? You are a male animal with such a mutation, such as they sexy spiky back, you knock up six females, four give birth to kids with the same spiky back, half them male, other two mothers die during birth. Now your pack / dating pool has a gender imbalance but no matter - you are still attractive, you are the guy with the sexy spiky back so go on outcompeting other males. You end up with more kids than other males, from more females, some of them who died during giving birth. The mole mothers your spiky-back kids kill, the more intense the competition for females becomes, but that is fine for you, you are the attractive guy with the spiky back. Your sons continue the same. See how the spiky back could be a runaway feature? The guy with even bigger spikes has kids who kill even more mothers but still he gets more mates. And so on. The mother-killing aspect of spikes contributes to more intense sexual competition, in which the sexy nature of said spikes works more efficiently.

Does that make sense?

Of course in this case we would probably see females develop spike-resistant insides. Aaaaand maybe that is where the nerds-are-creepy meme came from :-DDD (disregard this last part, just a joke)

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:35:47PM 1 point [-]

Imagine any trait that increases your chance to find a mate but decreases the chance your mate survives into having another kid.

This is practically the definition of a trait that is chosen through sexual selection rather than survival of the fittest. Believe it or not, those big boobs are net negatives at helping women survive, but they sure attract a lot of male attention. The antlers on deer and moose, the tail on a peacock, these all hurt the survival chances of the creatures carrying them, but females dig them so whaddyagonnado. Riding motorcycles, driving fast sports cars, and spending all your money on diamonds and hotel suites are none to helpful at surviving, but great ways to get a certain kind of laid.

What does this have to do with great filters?

Comment author: Romashka 20 April 2015 06:38:14PM 1 point [-]

You really can't have a kid survive its mother who died in childbirth if the kid is as helpless as here.

UNLESS you have not only competition, but altruism, too.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 06:40:59PM 1 point [-]

Yes, altruism can pretty easily be part of the picture. Kin selection and all that. Or, we can simply say that if a gene makes a male mate with 2x as many females but also makes 20% of the females die with the child dying too, it still propagates. And it still increases sexual competition by unbalancing gender ratios thus if it was in itself a sexual competition advantage, now it is on the relative level stronger.

Comment author: Lumifer 20 April 2015 07:24:35PM 0 points [-]

Or, we can simply say that if a gene makes a male mate with 2x as many females but also makes 20% of the females die with the child dying too, it still propagates.

Propagates for a very short while. If you initial population was stable (which means that each female had, on the average, two children which survive until they breed), introducing a mutation which kills off 20% of the females during birth is likely to lead to this population dying out pretty quickly. Yes, you'll have lots of males around, but they can't give birth.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 April 2015 06:02:49PM *  2 points [-]

See how the spiky back could be a runaway feature?

Until some other species takes over your ecological niche.

I seem to remember hearing about a gene in mice that would ensure that it always gets copied into the offspring if present (leading to rapid growth in the gene pool) but had the unfortunate effect that homozygotes are sterile.* Under random mating, you can calculate the population levels at which the gene frequency is stable,** but under non-random mating, a group where 50% of the parents have this gene could totally annihilate itself (as it would be possible to ensure that every child in the next generation is a carrier, and thus the generation after that will be totally sterile).

But consider this gene without a drawback: if one parent has at least one copy, then the child will, and if both parents each have at least one copy, then the children will have two copies, but the gene is fitness neutral in all permutations. Then we can calculate how many generations it will take for the gene to reach fixation, given random mating.

*Suppose the mechanism was that it would break the other chromosome. This means you're the only option--unless the other chromosome had the exact same idea, and now there aren't any functional chromosomes.

**As it turns out, the heterozygote advantage and homozygote disadvantage are both so strong that the only stable levels are 0 and 1. If you drop the heterozygote advantage to something more likely, like a heterozygote having a 55% chance of passing it on to a child, then you get a more interesting answer.

The important thing is not to calculate if it is a net positive or net negative, but rather what happens?

This is a fundamentally mistaken way of looking at evolution. The only important thing is whether it is a selective advantage or disadvantage! Populations roll down the selection gradient, and the assumption that population sizes are the same from year to year is a feature of mathematical models, not reality.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 06:17:34PM *  1 point [-]

You are good at lowering the probability I give to this hypothesis, and I thank you for that, but it is stil not 0.

First about the second point - my point is more like selective advantages do not mean the fitness of the group, or even the fitness of the parents to be maximized, but solely that of the propagation of the gene in descendants. So, from that angle, a gene killing some parents but still making an animal more sexually succesful can still confer a selective advantage. Depending on the ratio of this two of course. My point is precisely that on the whole it can be hugely destructive for the group.

Of course, and now back to your first point, this weakens the group. This would happen with a spiky back but here is where my metaphor stops being useful. It is intelligence. It begins with the ecological dominance - social competition model. The group was all right before intelligence. Surely a weaker but smarter group can compensate for the group level weakening?

My point is pulling an Occam here. Our best hypothesis is that an unknown factor X launched a runaway IQ based competition inside the hominid species. What if factor X is intelligence itself, basically it killing mothers, thus making the sexual competition of males more vivid? Surely such a reduction of factors is worth pondering? And as a side-effect, whatever group level weakness it would cause wrt other species, they would resolve that because of this intelligence, which according to EDSC was not formerly necessary, but at this point became useful for keeping other species at bay?

And if this all at least sounds not-impossible enough to invest resources into pondering or testing, it could generate a Great Filter hypothesis, namely that intelligence needs to be advantageous for the offspring but at some level harmful to parents (dangerous birth, maternal care) to launch such an arms race, it would basically predict that any alien species without the special difficulties of Earth mammals and their problems of pushing a big head through a vagina would not have this arms race.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2015 07:38:45PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure, but I think your model assumes intelligence is mostly (entirely?) useful for males. Actually, females also have a complex bunch of roles, since they need to take care of themselves and their children and make alliances to get help from both males and females.

You might be interested in Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy.

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:40:54PM 0 points [-]

Actually it is notable that women and men have such similar intelligence. Women and men are quite easy to distinguish physically in a variety of ways, but there is probably way ( I don't believe one has been discovered) to reliably distinguish a woman from a man based purely on how their minds work. Minds are a lot more like livers, kidneys and eyeballs (effectively identical in each sex) than like body shape, genitals or hair distribution. I haven't heard this said before, but this would seem to suggest that minds are NOT primarily to get us laid, that they do not evolve from sexual selection, but rather arise from natural selection (survival of the fittest).

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 08:12:32PM *  1 point [-]

Of course, but "useful" is different from "increases reproductive fitness", and the basic assumption is that the selective pressure of intelligence came from competition inside the species. It is sort of difficult for me to imagine what kind of competition can happen between ancestral females to increase reproductive fitness (and not simply to have a better life, these two are different things). Let's assume for now it is not for higher quantity of children, nor for higher quality sperm thus the genetic quality of children (it does not really require much of a competition, it is cheap), what else is left? Largely the upbringing and life of those children. Am I on the right track there that it is more about what happens to the children once they are born? Are the get resources invested by the genetic father, by the tribe, by the chieftain, by the queen, by whoever, what status they get and so on? As this sounds vaguely possible for I just don't know to visualize it. (Sort of Cersei Lannister situation, push children into high status positions?)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2015 08:53:40PM *  1 point [-]

I have to check on this, but I think competition can go all the way to low status female's children being killed. Even if it doesn't go that far, less access to food/more stressed mothers mean that the children of a low status mother are more likely to be less capable adults.

Comment author: Viliam 20 April 2015 10:57:42PM *  1 point [-]

Yep, higher-status female apes sometimes kill lower-status female apes' babies. One of the reasons why female cliques are so important even when females typically do not use them to kill other adult females.

In humans, you see how some women have the instinct to touch other women's babies, and how those mothers are usually scared like shit. Touching other womens' babies is a female status move. -- That's because as a female ape you couldn't realistically defend yourself and your baby from a group of female apes; you would be completely in their mercy. So another female ape touching your baby reminds you of your relative positions in the tribe.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 09:19:41AM *  4 points [-]

"life pro tips" for people slightly on the schizoid spectrum? I have realized that my version of "nerdiness" actually checks significant checkmarks of diagnostic criteria, such as indifference, aloofness, anhedonia, inner fantasies, being suspiciously "good" at dealing with criticism (i.e. not care) etc. One good idea I managed to google up is to build empathy by praising people. This goes well with a buddhist practice I have found earlier, which is to wish good things to people, like happiness or long life.

These things may deal with the social aspect of it pretty well, but I guess what I would like to know, is this kind of internal retreat from the outer world does come from retreating to the social world? I mean, perhaps not for everybody, but for me the world outside my head can be split into two distinct categories, the social world of humans and the material world of everything else, nature, the universe, also human made things, cars etc. The world of subjects and the world of objects, right? Do you think feeling aloof, indifferent and internally retreating from the world of objects too (unlike aspergers, who are often fascinated by a narrow range of objects, this seems the major difference between asperger and schizoid) can come from a retreat from the social, human world, so fixing that would fix the other as well? How to put it... I was never really interested in the beauty of nature (as a subset of never really interested in anything), do you think getting more interested in people (by practicing praises and good wishes) also makes one more interested in this non-people things of the world as well? That everything reduces to the social?

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 10:25:58PM 0 points [-]

I can offer no help; but feel like "life pro tips for living happy with schizoid spectrum disorders" would be a really good piece of knowledge to create.

Comment author: Omid 20 April 2015 12:54:06AM 2 points [-]

I think I have ADHD. What should I do now?

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 22 April 2015 01:27:04AM 2 points [-]

In environments where you can, allow yourself to fidget, or even better, keep moving more actively (stationary bike, exercise ball, treadmill, etc.). I have borderline ADHD and have found that to be much more effective than meds. YMMV.

Comment author: James_Miller 20 April 2015 03:53:13AM *  4 points [-]

Consider experimenting with supplements. If you are a U.S. student look into getting exam accommodations. You might also consider neurofeedback and meditation.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 20 April 2015 10:35:59AM 1 point [-]

UK also.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 20 April 2015 03:46:34AM 5 points [-]

I'd give ADHD meds a try. In fact, I did.

I had a doctor who said they were like a light switch and you'd know quickly if they were helping (he had ADHD as well).

I didn't feel any improvement and stopped.

Comment author: evand 20 April 2015 03:18:00AM 3 points [-]

What problems are your trying to solve? Knowing you have ADHD is useful because it offers insight into what solutions will work well. For example, it might offer suggestions as to what medications might produce useful results.

Comment author: Omid 20 April 2015 03:58:23PM 2 points [-]

I want to have more focus and find it easier to do boring things.

Comment author: Lumifer 20 April 2015 04:17:53PM 3 points [-]

That's a very common desire. I am guessing that most everyone would like to have more focus and willpower.

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 10:35:30PM 0 points [-]

consider the effects that caffeine has on kids with ADHD. (there is some research out) and then evaluate if that is similar to caffeine'e effect on you.

After that consider other alternatives; but coffee seems like the most "secretly be normal" advice I have.

<I don't drink coffee>

Comment author: dxu 20 April 2015 12:19:27AM *  15 points [-]

Has anyone here ever had the "location" of their sense of self change? I ask because I've recently read that while some people feel like "they" are located in their heads, others feel like "they" are in their chests, or even feet. Furthermore, apparently some people actually "shift around", in that sometimes they feel like their sense of self is in one body part, and then it's somewhere else.

I find this really interesting because I have never had such an experience myself; I'm always "in my head", so to speak--more precisely, I feel as though "I" am located specifically at a point slightly behind my eyes. The obvious hypothesis is that my visual sense is the sense that conveys the most information (aside from touch, which isn't pinned down to a specific location), which is why I identify with it most, but the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed, which somewhat contradicts that hypothesis. Also, the fact that some people apparently don't perceive themselves in that place is more weak evidence against that hypothesis.

So, any thoughts/stories/anecdotes?

Comment author: negamuhia 24 April 2015 11:56:46AM -1 points [-]

If you practice mindfulness meditation, you'll realize that your sense of self is an illusion. It's probably true that most people believe that their "self" is located in their head, but if you investigate it yourself, you'll find that there's actually no "self" at all.

Comment author: Ishaan 21 April 2015 11:21:21PM *  -1 points [-]

Try closing your eyes and navigating your home with a cane at the same time and see if it persists? Try checking if it persists when you're playing video-games? Does your sense of self go into the character? What about if you watch another person really closely?

I have a shifting spatial attention that changes according to the task at hand. The only sense in which "self" is located in my "head" is that to me the world "self" partially means things like "face" and "brain" to me and so recalling the word "self" directs my spatial attention there, in the same way that "door' directs spatial attention to the door.

But as I go through the day I don't think there is anything mentally privileged about the space right behind my eyes unless I specifically start thinking about "self" and what it means. I suspect spatial attention and the nature of how verbal concepts direct it is most of what is going on here.

Comment author: mwengler 21 April 2015 10:46:44PM 3 points [-]

I always thought my sense of self was in my head because of where my eyes and ears were. I look out at myself and see my hands typing and my legs when I am walking and I am looking from my head. I.e., I am in my head, that is the center.

Comment author: passive_fist 21 April 2015 03:40:24AM 1 point [-]

I have had out-of-body experiences. Nothing too major; just the sensation of floating above my 'actual' body, sometimes only a few centimeters, other times a full human body length (as if I was standing on my own head). I had a burst of these out-of-body experiences around 2005-2006 (perhaps four or five in a two-year period) and have not had them since. Each episode lasted only a minute or two. Once, a friend was present, and they told me I had 'zoned out' for several minutes. It's worth mentioning don't know what caused or triggered the episodes. During the episodes my eyes were fully open and I could see what was happening in front of me. However, I wasn't focused on sensory input but was more inward-focused on my own thoughts.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2015 11:52:26PM 2 points [-]

http://www.yale.edu/minddevlab/papers/starmans%26bloom.pdf?hc_location=ufi

I'm not sure this is definitive, but it's at least interesting.

Comment author: Username 20 April 2015 11:25:58PM 2 points [-]

When I'm reaching into a space I can't see with my hands to say, untangle something, I definitely have more of a sense of space around my hands than my head. Closing your eyes and untying/retying your shoes right now might simulate this.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 09:22:04AM 8 points [-]

I think this is learned - Aristotle considered it is in the heart and the brain is just about cooling blood. I think it is because we are taught from childhood to "use your head" etc.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 April 2015 04:41:55PM *  0 points [-]

Be critical of these sorts of factoids. Aristotle was a 'wise man' which in that pre-scientific time meant more seemingly-wise than actually-wise regarding most topics (although Aristotle was better than other contemporaries to be fair). You can take it as weak evidence that Aristotle claiming the self to be in the heart and not in the brain means that most people of the time thought it was in the brain not the heart, as with today. His view got recorded for history because it was contrarian.

Comment author: Toggle 22 April 2015 08:20:54PM 4 points [-]

In ancient Greece, it was common knowledge that the liver was the thinking organ. This is obvious, because it is purple (the color of royalty) and triangular (mathematically and philosophically significant).

Comment author: Houshalter 22 April 2015 06:41:55AM 4 points [-]

Is this true that most people believed the brain was where thought came from? I know the Egyptians used to rip it out because they didn't think it was important.

I was literally just thinking about this the other day, about how ancient people didn't notice that people that got head injuries would change their behave or die instantly.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 23 April 2015 12:09:12PM *  4 points [-]

I was literally just thinking about this the other day, about how ancient people didn't notice that people that got head injuries would change their behave or die instantly.

I don't have a single friend whose behavior I'd have noticed changing after a head injury: the only reason I know it happens is because I've read case reports of it happening to someone. Maybe some doctor might have noticed, but then, I'd expect ancient peoples to also have fewer head injuries that were serious enough to change behavior but also mild enough to be survivable.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2015 03:47:33PM 4 points [-]

Is this true that most people believed the brain was where thought came from? I know the Egyptians used to rip it out because they didn't think it was important.

That is good evidence, on the other hand.

Comment author: Lumifer 22 April 2015 02:44:28PM 3 points [-]

People that got heart injuries tend to die instantly, too :-/

A better clue would be that you can knock someone out by hitting him on the head, but not on any other part of the body.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2015 03:47:13PM 2 points [-]

If you hit someone hard in the region of the heart, they die.

Comment author: Lumifer 20 April 2015 02:43:24AM 11 points [-]

The large field of the so-called out-of-body experiences is precisely about the "location of self" moving outside of the body. I understand that specific types of meditation and mental exercises can produce this effect fairly reliably. So can some psychoactives.

the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed

Don't forget that your ears which provide you with hearing and the sense of balance and orientation are on your head, too.

Comment author: Ishaan 21 April 2015 10:58:12PM *  3 points [-]

I've have had out of body experiences which match the description of other out of body experiences fairly well (for example, while I am half dreaming with eyes open during sleep paralysis) and I think that's completely different.

In an out-of-body experience of the type that I have, you feel like your head and other body parts are somewhere different than where it really is.Your sense of self in relation to your body is preserved. You might still be in your head, but you imagine your head is somewhere else. (And hallucinate visual and tactile phenomenon consistent with your body being somewhere else).

It's not much different drom a regular dream - instead of dreaming you're in a fantasy place, you dream you are in your room but in another location of your room. (Then you feel a sort of snap back to your true body when the dream ends)

That's different from feeling a sense of self as localized somewhere other than behind the eyes.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2015 12:26:47AM 6 points [-]

I've occasionally been able to move my sense of self downwards from my head. From what I've read, people didn't put their sense of self in their heads (it was typically in the heart or abdomen) until the importance of the brain was discovered.

Comment author: pianoforte611 20 April 2015 12:47:20AM 6 points [-]

I find this very hard to believe, given that humans are highly visual creatures and our eyes are located in our head. What time period/people had their sense of self in their heart or abdomen?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 09:26:41AM 3 points [-]

Whenever my nerdy/schizoid/introverted side is stronger, I feel exactly this, I am behind the eyes and staring forward, as in this state my spatial location ability, the ability to be aware in 360 degrees, is bad. But whenever this side of me retreats a bit (for example any sense of success or victory beats down the inner nerd for a while) and I come out from my inner shell to bask in the world, I feel at home in space, I get 360 degrees awareness, I know where my legs and hands are and so on, then I am less aware of where I am and more in the center of the body, perhaps chest level.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 20 April 2015 03:49:38AM *  2 points [-]

Not everyone is that visually focused.

I'd say I'm more focused on auditory and kinesthetic senses. I'm focused in my head, but more between the ears than behind the eyes.

Comment author: CellBioGuy 20 April 2015 01:01:41AM 1 point [-]

Even moreso than visual, we are mental creatures. Ideas and culture can make all the difference.

To the OP: there are times and circumstances by which I can lose much connection to the location of my body at all. Usually associated with stargazing.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2015 09:23:28AM 1 point [-]

Worth noting, the Dalai Lama recommends before falling asleep focusing the sense of self in the middle of the chest at the level of the heart for deeper sleeping or in the throat for more vivid dreams. I have never tried it, but may be an experiment for people with sleep problems or trying to lucid dream.

Comment author: Elo 26 April 2015 09:56:53PM 0 points [-]

A hypothesis; if you think your sense of self is connected to the location of your eyes; try spend some time blindfolded; say 1 hour in a normal/safe environment without vision and see if it moves. It might just be in your hands as you feel your way around; or your feet as you travel around.

it would seem reasonable that the focus of your interaction with the environment feels like its at one of your strongest senses but might be elsewhere for other people with different sensory wiring.