Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015
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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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I also recall that the perceived location of self (soul, mind) has changed historically. Without doubt Aristotele placed it in the heart but otherwise refs are hard to find. I vaguely recall reading about it in Precht.
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.
Just tried it. I'm able to move the focus of my attention downward. Mostly the same way as I can consciously widen the angle of my attention.
But I can't be sure that this implies that it is my self. I'd like to add that there are multiple self: A perceiving self (which I'm tempted to locate in the brain), a whole self which contains everything of my body that I take to be my body and then probably another self which is the space that I contain and where I do not wan't anybody to intrude on. And some more.
ADDED: The widening of the angle of perception seems to be this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconcentration_of_attention
I just tried imagining being in my heart looking up at my head. I can't guarantee that I actually moved my sense of self-- maybe "I" was still in my head creating an imagined self in my heart-- but it was at least an interesting and rather cheering experience. I feel more alert.
Can confirm that.
I noticed that my mood subly changed in response to the moved location - presumably due to the associations these bring. This would match up with the Dalai Lama receommendations in some other comment.
For me, there was a large postural change. Oddly, moving my sense of self down meant that my head came up.
Another thing I noticed: The effect feels like when directing attention toward something outside of the focus area (direction of gaze).
Maybe the head is the most vulnerable region to injury, and the locating of the self in the head reflects the need to protect the brain and other inputs (mouth, eyes, ears).
Besides just look at a dog or any animal really, it does everything with the head, eat, fight, hunt etc.
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.
Don't forget that your ears which provide you with hearing and the sense of balance and orientation are on your head, too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a single data point, this exactly corresponds to me. I identify with the locus of my vision. I wonder how blind, or blind-deaf people identify.
I haven't had this experience myself, but apparently it's not difficult to induce: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134059271/creating-the-illusion-of-a-different-body
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.
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.
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 moved elsewhere.
I think I have ADHD. What should I do now?
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.
I want to have more focus and find it easier to do boring things.
That's a very common desire. I am guessing that most everyone would like to have more focus and willpower.
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.
Consider experimenting with supplements. If you are a U.S. student look into getting exam accommodations. You might also consider neurofeedback and meditation.
UK also.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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?
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.)
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.
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.
PZ Myers:
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?
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.
If you can perform CPR with little cost to you, you should. If performing CPR has a large cost to you, or if there are so many people that need CPR that performing CPR on all of them is, in total, a large cost to you, you are not obliged to do anything.
How easy would it be for the future civilization to resurrect the brains?
Presumably, the ease will change with time, tending easier until ceilings of possible economic and technological progress are reached. If it takes centuries for the procedure of resurrecting the cryopreserved to go from "experimental and expensive" to "cheap and routine", the old 21st-century cryo-patients can wait, they aren't getting any deader.
I'm pretty sure cost of resurrection isn't his true rejection, his true rejection is more like 'point and laugh at weirdos'.
I'm guessing that any civilisation capable of resurrecting cryonics patients would be post-scarcity, and cost would therefore be irrelivent. But even if I am wrong on this point, well, to continue his mummified Egyptians analogy, can you imagine how much money you would make selling the TV rights to the first ever resurrection of a Pharaoh?
Additionally, don't Alcor, and many individuals, have funds set up to cover the cost of resurrection?
I understand that there are plausible arguments against cryonics, such as technological feasibility. But the "why bother saving people?" argument is both stupid and repugnant.
I find the idea of "true rejection" over-used. Many people, for many things, have more than one reason to reject them, and none of those reasons is the reason.
That would only make money because it hasn't been done before. Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money. A question asking what a future civilization would do about a frozen head implies asking what they would do for a typical frozen head. Being one of the first frozen heads they run across is very atypical, and carries a higher profit only because it is atypical.
This does not seem psychologically realistic. Humans aren't built to arrive at conclusions through rational evaluation of multiple independent lines of evidence; rather, they choose their answer in advance for some reason or other (usually "this is weird" or "my tribe rejects this"), and only then begin cherry-picking arguments to support their conclusion.
This is true, but ignores skeptical_lurker's point that any civilization capable of resurrection is likely to be post-scarcity.
That seems to have an implied "... so every time I argue with a human, I should never assume that the human has more than one reason for something". I hope you can see how that will go seriously wrong when the human actually does have more than one reason, and particularly on LW-style topics.
If the civilization is post-scarcity, then making money from TV rights to the first Pharaoh is not useful as an analogy; the future civilization never does one thing because it gets them more of something than another thing does.
Yes, that's why Alcor is so expensive.
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."
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.
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".
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.
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.
You know what he does for a living don't you?
"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.
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.
Lots of people employing the weirdness heuristic, as expected. Oh, and of course David Gerard's over there too.
sigh
Is it wrong that I'm most saddened that they tore apart her brain for a year chasing that tumor, before they did the sensible thing and let her be cryopreserved?
Not that this is an open and shut case at all, but we need laws on the books regarding elective cryopreservation in the case of brain degenerative disease.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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?
This is not a possible explanation for the Great Filter.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
My point is more like the runaway arms race of intelligence is pretty tricky to figure out. Sure, one thing is clear - if it only happened inside one species, the selective pressure was inside the species: not adaptation to the environment (that would predict a world where we have 70 IQ chimp servants) but something inside the species, and given that it has to be a pressure, a do-or-not-reproduce kind of pretty tough stuff, and being nice and empathic with each other is not a pressure, it must be some kind of a competition. So far it is not a new idea, but a rehearsal of the most popular hypotheses.
Now, my point is simply you got a factor inside the hominid species, a factor X, which leads to the runaway arms race of intelligence, an Y. My point is, what if they are the same?
It is Occam and Solomonoff at work here. Usually we assume two variables, an unknown factor X launched a runaway arms race of intelligence, Y competition inside the human-hominid species.
So why not ponder the possibility that X = Y ? What if intelligent offspring killing / tying up mothers due to big heads led to males more intensely IQ-compete for the women who were not dead nor tied up with a child or three?
No. There no evidence that different lineages differ mainly in inside species selection.
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.
Dinosaurs did not give birth and bears don't have a particularly big head to body ratio - the idea here is specifically that childbirth is hard and dangerous, not simply running around with a big head would be so.
As for the brain, I think having eyes close to mouth is useful to basically every animal, being able to hit food or enemies with the mouth accurately, and eyes came from brains.
There no reason why species on other plants who are intelligent have to give birth. Yes, humans do but to be a great filter it would have to be true more universally.
Precisely. I am trying to say that giving birth means intelligence has a downside, and that could have paradoxically lead to intelligence getting more widespread due to the downside meaning the need for more intense competition.
A thought occurred to me that it's more likely that a brain initially develops near major sensory input channels. Dinosaurs did have secondary brains thought but their function is also proximity based (ie reflex time gets too long for just one brain location in that sized body).
I could guestimate that the primary constraint is eye to brain distance and the other senses are near because of lessened wiring and easier time integrating the information the nearer to a pointlike approximation one gets. That is if the information itself doesn't require a spesific placing.
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?
2 well, if a trait has some visible manifestation, what prevents the offspring from being eaten before reaching reproductive age? Competition still works. 3. I don't know, too. Just thought someone might give it their best shot. 4. If only the sons can use it effectively, then does it not mean that daughters having this gene would be outcompeted, dying in childbirth always (if it's a dominant allele) or a fixed % of times (if it's not), and so the allele will just reach some equilibrium in the population? And the 'intelligent' males will seek to have children from 'not-intelligent' females, since some offspring is strictly better than zero? (That's probably what Vaniver said.)
I don't understand this actually lost at conscpicuous leisure. The point of status games is to signal power that could destroy a potential opponent. Wearing a heavy gold necklace does it (it could pay for hit men). Having a lot of leisure time not. Maybe I am just too used to people playing the aggressive kinds of status (gym-grown muscles are another good example of a could-destroy-you signal) but a signal without teeth - a signal lacking the demonstration of potentially dangerous power - does not seem like something to me that is supposed to work. What am I missing? Why didn't all those conspicuous leisure guys (or later contrarians or authentics) just walk around with gold jewelry for example?
If the people with the highest social popularity are "authentic" then being "authentic" is a signal for other people that you have high social popularity.
Outside of the ghetto popular men don't wear gold chains, so it's not a signal of high social popularity.
I can also simply that you can help your friends and family. A medical doctor doesn't have his social status only because he's rich. He's also a go to person to ask for medical advice.
My point is precisely that I think status is not popularity but more like power. In fact, it surprises me to even consider status as popularity. Al Capone type criminals were not liked, but feared. Fear can elicit more respect(ful behavior) than liking. Wait, now I am seriously confused, I always assumed people behaving high status should come accross at least slightly scary to others, even a genuine achievement as "oh, he can do something I never will", could it really be that acting high status is more often liked than feared? A classic example of high-status signal is correcting other people's grammar. That cannot possibly make one popular, but a bit feared yes, as it conjure childhood memories of teachers.
You got the causation the wrong way around. The point of a signal isn't that the signal itself makes you popular it's that the signal goes along with status.
Few people correct the status of people they consider to be higher status then themselves. The only way that a low status people corrects a high status person is that the person is completely clueless.
Correcting a high status person can mean losing their support.
There are social interactions where people I driven by mainly by fear but that's not the kind of environment in which you want to be.
For Americans, Meryl Streep may be far more popular than Vladimir Putin, but that does not translate into a corresponding hierarchy of fears.
It's a common error of too many parents to believe that fear brings respect. In my experience, fear brings hatred. Only the self-preservation parts of the reaction to fear are often mistaken for gestures of respect. Again, my experience is that true respect comes from admiration.
But again the problem is that does status mean popularity? What does that mean? It is not that I think popularity creates fear, I think status as such does not equal popularity, it is more like being seen a BIG, not popular, and t this may or may not create fear.
As for fear and respect, this is highly complicated IMHO. As far as I can tell, there are some people who genuinely respect those who scare them because they admire their fearsomeness. I think at our school the bully type guys genuinely respected the scariest male teachers as basically they saw them a role model on how to be a bigger bully. I think there is something true about the cliche "these villains only respect violence" type stuff from movies. Basically it means, often when people were hurt a lot, they will turn very defensive and the best defense is an offense and thus adopt a hard, tough "don't try messing with me" frame. At that point, those who are more fearsome may be genuinely respected and imitated. This is pretty common with males of lower-class background, the most dangerous looking MMA guys having the most respect.
Needless to say, I don't consider it healthy. I mean, not healthy for children. As for adults... I would say, for most people, by the time we turned 30, unless we lived in very sheltered circumstances, we probably developed a darker, harder, "don't try messing with me" side just as a cumulative effect of conflicts and bullying received and all that. And thus we may respect scary dominant people. It is probably part of the normal cumulative emotional scarring going on with life. Well, or mine is abnormal.
That's respect that leads to avoiding conflicts with those people. On the other hand we usually don't build relationships with them that are about exchanging favors.
Is status about favor exchange? I really would like a definition of what status is and isn't. My go-to definition is that it is about being "big". This is primitive, but that is the whole point, it has to be.
Status is about access to resources and control for resources. A person who gets favors from other people can access more resources.
Having the ability to physically beat up a doctor isn't likely to give you any preferential treatment from the doctors. Other forms of social status do.
Popularity means that you can get help. We aren't in the early environment any more, and I don't think we have quite the same reflexes.
Also note that if violence is a possibility, older men get safety and dominance by their ability to recruit younger men, not by their ability to do their own fighting.
Have another angle-- in civilization, winning means coming out ahead while cooperating.
It signals wealth and security. Obvious signals of power also signal some level of insecurity. The one going around instilling fear is himself afraid. Criminals know how precarious their own positions are. The boss realizes that a lot of his underlings are just waiting for a moment of weakness so they can stab him in the back. In one sense, appearing not to care can send a signal that you're powerful enough that others don't even register as threats.
If you think status signalling reduces to a threat of force, you are missing out on the most important parts. Cooperative signalling and in-group/out-group signaling are extremely important.
Gold chains are a lousy symbol as they are easy to fake and actually pretty cheap by first world signalling standards. Hence they are currently only used by underclass people or those not long removed from the underclass.
In the past, leisure demonstrated ownership of capital (i.e. I don't have to constantly be working because my money makes money.) Leisure activities can also demonstrate social group membership (going to a yacht regatta vs. going to an avant-garde fashion show.)
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?
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.
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.
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. ;)
That's not how it works.
You are right, Buddha himself had to quit his job before he could achieve enlightenment.
Why exactly mobile? From a user angle, it is super hard to fish out the borderline good ones from all the crap in Google Play, the search engine does not really help you find the unpopular good ones amongst the popular crap, so it is mostly from hearsay, and the UI has limitations. I guess I would go for the desktop.
Tried something like that. Was unable to do anything productive after 5 hours without a real deadline.
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.)
If it doesn't feel real, it's easy to ignore.
Renegotiate work time to 5 hours.
Post to lesswrong.com.
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?
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:
The habits of thought are not involved in all of this -- it's more of a broadening-your-horizons exercise.
I would interpret that claim as: "we may be practically useless, but we are still fucking high-status!" :D
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.
Could you make that argument for finance? I see that learning finance is very useful for personal financial decisions but how does it provide use beyond that?
Obviously "finance" is a very wide area that covers a lot of different ideas, but my observation of "finance people" is that they have a powerful mental vocabulary for thinking about what kind of a value something is and what can be done with it over time. For example: the difference between stock values and flow values, expected return of a portfolio of assets, the leveraging of credit, the mitigation of risk.
More generally, they seem to be able to look at some number assigned to a thing, and observe that it's morphologically similar to some other number assigned to some different thing, and understand what sort of things can happen to both those numbers, and what sort of process is required to turn one sort of number into another sort of number.
Finance is about marshalling resources and using them to efficiently create a lot more wealth. Since wealth is at minimum the thing that keeps us from working 24/7 on getting enough food to eat, and generally gives us the kind of free time we need to invent AIs, post on message boards, have hobbies, and try to get the hot chicks, it can be quite useful even for a non-wall-street worker. Think of finance as the thing that keeps you from carrying a balance on your credit card or buying lottery tickets as investments.
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.
Physics lawyers definitely need to exist. I would strongly like to get an injunction against the laws of thermodynamics.
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.)
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.
That is, ahem, bullshit. Stupid undergrads might think so for a short while, "statistics folks" do not.
"Statisticians think everything is normally distributed" seems to be one of those weirdly enduring myths. I'd love to know how it gets propagated.
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.
Someone was overly impressed by the Central Limit Theorem... X-)
Given that I remember spending a year of AP statistics only doing calculations with things we assumed to be normally distributed, it's not an unreasonable objection to at least some forms of teaching statistics.
Hopefully people with statistics degrees move beyond that stage, though.
I can't say I ran into it before (whereas "economists think humans are all rational self-interested agents", jeez...)
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.
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?
I read that Germans are often anti-semites, is it true?
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also means that the people who are currently working at minimum wage jobs are likely to lose their jobs to the cheaper competition.
That depends on the degree to which the two groups compete for jobs. There are also positive secondary effects which reduce the impact (immigration reduces inflation and increases the overall market size). The employment impact of immigration on low-skilled workers is somewhere between slightly negative and slightly positive.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The same thing that you want to maximize in the long run.
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.
The answer probably depends on what your utility is nearest to being proportional to the logarithm of.
Most likely your utility (so far as you have one) looks like other_stuff + f(wealth) where wealth = g(annual_income, liquid_assets, other_assets) or something of the kind, where f and g are functions about which we don't know very much. It's probably OK to assume that g is just a linear combination of its inputs. So it seems like there are two things to do.
And then you can try plugging the result into the Kelly formula, seeing how over-risky it feels, and (if you are so inclined) correcting for excess risk aversion not already factored into f.
The amount which you can afford to lose.
This is true, but incomplete. If utility is monotonically increasing with wealth, the Kelly Criterion tells you how to size your bets.
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.
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.
Upvoted for updating.
Does anyone here suffer from sexual or general anhedonia? Any comforting guesses as to when we will reach the point of being able to routinely cure it?
Do we "routinely cure" depression? People do stop being depressed but I'm not sure that I would use the word "routinely cure".
It might be more productive to think of the suffering person as a subject than as an object. Feeling pleasure is only possible if you actually see yourself as a subject.
Parts of the brain don't function right. Contrary to your and the majority's belief, it's not a matter of choice to see yourself as a subject and alter your thinking. It wouldn't cure your aging for the same reason it won't cure the type of anhedonia in question.
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?
Maybe speech-to-text software can make writing less painful?
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.
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.
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.
Write by hand on your bed. Write on your phone during bus rides. Write by dancing to sign language. Write in a new medium humanity hasn't dreamt of. The keyboard is just one of many possible tools.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Seeking Phi in Game Theory
For a bit of fiction I'm thinking of... is there any aspect of game theory in which offering the number/symbol phi can indicate a threat to defect unless the other player cooperates?
So far, a quick bit of Googling has only turned up phi in relation to the Bargaining problem, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargaining_problem , and while I /could/ wrestle such an interpretation out of what's there, I'm hoping there's a less abstruse way to go about it.
Aha - at http://www.pnas.org/content/109/26/10409.full.pdf , zero-determinant strategies are defined by two factors, chi and phi, and at least when chi is 1, maximum phi results in the strategy of Tit-for-Tat, which is exactly what I was looking for.
Hm... is there a mathematical notation for the maximum of a variable, like |x| indicates the absolute value of x?