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Comments (302)
Since utilions are a unit of caring and Less Wrong (the website) has helped me immensely in making the transition from a somewhat despondent college graduate to a software engineer job with an annual salary + benefits, is there any way I can donate some dollars towards the site's upkeep?
Failing that, and as a more immediate measure, I extend my sincere thanks to everyone on Less Wrong, especially Eliezer Yudkowsky and his works HPMOR & An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem for enlightening me.
On a more useful note, it appears that the Java applets at http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes are now blocked by the current version of the Oracle Java Runtime Environment for Windows.
Currently the site is run officially run by MIRI, CFAR and FHI. If you want to donate money to thank for LW's existence donating it to one of those three organisations makes the most sense.
Apart from just donating you can also support CFAR by taking part in a CFAR workshop.
I would like to see a published list of recommended improvements that could be made to lesswrong, (discussed and voted on by people) and then consider using your $$ to put a bounty up to pay someone to implement solutions. Do you think that would work?
I personally dislike the way that discussion posts age. It is doubtfully the most reasoning that can be done on a post where posts seem to die after a week, nor are we getting the most out of them when they are "too far behind us" in about two weeks. Not sure how to solve this, but its been bugging me for a while now.
I've been a regular on LW and have obtained a PhD and well-paying job since my time here. I've been wondering, since we have a lot of seemingly-successful people on this site, can't we form some kind of group to bring rational thinking to the masses? Society at large seems extremely mistrustful of scientists and scientific opinion at the moment. It would be great if we could do something meaningful to change that.
What exactly is the thing you want to bring to the masses? Why do you believe it has much to do with "rationality" once the masses adopt it?
Perhaps something like HPMOR (but way easier to understand) as a point'n'click adventure. A rewrite of "Rationality" in a simpler language could possibly also be worthwhile as suggested elsewhere.
I've wondered for a while now if we could do a Kickstarter and use the money to hire someone to upgrade the site or to implement some of the suggestions that people have been making.
My 4th grade teacher is teaching my class how to write poetry, and this is one of the poems that I wrote:
Where am I?
What is this place?
Is it the darkness of night?
I heard screams
and then I was here
Here, as in nowhere
This place was not nothing
it was less than that.
I didn’t see nothing,
for I had nothing to see with
I didn’t hear nothing,
for I had nothing to hear with
I didn’t feel nothing,
for I had nothing to feel with.
I had slept before, but nothing like this
Was Grandma here?
Did she meet this fate too?
I couldn’t know, for
I had nothing to know with
Even if she was here,
she did not exist for me
They said I would go to the land of the clouds
they said nothing of this place
Even the eternal flame would be better than this
for there they had warmth
and I had less than cold
Why would
anyone
want this fate?
The final sight,
and then less than nothing
I want to see the world
I asked my son Alex to post this because I'm proud of his writing skill, but also to show a challenge of raising a child without religion. He is far from obsessed with death, and told me he is thinking of death less than 1% of the time. Still, it would be comforting to be able to honestly tell him that he has nothing to fear from death, although knowing Alex he would use this as a counterargument when I tell him to be safe by, for example, buckling his seat-belt or looking both ways when crossing the street.
Is this considered new? There are people in parts of Europe esp. post-Commie lands where even their grandparents had hardly any, or even their great-grandparents considered it more of a social ritual than personal faith. I was about 8 when one grandfather died, my parents simply said he is with us in our memories and that was it. There was nothing particularly difficult about it. If I may put it this way, I did not get a very optimistic upbringing, we expected life to be hard and rather painful and this was simply one of the pains, to lose loved ones. Also, as a child I was not really able to imagine or care about my own death, my parents usually rather scared me with maiming or disfigurement when I was doing unsafe things like not wanting to buckle the seatbelt or similar things. I don't remember the details, but living ugly or disabled looked far worse than just being dead. There may be a bit of an inferential distance here, so I will try to reword it: the idea of playing a particularly low-status or boring or painful game of life was scary, but simply not playing it anymore was not too scary.
Interesting, so the cost of raising a non-religious child is higher the nicer your family's life. Once, when my son was about 4 I told him not to stare at the sun else he go blind. He responded by saying that being blind wouldn't be so bad because he could read using braille. I wonder if a consequence of schools teaching inclusion of the physically disabled is that children don't fear as much becoming disabled themselves and so take more risks.
Yes, but I also have a different suspicion here - you may have already at 4 strongly pushed your son towards intellectual pursuits if he already thought reading is far more important than looking at cute or pretty things. Or people. Even being able to read before school is fairly rare, but already liking it so much more than say drawing, that is really rare.
Our life was nice enough, but I suspect it is more about e.g. American culture being in general optimistic no matter how bad is your life, Eastern Europe more pessimistic no matter how nice is your life.I suspect these come from centuries long historical habits, not about how nice your personal life is.
Quite frankly, I would like to learn to be more optimistic. But it is interesting that one part of me considers that "shallow". That must be a weird sort of rationalization.
That's an interesting thought; I feel just the opposite about the pessimism/optimism spectrum. To me, it seems that to allow the negative to affect your mindset overmuch is a far greater negative than a positive. That's not to say, though, that I think pessimism doesn't have its place, or that optimism is always a good thing; just that as a mindset, it's of greater personal benefit to be an optimist. Interestingly enough, more of my beliefs came from Japan (in the form of video games; the Mother series, and The World Ends With You in particular) than from the US.
I've always felt that to allow oneself to fall to pessimism is the easier path (optimism is a constant struggle for me, though I put on a mien as if it were otherwise), and largely more painful. I used to be quite a bit more pessimistic, but found that, while it's a lot of effort, to push myself toward optimism leads to a higher happiness default point for me. Can you explain your view?
Of course, that is why I try to overcome but it still "feels deeper".
Negativity simply tends to "feel deep". And "feel wise". I am an adult, but you see really a lot of it amongst teenagers, goths etc. basically the more angst and cynicism they have "deeper" and "wiser" they feel.
Or for example look at media like Game of Thrones, it is generally the most negative quotes that "feel deep". "Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don't ever believe any different." "You're awful." "It is the world that is awful." This sort of stuff tends to "feel deep" far more than something cheery.
Adults have different reasons for being negative (such as habit), but there is still a certain sense of "feeling deep" lurking which impends developing positivity.
Of course pessimism is far easier! But it still "feels deeper". Most people including me are lazy. If something is easy and has some sort of a reward at all (you feel bad, but at least you feel "deep"), we are likely to do it. Why else you think fast-food driven obesity is such a big deal thes days? :-)
Similarly, a very basic human feature is the sour grapes effect. Optimism is hard, so let's find an excuse to not do it. Well, the excuse is that it is "shallow".
I wonder how it is not so for you... perhaps you are of the minority who is not inherently lazy, who does not automatically go for the smallest resistance, the easiest path and then make excuses. But I am.
This looks like a counterfactual to me :-) I suspect that children nowadays take considerably less risks than 50 years ago, never mind a hundred or two.
True.
You should definitely write about your experiences raising a child as a rationalist. I am not kidding; this would be immensely beneficial to a large number of people.
Gwern might disagree. According to studies parents have little effect on their children's deveopment. But I disagree with that. I'd guess that James' parenting is his genes way of ensuring Alex' develops as well as James'. And I'd be very interested to compare mehods.
I was raised agnostic. The day I learned about mortality was pretty awful; it effected me for quite a while.
That prompted me to look up how to make line breaks in Markdown syntax, which I'd been wondering about myself for a while.
Try typing two or more spaces and then hitting enter
whenever you want a new line.
Thanks; I fixed it up now!
Complexity-Induced Mental Illness by Scott Adams
This gave me the idea that we might be in the middle of a great filter(ing) right now. Obviously humans are not made for the environment of modern society. Being here is not a stable state. The progression of the behavior of persons or (sub) populations become increasingly erratic. It is contained by societies regulation means but I can imagine that this might collapse - as other such systems did before. Compare also with Jared Diamond's Collapse.
The scandal about /r/fatpeoplehate directed my attention to the obesity problem and its outcomes and one weird angle I figured out is that people are increasingly better at harming themselves with things that considered harmless. For example, we would be horrified if we saw a 8 year old child purchase vodka or drugs, but purchasing chocolate looks entirely innocent and harmless. And yet, it seems, more and more adults can kill themselves with chocolate and pizza.
The interesting thing here is that sugar or similar things do not give such a high as alcohol or most drugs and the health effects are far more visible, a wide girth is more visible and less likely to be hidden by an Ugh Field than a scarred liver.
So it sounds a lot like this is a particularly unlikely form of destructive hedonism, low pay-off and highly visible costs. Why is it becoming so popular then?
The best answer I could figure out was ease. It is simply far easier than finding a drug dealer and less shameful than chugging whiskey I guess.
The lesson is that even in self-destructive hedonism there is a growing trend to go for the easy and not too much fun (chocolate) not the hard and much fun (drugs). I think back in 1968 an acid-dropping hippie would have simply called that lazy or boring.
My point is here a kind of a "not with a bang but with a whimper" kind of outcome, not particularly spectacularly ka-boomish Great Filters but simply the loss of energy and drive.
When considering candidates for the Great Filter, you must keep in mind that it stopped all the to-be universe conquerors in our past light cone. Your suggestion doesn't seem that insurmountable.
Agreed. I don't think that much of the filtering strength of the great filter is one specific epoch. But within the epoch of civilizations it may be that a large part of the filter power is right now.
Possibly relevant: Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Panel - The Price Of Modern Life Is Depression And Loneliness.
One of the main points I got from that is that it is not at all clear that mental illness is growing, because one thing that has definitely been growing is the sensitivity of diagnosis and if there was any growth of mental illness it'd just be obscured by that.
I'd add that alcoholism can mask a lot of smaller but more complicated mental issues, and since alcoholism is going down, those should be becoming more visible.
Can someone recommend a book on domain theory?
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/24659/resources-for-learning-domain-theory
For a moment I was all ready to recommend Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans. Then I realized you meant the topic in mathematics, not the process of consulting domain experts in software development.
For now I have less writing to do at work, so about a month ago I set out in my spare time to write up a discussion-level post on the Fermi paradox and what I see as neglected aspects thereof - what we have actually observed and actually have not, and what we can actually exclude and what we cannot, and options for intelligent systems that are neither universal expansion nor destruction. It's coming along, but has ballooned in size drastically. It has become full of what I feel are quite relevant digressions about our place and time in the universe, astrobiology, geochemistry, reasons that SETI candidate signals or lack thereof mean almost nothing, and ecology. This is what happens when you are a biologist who very nearly became an astronomer and grew up around a part-time geologist mother.
Anyways, I just wanted one piece of advice: do people think I should keep everything in one monolithic post, or chop it up into thematically-closer-related bits?
I think it's useful to have everything concentrated into one post. That makes it easier for people to link to the post if they consider it to be the best exploration of the topic on the internet.
Monolithic posts can be intimidating. You can accomplish close to the same thing with digestible posts that end with a link to the next one.
Well, let's see, what's the current word count?
I asked Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh a couple questions about the status of CSER and he took the time to write me an in-depth reply that you can read here. (This isn't me encouraging you to ask him more questions, it's me sharing what he already wrote so he didn't spend his time in vain :P)
Today, I was using someone else's computer and typed "lesswrong" into the search/address bar. Apparently the next most popular search is "lesswrong cult". I started shrieking with laughter, getting a concerned reaction from the owner, which doesn't help our image much.
Eliezer wants to be a guru. No one calls him on it. There is an enormous amount of unhealthy hero worship. What did you expect, exactly?
-- Yvain on EY.
I don't know, it feels like I see more people criticizing perceived hero worship of EY than I see actual hero worship. If anything the "in" thing on LW these days seems to be signalling how evolved one is by putting down EY or writing off the sequences as "just a decent popular introduction to cognitive biases, nothing more" or whatever.
I don't call it out so much as find it incredibly amusing.
Eliezer wants to be a guru. No one calls him on it. There is an enormous amount of unhealthy hero worship. What did you expect, exactly?
Even if you see Eliezer as a wanna-be-guru, he is not that powerful. The kind of hero worship that you see in real cults is on a different scale.
Very charismatic people who actually get people to follow them through the strength of their charisma don't come across as "hilariously over-the-top arrogant" to people within their in-group.
I also find it hard how you can cite such a paragraph by Yvain and at the same time say with a straight face "Nobody calls EY on it".
Arrogance is just poor instrumental rationality in interpersonal communication. "Guruhood" is something different, and more dangerous.
I don't know exactly what you mean with "Guruhood" in this context. If you look at a figure like Ayn Rand, someone who would have said what Scott wrote about EY would have been kicked out of Ayn Rand's inner circle. Ayn Rand kicked people out because they had the wrong taste of music.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
It's not enough to not be Hitler, basically.
My model for a thought leader is someone like Richard Feynman. Feynman didn't write epistles or officiate weddings. This did not prevent him from being enormously influential in physics.
The fact of the matter is, EY wants to be a guru, and the community wants him to be a guru, too.
I don't think a guru being beyond criticism is something unique to a particular group like Ayn Rand's objectivists.
I don't think Ayn Rand was Hitler. She wasn't as bad as cult leaders like Jim Jones,
Do you think that everybody who tries to build a community is a guru?
My point was, it's not a steelman response to pick a deliberately weak foil (and Rand is a quite weak foil as far as movement leaders are concerned). It's not enough to be ?better? than Rand. There isn't even a total ordering on awfulness. That's what the Anna Karenina quote was about.
No?
But I am not talking about everybody, I am talking about EY. And the relevant feature of EY's is not that he tried (and succeeded) to build a community, it's that he writes epistles, officiates weddings, has something called the Sequences (with a capital S!), etc. etc. etc.
He is not trying to build a community of colleagues/equals, as far as I can tell. If he did, he would act a lot more like Feynman.
Do you use "movement leader" synonymous with "guru"? Feymann isn't a movement leader. Do you object to EY wanting to be a movement leader?
I don't think Ayn Rand is a deliberately weak foil. Jim Jones is a deliberately weak foil. I use Ayn Rand because it's the nearest "rational cult" I can think of.
If I would seek for "rational movement" I could also go for New Atheists. Richard Dawkins is a movement leader. On the other hand I wouldn't call him a guru. Would you?
Why are you comparing against a negative example, rather than an example to emulate?
I already described what sorts of features of EY's make him a "guru."
It can make sense to call out borderline cases within your own community, because that gives you the greatest chance of making a difference.
I don't believe in the paradigm of "call out culture". Copying SJW tactics isn't a good idea. In most cases it's more effective to give feedback for improvement privately.
The idea that EY didn't get pushback is completely illusory. He got enough pushback that he now doesn't post on LW. During the last year where UFAI got more of public attention EY didn't seek the spotlight but rather left that role to FHI. To me that reflect an understanding that this decision was in the benefit of the cause.
I didn't mention anyone by name.
That still leaves my first paragraph. I don't believe that "calling out" is generally the best technique for making a difference.
I am completely unsurprised.
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By some estimates around "one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria." This just might be contributing to the medical community's interest in malaria.
I don't know about that... We know how to eradicate malaria -- we posess the knowledge, the tools, we've successfully done it before. Really, the only thing that needs to happen is for the governments of the SubSaharan Africa to get their shit together. That, unfortunately, is not a medical problem.
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According to this review article, titled "Short History of Malaria and Its Eradication in Italy With Short Notes on the Fight Against the Infection in the Mediterranean Basin",
They tried free distribution of quinine, and, as you have mentioned, vector control, which involved draining marshes and spraying DDT and other insecticides:
It is curious to note a parallel with a current involvement of philantropists in fight against malaria - back in 1920s and 1930s it was Rockefeller Foundation that funded the creation of Malaria Experimental Station and Institute of Public Health in Italy.
Not only that, the entire southern US up to and including Washington, DC was a malaria zone. Southern Florida was basically not considered fit for human habitation until malaria was eradicated.
Governments in subsaharan Africa don't use massive amounts of DDT, not because they are incompetent but because of Western pressure.
At least in Mozambique, it seems that DDT have met resistance both from the West and (parts of) local population.
This report from 2000 from BMJ (British Medical Journal) blames foreign donors, although it does not provide any references for its figures:
But environmental concerns are only a part of the whole picture, and, according to Mozambique's chief of infectious disease control, a smaller one.
DDT is used in indoor residual spraying (IRS) which, along with insecticide treated mosquito nets and Artemisinin Combination Therapies, is one of the three main interventions promoted by World Health Organization. But due to the fact that it has unaesthetic side effects and cannot be done everywhere, in some countries it became associated with social issues:
Some Westerners also pattern match it to social issues, and not only environmental ones.
Yes, and this is an evil comparable to the slave trade.
Can you provide any evidence that it is true?
I'm basing it on the large amount of harm that malaria does in Africa and by assuming that Western pressure on Africans to not use DDT has made this harm somewhat worse.
It is the existence of Western pressure for which I was asking for evidence.
From NYT's Kristof
From Wikipedia
Although others claim that this isn't true.
How do you propose to eradicate malaria?
The same way it was done in the US. Or even in, say, Sri Lanka -- a country that was having a very long and bloody civil war in the process.
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Falciparum (the bad kind) only crossed into humans 5000 years ago (historical time!). But it used to be worse, before the evolution of sickle cell and other defenses (O+ Duffy negative blood, I think). Vivax crossed into humans 35 kya and was probably as bad or worse than falciparum before it evolved to be less virulent.
I think the actions of the Gates Foundation matter more than GiveWell's when it comes to the general public impression that malaria research is important.
Prestige as viewed by students or professors doesn't match funding provided by NIH, which focuses on diseases that affect Americans, both by mandate and because of lobbying by individuals. Other sources of funding are drug companies that don't have much opportunity to sell to poor people, and disease-specific charities, established by rich people because of relatives who have the diseases of rich people.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with prestige, but the perk of a field trip.
One can imagine someone who hears promotion of the AMF but doesn't grok effective altruism deciding that it means they should be researching Malaria. Even without such promotion, Malaria is a big-name disease and I wouldn't be surprised at non-EAs ending up contributing to an oversupply of malaria researchers because they don't realise that some disease that's less of a big deal but has fewer people working on it might be better.
This thread is one of the top-voted on the nootropics subreddit & looks like it has a few interesting ideas: How do smart people really think?
I can honestly say that utilizing a memory palace and linking was a significant jump in my life. I started training myself in their use about a year ago, but never had to put them into action in a constrained time frame until recently. It felt wonderful. Currently working on incorporating spaced repetition into my routine. My chief problem is prioritizing lists. Figuring out what needs to be memorized in a subject requires some understanding, and I usually lack that in subjects I'm deeply interested in.
A combination of mnemonic techniques and mental math methods that I'd never encountered in childhood make a huge difference. I wonder why they are not taught in schools.
CARVER encourages tertiary recon to validate whatever data was initially gathered. I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem for a neo-rationalist civilian or SOCOM, but when it's applied in regular Army, the element that's engaged in tertiary recon has incentive to simply agree with the initial report, especially if that's the sort of thing command encourages.
That's about all the topics I have serious familiarity with on that thread. Will check out the rest.
What kind of work do you do that being able to do mental math makes a huge difference?
I am sure that there are many jobs where mental math makes a huge difference.
I manage a team of engineers, and though pretty much all of them are head and shoulders above me in their specialisation, they think I really know my stuff because I find errors in their work and zero-in on them on the fly. The skill that I have is doing rough approximations in my head. Then from experience: a factor-of-two difference is commonly confusing kg and lb, a factor of 10 - confusing kg and N, a factor of fifty - mistaking degrees and radians (usually in Excel, where radians are the default mesurement), etc... I get a LOT of mileage from this :). If they did the same, their already good work would be even better. And I imagine any calculation intensive job (finance, economics, science, business...) is similar.
what kinds of things do you have remembered in the repository? (can you make a list?)
My math skills are probably extremely poor, so it's been easier for me to to make large gains. Most often, this is manifest in three digit multiplication or division, in situations that don't allow for calculators. Small scale logistics (how much fuel do we need for x days in x area? How much food?) and other stuff a middle schooler wouldn't have trouble with. The difference between three minutes and thirty seconds usually doesn't matter, but I'm preparing for worst case scenarios anyway.
Currently, I have memorized nonsense paragraphs for work and basic medical diagnostic algorithms, as well as the pharmacology of drugs I administer most often. Memorizing faces, names, and minor facts concerning people at work is uncommonly useful in getting the job done. Following proper channels is usually nigh impossible, so we rely on a system of favors.
Basic python functions. Any factoid that may inspire fiction.
I am sometimes (about once a month) in situations where I am given a short amount of time to take in specific information, often digits, and there are dozens of checklists. This is where I've seen the most dramatic improvement.
Hrm. I think I've figured it out, purely from writing this reply. I'll just focus on biases, python functions, and mathematical formulas I encounter until I'm ready to take on another major subject.
What are some recommended readings for those who want to decrease existential risk? I know Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence, How can I reduce existential risk from AI?, and MIRI's article Reducing Long-Term Catastrophic Risks from Artificial Intelligence are useful, but what else? What about non-AI-related existential risks?
What are good reasons not to create a for-profit AI applied deep-learning startup starting with a team who are concerned about AI risk?
Gaining expertise, reputation and network are valuable, especially if you're concerned about AI risk. Revenue will be higher in worlds where AI advances more quickly, which is altruistically useful. The climate is very favourable for this kind of company to be funded presently, both by angels/VCs and by grant-funding such as FLI's. This would have a chance of growing much faster than MIRI, due to the for-profit company structure, and could be aborted if it was excessively speeding-up AI progress, or was otherwise net harmful.
Why should or shouldn't this be done?
Do it if you can.
If the founders did it, they'd have to be careful to retain control so that shutting down the company would be an option, and a decision they had the authority to make. It's easy for investors and VCs to influence or take over running a company, without extraordinary pushback from founders, especially if the company is making money. "Could be aborted if it was excessively speeding-up AI progress, or was otherwise net harmful" sounds glib to me. Making a plan of how to do that, exactly, and under what conditions it would be done, and putting that into contracts right from the start, would be important. Otherwise, it wouldn't get done.
Studying risk analysis, and failure analysis, and the human factors of how people respond to emergencies would be helpful.
Well one would decide whether it was worth doing partially on the basis that investors interested in AI risk, including Jaan Tallinn and Elon Musk were willing to fund it in the early-mid stages. Of course, if you're soliciting funds from people who are already interested in AI risk, then you can't claim to be influencing AI-investors to become interested in AI risk - you can't have your cake and eat it too.
I'm at the moment writing an LW discussion article in Evernote. It contains links. Is there an easy way to delete all the formatting expect the links?
One option might be to paste and save, and then edit the html (by clicking the html button).
There seem to be quite a lot of div tags. I was hoping for a more straightfoward way.
Does anyone find any benefit to taking notes while reading fiction? I've been keeping a reading journal since the beginning of this year, and I just find it a chore that makes more difficult to decide to read. All my notes just end up being plot summaries anyway, which I can find online. I don't see myself ever re-reading the notes again. Am I missing something, or is it just a terrible idea?
Why did you decide to keep a reading journal in the first place? This might help you come to an answer.
I have taken notes on fiction only a few times when reading for pleasure - mostly in reading sf when some new idea or speculation made me wonder about its further implications and I jotted it down for discussion with other like minded people. That worked fine and I still do it once in a while. I also took notes once or twice when reading fiction as part of a reading group, again with the idea of highlighting discussion points that interested me. But I felt that taking notes detracted from the actual reading and enjoying part of reading - discussion wasn't any different without notes.
It is very necessary when reading certain Greg Egan novels.
Since I have a hard time remembering names (not just of people, I have a huge list of gene names at my desk in the lab) sometimes I need to make a minor-character list for a book.
Zoltan Istvan generated a lot of notice - to himself - with this troll on Huffington Post:
Is it Time for Fast Track Atheist Security Checks at Airports?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/is-it-time-for-fast-track_b_7549062.html
As I noted awhile back, I find his online career interesting to observe because it shows successful self-promotion in action.
Transhumanism related:
EVEN MATERIALISTS CRAVE RELIGION by Wesley J. Smith
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/06/even-materialists-crave-religion
The Church of Transhumanism: Let us Upload by WESLEY J. SMITH
http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/419688/church-transhumanism
Evangelical Christian or Transhumanist? A Quiz Written by J.M. PORUP
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/evangelical-christian-or-transhumanist-a-quiz
Even materalists crave some things that are traditionally associated with religion.
FTFY.
We should do something about this meme that "meaning" has to be associated with "believing in ontologically basic mental things".
That is not easy. The meaning of a sentence equals the intent of the speaker. "The meaning of life" means something somewhere making our lives with an intent, for a purpose. It does not have to be ontologically basic - if it turned out we live in a simulation, brains in vats, in a grand experiment, that would at least explain an immediate intent. However then we would worry about the meaning of the lives of the experimenters themselves, trying to reduce it to some intent outside them. So at the end of the day, the only satisfactory meaning-of-life would be an ontologically basic intent from an ontologically basic mind. Divorcing these two from each other is not easy.
Quite frankly I don't have an optimistic solution. I am a natural pessimitist and felt validated when I realized all this. No, there is no meaning to life at all because nothing has ontologically basic intent out there. The optimistic existentialist stuff, that we can "find" meaning in life is equally invalid, we cannot find something that does not exist. We can try to "put" meaning into life i.e. have intents, have goals, but it will never feel as powerful as the people who believe in an intent outside them (providence, fate, karma) feel about it. Let's just suck it up, there is really no solution here.
The only optimists in this regard are the people who are glad about this all because it means freedom for them. How they decide if something is important still beats me, perhaps they have an internal value function that does not need to borrow terminal goals from an external source.
In his keynote at the LWCW Val of CFAR made the point that caring is an essential part of rationality.
Eliezer also speaks about the value of having something to protect. It's Harry's "The power The Dark Lord knows not".
He is also running to be U.S. President, briefly posted on LW, and wrote an Amazon review of my book. He has managed to get lots of publicity for transhumanism, and I think on net will do tranhumanism lots of good.
I have a problem with how easily people can position themselves as authority figures in social movements which lack competition or standards to vet the candidates. A genuinely capable person might emerge regardless, but more through good luck than through a good process.
For example, Madalyn Murray O'Hair became America's most famous atheist in the 1960's and 1970's because no one else wanted the job, not because she excelled at it compared with competitors. A mediocre but extroverted and opinionated woman willing to take risks could step into the void of the time and assume that title. Even during her life, many other atheists never bought into her cult of personality and considered her a charlatan.
By contrast, in today's world, when many atheists have become minor celebrities, often with best selling books, and when atheists even in hick towns like Tulsa's Seth Andrews can attract followings around the world by setting up websites and uploading podcasts and videos, Madalyn with that kind of competition wouldn't necessarily stand out as particularly noteworthy.
I see a similar situation with today's transhumanist scene. Any newcomer on the make with the right sort of personality (the sort I don't have), willing to exploit social media to present controversial ideas as transhumanist philosophy, could persuade other people into accepting him as a transhumanist authority figure in a relatively short time. It would help if objective standards emerged to assess who deserves this kind of status and who doesn't.
Now, Zoltan Istvan might do something eventually to show that he has the goods. In the meantime I have misgivings about his activities.
How sure are you that O'Hair became the speaker for American atheism because no one else wanted the job rather than because the media focused on her because she was annoying?
[Link] The Health Advice Scott Adams Does’t Find Credible.
It's a nice piece on correlation vs. causation e.g.
And so he goes on with dog owners, light drinkers and first of all exercise. Maybe before you go on to read it you wonder what the correlation may be.
Maybe also consider whether this applies to other Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity.
That paragraph you quoted doesn't sound smart to me. It seems like it's argues against a strawman. Scientists who studies issues like this usually don't publish raw correlations but try to control for various factors they can think of.
Of course you can still criticise that scientists failed to control for relevant factors but that means you actually have to read the papers.
You can also make general arguments against the usefulness of regression analysis but Scott doesn't make those in that article.
I think Scott doesn't argue against scientific papers in particular or in general. I think he is raising the sanity waterline. Increase the awareness for these things in general. The specialized scientists may be aware of thse - and probably joke about them. But I was surprised a bit. I could have come up with that - but I didn't. Did you?
If you read "Married people live longer" what does that sentence mean?
The people on the street think it means (A): "We measured the the lifespan of married people and we measured the lifespan of unmarried people. It turns out that the lifespan value we measured for the people who are married is higher."
The problem is that's not what it means. It rather means (B): "We measured a bunch of factors among them lifespan and whether people are married. Then we did run a regression analysis and found that being marriages influences lifespan in a positive way."
Knowing that the sentence means (B) is statistical literacy. Literacy that Scott isn't showing when he assumes that a common factor like income isn't factored out of the question of whether moderate drinking is healthy.
Why do you think they joke about them instead of fixing the issue by controlling for the factors they can think of?
I'm certainly able to not take the conclusions of observational studies as strong evidence.
"Measuring a bunch of factors etc." is an observational investigation; "being married influences lifespan" is a causal statement. The former absolutely does not mean the latter, although given additional causal information or assumptions you may be able to deduce it from the experiment. Merely controlling for common factors does not fix this.
I didn't want to imply that there's a causal link. Do you have suggestions for another verb to replace "influence" in that sentence?
"Is positively associated with." "Tend to be found together with." "Correlates with."
Have statisticians who do not understand causation and philosophers who do not believe in it corrupted the language so much as to make "influence", a purely causal concept in everyday language, be a synonym of "association"?
To me those options don't feel like they are everyday language.
They do mean the right thing, though. And "tend to be found together with"? Everyday words, all of them, put together in an everyday way. Perhaps it is the concept that is not an everyday one. It needs to be.
Can someone give an extensional definition of free will? Or link to one.
Presuming free will references something in the first place, it would reference an infinite set, by its nature. I don't think you can have one.
I am not asking for an exhaustive definition, just a fence around the concept.
Are you asking for a procedure for identifying acts of free will (the doable kind of extensive definition) or a set of in-out exemplars (ostensive definition)?
By extensional definition I mean fencing off the notion of free will with a set of reasonably sharp (close to the free will/not free will boundary) examples of not having free will.
A rock not having free will is uncontroversial, but not sharp (very far from the boundary). I am looking for a set of examples where most people would agree that
It is an example of not having free will (uncontroversial)
It is hard to move it toward the "definitely free will" case without major disagreements from others (reasonably sharp).
Pretty sure I'm misparsing you somehow, but here are some things I might consider nonfree action :
A) an action is rewarded with a heroin fix; the actor is in withdrawal
B) an action will relieve extreme and urgent pain
C) an action is demanded by reflex (e.g. withdrawal from heat)
D) an action is demanded by an irresistably salient emotional appeal that the agent does not reflectively endorse (release the country-slaying neurotoxin, or I shall shoot your child)
I think these are very good examples, I would agree with C), disagree with D), require clarification on B) and have no strong opinion on A). Others might have different opinions. I further think that without amassing a wealth of examples like this and selecting a subset where there is a general agreement on which side of the fence they lie is necessary for a productive discussion of the issue.
If you intend to try again in the current open thread, feel free to transfer the examples.
Trying to clarify my intuitions re. B:
Consider Paul Atreides undergoing the gom jabbar; he will die unless he keeps his hand in the box. Given that he knows this, I count his success as a freely willed action; if (counterfactually) the pain had been sufficient to overcome him, withdrawing his hand would not have been freely willed, because it is counter to his consciously endorsed values (and, in this case, not subtle or confused values).
However, if (also counterfactually) the threat of death had not been present or known to him, then withdrawing his hand may have been a freely willed act (if the pain built slowly enough to be noticed rather than just triggering a burn-reaction).
Examples of free will: pretty much all of people's everyday activities.
Examples of non-free will: being asleep.
Borderline examples: the will exercised by a being in a state of endarkenment, e.g. due to the three poisons.
"Free will" is a pleonasm. There are degrees of it, but there is not really such a thing as an unfree will.
Eliezer set the problem of dissolving the question of free will as a beginning exercise in the practice of dissolving problems. The link includes a link to his solution, but he recommends solving the problem on one's own before reading his answer.
His solution seems satisfactory to me. I do not know if this solution can already be found in academic philosophy, or what academic philosophers think about it, but in shorter form it is stated in this Zen story.
Eliezer uses a compatibilist definition
which works well for the central example (mentally competent human in Western culture), but fails at the boundaries (unusual cultures, mental disorders, non-human animals, algorithms). Hence my original question.
He further elaborates
Yet, in the next paragraph he states
which seems to me to contradict the one before, as it expands the definition to include every possible human mind-state.
I do not recall him giving an example of a mind state which is clearly marked as "no free will".
I don't know what E's sentence is doing there, to the point that I suspect it's been garbled by an editing error. But I don't see why "having free will" should not include pretty much all mind states, short of being asleep or abnormalities such as drug addiction. The phenomenon he is pointing to, whatever its name, is something that human minds do.
I'm very unclear on your question, and where you think the contradiction lies. Being addicted to a drug that you will reliably seek despite considering it wrong would reduce your "free will," as it would take you closer to being "never uncertain of my future decisions, or in a brain-state where my emotions and morals fail to determine my actions in the usual way."
(I would personally not have included the "uncertain" part before encountering Eliezer's work, but of course other writers do treat it as important.)
Tried to clarify my question again.
this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by this comment
Compare to driving vs. being a passenger in a car driving on a twisty road. I often find the former fun, and the latter decidedly uncomfortable, because the first is a tightly coupled feedback loop and the second is highly varying inputs without much in the way of predictability or control.
"Head-eye" coordination is a thing; the neck muscles and the eye muscles communicate closely, and one would expect that the visual cortex might have access to some of that information as well. Breaking that link will violate expectations on a perceptual level.
POV results in jarring perspective changes and it makes it harder for the viewer to orient themselves and understand what is going on. Historically there were also technical obstacles, but steadicam + digital video make it more feasible. Another problem is it makes staging more difficult for obvious reasons.
A good example of POV film-making is the British comedy Peep Show, which I found almost unwatchable at first because of the jarring shifts in perspective. Still a great show, but the POV is mostly a gimmick you have to get used to rather than a benefit:
It's likely to result in shakycam or at least large sudden changes in field of view, which I find disorienting.
Agree; shakycam is painful; unless we can stabilise the camera - half the time it sucks to have a camera on someone's face. You know how many video-corrections the brain just "does" without us noticing?! (lots)
(we can stabilise; I have seen algorithms come out; but in the form of research; not for public use)
Not everyone can easily adapt to immersion-style media. The first time I heard surround speakers in a cinema theater, in 1999, I hated it, and I still do to this day; I find it horribly distracting.
I'm trying to figure out what percentage of a balanced investment portfolio should go towards rental real estate, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable sources of advice on this question.
I have a friend who invests in rental real estate, and he says he can give me a guaranteed 10% ROI if I invest $10,000+ with him, or 15% if I invest $100,000+. From looking around online this does indeed appear reasonable - rental real estate often gives much higher returns than this, so it sounds reasonable that he can guarantee a lower rate and then either pocket the remainder (his reward) or pay up the difference out of pocket (his risk). So it sounds like a pretty decent investment as far as I can tell.
But I don't want to put all my financial eggs in one investment basket - I'm not an expert, but I've always heard that diversification and a "balanced portfolio" are the names of the game. My question is approximately what percentage of my assets should I put into rental property investments like this vs. e.g. a Vanguard targeted retirement fund. As I said, I'm having trouble finding reliable sources of advice on this question.
Anybody here know anything on this subject? Anybody know somewhere I could go to find accurate, reliable, and unbiased advice?
Heh. Ask him to actually guarantee it -- that is, structure the transaction as a loan yielding 10% (or 15%) with him fully liable for the principal and the interest. See if he agrees :-/ Don't forget to check that the counterparty (the borrower) has assets to pay you back.
There are financial securities called REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts) which invest in property (sometimes commercial, sometimes rental, read the prospectus) and return the income to you less a haircut. As a sanity check you can take a look at how high returns do they provide.
I don't believe it. If he could guarantee it, he would instead borrow from a bank at 3-5% as much as he can (potentially using his house as a collateral) and invest that. Besides, at that rate of return, other investors would flock in, including fund managers, and saturate the market.
Theoretically, the market portfolio, which is the efficient portfolio according to Modern Portfolio Theory should replicate the world's assets weighted by value. For America, household (and non-profit) net worth is ~$85T and the value of real estate holdings is ~$14T (value less mortgages) (source), so about 16% is pretty justifiable. This is all pretty back of the envelope though.
People who hang out with a lot of high-brow people e.g. Bay Area, what are the general trends of sports, exercise and active hobbies? People still do the more repetitive, kinda boring kinds like lifting or running, or they go in the direction of fsck that, you only live once, get your exercise from some fun activity like disc golfing or rollerblading or whatever? What are the trending sporty activities that have a good exercise value and a good self-confidence value as well in high-brow circles? To give a good example of the later, martial arts and dancing tends to be confidence boosters, the first in general and the second sexually, but they are so obvious that anyone knows them, I figure these high-IQ Silicon Valley places have already figured out highly optimized activities that are fun like playing soccer, make you ripped like a convict, make you proud like a boxer and feel sexy like a slick tango dancer? This was done, or not yet? Or generally, what is trending in these circles?
What do you want to optimize for? ("everything" is not a good answer)
Everything :) It is not a good answer if we are about inventing something very new, but my secret hope is reinvent something very old, something that really fits out biological natures but was lost during civilization, and thus solves a lot of problems at once, a lot of problems that all stem of not living in an ancestral env. So I am thinking about somethng as fun as soccer, as fit making as deadlifts, as proud making as boxing and as sexy feeling as tango. Because I am hoping when we are not having fun, are not being fun, being timid or not feeling it will turn out it all comes from not living an ancestral life yet that can be simulated.
I understand it is a bit unlikely, as evolution does not optimze for having made a perfect golden age. But there is a small chance humans did i.e. 100K years ago with similar brain sizes but far simpler env, far fewer variables, they figured ways to live happy, fit, sexy, proud etc.
I mean how else can soccer be so much fun or dancing so sexy etc. if they do not tap into something in the brain that is really old? I don't think they simply overstimulate circuits made for something else, maybe yes, but that is not the only option, the other option is that there were some ur-activities they all derive from.
So there is a hope that this is only a reinvention, hence the "everything".
Even if it not a reinvention, optimizing for "everything" can still be salvaged if we show most elements are synergistic.
Finally, it is about what they are optimizing for, not me. Hence the question what is trending.
I don't know anything about high-brow circles, but I am a big fan of swordfighting and weapon martial arts and would suggest trying that out. There's been some resurfacing of the pasttime/art/practice in historical recreation groups though I got interested in it after getting a quarter of the way through Musashi's Book of Nine Spheres and reading his assertion that it would be impossible to understand his book without practicing swordfighting yourself.
I've tried out rapier-fencing and kali stick fighting (a stick in each hand) and have found it very intellectually stimulating. It's also been interesting to explore the areas of my personality and body that involve high physical activity, mobility, agression, and composure under pressure. Fighting effectively while using a weapon in each hand has been described to me as similar to a combination of chess and tennis. (I don't think it's quite that difficult, but I'm also not the best swordfighter in the world nor do I practice against said greatest swordfighters.)
Exposure to stimuli that add additional perspectives to everyday life helps as well. Real pressure in life doesn't involve a spreadsheet deadline. It involves an angry large human attempting to painfully whack you over the head with a large stick (a remarkably refreshing experience) and attempting to deal with that situation as optimally as possible.
HEMA/longsword/Fiore/Marozzo.com/Liechtenauer/Wiktenauer.com/hroarr.com? That stuff?
I think it ranks insanely high on the fun level but does it do anything for fitness, self-confidence or feeling sexy?
Also, have you tried empty-handed martial arts like boxing, wing chun, karate or bjj? How would you are empty-hand vs. weapon on these four axes: fun, fitness, feeling confident, feeling sexy?
HEMA/Fiore is the rapier-fencing stuff that I've been doing. I've enjoyed learning footwork from the more formal setting I've found with the rapier people I know.
The other stuff I've done (which makes up the majority) is more freestyle rattan dual-wielding and freestyle shinai fighting that uses a mix of japanese fighting (less kendo, more musashi), filipino stick fighting, and some HEMA twohanded sword fighting (this stuff is weird). This resembles the dogbrothers videos more than anything else (although we both don't wear much padding and don't hit anywhere near as hard as we could).
I've tried brazilian jiu-jitsu with a focus on very close sparring but I didn't enjoy it very much at all and found it to have limited usefulness. I don't think the place I went to gave very good instruction or had the right focus.
I would rate the above as follows:
Rattan dual-wielding fun 10 (12 if i can go above 10 in the 1-10 scale), fitness 8, feeling confident 9 , feeling sexy 8?,
Rapier fighting fun 7, fitness 6, feeling confident 3 , feeling sexy 6? (dressing in armor probably contributes for 4 points and the other 2 are from actual rapier fencing)
shinai fighting fun 6, fitness 5, feeling confident 4, feeling sexy 3
brazilian jiu-jitsu (unoptimized dojo) fun 1, fitness 3, feeling confident 2, feeling sexy 0
Rattan (kali stick) dual wielding wins by a large margin and is probably the most fun thing I do in my life. It accomplishes the all-important task among sports of creating a strong cardio and muscular activity that is fun to the point that you will do it for hours on end. It has also taught me a great deal about myself physically and about states of mind that I can use to achieve higher functionality when necessary. It has strongly boosted my confidence and gives a strong sense of physical empowerment (you might call this "feeling sexy"?) that has been a refreshing change in my life.
This is fairly awesome. I was actually speculating something like this. For some reason, I feel fencing / armed fighting is "more natural" than unarmed martial arts. This makes no sense - I think it is far more likely that it has no biological basis but simply a specific application of human generic intelligence / tool-using, I don't think have evolved specific circuits for beating things with sticks in a skillful way. Yet, it does feel exactly so. I cannot really tell why, maybe just the effect of too many movies, but it does feel so that a human was "born" for holding a sword much more than for making a fist.
May I ask what makes rattan dual wielding so special? From a fitness point of view, they are lighter than metal weapons / feders ? And what makes it more fun? Is it the coordination thing? From my limited experience, I don't really like that kind of one-handed fencing where I put the other hand behing my back, it is not natural at all. But holding a buckler, or using a two-handed longsword that feels natural enough. I never tried dual-wielding. What it is really like?
Whoops. Forgot to post this:
Dual wielding is strange, cumbersome, uncomfortable, and amazing since all of its starting flaws decrease as you build proficiency over time.
Dual wielding requires coordination and ambidexterity but you build both of them as you practice regularly. I do practice swings with both arms every day independently and then together. When you dual wield you need to be a proficient fighter with each arm independently and with both arms together. When you fight you need to be able to (attack-left defend-right), (attack-right defend-left), (attack-left attack-right), and (defend-left defend-right) with each mode all being the same mode and switched in between seemlessly. This is harder and easier than it sounds. It also has major psychological benefits when fighting someone since any sort of "mode" that gets adjusted to can throw them off significantly when you switch to another.
Idealy every movement involves both arms simultaneously. However,i'm not quite there yet so there's a lot of switching between which arm is my attacking arm (with the other defending) back and forth. (With both arms attacking occasionally or when there's an opening, of course.)
Dual wielding has a reduction in reach compared to a twohanded weapon but it also provides you a constant extra source of defending yourself and harming an opponent which most competent fighters will approriately be very careful against.
The actual experience of fighting with two weapons at once is likely beyond my abilities to describe. It's quite different from everything I've put in my posts and may be very different for me than it would be for you.
Rattan dual wielding is more fun for me personally and complex in a way that is really fun. Kali stick fighting (which i have only learned informally) is interesting because it uses the rattan sticks as a practice weapon that can easily be replaced with something more dangerous (mace, axe, sword, etc.) or anything that you happen to find around you when you need it (pipe, stick, glass bottle, etc.). It builds coordination, control of your off-hand, and allows for a lot of creativity.
The rattan sticks are useful instead of a metal stick due to their light weight, grip, and how easily they bounce off of other rattan sticks. (They also have a very satisfying sound.) Lots of the practice drills i've done involve both people using them and executing repeated patterns (occasionally with slight deviations) over and over and over until you fully engrain the response in System 1 and can do it as an immediate reaction to a given stimuli.
Lots of things make it more fun than the fencing for me(which i haven't done as much of). The extreme coordination, sensation of slashing rather than stabbing, and the strange moves i've learned to do with them are really fun. The creativity, spontaneity, the flow of body movements and impacts, the mental reactions, psychological warfare on the person opposite you (learning how to terrify people with a look or yell is fun), and entire experience is awesome.
The fencing that I've done was more historical in nature rather than modern fencing. It used a rapier and a dagger rather than just a single foil. I don't know if I'd reccomend fencing with a foil. It looks interesting but kind of boring. (I would likely learn it just to know how, but not want to do it often.)
Dual-wielding itself is strange. I will have to write more about it a bit later.
I am not a big fan of noble savage theory. Seems to me the lives of ancient humans were more likely to be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" than "happy, fit, sexy, proud". There are still some stone-age tribes around, you can take a look :-/
Going back to sport, there are some primal crossfit versions which basically try to emulate prehistoric "exercise" -- you run, but not on roads or trails, you lift, but boulders instead of iron, you carry logs, climb trees, etc.
However I think you're mixing up different things. There's a hardwired pleasure in movement (which many people managed to suppress quite successfully nowadays); there is the competition aspect into which competitive sports like soccer (or boxing) plug into; there is the general fit = sexy linkage, so weightlifting is popular; and dancing is either pleasure in movement or foreplay with clothes on. You are not going to find a single activity which satisfies everything in here.
At this point, any tribe still living anything like a stone-age lifestyle is ipso facto very unusual and so shouldn't be expected to be representative of actual stone-age lifestyles back in the Stone Age when everyone was living them.
(This remark is not original to me; I have a vague feeling I saw it years ago in a book by C S Lewis.)
A fair point, though I'm not sure I accept it fully. Yes, certain groups of people progressed to civilization while other groups did not. That, on the face of it, makes them different. However the jump to the conclusion that their lifestyle (and the degree of happiness and sexiness) back in the stone-age days was significantly different looks very tenuous to me.
I am not a big fan of it either, but I see a non-zero chance that same brains with simpler environments can sometimes ponder or experiment with some problems more.
Any people who are still in stone age should be considered automatically huge outliers.
Now, as for sports, just from the top of my mind, competitive acrobatic dancing e.g. womens pole dancing would easily satisfy a large chunk of it. This is why I think there is a potential to optimize it.
Um, the general rule is that simpler environments lead to simpler brains. I don't buy the whole "the current life is making us crazy" argument. Put someone smart in a very simple environment (e.g. an exile to a small village in the boonies) and while there is a non-zero chance he'll write a genius book, I'll bet on him becoming an alcoholic or sinking into the general dumbness.
It's not a sport, it's an occupation with the goal of making men stuff money into your underwear X-)
If you want a high-status full-body-development sport, try kite surfing.
Lumi, you are smarter than this, you must be trolling me now :)
Kitesurfing is a textbook example of the high-investment extreme sports that require the right location, expensive equipment, right weather, high pre-existing fitness and so on. It is not a generic applicable routine.
As a comparison, basketball requires a hoop, a ball, and at least one opponent. It has far more capability there, to be become a universal exercise sport.
Let me point out that you didn't ask for a "universal exercise sport". You asked for what kind of fun sport do "high-brow people e.g. Bay Area" do and kite-surfing is a valid answer to this question.
As a low-investment alternative, try parkour? :-)
This sounds good, actually. Is it popular there?
It's an urban youth sport with a strong counterculture vibe. Not very beloved by authorities and property owners :-/
A bigger problem is that you're guaranteed cuts and bruises, with broken bones not a particularly unlikely outcome.
Or a Buddha / Zen masta :) Let's face it we both are speculating here. There is no evidence either way.
Yeah maybe try to stick to forming opinions about things you actually know about :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-rf8jTvqE
Of course there is. Sending inconvenient (and sometimes smart) people into exile to the far corner of nowhere has been a pretty standard way of doing things at least since the Romans. I am not aware of any study which tried to systematize evidence, but there is data.
As to your video, I would call it "performance art with athletic elements" :-P
That's not true. There are people who do pole dancing as recreational sport.
For some reason people are often surprised when I link this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-rf8jTvqE
Says a lot about prejudices and all too fixed priors :)
If you believe that your rain dance has to please the rain god, you won't optimize your rain dance for muscle building or other physical benefits.
It will also be less effective for other people who copy the rain dance without believing in it's significance.
Pole dancing isn't ergonomic. It's bad for joints. It doesn't train good movement habits.
If you want acrobatic dancing there's Zouk. Outside of regulated ballroom dances that have rules about feet touching the ground stage dancing also involves a lot of acrobatics.
From your list of goals I don't think "Feeling proud" is a worthwhile goal. It's better than feeling angry but I don't consider it to a clearly positive emotion.
... swimming? It never gets old.
Way better for me; tango and soccer are practically dead to me; swimming is fun.
OTOH if you optimize for fitness benefits, I am almost sure swimming is not optimal: e.g. cardio training and weight lifting should be better.
You should really figure out what you wish to optimize for. If you want to optimize for 'everything' you should be fine doing 'anything' that looks like it helps it.
I doubt that such a paradise has ever existed. Happy? Fit? Sexy? Proud? Maybe "fit" can be estimated from the fossil record (what does it say?) but for the rest, how would we know?
I don't find it very probable either, it is just a hope, that if people of similar brain sizes were not overwhelmed by a hugely complex social environment they could figure out a few things we so far didn't.
I mean... do we have any explanation how could people 2500 years ago figure out things we often find insightful even today, such as Buddhism? I would say, it was simply because had a simpler environment and thus could dig deeper in a few things. Could reflect more. Perhaps.
Not sure what exactly needs explanation here.
How could people 2500 years ago have insights about life? I guess the same way they do today.
Why do we find those insights interesting? Probably selection bias: those insights that were too culture-dependent were already forgotten, only the more universal ones remained.
Yeah, some people had life simple enough, so they could spend their time meditating about stuff. For example those born in royal families.
Could Malthusian tragedy be the Great Filter? Meaning, maybe most civilizations, before they develop AGI or space colonization, breed so much that everyone is too busy trying to survive and reproduce to work on AGI or spaceflight, until a supernova or meteor or plague kills them off.
Since humans don't seem to be headed into this trap, alien species who do fall into this trap would have to differ from humans. Some ways this might happen:
Human technological progress doesn't seem to be as fast as it can be, though, which suggests that there's a lot of "slack" time in which civilizations can develop technologically before evolving to be more Malthusian.
Your Malthusian collapse seems to be conditional on some particulars of aliens' biology, but the Great Filter has to be very very general and almost universal.
That doesn't seem like it would lend itself to evolving culture. Specifically, since parents don't invest in their offspring they don't tell them what they've learned. Thus no matter how smart individuals are, knowledge doesn't pass to the next generation.
More generally, you can imagine a lot of failure modes where an alien species evolves to become intelligent, but cannot build technological civilization because it cannot achieve large scale social cooperation.
E.g. imagine a society where human brains evolved just a little bit differently and >90% of population are dyslectics. This very obviously wouldn't matter until about the time proto-writing changed into true writing, i.e. after urban development and proto-states. But then, such a civilization is trapped.
Being able to read would be a valuable advantage and after tens of thousands of years of evolution, more and more people could read.
There's actually some evidence humans have made some adaptions to be better at reading, but I can't find a source.
I have two somewhat contradictory arguments.
First, this is probably a poor candidate for the great filter because it lacks the quality of comprehensiveness. Remember that a threat is not a candidate for a great filter if it merely exterminates 90%, or 99%, of all sentient species. Under those conditions, it's still quite easy to populate the stars with great and powerful civilizations, and so such a threat fails to explain the silence. Humans seem to have ably evaded the malthusian threat so far, in such a way that is not immediately recognizable as a thermodynamic miracle, so it's reasonable to expect that a nontrivial fraction of all civilizations would do so. At least up to our current stage of development.
Second, I'll point out that bullets two and four are traits possessed by digital intelligences in competition with one another (possibly the first as well), and they supplement it with a bullet you should have included but didn't- functional immortality. These conditions correspond to what Nick Bostrom calls a 'multipolar scenario', a situation in which there exist a number of different superintelligences with contradicting values. And indeed, there are many smart people who think about the dangers of these selection pressures to a sufficiently advancd civilization.
So, malthusian pressures on biological systems are unlikely to explain the apparent lack of spacefaring civilizations. On the other hand, malthusian pressures on technologically optimized digital entities (possibly an obligate stage of civilization) may be much more of a threat, perhaps even one deserving the name 'Great Filter'.
This filter applies even before they invent technology. Brains use lots of energy and development time. This is typically selected against. Therefore most organisms only evolve the minimum amount of intelligence they need. And human level intelligence is never an advantage in most environments.
So you need some really weird set of conditions to create an environment that selects for high intelligence, and doesn't select too strongly against energy efficiency or development time. I don't know what these conditions are, but they only occurred once on Earth, over hundreds of millions of years. This suggests these conditions occur very rarely, and we might just be very lucky.
People working on friendly AI probably assume that the odds of inventing a friendly AI is higher than establishing a world order in which research associated with existential risks is generally banned. Why is that? Is the reasoning that our civilization is likely to end without significant technological progress (due to reasons like nuclear war, climate change and societal collapse), so we should give it at least a try?
You make the mistake of equating something being generally banned and it not happening. Selling MDMA is generally banned. On the other hand it's still possible to purchase it in many places.
As a stronger argument to your point - In Australia nearly no one owns guns; its very difficult to get guns and I certainly know of no-one who has one. However I am completely confident that I can call my shadiest friend and he could call his shadiest of friend (and possibly to a 3rd degree - his friend) and within 7 days I could have a gun for the low-low price of "some monetary compensation".
I'm sure some people in rural areas do. Wiki says:
And that's only people who legally own guns, of course.
It's extremely hard to ban the research worldwide, and then it's extremely hard to enforce such decision.
Firstly, you'll have to convince all the world's governments (btw, there are >200) to pass such laws.
Then, you'll likely have all powerful nations doing the research secretly, because it provides some powerful weaponry / other ways to acquire power; or just out of fear that some other government will do it first.
And even if you somehow managed to pass the law worldwide, and stopped governments from doing research secretly, how would you stop individual researchers?
The humanity hasn't prevented the use of nuclear bombs, and has barely prevented a full-blown nuclear war; while nuclear bombs require national-level industry to produce, and are available to a few countries only. How can we hope to ban something which can be researched and launched in your basement?
If society doesn't end first, banning X-risks research worldwide is an effort that must be prolonged indefinitely, always ensuring that nobody ever fiddles with her computer in a way that could create an AGI. This means that with time the probability to enforce successfully the ban always decreases.
Building an FAI instead, is an effort that once accomplished stays so: its probability, however small, might even increase with time.
That last part plays a role in my thinking. But I'd consider the world ban idea if I thought for a second that we could convince, not only China, but every nation-level player that might pose a threat. If you're imagining a UN ban that does the job, you have either a mental picture of AI research or a level of confidence in the UN that I find bizarre.
No idea whether it's the website or just me, but please consider maintaining the typed but unposted comments in the text box after a resumed session. It works for other websites and it used to work here too, but now when Firefox crashes while I'm writing a post I lose everything I've typed. At the very most, when it's a top-level comment, the previously typed text shows up instead of "Enter Comment Here" or whatever, and I'm then able to make a screenshot and rewrite my comment, but as soon as I click inside the text box it's of course gone. Please, if someone could look into it... I'm getting sick of constantly losing long posts. What's worse, not even copying the text as I'm writing it seems to work on the first attempt lately, so now I have to pre-write all my comments.
EDIT: Oh for Pete's sake. After carefully copying my retyped post several times as I was writing it, I lost it once again. And I'm definitely not rewriting it a third time. Trying to type something into a comment box seems to erase everything on my clipboard. Also, this is my third time attempting to make this edit. I don't remember whether this problem is common to reddit, but it definitely doesn't happen on any other website I use.
Sorry about you having to prewrite comments in notebook (or gnuedit or whatever). The easiest resolution might be to resolve your browser-crashing problem. Barring that, best of luck in figuring out where stuff in comment boxes gets saved by the browser, and how to make sure it happens.
I know what causes my crashing problems (bad browsing habits, suffice to say), but while I can reduce the chance of occurrence I can never know in advance just when the browser is going to crash. (On LW it seems to correlate with typing speed.) How post-crash text recovery is handled varies with the website, not with anything I can change, and having had this problem for a while, I have come to appreciate more the websites that offer better support for this.
Consider the question: why is there such a stigma associated with rationality?
My impression is that it's because rationality is so general. Well, I don't think that's the only reason, but I think it plays a big role.
Think about it:
But there is with rationality. Maybe it's because all of those other things are narrow enough that it's not seen as an attempt to be "better" than others. But since rationality is so general, it is seen as an attempt to be "better" than others.
Of course, the term "better" can be broken into components, and it isn't so black and white. But my impression is that other people see it as black and white. Sort of - I think they see it as if there's some sort of threshold where if you cross it, you enter the domain of "better is black and white, and you're trying to be better than everyone else".
I'd start one step earlier: Is there a stigma associated with rationality?
And I would answer "no, there isn't". There is a stigma associated with smart but socially awkward people who try to tell others that their thinking is broken, but that's quite a different thing :-/
How do you interpret the (seemingly hostile) responses to LW/Eliezer on sites like https://news.ycombinator.com/news and reddit? (If you're familiar with it, that is)
Hostility towards LW/Eliezer doesn't have any more to do with a general hostility to rationality than does hostility towards Objectivism/Ayn Rand.
Eliezer's treatment of topics like cryonics, friendly AI, transhumanism, and the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics are more than enough to fuel a debate, even if one agrees that rationality is a worthwhile aspiration. People can disagree with you without being enemies of truth or logic.
LW is weird by mainstream standards. We use inaccessible language. There's advocacy of ideas like cryonics. We build pillow forts. People think incorrectly we believe in the basilisk.
Being different always produces some hostile responses.
I'm getting a pretty strong impression that there's more to it than simply being different.
Sorry, not familiar, I'm not much interested in internet dramas unless they are supremely entertaining.
I am sure there are YC people and redditors who don't like Eliezer and/or LW, but so what?
I see it as demonstrating peoples' hostility towards rationality.
Really, someone who doesn't like Eliezer or is put off by the LW vibe is suddenly demonstrating "hostility to rationality"?
You think that LW is the sole pure source of rationality in the world? That Eliezer (PBUH) brought True Rationality (tm) into the barbaric world of hoplessly deluded pagans?
No to all of that. Not necessarily the fact that they're put off, but the apparent magnitude + the fact that it seems to be shared by a lot of people.
The iffy part is the jump from "people hate LW/EY" to "therefore these people hate rationality". I don't see any reasons for this to be a valid conclusion.
Good point. I'm less sure that people hate rationality (or really, that they're put off by it; hate is a strong word). I can't recall any/much explicit evidence, but when I query my memory, but I'm remembering people responding as if they're put off by rationality itself. Like the way people talk on HN is as if they're put off by the concept itself. And that's the way people seem to respond if I mention that I'm interested in/study rationality. Definitely something that could use more evidence and investigation though.
Why do you say that in the first place? In what kind of context do you say that?
In some cases it is probably the other way round, i.e. some people probably started disliking LW and EY (there are several distinct (in some cases overlapping) reasons why some people might not like LW), and only then started to scoff at any mention of rationality, because it gets associated with a thing they dislike.
If what you have in mind is other meanings of the word "rationality", e.g. what someone who hasn't even heard of LW might think when they hear this word, the explanation, of course, would be different.
The sort who can't last five minutes without bringing up how much they improved will find plenty of stigma.
Provided you don't become a self-righteous ass about it.
It's an attitude thing. People will perceive an attempt to be better than others if the individual starts acting the part. Socrates made a lot of enemies with his habit of going around correcting flaws in people's thinking.
The associated word is nerd. There a stigma for that.
Having the body of a bodybuilder isn't likely to make you seen as high status in an academic conference.
There a huge stigma associated with self help.
Do you mean "rationality" as defined in the LW-Wiki or rationality as the term is commonly understood out there?
Having just been at the LW Community camp in Berlin it's difficult for me to put a finger on what's connecting this community. There are people who explicitly don't label as rationalist but use phrases like "socially optimal" in normal conversation. It seems that there a clear cluster in which people of this community fall whether or not a person holds various individual beliefs.
There is resentment of thinking. You are smarter and you know more so you are offensive to them.
My impression is that this isn't true for smartness/knowledge in general. Ex. math, history, business...
It's not a function of particular domains, it's a function of particular people.
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Yes. Why do you want to do this?
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It's not that unusual. I think it's rare that someone would specifically wear 2 t-shirts, but it's extremely common for people to wear a t-shirt over a long-sleeved shirt, or for women to wear a long tank top underneath a shorter tank top (or variations on this theme) for a layering effect, at least in America.
I would say two t-shirts is still unusual. To me it would be almost as strange as wearing two button-downs at once. Layering is pretty much always done with two items of clothing that are different, i.e. a t-shirt paired with a long sleeve shirt / sweater / jacket. If you want the t-shirt visible, you could wear a wifebeater underneath or an open-faced long sleeve shirt on top.
I'd disagree with the other commenter that a long sleeve underneath a t-shirt is a good look. I've seen people wear it, but this look is mostly something that I'd expect a middle schooler to wear.
I've known a thin guy who would do this to seem bulkier. More common is the thermal long-sleeved undershirt with a t-shirt over it, which is also better on the warmth front.
Ensure that you're good with color coordination, then just do it. It's more likely to be the good kind of unconventional than the weird kind.