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Comments (297)
Iranian leaders regularly chant "Death to America" and yet the United States seems to be on course to letting Iran acquire atomic weapons even though we currently have the capacity to destroy Iran's military and industrial capacity at a tiny cost to ourselves.
Iranians chant "death to America" because of America's past abuses, such as overthrowing the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh to install the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran and supporting Saddam Hussein's bloody war of aggression against Iran (hundreds of thousands of Iranians died.) This included direct support for Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs. It's ridiculous to frame this as Iranian "mad dogs" vs. innocent Americans. They have every reason to fear foreign aggression. For example, this and this.
Attacking Iran again would simply be continuing the pattern of violent aggression the US has established in the Middle East for decades.
Downvoted for mindlessly regurgitating a pile of propaganda onto LW.
Upvoted for happening to be true.
LOL. I'm not going to play "burn out the heresy with my karma flamethrower", but you might want to step back from the tribal fight and think about what "true" actually means in this context.
Note: that downvote is not mine.
And letting Iran have nukes would lead to the Middle East becoming a peaceful place.
Both all of your statements and those of James_Miller can be true without contradicting each other.
Regardless of how modern Iran came to be or who is to blame, you seem to agree that the Iranian public is quite hostile to the U.S.
I don't worry about this too much, because I assume that the CIA/DOD/whoever have determined that we can live with a nuke powered Iran, even if they hate us.
This is a bit of a suspicious summary to me, because it sounds exactly like the summary from the angle of a highly educated, perhaps pol sci grad left-leaning highly critical American. Is it really likely that average guy in Iran really has the same perspective? Or their leaders? You simply don't seem to be making any effort to simulate their minds.
To give you one example of the lack of simulation here: too long memory. Mossadegh, really? 1953? That is what some guy born in 1970 or 80 will riot about? You have to be half a historian and full of a high-brown person to care what happened in 1953. For comparison, for most people who shot Kennedy and why is ancient history and that was 10 years later, in a country with far better collective memory than Iran (more books published, more media made etc.) If it turns out today the Russkies did it somehow, how many Americans will get angry? My prediction: not many.
A nation's memory is limited, and too many things have happened in the U.S. since Kennedy's death. Bolivia is still sore from losing its coast to Chile in 1884, because not much has happened to Bolivians afterwards.
Are you really arguing that not that much happened in Iran since 1953??
Much indeed, but instead of being varied and fleeting, the events that followed were directly related to 1953 and served to reinforce that memory. The fact that the U.S. has steadily kept ruining the lives of Iran's neighbors doesn't help, either.
So, the Islamic Revolution was directly related to 1953? As was the Iraq-Iran war?
Let's look at Iran's neighbors. There's Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which all are doing just fine. There's Turkey, which is just fine as well. There are some former Russian republics which are a mess, but for that you have to talk to Mr.Putin. There is Afghanistan which has been a mess since the Russian invasion (or, arguably, since the British Empire's Great Game) and while the US has certainly been involved, I don't think you can blame it for Afghanistan being what it is. There's Pakistan which is not the best of countries but is still managing to muddle through and even acquire nuclear weapons in the process.
So I guess all you mean is Iraq. Same Iraq which you agreed was supported by the US in "the bloody war of aggression against Iran"? But yes, you have a valid point in that the Second Iraq war was started on the pretext of preventing Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. Iran certainly took notice and, I suspect, came to the conclusion that a deterrent against a conventional US invasion would be a very useful thing to have.
I think you just undermined your own argument that Iran doesn't want nukes :-)
Yes, the whole point of the revolution was to remove the U.S.-appointed monarch and reverse the pro-Western trend he had started. And then Iraq invaded Iran because it was afraid the revolution would spread.
Just one year after the revolution, Jimmy Carter proclaimed that the Persian Gulf was the U.S.'s personal playground, and no one (else) was allowed to mess with it. Bush I and Bush II acted accordingly. Even the continued goodwill toward Saudi Arabia is a cause of worry for Iran, as they're sectarian rivals. And then there's Israel, which is viewed as a representative of U.S. interests against Muslim populations.
The Second Iraq war was started on the pretext that Iraq already had WMDs. For Iran, having them isn't going to stop a U.S. invasion.
Sigh. OK, we live in different universes. I wish you luck in yours.
You really are in your own delusional universe if you think the revolution had nothing to do with removing the foreign-imposed dictator.
He needs less luck than you since his contains the President of the United States and most of academia.
That the revolution was to remove the American influence seems to me much weaker, and thus easier to prove, than the claim that it was directly related to 1953.
I'm actually more of a conservative than liberal but I think anyone acquainted with the facts and making a good-faith effort not to see Iranians as Evil Mutants should come to the same conclusions. The US media essentially never mentions these facts and even when they do they treat each as an isolated incident rather than part of a consistent pattern which explains the attitude many Iranians have toward the US. I learned these things from being active in the US antiwar movement for the last 10 years or so.
First of all they aren't rioting; they're protesting. It would be one thing if the US had acknowledged the wrongness of this action and apologized for it. To the best of my knowledge this has never happened. And don't forget that the Shah was imposed by the US and reigned until 1979! That isn't exactly ancient history. There are many people presently alive who fully remember the Iran-Iraq war and the Shah's dictatorship.
That's very different. The government wasn't replaced when JFK died; his vice president (who largely continued his policies) was made president. Very little changed for most Americans. Furthermore the Soviet Union no longer exists, whereas the US government continues to behave in a very similar, heavy handed way in the Middle East as it did in the 1950s. The difference is instead of dictatorships, the US tends to create anarchy and long-term civil war.
Here is a counter-example for you. I am well acquained with the facts and I do not see Iranians as Evil Mutants (well, not any more than I see Americans as such :-P). I do not come to the same conclusions as you, obviously.
What conclusions have you arrived at? Do you think some statements mentioned are incorrect or do you think that something else (e.g. role of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself and other people within Iran itself, or ideology of Iranian Revolution and role of people like Ali Shariati, or role of contemporary events in neighbouring countries or something else entirely) should be more emphasized?
What exactly is the question here?
In the comments above I was mostly pushing against the leftist view of geopolitics which sets up the US as Evil Mutants intent on oppressing the rest of the world (in the Middle East together with their lapdog / puppet Israel), while anyone opposed to the US is a victim with legitimate grievances and if they have the "Death to America" attitude it is justified.
There is a difference between one-off events and events that fall into a certain pattern and narrative. The latter are often remembered as being an example of events that fall into that narrative. In my impression Kennedy's assassination, despite all conspiracy theories surrounding it, is rarely thought of as being a part of a bigger narrative.
More media doesn't mean better collective memory. Iranian children are taught their history in school.
Western culture focuses more on the short term, than more traditional cultures do.
That's an awesome typo :-D
I didn't mean to frame this as " Iranian "mad dogs" vs. innocent Americans." Rather, for reasons another nation hates my nation, and my nation seems willing to let this other nation acquire atomic weapons.
I remember some U.S. general (I think) saying that the great tragedy of the Iran/Iraq war was that someday it will end.
This deal doesn't give Iran a path to the bomb. The whole process is to be closely supervised. More importantly, Iran doesn't want the bomb. It would be suicidal for them to invite a hundredfold-larger U.S. arsenal.
How do you know?
For example.
I am not impressed by the opinion of this guy, mostly because he states obviously false things as if they were facts. Notably:
"A handful of bombs doesn’t help as long as Iran is surrounded by bombs". That is not true at all, a nuclear weapon is a highly useful deterrent, especially against conventional attacks. Ask Kim Jong-un about it.
"Iran would cease to exist only twenty minutes after having carried out a nuclear attack on Israel". Is there any evidence that the US stands ready to launch a nuclear attack (in 20 minutes!) against a country that would drop a nuke on Israel? Not to mention that the way Iran is likely to nuke Israel is via their Hezbollah proxy.
The whole strawman premise there seems to be that Iran wants to do some kind of nuclear-brinkmanship new Cold War with the US. This is utter nonsense, of course. Iran does want nuclear weapons, but not for launching at the US.
Whether or not the US is willing to launch nukes, Israel has submaries that carry nuclear weapons and that likely would retaliate with them in case Israel get's nuked.
Not "has", but "is in the process of acquiring". I suspect that has much to do with the nuclear weapons that Iran does not want and is not building X-/
Besides, the easiest way to nuke Israel looks like this: a rusty freighter under the Panamian flag arrives into Tel Aviv. One minute after it docks, Tel Aviv is a radioactive crater. That's all the information you have -- what next, do you order a nuclear launch on Tehran? On which basis?
And, of course, a few nukes will not make a large country like Iran "cease to exist". Look at Japan.
Israel has at least 3 submaries capable of carrying nuclear weapons: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/israel-deploys-nuclear-weapons-on-german-submarines-a-836671.html
I would guess that Israel has protocols for direct nuclear answers.
There are the old Dolphins and the new Dolphins, they are very different. It is the new Dolphins which are supposed to have the second-strike nuclear capability and Israel just got the first one in the series. See e.g. here.
I am sure it has. But the situation when you tracked a long-range bomber from Iranian airspace and that bomber dropped a nuke is very different from the situation when a nuke just exploded in a city and you have no idea how that happened or who is responsible.
NTI cites a 1999 Jane's report saying that the old Dolphins carried nuclear missiles. (And the 1999 ship may well have been specified in 1989.)
Especially if Iran announces that should we be hit in retaliation, we will use all of our (remaining) nuclear weapons.
Yes,and think what happens to economic investment in Tel Aviv if people in a nuclear-armed Iran hint that they might do this.
Israel has its own very sophisticated nuclear arsenal. US participation would not be needed.
I was under the impression that the true deterrent there was hardened and decentralized conventional artillery able to do significant damage to Seoul, since we're pretty sure North Korean nukes will work as well as their cure for MERS, Ebola, and AIDS.
Ideally you want multiple deterrents, of course.
As to the chances of the nuke working, well, you gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, punk? X-/
Edited to add: We are discussing here whether Iran wants nukes. Therefore what is relevant is that the Kims wanted nukes, even though they had the artillery-can-reach-Seoul deterrent already.
From what I understand, if the U.S. suspects Iran of cheating we have to wait at least 24 days and get the approval of other nations before we can inspect anything. Closely supervised, NO. Once Iran has an atomic weapon and the ability to hit a U.S. allied city with it, Iran wins immunity from U.S. attacks, unless it strike us first.
Wouldn't any early limited nuke capabilities of Iran be unlikely to get past our missile defense? From my understanding our current defense systems could not withstand say a full-scale russian assault, but they are fairly capable in defending against limited strikes from smaller powers.
Not if they smuggle the bomb into the United States.
If you're already at the stage of smuggling nuclear bombs across oceans and national borders, then whether or not Iran has the technology to make them is almost entirely irrelevant. There are plenty of nukes unaccounted for from soviet stockpiles, North Korea would probably be happy to covertly sell someone nukes, and so on.
I could probably smuggle a large box from the Middle East to the United States via the Mexican border. I'm not sure you are right about the unaccounted for Soviet nukes.
http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-mass-destruction/loose-nukes/p9549
I think you're underestimating Iran's defences.
At the present time, with Natanz's plant fully bunkered, there's no way to disable it and the couple of other support plants with a surgical attack. If you want to disable Iran's nuclear capacity (not even considering its military or industrial facilities) you need to go heavy tactical or nuclear, which will mean full scale war (ugliness ensues).
Besides, international sanctions were much more effective at destroying Iran's economy, which is the only reason why they accepted the terms under the present treaty.
The current deal will lift international sanctions. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb might be able to destroy any of Iran's nuclear plants.
All that you say is true. My point was that it won't be a tiny cost: the use of heavy weapon (like the one you indicate) doesn't allow plausible deniability, it will mean a full scale war with Iran, and that could very well tip a third global war.
I don't see how since Iran has almost no friends and lacks the logistical capacity to attack forces far away.
I think you underrate the cost of destroying Iran's industrial capacity. It costs more than just the bombs. It likely will result in Russia deploying more troops in Ukraine and issues in a variety of other conflicts.
As if Putin needed help finding an excuse to meddle in Ukraine.
I think it cuts the other way, and we will have more additional conflicts if the United States allows Iran to acquire atomic weapons. I don't see how it will be in Russia's self-interest to put more troops in Ukraine if the U.S. attacks Iran.
Moral capital has value. It would create a situation in which European powers are a lot less likely to do anything about Ukraine.
Bombing in a way that targeted to do industrial damage might even tipp the scales in a way that the value of US military bases on EU soil get's more questionable.
Europe acts out of self-interest in opposing Russian actions in Ukraine. Europe will be less likely to act if they perceive the U.S. being unwilling to use force against its enemies because it makes us a less reliable friend. I see the current deal as a U.S. betrayal of Israel and think other U.S. allies will interpret it likewise. The Baltic states will figure that if the U.S. isn't willing to stand up to Iran, it certainly won't protect them from Russia so they will be far less likely to anger Russia. Please keep in mind how Sweden reacted when Hitler requested access to Swedish territory to help with his invasion of Norway.
I think you are very wrong if you think that unilateral usage of force against international law (which a specific attack targeted on destroying industry clearly is) will make the US seem reliable to European nations.
Israel prefers to have a weak Iran with little influence in other states in the middle East. Sanction weaken Iran regardles of the subject of nuclear missles.
Given Sunni ISIS there are advantages of a stronger Shia Iran.
There are no treaty obligations at all in which the US promised to attack Iran for Israel. I don't see how it could be betrayal.
You mean like the US is also wanting to request to use Swedish territory to have military bases (Sweden currently not being a NATO country)? In Germany US military bases currently enaging in economic spying. The NSA even spied on the German ministry of agriculture.
I think you make a mistake of modeling countries as single actors when politics is much more complicated and there are a lot of forces within countries pushing against each other.
Are you confused as to why politicians would repeat a phrase that reliably energizes their political base even though it may not represent reality completely accurately?
In general, no. But I take the chant as evidence that lots of people in Iran would be happy if an atomic bomb went off in New York City. If someone says he wants to kill me, I raise my estimate of the likelihood of him wanting to kill me. If he says it over and over again to his cheering friends, I fear him and want him to be weak even if in the past I have given him justifiable cause for offense. I become really, really scared and desperate if I think he would be willing to kill me even at the cost of giving up his own life. I wish my president shared this view.
I think the issue is how seriously do you want to take that phrase.
For example, a few years ago when Putin was talking about gathering all the Russians under the protective wings of Mother Russia, most people interpreted this as a "phrase that reliably energizes [his] political base". And then Ukraine happened.
If certain phrases "energize" the voters, it seems likely that they will vote for the politician who promises to do it. And if the politician wants to be elected repeatedly, sooner or later he must start doing something that at least resembles the promise.
A counter-example: the recent Greek referendum X-/
But yes, you make a fair point and so raise an interesting question -- what would be that "something that at least resembles the promise" with respect to the "Death to America" chants?
Or if the politician isn't willing to do it, he'll get replaced by someone who is.
Someone seems to have downvoted nearly ever comment to my top post.
I think someone disapproves of political discussions on LW and is willing to karma-hose all participants in such.
I agree with them. this is very specific of a political discussion, not a political philosophy one. Don't like it taking place here
There is a bit of a difference between disliking a particular discussion on a forum and mass-downvoting all participants.
Sorry, let me clarify, I agree that this place is not for politics, but a simple downvote on the top post, and a post describing that would have been fine. no need to downvote all sub-posts.
I experienced a discussion on facebook a few months ago where someone tried to calmly have a discussion, of course it being facebook it failed, but I am interested in the idea, and wanted to see if it can be carried out here calmly, knowing it is potentially of controversy. I first automatically felt negative to the discussion but then I system-2'd it and realised I don't know what the answers might be:
The historic basis of relationships was for procreation and child rearing purposes. In the future I expect that to not be the case. either with designer-babies, or just plenty of non-natural birthing solutions as to make the next generation make-able without needing to go through a regular-family structure.
At that time, the potential for intra-family sexual relations would be possible and not at all whatsoever biologically-risky of causing genetic abnormalities.
How will the world's opinion change about intra-family intra-relations in the future?
Potentially anyone consenting could have sexual encounters with anyone else who is also consenting. However there are existing relationships where one party carries the power - i.e. parent-child, where even if the child is above consenting age (even as far as 10+ years above the age of consent) there can still be power held by the parent over the child.
That was the only point of value before the thread turned to a mush-zone.
Of course there already exist normal relationships with power imbalances. And as was mentioned a few days ago here - an abusive relationship sucks if its from an AI to you, or from a human partner to you.
Any thoughts?
(Edit: inter -> intra, Thanks @Artaxerxes)
Um, no. The historic basis of relationships was allying for a common goal. Or, did you mean sexual relationships. In that case it would be helpful to define what you mean by "sexual", especially once it's no longer connected to reproduction.
That would turn humans into a eusocial species. That change is likely to have a much bigger and more important effect then whatever ways of creating superstimulus by non-reproductively rubbing genitals are socially allowed.
granted. A historic reason for a relationship is procreation. but you are grasping at things that were not relevant to the original point and question, which was mostly answered by others in the suggestion of some concepts missing from my map.
cute.
I don't see any moral reason why this should not happen, aside from deontological. It's possible to make the case that you would be more likely to end up in a dsyfunctional relationship, but it's possible to make the opposite case too - you have a much better idea of what the person is REALLY like before entering into a relationship with them, so you're less likely to enter into a relationship if you're incompatible.
I think this is one of those "gay marriage 50 years ago" things. People are going to come up with all sorts of excuses why it's wrong, simply because they're not comfortable with it.
And do you have evidence they were wrong? According to gay activist groups themselves half of all male homosexual relationships are abusive, for example.
Almost all of the evidence I've seen has shown they're wrong. A quick google for statistics on incidences of abuse vs. heterosexual relationships showed they were wrong, and the few sources I've seen (which I couldn't find through my quick google) that showed the opposite where from biased organizations already predisposed against homosexuality.
I could be convinced of the opposite, but that one sentence you gave will hardly bump my prior.
That's partway where the original discussion was going.
if only that were true for all people who enter relationships.
(rational relationships is a recent pet topic of mine)
I would apply the rule that I apply to polyamory - there are ways to do it wrong, and ways to do it less wrong. I do wonder if it has an inherent wrongness risk to it, but people probably implied that about being gay 50 years ago...
And I've yet to see evidence that they were wrong.
Isn't this a fully general explanation for anything at all?
It could be, for anything that people aren't comfortable with. This isn't in any way a rebuttal to arguments - it's an explanation for bad/non-arguments.
In the absence of a singularity, I would not expect this to become widely accepted within my lifetime. I'd say polyamory is the next type of relation likely to become tolerated and that is still at least ten years off. Incest is probably only slightly less despised than pedophilia, but I've seen pedophilia frequently equated with murder, so that's not saying much. Bestiality is probably the least likely thing I'd expect to become accepted. None of these three are going to happen within a timeframe I'd feel comfortable making predictions about, but never is a really long time so who knows.
yes, obviously the singularity changes everything.
Wouldn't "inter-family" be between different families? I'm not sure, but "intra-family" makes more sense to me, if you're trying to refer to incestuous relationships. A quick google search suggests the same.
I'm not sure what society will do, but I don't see anything wrong with incest or incestuous relationships in general, and don't believe that they should be illegal. That's not to say that incestuous relationships can't have something wrong with them, but from what I can tell, incestuous relationships that have something wrong with them are due to reasons separate to the fact that they are incestuous (paedophilic, abusive, power imbalance, whatever).
Thanks for this. I believe, based on the responses that this might classify as an interesting and soon outdated; old-world belief. Glad to have made note of the idea.
I have no support for it, or personal interest, but I am also entirely not against it either.
The big phrase to keep in mind for incest is "conflict of interest". We are expected to keep certain kinds of social relations with our relatives. Also having romantic and sexual relationships conflicts with those.
Furthermore, because there is a natural tendency for humans to be less attracted to close relatives than to others, it is in practice very likely that a sexual/romantic relationship with a close relative will be dysfunctional in other ways--so likely that we may be better off just outlawing them period even if they are not necessarily dysfunctional.
I am of the opinion that I am "of similar brain" genetically and phenotypically and equally theoretically "of similar mind" to people who are related to me. Therefore able to get along with them better. When looking for partners today, I look for people "of similar mind", or at least I feel like its a criteria of mine.
Do you have a source for "natural tendency for humans to be less attracted to close relatives than to others"? I am interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
Thanks! I am not sure how my knowledge of the universe had a hole in this specific space.
One mechanism is the MHC complex
There are other mechanism that prevent siblings that lived together as children from developing romantic interest in each other as well. As a result most cases of incest between siblings are not by siblings that lived together as children.
From Omnilibrium:
What is the True Islam?
Are finanicial sector profits primarily reflective of real value created?
Is faster economic growth good for improving long-run outcomes for humanity?
The firing of Tim Hunt - right or wrong?
Political Evolution and the Future of Democracy
I strongly disagree with the True Islam post. Definitions are neither true nor false, but useful or not useful. It's extremely useful for Western leaders to define Islam so that ISIS is not part of it.
Whether it is "useful" depends on what purpose you are trying to determine it is useful for. It's obviously useful for certain kinds of Western political rhetoric., but it may be useful for one purpose and harmful for another.
What is Omnilibrium? What are these links about? If this comment is a reply to something or making a point, what?
LessWrong offshoot for political discussion.
I found this paper: Adults Can Be Trained to Acquire Synesthetic Experiences.
The goal of the study was to see if they could induce synesthesia artificially by forcing people to associate letters with colors. But the interesting part is that after 9 weeks of training, the participants gained 12 IQ points. I have read that increasing IQ is really difficult, and effect sizes this large are unheard of. So I found this really surprising, especially since it doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of attention.
EDIT: This is a Cattell Culture Fair IQ which uses 24 points as a standard deviation instead of 15. So it's more like 7.5 IQ points.
They made each participant do 30 minutes of training every day of 9 weeks, which involved a few different tasks to try to form associations between colors and letters. They also assigned colored reading material to read at home.
They took IQ tests before and after and gained 12 IQ points after the training. A control group also took the tests before and after but did not receive training, and did not improve. The sample sizes are small, but the effect sizes might be large enough to justify it. They give a p value of 0.008.
In the paper there are some quotes from subjects, and they describe thinking about words visually. E.g. ‘‘I see the colors like on a monitor in my head and its very automatic’’ or ‘‘The color immediately pops into my head… When I look at a sign the whole word appears colored according to the training colors… it is just as automatic for single letters’’.
I speculate that this might be the cause of the effect, something about using more of the visual system when thinking. That's just weak speculation though.
I tried to do some more research to see if there was any correlation between synesthesia and IQ. I did not expect there to be, but perhaps it does correlate. This paper suggests it might:
The data from this study shows 10 synesthetes had the same average IQ scores as the controls (but greater standard deviation if that means anything.)
Same story with this study of 10 female synesthetes:
But on second look, it looks like the last two studies intentionally selected the control group to have the same IQs to avoid confounders. If that's the case then it does support the hypothesis as the reported IQ is greater than average.
Here is another study with more of the same:
So now I want to try the experiment on myself. I'm considering how to do this. I want to make some kind of tool or browser extension that could color text to match the desired associations. I want to know if it would be better to try letter level associations or word level ones.
I think that word level coloring would be more semantically meaningful and therefore likely to help. But the paper used letter coloring. Most of the subjects in those papers reportedly had grapheme–color synesthesia. They weren't very specific on the details, or I didn't look too closely.
Second whether to just use random colors, or try to assign them meaningfully. Like grouping nouns together, or using something like word2vec to find semantically similar words and optimize them to be close in color space if possible. If I do that it's more complicated and there are a lot of technical decisions to make.
And then how to actually color text in a readable way. Perhaps limiting the color space to what can be read on a white background, or somehow outlining the letters.
EDIT: I found a chrome extension that has some of these features. Only does letter level associations. And the source is available!
My earlier comment on that study: https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/2mryte/surprising_iq_boost_12_in_average_by_a_training/cm760v8 I don't believe it either.
Their sample size is 14 people for the intervention group and 9 people for the control group. The effect size has to be gigantic and I don't believe it. Their p value stands for a pile of manure.
Lessee...
Oh, dear. Take a look at plot 2 in figure s2 in the supplementary information. They are saying that at the start their intervention group was 15 IQ points below the control group! And post-training the intervention group mostly closed the gap with the control group (but still did not quite get there).
Yeah, I'll stick with my "pile of manure" interpretation.
I don't see what's wrong with a low sample size. That seems pretty standard and it's enough to rule out noise in this case. Almost all of the participants improved and by a statistically significant amount.
They actually selected the test group for having the lowest score on the synesthesia test. So this fits with my theory of synesthesia being correlated with IQ, but it's also interesting that synesthesia training improves IQ.
The usual things -- the results are at best brittle and worst just a figment of someone's imagination.
Yeah, well, that's a problem :-/
I eyeballed the IQ improvement graph for the intervention group and converted it into numbers. By the way, there are only 13 lines there, so either someone's results exactly matched some other person on both tests or they just forgot one.
The starting values are (91 96 99 102 105 109 109 113 122 133 139 139 145)
and the ending values are (122 113 109 118 133 99 118 123 151 133 145 151 151)
The deltas (change in IQ) are (31 17 10 16 28 -10 9 10 29 0 6 12 6)
So what do we see? One person got dumber by 10 points, one stayed exactly the same, and 11 got their scores up. Notably three people increased their scores by more than one standard deviation -- by 28, 29, and 31 points.
Y'know, I am not going to believe that a bit of association training between letters and colors will produce a greater than 1 sd increase in IQ for about a quarter (23%) of people.
The replication project in psychology just found that only a third of the findings they investigated replicated. In general studies with low sample size often don't replicate.
The second sentence surprises me a little--there should be training effects increasing the tested IQ of the control group if only 9 weeks passed. That's some evidence for this being luck--if your control group gets unlucky and your experimental group gets lucky, then you see a huge effect.
There are 26 letters, but... lots of words.
It would not surprise me if synesthesia is learnable. Isn't written language basically learned synesthesia?
That's the theory of the paper:
One-Minute Time Machine -- a short romantic movie that LW readers might like.
Excellent! I don't share the guy's qualms, though. The girl I can empathize with. Oh, and hopefully Eitan_Zohar doesn't come across it.
I was lucky enough to stumble upon LW a few months ago, right after deconverting from Christianity. I had a lot of questions, and people here have been incredibly, incredibly helpful. I've been directed to many great old posts, clicked on hyperlinks to hundreds more, and finished reading Rationality: AI to Zombies last month. But a very short time ago, I was one of those rare, overly trusting fundamentalist Christians who truly believed the entire Bible was God's Word... anyway, I made a comment or two sharing my old perspective, and people here seemed to find it interesting, so I thought I might as well share the few blog posts I've written, even though my Christian friends/family were my target audience.
Things I Miss About Christianity If I'm totally honest, there's actually a lot.
Atheists and Christians: Thinking More Similarly Than You Think Just some thought patterns I've observed. Doesn't apply too much to LWers.
Is Christianity Wildly Improbable? Talks about my apologetics class in college, motivated cognition, and some evidence against Christianity which Christians have a harder time responding to by simply repeating how God is above human reason.
The Joy of Atheism Part 1 - Opportunity Costs and Decision Making Shares my top three goals as a Christian and how I thought all Christians should have the same goals, in the same order.
The Joy of Atheism Part 2 - Scope Insensitivity Talks about scope insensitivity with regard to hell.
The Joy of Atheism Part 3 - Discovering Emotion This one is really cool!! Atheism made me more human!
Why I'm Not a Thief Talks a little about morality.
But...What about miracles? What about miracles? Could it be rational to believe in them? What about answered prayer?
Ecclesiastes and Meanings Talks about my love for Ecclesiastes and what meaning might mean.
Anyway, I've read and learned a ton in the past few months, corrected some mistakes, and have been able to better organize and articulate my own thoughts. I credit LW for almost everything, and I'm sure that a lot of terminology and ideology I've picked up on here comes across in my posts. I wanted to write about what it was like to be a Christian while the memories were still fresh in my head. Also, I read Scott's post about selection bias and atheist stereotypes and thought I'd do my small part to help reverse the stereotype.
People's reactions have generally been positive. I just went home for two weeks and had as much fun as ever with my old Christian friends. While they still don't agree with my worldview, at least they understand where I'm coming from. No one's called me arrogant in a while. No deconversions either, but a number of people have messaged me thanking me for making them stop and think, so there's that?
Any comments/criticisms/things I could have included in a post but didn't are welcome!
Some of those things could be re-created without the supernatural context. Instead of "praying" they could simple be "wishing". Like: I am expressing a wish, not because I believe it will magically happen, but as a part of self-therapy. We are expressing our wishes together, to help each other with their own self-therapy, and to encourage group bonding.
In other words, do more or less what you did before, just be honest about why you are doing it. You will not get back all the nice feelings (the parts that come from believing the magic is real), but you may get some of the psychological benefits.
Thanks. That may be rational and all, but any psychological benefits I could get out of "wishing" would probably be countered by strong negative feelings of cheesiness.
Also, as far as I can tell, all the benefits of prayer came from really believing in an all-knowing, all-loving personal God.
Anyway, I'm totally fine, at least for now. I don't feel like I need/have ever needed much self-therapy, but that doesn't mean I was immune to the therapeutic effects. When I first de-converted, I probably even did it because subconsciously I thought I would be happier without Christianity, and I still think I am! I just also realized that, truth aside for a moment, there are legitimate pros and cons to believing either side.
The first kind of prayer you listed was prayers of gratitude. Gratitude journaling seems to be very similar and produce benefits without acknowledging a God. The same goes for many kind of gratitude meditation.
When it comes to asking for redemption, you can do focusing with the feelings surrounding the action you feel bad about. You can also do various kinds of parts therapy where you speak to a specific part of your subconscious and ask it what you have to do to make up.
Thanks!
I know about gratitude journaling. I actually suggested my mom do at bedtime it with my youngest sister when it seemed like she might be getting spoiled and grumpy, and it's worked really well. It's a great tool, I just don't think it would yield any additional benefits for me, since luckily, I tend to think about things I'm happy/grateful about all day long. Those prayers were spontaneous; it's not like I said "ok, now I'm going to sit down and think of things to thank God for." The only difference after deconverting, when these prayers still came instinctually, was that I couldn't say "thanks God" anymore... it's hard to explain, but "thanks universe" just isn't the same.
Anyway, I've come to realize that with many of the things I'm thankful for, I can redirect the thoughts of gratitude toward people in my life. For example, instead of thanking God for the ability to run and for the enjoyment I get out of it, I can think fondly of my parents for sacrificing to send me to a Lutheran high school (which I otherwise might have considered a sad waste of their tight budget) that happened to have a great team and really knowledgeable, experienced, motivating coaches, since if I'd never gone there, I probably would have never come to love running the way I do now. Instead of thanking God for giving me such a great job, I can redirect my gratitude toward my friend's dad, who was into economics and lent me books that made me aware enough of the sunk cost fallacy to quit my old one after only two weeks and move across the country.
As for asking for redemption, I'm pretty good at apologizing, and people I know are pretty good at forgiveness. It's hard to explain feeling loved in a truly unconditional way, but it was more of a bonus than anything. On a scale of 1-100, I miss this about a 5.
Your tips are good, and I would recommend them to others, but personally, I think that all I'll need is the time to gradually readjust.
You had a ritual and conditioned yourself to feel good whenever you say "thanks God". You don't have that conditioning for the phrase "thanks universe".
Yes, time solves a lot. If you still feel there something missing however, there are way to patch all the holes.
Do you come from a Christian background? Have you ever really, truly, trustingly believed? I mean, you may be right that it's just conditioning, and I'm sure that's at least part of it. But you don't think believing you're special/loved as an individual, part of someone's incomprehensible but perfect plan, could have any kind of special effect?
No, but I have seen a lot of different mental interventions. There are a lot of different ways to get to certain effects. Effects feel only special if you know just one way to get to the effect. I have seen people cry because of the beauty of life without them being on drugs or any religion being involved.
Believing that one is loved is certainly useful but the core belief is not "I'm loved by God" but the generalized "I'm loved". Children learn "I'm loved" or "I'm not loved" when they are very little based on the experiences with their parents. As they grow older they then apply that belief in multiple situations. A Christian will feel deeply loved by God or he might be afraid of God.
If you deeply feel loved by God you shouldn't have a problem to feel deeply loved by your friends because it's the same core belief. You still have the same fun with your old Christian friends and family and feel that they are understanding where you are coming from.
Your belief might in "I'm loved" might be a bit shaken, but I think the core will still be intact.
If it's "triggering" you, then of course don't do it.
However, I believe there are benefits in some religious rituals, which would be nice to have without accepting the supernatural framework. For example, it helps me think more clearly when instead of just having thoughts in my head, I speak them aloud. And that's part of what praying does. (And, as you say, another part is the belief in Magical Sky Daddy who listens and will do something about it. That part cannot be salvaged.) Also, when people pray together, they hear each other's wishes, and may help to each other, or give useful advice. This can be replaced with simple conversation about one's goals and dreams; it's just that most people usually don't have this conversation on a regular schedule. Which is a pity, because maybe at this moment some of my friends have a problem I could help solving, they just don't bother telling me about it, so I don't know.
Another part of religious rituals is more or less gratitude journaling. (Related LW debates: 1, 2, 3.)
From epistemic point of view, I believe religion is stupid, but I don't want to "revert stupidity". Just because there are verses about washing feet in Bible, I am not going to stop washing my feet. I am trying to do the same with psychological hygiene; not to avoid a potentially useful psychological or sociological hack just because I first found it in religious context.
As a sidenote, LW community seems divided on this topic. Some people would like to reinvent some religious rituals for secular purposes, some people find it creepy. I am on the side of using the rituals, but perhaps that's because I never was a part of an organized religion, so I don't have strong feelings associated with that.
Definitely, I should make an effort to have these conversations with my friends. I have yet to decide on any goals myself, but I would love to encourage my friends with their goals.
Gratitude journaling - see my reply to ChristianKI's comment. But yeah, it's a great tool that I've recommended to others who don't naturally "look on the bright side."
As for secular rituals - I am on the creepy side, but I think you're right that my feelings come from having been part of an organized religion. I look at secular rituals and they seem to have maybe 10% of cherry-picked Christianity's psychological pleasantness. So it looks like a pathetic substitute. But from your less biased perspective, things that can cause even a small increase in people's happiness can still totally be worth doing. Someone sent me this link about a secular "church" and it actually seemed pretty cool. I would probably even go. But I'd have to overcome the impulse to compare it to a real church, because they're very different things...
I made a tool to download all of my lesswrong comments. I think that it is useful data to have. In case anyone is interested it's available here: https://github.com/Houshalter/LesswrongCommentArchive
Could someone be kind enough to share the text of Stuart Russell's interview with Science here?
Quoted here
There you go.
Superb, thanks! Did you create this, or is there a way I could have found this for myself? Cheers :)
Message sent.
Despite there being multiple posts on recommended reading, there does not seem to be any comprehensive and non-redundant list stating what one ought to read. The previous lists do not seem to cover much non-rationality-related but still useful material that LWers might not have otherwise learned about (e.g. material on productivity, happiness, health, and emotional intelligence). However, there still is good material on these topics, often in the form of LW blog posts.
So, what is the cause of the absence of a single, comprehensive list? Such a list sounds incredibly useful for making efficient use of LWers' time. Should one be made? If so, I am happy to make a post about it and state my recommendations.
The tricky thing is to summarize both recommendation for books and those against books. We had a book recommendation survey after Europe-LWCW and Thinking Fast and Slow got 5 people in favor and 4 against it.
The top nonfiction recommendation were: Influence by Cialdini, Getting Things Done, Gödel Escher Bach and The Charisma Myth. Those four also got no recommendations against them.
The short answer seems to be a combination of "tastes differ," "starting points differ," and "destinations differ."
Good Judgment Project has ended with season 4 and everyone's evaluations are available. They say they're taking down the site next month, so you may want to log in and make copies of everything relevant.
You can see my own stuff at https://www.dropbox.com/s/03ig3zr8j9szrjr/gjp-season4-allpages.maff - I managed to hit #41 out of 343 or the 12th percentile. Not bad.
If I want to learn General Semantics, what is the best book for a beginner?
(Maybe it was already answered on LW, but I can't find it.)
I asked this before, and the answer I got back was split into three main suggestions along a clear continuum:
The Sequences
Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action
Korzybski's Science and Sanity
I've only read the first two. Apparently there is no substitute for reading Science and Sanity if you want to get everything out of Korzybski; people like Hayakawa can take out an insight or two and make them more beginner-friendly, but not the entire structure simultaneously. The Sequences apparently has many of the same insights, but arranged differently / not completely the same, and of the people who went through the trouble of reading both, at least one thinks it may not be necessary for LWers and at least one thinks there's still value there.
New papers byt Jan Leike, Marcus Hutter:
Solomonoff Induction Violates Nicod's Criterion http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04121
On the Computability of Solomonoff Induction and Knowledge-Seeking http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04124
Some users might find this interesting: I've finished up 3 years of scraping/downloading all the Tor-Bitcoin darknet markets and have released it all as a 50GB compressed archive (~1.5tb). See http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20archives
Thank you.
LOL
Quote:
I thought the trolley experiment didn't actually have a known best-case solution? I thought the point of it was to state that one human life is not always worth less than N other human lives. Where N>0.
Confused as to why we are evaluating a "test" for the test's sake, and complaining about the test results when the only point of it was to make an analogy to real life weights.
There is no "solution", but the point of the study is "substantial framing effects and order effects", that is, people gave different answers depending on how the same question was framed or what preceded it.
Is it worth it to learn a second language for the cognitive benefits? I've seen a few puff pieces about how a second language can help your brain, but how solid is the research?
This has come up before on LW and I've criticized the idea that English-speakers benefit from learning a second language. It's hard, a huge time and effort investment, you forget fast without crutches like spaced repetition, the observed returns are minimal, and the cognitive benefits pretty subtle for what may be a lifelong project in reaching native fluency.
I would expect they have the correlation backwards. Smart people are more likely to find it easy and interesting to learn extra languages.
Quality observational research is probably very difficult to do since you can't properly control for indirect cognitive benefits you get from learning a second language and I'd take any results with a grain of salt. You also can't properly control for confounding factors e.g. reasons for learning a second language. I think you'd need experimental research with randomization to several languages and this would be very costly and possibly inethical to set up.
I have without a question gotten a huge boost from learning English since there aren't enough texts in my native language about psychology, cognitive science and medicine that happen to be my main interests. My native language also lacks the vocabulary to deal with those subjects efficiently. I have also learned several memory techniques and done cognitive tests and training solely because of being fluent in English.
You just need to have an area where different schools have different curriculums and there a lottery mechanism for deciding which student goes to which school.
It has been reported, that a 5 quarks particle has been produced/spotted in LHC CERN.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33517492
I am very happy, that this apparently isn't a strange matter particle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_matter
At least not of a dangerous kind. For now, at least.
So, I hope it will continue, without a major malfunction on the global (cosmic) scale.
Nothing terrible was going to happen. As has been pointed out, collisions that energetic or more happen all the time in the upper atmosphere.
17/7 - Update: Thank you to everyone for their assistance. Here is a re-worked version of Father. It is unlisted, for testing purposes. If one happens to comes across this post, please consider giving feedback regarding how long it captures your attention.
In the interests of privacy, please excuse the specialised account and lack of identifying personal information.
A bit of background: recently created a YouTube channel for the dual purposes of creating an online repository of works that can easily be hyperlinked, and establishing an alternative source of income. The channel is intended to be humorous, though neither speciously nor vituperatively so. One aim of posting this here is to see whether the humour is agreeable to elements of the LW community.
Another is to ask for advice. After a few days utilising Google's AdWords to generate views on one of the videos, of the 600 views received, not a single one engaged with the video beyond merely watching it. All the low-hanging fruit - enticing the viewer to engage by liking, subscribing, etc. has been plucked. One question is whether these requests for engagement are too subtle; perhaps erring on the side of not trying to annoy viewers has led to missed opportunities? The prospect for channel growth seems bleak in light of the above statistic.
Social media marketing, in the form of reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest have not yielded any subscribers. Word of mouth has yielded positive feedback, but no engagement outside of personal acquaintances. If the advice received here does not help, the next step is to create an account on a YouTube specific forum asking for assistance.
Are there obvious avenues for marketing being overlooked, here? Is there an obvious demographic or audience that would most enjoy these videos? Outside perspective is needed, and the dearth of feedback from strangers - both positive and negative - does not offer much indication of how to do things differently. Thank you for your time.
You're giving me no relatable subject I could be interested in, nothing pretty to look at and no music. Literally the only hint that lets me expect anything good from this channel is the word "Comedy" in the title. And when you fail to give me a good joke in the first 5 seconds, my expectation for funniness from the rest of the video goes way down. This means no expectation to be entertained is left, so I leave.
Your voice is good though, and the sound quality is fine.
Minor points: You talk too slowly, except in your first video. Your channel banner is repulsive. The visualizations you use are both ugly and getting worse; the newest one is downright painful to look at. (Seriously, an unmoving image would do less harm.)
If you show your face and drop a quick one-liner right at the beginning and talk a bit faster, this might be going places, otherwise I don't think you have a chance to be talked about for this, let alone make money.
I listened to about three minutes of the one about the narrator's father. The humor wasn't to my taste-- a sort of silliness that just didn't work.
I see you were trying not to be annoying, but I wasn't crazy about the unclear context (was this a video game, a dream, or what?), the weird voices, and the narrator's fear of his father.. My tentative suggestion is that you go for being as annoying as you feel like being, and see whether you can attract an audience who isn't me.
My 5 second judgement, which is about as much attention as a totally unknown channel can expect to get, is that these videos are stand-up comedy by somebody without the confidence to perform live in front of an audience. This immediately signals that it's not worth my time.
Eh, it's not my kind of humor. I found all those videos totally unfunny, so I just clicked on them, listened for 5 seconds, and closed the page. So the first question is whether my reaction is typical or not. Can you measure how many of those people who clicked on video watched it till the end? Because only those are your audience. And if they are your personal acquaintances, there is still a risk they wouldn't watch the whole video otherwise.
I believe there is a niche for any kind of product, but the question is how to find it. Perhaps you could find similar videos and see how they do it.
What are your thoughts on this AI failure mode: Assume an AI works by rewarding itself when it improves its model of the world (which is roughly Schmidhuber’s curiosity-driven reinforcement learning approach to AI), however, the AI figures out that it can also receive reward if it turns this sort of learning on its head: Instead of changing a model to make it better fit the world, the AI starts changing the world to make it better fit its model.
Has this been considered before? Can we see this occurring in natural intelligence?
Isn't it basically the definition of agency? Steering the world state toward the one you want?
The problem is that in this specific case "the world state you want" is more or less defined as something that is easy to model (because you are rewarded when your models for the world), which may give you incentives to destroy exceptional complicated things... such as life.
It would be a form of agency but probably not the definition of it. In the curiosity-driven approach the agent is thought to choose actions such that it can gain reward form learning new things about the world, thereby compressing the knowledge about the world more (possibly overlooking that the reward could also be gained from making the world better fit the current model of it).
The best illustrating example I can think of right now is an AI that falsely assumes that the Earth is spherical and it decides to flatten the equator instead of updating its model.
One might call this 'cleaning' or 'homogenizing' the world; instead of trying to get better at predicting the variation, you try to reduce the variation so that prediction is easier.
I don't think I've seen much mathematical work on this, and very little that discusses it as an AI failure mode. Most of the discussions I see of it as a failure mode have to do with markets, globalization, agriculture, and pandemic risk.
Good books on economics, investing?
Are there equivalent books to "Probability theory, the logic of science" and/or "The Feynman lectures on Physics" in economics or investing?
Who are the great authors of these fields?
Not necessarily the best, but a good one and immediately accessible: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC.html
I haven't read Feyman's lectures on physics, but if it's "someone really good at this explains how he thinks in an intuitive way", then Warren Buffet's letters to shareholders are an equivalent in investing.
Obligatory link to The Best Textbook on Every Subject.
I'm told that Mas-Colell's book is the classic on microeconomics (provided you have the mathematical prerequisites), although this recommendation is second-hand since it's still on my to-read list.
Link from March that apparently hasn't been discussed here: Y-Combinator's Sam Altman thinks AI needs regulation:
“For example, beyond a certain checkpoint, we could require development [to] happen only on airgapped computers, require that self-improving software require human intervention to move forward on each iteration, require that certain parts of the software be subject to third-party code reviews, etc.,”
Sounds sensible.
This post makes an interesting argument for why it'd be a bad idea to regulate AI: you'd give people who are willing to skirt rules an advantage. LW wiki article. I suspect the AI community is best off creating its own regulatory structures and getting the government to give them power rather than hoping for competent government regulators.
More recent is his AMA. He answered a question about AI: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altman_reddit_board_member_and_president/csz46jc
He also wrote some stuff about AI on his blog (which turned out to be very controversial among readers.) I believe this is the source of your article:
http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
I live in South Africa. We don't, as far as I know, have a cryonics facility comparable to, say, Alcor.
What are my options apart from "emigrate and live next to a cryonics facility"?
Also, I'm not sure if I'm misremembering, but I think it was Eliezer that said cryonics isn't really a viable option without an AI powerful enough to reverse the inevitable damage. Here's my second question, with said AI powerful enough to reverse the damage and recreate you, why would cryonics be a necessary step? Wouldn't alternative solutions also be viable? For example, brain scans while alive and then something like the Visible Human Project (body sliced into cross sections) coupled with a copy of your genome. This could perhaps also be supplemented by a daily journal. Surely a powerful enough AI would be able to recreate the human that created those writings using the information provided?
Is it a completely stupid idea?
Cryonics is an ambulance ride through an earthquake zone to the nearest revival facility, The distance is measured in years rather than miles, and the earthquake is the chances of history. The better the preservation, the lower the technology required to revive you, and the sooner you will reach a facility that can do it.
A "powerful enough" AI isn't magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists. We currently don't know what must be preserved and what is redundant, beyond just "keep the brain, the rest of the body can probably be discarded, but we'll freeze it as well at extra cost if you want."
On a present-day level, the feted accomplishments of Deep Learning suggest to me that setting such algorithms to munch over a person's highly documented life might be enough to enable a more or less plausible simulation of them after death. Plausible enough at least to be offered as a comfort to the bereaved. A market opportunity! Also, fuel for a debate on whether these simulations are people.
Technically, it can of course - through inference. Any information we have recovered about our history - history itself - is all inference used to recover lost information.
Even with successful cryonics, you still end up with a probability distribution over the person's brain wiring matrix - it just has much lower variance, requiring less inference/guesswork to get a 'successful' result (however one defines that).
Agreed with your last paragraph that crossing the uncanny valley will be difficult and there is much room for public backlash. It's so closely related to AI tech that one mostly implies the other.
Sounds like Hollywood image enhancement, where a few blurry pixels are magically transformed into a pin-sharp glossy magazine photograph.
I could point out that if you can infer the information, then by definition it still exists, but the real point here is just how powerful an AI can be and what inferences are possible. Let's say that yesterday I rolled a dice ten times without looking at the result. Can a "powerful enough" AI infer the numbers rolled? Is the best-fit reconstruction of someone's mind, given an atom-by-atom scan a century from now of a body frozen by Alcor today, good enough to be a mind?
Can you recommend an article about what is the difference between the simulation of a person vs. "really" reviving a person? Primarily from the angle of: why should I or anyone would consider someone in the future making a plausible simulation of us is good for "us" ? I am really confused about the identity of a person i.e. when is a simulation is really "me" in the sense of me having a self-interest about that situation. I am heavily influenced by Buddhist ideas saying such an identity does not exist, is illusionary. I currently think the closest thing to this is memories, if I exist at all, I exist as something that remembers what happened to this illusion-me. I see this as a difficult philosophical problem and don't know how to relate to it.
Same here. My own attitude is that we do not currently have software for which the question of it being any more conscious than a rock arises, nor any route to making such software. Therefore I am not going to worry about it. While it may be interesting for philosophers, I relate to the problem by ignoring it, or engaging in it no further than as an idle recreation.
I view it from a practical viewpoint: Even if you believe the Buddhist view, that the self is an illusion etc. you still feel like you have a self for >95% of the time (i.e. whenever you're not meditating). When you wake up in the morning you feel like you are the same person that went to sleep the evening before. On the other hand, a clone of you would not feel like it is you anymore than one identical twin feels it is the other. So ideally people in the future should create a person/simulation that feels like it went to sleep and woke up again when it "should" have died.
Problems arise mainly when you hit something that only partially feels like it is the same person. I'd say there is still a considerable range of possible people that are sufficiently similar that we say it is the same person, since there is also considerable variation in the normal functioning of human brains.
E.g.:
I wonder whether it is possible to find some sort of "core" personality/traits/memories, such that we can say as long as it remains unchanged it is the same person. I suspect there isn't, as it seems to be a gradient instead of a binary classification.
This is a widely discussed topic. See, eg, here: http://mindclones.blogspot.com/?m=1
You might be able to reconstruct the person's public face, but will have major problems with his private life.
You could start a cryonics facility in South Africa.
It's full of people who can afford to take out a life insurance in the hundreds of thousands of USD range to a cryo facility. /sarcasm
Actually, yes.
EDIT: At least, adjusting the cost for how much a USD gets you in South Africa.
With regard to your first question, you could also
A) plan to move to a hospice near a facility when you are near to death
and/or
B) arrange for standby to transfer you after legal death.
Of course, there are many trade-offs involved with either. In my estimation, the most useful thing would be for you to get engaged in a local community and try to push forward on basic research and logistical issues involved, although obviously that is not an easy task.
With regard to your second question, as with everything in cryonics, this has been endlessly discussed. See a good article by Mike Dawrin on the topic here: http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/08/11/the-kurzwild-man-in-the-night/index.html
Maybe machine learning can give us recommendations for gardening without hurting your back.
"When changing directions turn with the feet, not at thewaist, to avoid a twisting motion."
“Push” rather than “pull” objects.
Why not take a machine learning class?
In a reddit AMA a couple of days ago, someone asked Sam Altman (president of Y Combinator) "How do you think we can best prepare ourselves for the advance of AI in the future? Have you and Elon Musk discussed this topic, by chance?" He replied:
Any guesses on the news?
Announcing that YC accepts a related nonprofit into it's next batch.
I was just wondering abou the following: testosterone as a hormone is actually closely linkable to pretty much everything that is culturally considered masculine (muscles, risk-taking i.e. courage, sex drive etc.) and thus it is not wrong to "essentialize" it as the The He Hormone.
However it seems estrogen does not work like that for women: surprisingly, it is NOT linked with many culturally feminine characteristics, and probably should NOT be essentialized as The She Hormone. For example, it crashes during childbirth: i.e it has nothing to do with nurturing, motherhood stuff (if it had, it should peak at birth and gradually drop as children become more self-sufficient, yet it actually peaks in early pregnancy and drops at birth). Given that birth control pills are estrogen, it reduces fertility (at least in those doses) and there is a common report that it reduces libido as well (at least in those doses, again). The primary behavioral effects seem to be a strong desire to be accepted by one's group (see puberty, "teenage girl syndrome", and once I learned it I saw the word "marginalization" in a different light as well) and mood swings (see: early pregnancy). (I should also add I see more and more health-conscious women warning each other about xenoestrogens in food, increasing the risk of ovarian cancer. They are probably not very good for men either (manboobz?) so I think this should be paid attention to in general, I just want to point out how xenoestrogens seem to have no beneficial effects for women which is a bit weird as well.)
So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.
Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?
I should not be surprised that complex human behaviors cannot be reduced to a hormone. But once I was surprised that many popular, symbolical, role-model men in fact often can be, that everything that a Mike Tyson type symbolizes is T, I expected the same...
It's a gross oversimplification to link testosterone with 'masculinity' in this way. Testosterone is most closely linked with muscle size, bone density, acne, and body hair. All other links you mention seem tenuous and ill-supported by evidence. No link has been established between testosterone level and aggression. A link between risk-taking and testosterone does exist, but as it turns out, both high and low testosterone levels are linked with risk-taking. It's average testosterone levels that display lower risk-taking. Even so, the correlation is small and risk-taking is much more correlated with other chemicals like dopamine levels. As for sex drive, most studies looking at this correlation haven't eliminated the effects of aging and lifestyle changes which are probably more important.
Aggression is one of the less useful terms here and really deserves tabooing, because it is a too broad term, it covers everything from a bit too intense status competition to completely mindless destructivity.
In other words, aggression is not a useful term because it describes behavior largely from the angle of the victim or a peaceful bystander, and does not really predict what the perpetrator really wants. Few people ever simply want to be aggressive. They usually want something else through aggressive behavior.
I would prefer to use terms like competitiveness, dominance and status, they are far more accurate, they describe what people really want. For example, you can see war between tribes and nations as a particularly destructive way to compete for dominance and status, while trade wars and the World Cup being a milder form of competing for status and dominance. This actually predicts human behavior - instead of a concept like aggression which sounds a lot like mindless destructivity, it predicts how men behaved in wars i.e. seeking "glory" and similar status-related concerns.
This formulating is actually far more predictive of what people want and here the link with testosterone is clear, even so much that researchers use T levels as a marker of a compeititive, status-driven behavior, for example when they wanted to test the effects of stereotype threat in women, they had this hypothesis that being told that boys are better at math will only hold back women who have a competitive spirit i.e. want to out-do boys and will not harm women who simply want to be good at it but not comparatively better than others, they used T levels as a marker of such spirit. They say " given that baseline testosterone levels have been shown to be related to status-relevant concerns and behavior in both humans and other animals".
This is the central idea, aggression is not really a good way to formulate it. To see war-waging esp. tribal raids and other typically, classically male behavior as aggressive, while technically correct, it misses the real motivation i..e. competing for status and dominance.
Most men in war didn't try to seek glory but tried to avoid getting killed and prevent their mates from getting killed.
"Competitive spirit" can play out in more than one way. Some people give up when they're told they have no chance of winning, others are motivated to try to do the "impossible".
Testosterone is popularly very misunderstood.
This is a bit of a word-game really, the article could use some tabooing. While cooperation and competition are often seen as opposites, in reality any status-competition game has both, because one needs allies to win.
It is really a huge stretch to imply an fair outcome means a cooperative outcome means a cooperative mentality means an anti-competitive mentality.
If we want to interpret the experiment hugging the query as close as possible, we see an attitude of enforcing fairness or more properly standing up to an punishing people if they try to play unfair with you which is very, very close to what we consider traditionally masculine approach and does NOT indicate a non-competitive personality: would we really expect a highly competitive person to gladly accept and take unfair deals? Offer a sucker's deal to a Clint Eastwood type and he will gladly take it? Surely not. What the experiment seems to confirm is that competitive drives can result in cooperative and fair overall outcomes - i.e. a modern version of the Fable of the Bees, it does not suggest that the mentality and approach of guys who rejected unfair offers was not competitive. It is the outcome that was fair and cooperative, not the drive.
This should dissolve any feelings of oddness about this topic.
Woman is the biological default. That's why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special "Y" chromosome - leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That's why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.
Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that's not how humans came about.
You could with equal sense (i.e. very little) summarise the same empirical observations as "a woman is an incompletely developed man."
No quite because 'development' at least suggests that the change happens 'later'.
We don't have to imagine. We can look at birds, where the sex chromosomes are the opposite. I haven't looked at them, so I don't know how much is a consequence of the chromosomal structure. But, for some reason, I'm skeptical that most people who pontificate their role have looked either. The points about hormones and development are more reasonable.
You say that sex drive is "male". Then crashing libido would be "female".
I think there's some form of the mind projection fallacy going on here. I think the oddness is a result of expectations based on the principles of culture, instead of the principles of biology.
Introductory texts on cell biology.
It actually is not very odd for there to be a difference like this. Given that there are only two sexes, there only needs to be one hormone which is sex determining in that way. Having two in fact could have strange effects of its own.
Sex determination in placental mammals turns out to be really complicated, which is probably why there are so many intersex conditions. It's much simpler in marsupials, which is why male kangaroos don't have nipples. (Where would they keep them?)
If you think it's complicated in placental mammals, it's REALLY fun in zebrafish... all embryos start off building an ovary and dozens of loci all over the genome on autosomes rather than sex chromosomes alter the probability of the ovary spontaneously regressing then transforming into a testis. Immature egg cells are vital to both the process by which it becomes an ovary and by which it becomes a testis. Every breeding pair of zebrafish will produce a unique sex ratio of offspring depending on their genotypes at many loci and what they pass on to their offspring.