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Comments (326)
One of my professors claimed that postmodernism, and particularly its concept of "no objective truth", is responsible for much of the recent liberalism of society, through the idea of "live and let live". (Specific examples given were attitudes towards legalization of gay marriage and drugs.) I pointed out that libertarianism and liberalism predated postmodernism historically, and they said that that's true, but you can still trace the popularity back to postmodernism.
Is this historically accurate? If not, is there something I can point to that would convince them? It seems to me that the shift in society is much more a shift on the object level questions than on the meta level "should we ban things we disagree with", but I don't know very much recent history of philosophy (it isn't strictly their field either, so I'm justified in not taking them at face value).
Edit: re-asked on latest OT here
I don't know about history, but this reminds me of a "valley of bad rationality". Assuming that the historical hypothesis is true, I would treat it as just another example that if your belief system is sufficiently insane, another false belief does not necessarily make it worse, and could actually neutralize some more harmful beliefs. If you map is worse than noise, even beliefs like "there is no reality" could improve your thinking.
Where are neglected causes found?
Here's one for the "life pro tips" category since Less Wrong users are mostly male. It seems as though the best way to deal with balding is to catch it as early as possible, because that's the time drug treatments (well Finasteride at least) are most effective. Of the "big 3" baldness treatments, ketoconazole shampoo is available over the counter and has few side effects reported online. (It's also used as an anti-dandruff shampoo.) (EDIT: Looks like it is not recommended to take orally, although I don't see anyone saying that topical application carries risks. Here's a study saying it's about as effective as minoxidil?) I recently noticed that my hairline has receded ever so slightly... after doing some research, I bought some ketoconazole shampoo and am planning to start using it. This brand seems to have fewer bad experience reports and fewer shill reviews on Amazon than other brands. Thoughts? (BTW although it's the safest, ketoconazole also seems to be the least effective of the balding treatments... you should probably hop on the Finasteride if you have a serious problem. More info.)
Catching it early is important for sure. I've been using minoxidil for 3 years since my early twenties and my hairline has not receded at all since then, but it also hasn't recovered much. The generic minoxidil is quite cheap, I pay about 40 dollars a year.
Edit: I haven't tried Finasteride as I hear rumors of awful sexual symptoms.
BTW, there's the 'Boring advice repository', consider cross-posting or linking to this there, so that it would not get lost.
Update on the Slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
A list of our topics:
These are expected to grow and change as we need them. I count 58 people who have joined so far today. Feel free to PM me as well.
It's worth noting that parenting just opened up.
A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences by Eric Schwitzgebel and Mara [official surname still be decided]
"Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?" Yes, says Brian Tomasik, even present-day ones (by a very small but nonzero amount). He foresees their ethical significance increasing in the near future, and he isn't talking about strong AI, but an increase in the ordinary applications of reinforcement learning to our technology.
The argument is, briefly: for various claims about what consciousness physically is, RL programs display these features to some extent as well. Therefore they have a nonzero degree of consciousness, and so a nonzero degree of moral standing. Enough that we should be thinking now about guidelines for the ethical creation of such software.
He suggests that, paralleling guidelines for the use of animals in research, RL algorithms should be replaced by others whenever possible, or if they must be used, reduced in number, and driven through rewards, not punishments.
He considers the idea of an organisation of People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners, and the embedding of RL algorithms in humanoid bodies and videogame characters as ways of persuading the public to the idea that they have moral significance.
I would be much more morally concerned about reinforcement learning agents if this were a functional distinction.
He discusses that point in the paper.
Regarding prediction markets and regulation, does anyone know whether a betting market wherein the payout for the betting contract goes to the winner's choice in charities (as opposed to going to the winner) would avoid most or all of the legal issues involved?
So, Long Bets? Betting for charity has always been legal AFAIK.
Ask a lawyer, it probably depends on the exact wording of anti-gambling laws. The answer also is likely to depend on whether the betting market collects any fees in process.
A summary of rather counterintuitive results of the effect of priming on raising people's performance on various tests of cognitive abilities, and the ability to negate (or enhance) the effects of stereotype threat through priming:
"Picture yourself as a stereotypical male"
(It's not all about gender, either. Some of it is about race! How exciting!)
http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/128364907116/gruntledandhinged-drethelin-shlevy
Yes, effects that raise performance are good because they rule out a number of problematic mechanisms. However, this experiment has no control group and thus it does not have this benefit.
Recently a friend told me that values are important to relationship success. I met a business person the same day who claimed knowing his values got him to where he is as a social entrepreneur. Long ago, my psychiatrist asked me about my values, and I didn't know. Psychologist have tried to help me know my values on several occasions but I forget.
Just now I looked up how to find my values and found this article
Since their technique isn't any good for me since my memory is shoddy, I just selected from the list of values. Hope I haven't unconsciously chose socially desirable options.
Grouped by theme after choosing, I chose:
leadership::
rationality:
Julian Savulescu: The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God
Gwern rubbishes longevity research.
I think he's taking about the dream of achieving indefinite numbers of healthy years.
However, there are some people who live into their 90s in pretty good health, and they're far from the majority. What's the likelihood of just making good health into one's 90s much more likely? I'm not talking about lifestyle improvement-- I'm talking about some technological fix.
So, he's specifically talking about the failures of previous longevity research. It seems to me that modern longevity research has portions that are considerably better (among other things, the reductionistic view appears to be the dominant view among the top researchers). Consider this section in particular:
That Stambler spent too little time on whether or not they actually got the science right / pushed in the right or wrong direction, and spent too much time focusing on their political persuasion, strikes me as highly relevant and interesting when it comes to scientific history (and the modern versions--namely, choosing who to fund or not, and what experiments to pursue or not).
Gwern also makes a more general claim that aging is too complex for any simple solution to be plausible.
I don't think SENS is one of the simple approaches Gwern was referring to in context. The simple approaches are things like turning off a genetically coded "mortality switch," lengthening telomeres, calorie-restriction mimetics, or just getting tons of antioxidants in your diet. Here's a recent Aubrey de Grey interview.
It is the year 2050 and much of the world’s soils have only five more fertile harvests remaining
How to perform surgery on yourself with Clarity
I do irrational things. The other day I bought a flight interstate, somewhat impulsively, to a conference I knew next to nothing about for complicated reasons. Instantregret, but the cancellation fee is about half the price of the ticket. I also got some art professionally designed for a few hundred dollars, that I didn't need or want. I've also lost thousands gambling and on the stock exchange. I'm stupid in many ways, but I'm also capable enough to be able to share insights from the other side of sanity with the real world, or so I'd like to think. There are some things which I do that aren't rational, for which the term irrational isn't very useful, in the same what that people can be 'not even wrong', perhaps. But enough self-indulgent psychopity and self-handicapping.
I'm finding it hard recently to concentrate on anything other than surgery - particular self surgery and how and why I ought to perform it. But, Im not a surgeon. And, for this to be rational I ought to have a terminal goal. I don't have one. In fact, at best I can rationalise that in case I get in a survival situation and have no one to help, I can do it myself. But, that's extremely unlikely. It's not even rationalisation since I haven't made the decision, it's merely optimism. Being crazy is hard, so looking on the bright side keeps me from feeling like killing myself. At least this new found interest is somewhat amusing and something that is somewhat learnable. Sometimes I get interested in areas for which I have no where near the pre-requisite knowledge to understand, often some technical something in economics or computer science. In those cases, I just end up learning things incorrectly. At least with surgery, it's somewhat of a practical skill and medical students are often taught things superficially (this leads to this, or this is connected to that) rather than say, (this is proven by that the rem, or demonstrated by this experiment). To celebrate my 100 karma (and it was a difficult journey!) I just thought I would document this experience and what I'm compelled to research to give the more rational among you some insight in what its like to be on the far other side of rationality, and aware of it.
See examples of self-surgery for inspiration. Examples
people who do it are heroic. Don't be half assed
desensitise yourself by snooping on actual surgeries. From experience in psychiatric wards, it shouldn't be very hard to sneak into surgical viewing theatres. Minimal social engineering required. Hospitals are shocking with security. Note: Don't actually do this. Remember, this is just to explain my thinking process which as I mentioned is off the beaten path of sensisbility)
read this guide which is the only guide to self-surgery I can find. Though it suggests reading textbooks, the medical textbooks in the surgery section of my local university's library don't seem to be very useful at all in actually how to do surgery. Maybe one has to learn how to do it by watching.
Ok. At this point. Looks like I've somehow managed to overcome this little excursion from sensibility. I don't really care for self-surgery anymore. My testicles feel kinda sore for no apparent reason, but it feels good knowing that at least they're there and not in a medical waste bin instead.
In the spirit of radical honesty, I'm going to be posting this highly embarrassing comment then try not to think about it. Certainly won't be my most embarrassing post so far.
Voted up for honesty.
Do you know anything about the difference between the times when your irrational impulses fade and the times when you act on them?
Ahh, the miracle question. I had forgotten about those. Thank you for asking.
My answer is currently no.
Here's what I currently suspect, but I don't have the present of mind to be confident in this assessment. I'm particularly vulnerable to gambling and sexual and aesthetic impulses like compulsively listening to music, or staring at art. For instance, just I recently signed up for an international share trading account because I intended to bet about 1/4 of my assets (yes, I still am not convinced by either the kelly criterion nor modern portfolio theory since no free lunches!) on this one stock where I had very little knowledge of. Luckly for me, it takes 5 days to process the int. trading account application and I found it hard to get my mind of the stock so I started looking up more in depth information and realised it's not the undervalued, cheap, super awesome stock I thought it would be.
When I'm with people, I also tend to be less goal-oriented and give into impulses more readily. Another consideration for me is whether these impulses are the same class as say the surgical impulse, since that sounds more delusional than impulsive. None of these categorisations are clear. You've inspired me to sit down properly in the near future and map out different behaviours then try to summarise underling commonalities and potential control measures note to self.
The times when irrational impulse fades, in contrast, is times when I can use strict decision theoretic tools to explain to myself why it's irrational. That's why LessWrong is my scaffold out of insanity. If I can analyse a particular scenario and see that one particular choice dominates another, or I can model a particular impulse as my tendency to compensate for a sunk cost when I ought to be thinking at the margin, for instance, I can grit my way out of it.
Perhaps things are hardest when I'm dealing with extremely high subjective value options (e.g. jerking off to porn when I'm really horny), or betting a whole lot of money, I get carried away. Temporally, I discount at several orders of magnitude above hyperbolic, perhaps. But honestly, I don't really know. I'm just chucking intuitions into this comment box. I'll probably add to this answer at some point for my own reference.
As an aside, I saw your comment this morning and was thinking about it in the shower. Recalling the 'miracle question' approach to problem solving made me feel empowered. Later, I listened to a song I hadn't heard in a while just before going into the shower and realised that it would motivate me to linger less in there cause I anticipated the joy of continuing to listen to it after I got out. Then I thought about how I could suggest that approach to others who had trouble limiting their shower time, and grateful that there are places that I could share that information. At that point, I realised that my mood and anxiety had lifted a bit which I attributed to that sequence of events, cascading from you. I suspect increased self-trust in my ability to handle problems is at the heart of this (so I'll add that to my mental health checklist in the other thread sometime). So thank you! I'm going to be investigating how I can replicate this again.I did mess it up a bit by feeling very self-congratulatory then rumminating for a while and ultimately not getting out of the shower as promptly as perhaps possible, but hopefully that wouldn't occur in the future.
How do you get from "no free lunches" to disagreement with either Kelley or portfolio theory?
No free lunches & MPT
I could enunciate it, but wikipedia has an explanation. I honestly don't understand the Wikipedia explanation, but I would expect that it explains my intuitions in a more technical way than I do. If you have a specific point of disagreement, I'm happy to map out my logic and explore the evidence with you. I vaguely remember reading an article on the topic, too.
Optimal bet sizing and expected utility
I'd expect a theorem to maximise utility via diversification would entail some prediction that the utility of subsequent/other/more investments will be greater than the utility of the first/reference investment. If that isn't the case, it will lower the average expected utility of one's portfolio. I don't see the rationale behind the Kelly criterion as it related to any of my existing knowledge about maximising utility.
MPT: How can I have a specific point of disagreement with something as nonspecific as "I am not convinced by modern portfolio theory because no free lunches"? The particular but of the Wikipedia article you linked to actually says (correctly, so far as I can see) that minimising unsystematic risk through diversification (as indicated by MPT) is "one of the few free lunches available" because unsystematic risk isn't associated with higher expected returns.
Kelley: Actually most of the paragraph ostensibly about this seems to be still about MPT. Anyway, I'm afraid your expectation is just wrong. Diversifying can be a win even if what you diversify with is (on its own) lower-utility. Suppose someone offers you a bet that will pay you $1M if some event E occurs and cost you $900k if not, and suppose you reckon E very close to 50% likely. You probably don't take that bet because losing $900k would hurt you more than gaining $1M would help you. Now someone else offers you another bet, where you stand to gain $950k and lose $900k. Clearly you don't take that bet either, and clearly it's whose than the first. But now suppose the first bet party's you when E happens and the second very party's you when not-E happens. The two bets together are a guaranteed >=$50k gain; provided you trust your counterparties you should absolutely take them. So aging the second bet helped you even though on its own it was worse than the first.
Kelley, really: again I'm not sure what I can say to something as unspecific as "I don't see the rationale". I suppose I can briefly explain the rationale, so here goes. 1: if the utility you get from your money is proportional to log (amount), which may or may not be roughly true for you (I think it is for me) then placing a Kelley-sized bet is higher expected-utility than placing a bet of any other size at the same odds. (Assuming your utility I'd unaffected by the event the bet I'd on other than through its effect on your wealth.) 2: your long-term wealth is maximized (with high probability, not just in expectation) by making all your bets Kelley-sized, so if your utility is strongly affected by your wealth in the long term and indifferent to the short term then (almost regardless of exactly how utility depends on long-term wealth) you should place Kelley-sized bets.
Most people are more risk-averse than utility proportional to log wealth would justify. If you are, then your bets should be smaller than Kelley. Most people care about the short term as well as the long. If you do, then again your bets should generally be smaller than Kelley.
[EDITED some time after writing when I noticed a bunch of mobile-device autocorrect errors. Sorry.]
There was a guide online about all factors to consider when being a medical professional in a place with no medical infrastructure. it was basically a "how to do everything" guide. I can't recall the keyword name to find it now, but it was online and free. Not sure if I should encourage you; but reading a lot more will probably satisfy your interest in the topic.
I'm interested in the guide and haven't found it without several related google searches. Are you sure the guide wasn't on a tangential topic?
An argument by Stephen Hsu that boosted-IQ humans will appear before Artifical Intelligence and will co-evolve with AI after that.
Seems to me these two things are incomparable in speed. Imagine that research in genetic engineering will allows us to make each generation have IQ 20 points higher than the previous one. Could even such IQ-boosted humans compete with a superhuman AI which can rewrite its own source code?
Of course I am making many assumptions here, but the idea is that biological humans will probably still have to go through the cycle of birth and maturation, and face various biological constraints, while AI will not have these obstacles.
In view of this http://essay.utwente.nl/66307/1/Bolle%20Colin%20-s%201246933%20scriptie.pdf did the smartphone makers anticipate addiction, as did the tobacco companies in the U.S.?
Certainly both are profiting from it.
For me it seems like some version of The Tulip Mania.
Killer robots about to be released into the world's oceans!!eleven!
So says Auntie Beeb.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-09-02
I bought a $200 prepaid debit card to precommit to getting a beeminder account that won't fuck up my bank balance. I plan to use it to give up pornography and excessive masturbation (<or=1 a week is my goal). However, $200 doesn't have a lot of marginal value to me. I'm thinking of exploiting my irrationality and warm fuzzies by precommiting to donate it to a warm fuzzies charity, or maybe I'll put the money towards potential dates so I can get a girlfriend as substitute if I'm successful in nofapping or watching porn. Ideally there would be a system whereby I could donate to people who would be incentivised to help me stay on the yellow road, at the end of passing the Beeminder test. I hope beeminder will let me do that. Any tips or comments? I've never done beeminder before.
I'm confused. Do you want to use the $200 to pay people, charities, or a dating fund when you derail? Beeminder does not allow that directly, but you are free to do additional things when you derail if you want. However, Beeminder does have "supporters", who will get an email when you derail, and you could use this to do something similar (like get them to bug you to pay them).
Yes, either, and, or.
I am curious about your terminal goal here.
Are there any good reasons to use hotmail (outlook.com online) instead of gmail apart from switching costs if you already use outlook? Outlook is associated with business and therefore carries higher status and formality, perhaps?
I've never heard of this book or author before, anyone read it? How does it compare to eg "Smarter Than Us" or "Our Final Invention"?
Calum Chace, "Surviving AI"
I have yet to see a treatise, for strategic managers or from academics of any domain, on the game theoretic implications of data science and data-driven firm behaviour in general.
I for one would expect data driven organisations to be act more rationally and therefore predictable, meaning that game-theoretic optimal strategic behaviour, or rather an approximation of it because many data driven organisations will be stupid like many poker players forming a nash equilbirum would maximise expected utility. However, I don't see how machine learning provides an avenue for firms to inform their strategic multi-agent decisions. They instead need to consider artificial intelligence techniques more broadly and to be able to frame machine learning in that context. This, I suspect, will lead to the goldrush for AGI development. As soon as the potential for this becomes common knowledge, linkedin losers will start 'hailing AI experts as the sexiest job in the 21st century. MIRI, take head of my warning that if you are not more transparent with your research agenda (which to those who don't know, is still secret in part) you may find yourself developing FAI solutions way too slow.
Release your agenda and let others work on your problems cooperateively. Maybe you'll even get a more heterogenous audience at the Intelligent Agents Forum. Maybe mainstream researchers can craft work you can actually use on the mathematical foundations of AI or UAI. I suspect the reason that this community blog, albeit devoted to human rationality and not machine rationality, devolves into topics like 'polygamy' is that we don't have shared problems to solve.
Human rationality is a very, very awkward construct and the problem space is unclear and tangential, albeit related to MIRI's work which let's admit, is the very reason this please exists. Let us run wild and perhaps LessWrongers will start alternative agendas like developing criminal networks and intelligence networks so potential hostile AI could be detected in advance and stopped coersively. I'm just giving the first example I could think of.
My point is, you don't have any significant proprietary hard assets, why shouldn't I or any other particular funder instead create a prize on award for a more transparent FAI research organisation to pivet off your incredible work? I'm not in a position to judge whether or not your ongoing contributions are essential, but this could also be good opportunity for the community to discuss what will happen if or when you die or become incapable of contributing to the community. Same goes for other critical members of the community. Are their intellectual succession proceses in place?
Why aren't more LW's public intellectuals in the conventional sense - making appearances on radio or television news bulletins? The benefits seem obvious, if you're okay with fame. And, It's a position of influence and seems relatively easy to contact news organisations to say you have original research for a reputable organisation. Many of us are academics so that's probably true. Perhaps there is even an easier way to contact many news distributes at once to get your name out there and get offers coming to you. Something easier than say manually sending out press releases for instance. Though, they are probably paid PR services, but I mean there's probably a free service somewhere too.
The only existing ways I know are to get listed in expert databases like this one for Australia or for the world. I vaguely remember one run by an institute in Australia that requires experts to have completed meta-analyses or systematic reviews in their area, but it's for consulting work not journalists and the institute gets a cut (but they are prestigious, so it's good affiliation). Their name starts with K if I remember correctly. Don't know why I tend to remember the first names of things, but I tend to be pretty accurate with it. There's probably a menmotechnical explanation out there that some cogpsy LW will inform me about.
In general, having weird beliefs and politics makes it very dangerous to speak on live TV. Interviewers and editors are incentivized to make you seem crazy, scary, or ridiculous depending on where you appear. Eliezer is especially leery (justifiably so given his experiences with journalists) of this sort of thing, and he's the most prominent LW public intellectual.
There's also a question of need: Given that Elon Musk knows about and has given millions of dollars to the cause of AI risk, does MIRI really need to do TV publicity?
What hypothesis are you testing, or is gnawing at the back of your mind, in relation to LessWrong, as you surf LessWrong right now? Or perhaps you're just surfing idly.
For me its: Has anyone experimented with replacing their socialising with friends time with LessWrong exclusively? I wonder if the benefits associated with socialising such as increased well-being can be substituted for interaction in online communities.
Though, I suspect the nature of the community would be a strong determinant of the outcome. For instance, facebook would probably be unhealthy, as would IRC exclusively, but the LessWrong community as a whole excl. the IRL meeting community may be great! I feel like I've basically outgrown all my friends who I don't have some sort of professional relationship with anyway, or who I have a codependent/insecure-attachment towards.
Does anyone know of a good life expectancy calculator? Preferably one which has good justification behind the model, and also has been tested.
I tried this calculator, but I noticed a few issues. First, it sells me I should start doing conditioning exercise... when I did check that off. I think that part of the calculator is broken. It also seems to think that taller people live longer, when from what I understand it's well accepted that the opposite is true. Some of its other features seem unjustified to me, for example, it seems to think you get a life expectancy boost from eating less than 10% of your calories from fat, but I can't find any evidence for that.
Good life expectancy calculators seem very valuable to those interested in longevity. Perhaps some people at LessWrong should create some sort of model. Though I have little experience with these sorts of statistical models, I think the Monte Carlo method might be useful here to get a distribution. If we put the code on GitHub then others can take a look at its guts and submit corrections/improvements/pull requests if they want to.
A good life expectancy calculator implies a good model of which factors drive longevity. I don't believe such a model exists (for healthy people -- the effects of various illnesses on your life expectancy are known much better). There are a lot of correlation studies but correlations and causality are not quite the same thing.
"Some sort of a model" is a very low bar -- presumably you would like the model to be good. People who will be able to make a good comprehensive model of how various health/diet/lifestyle/etc. interventions affect longevity will probably be in the running for a Nobel.
It's like saying that you found online some investment advice which doesn't look too good, perhaps some LW people would like to construct a model of the markets that will give better advice. Well...
Fair points. I'm don't think what we understand about longevity is as bad as what we understand about investments.
I suppose what I'm looking for is a model which 1) doesn't have any obvious bugs, 2) doesn't contradict anything we do know, and 3) has at least some evidence behind the model. If it produces a fairly wide distribution because that represents the (poor) state of our knowledge, I think that's fine.
The issue of correlation vs. causation also is important, and I'm not sure what we could do about it short of allowing someone to turn off certain features of the model if they believe them to be untrustworthy. For example, I've seen a fair bit about how marriage is correlated with an increase in longevity, and it seems obvious to me that any similar sort of social structure where one has frequent socialization and possibly receives feedback and care is probably where the real benefit is. So I think you can say you are married if you believe your situation is equivalent in some way. Obviously these details need to be shown more rigorously, but this is the basic argument.
Could a moderator please nuke the swidon account and all of its posts?
The account is nuked. I need to find out how to remove posts.
agreed.
Is anyone willing to share an Anki deck with me? I'm trying to start using it. I'm running into a problem likely derived from having never, uh, learned how to learn. I look through a book or a paper or an article, and I find it informative, and I have no idea what parts of it I want to turn into cards. It just strikes me as generically informative. I think that learning this by example is going to be by far the easiest method.
There are many shared Anki decks. In my experience, the hardest thing to get correct in Anki is picking the correct thing to learn, and seeing someone else's deck doesn't work all that well for it because there's no guarantee that they're any good at picking what to learn, either.
Most of my experience with Anki has been with lists, like the NATO phonetic alphabet, where there's no real way to learn them besides familiarity, and the list is more useful the more of it you know.
What I'd recommend is either picking selections from the source that you think are valuable, or summarizing the source into pieces that you think are valuable, and then sticking them as cards (perhaps with the title of the source as the reverse). The point isn't necessarily to build the mapping between the selection and the title, but to reread the selected piece in intervals determined by the forgetting function.
Alright, I'll be a little more clear. I'm looking for someone's mixed deck, on multiple topics, and I'm looking for the structure of cards, things like length of section, amount of context, title choice, amount of topic overlap, number of cards per large scale concept.
I am really not looking for a deck that was shared with easily transferrable information like the NATO alphabet, I'm looking for how other people do the process of creating cards for new knowledge.
I am missing a big chunk of intuition on learning in general, and this is part of how I want to fix it. I also don't expect people to really be able to answer my questions on it, and I don't expect that I've gotten every specification. Which is why I wanted the example deck.
Edit: So I can't pull a deck off Ankiweb because I want the kind of decks nobody puts on Ankiweb.
I could send you some of my anki cards, but I don't know that you'll get useful structural information out of them. They tend to be pretty random bits that I think I'll want to know or phrases I want to build associations between. For most things, I take actual notes (I find that writing things down helps me remember the shape of the idea better, even if I never look at them), and only make flashcards for the highest value ideas.
It took me several months of starting and quitting anki to start to get the hang of it, and I'm still learning how to better structure cards to be easier to remember and transmit useful information.
I found this blog post and the two it links to at the top to be useful descriptions of an approach to learning, which incorporates anki among other things
Based on my own experience I strongly suspect the only way to do this is to fail repeatedly until you succeed. That said the following rules are very, very good.
If you really, really want an example I can send you my Developmental Psychology and Learning and Behaviour Deck. It consists of the entirety of a Cliff's Notes kind of Developmental Psychology book, a better dev psych's summary section and an L&B book's summary section. In retrospect the Cliff's Notes book was a mistake but I've invested enough in it now that I may as well continue it, most of the cards are mature anyway. I would recommend finding a decent book on the topic you're learning, and writing your own summaries or heavily rewording their summaries and using lots and lots of cloze deletions.
I just found this guide to using Anki.
http://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/
It's possible it may be worth looking at.
If you really want my deck pm me your email address.
http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm
Here again are the twenty rules of formulating knowledge. You will notice that the first 16 rules revolve around making memories simple! Some of the rules strongly overlap. For example: do not learn if you do not understand is a form of applying the minimum information principle which again is a way of making things simple:
Do not learn if you do not understand Learn before you memorize - build the picture of the whole before you dismember it into simple items in SuperMemo. If the whole shows holes, review it again! Build upon the basics - never jump both feet into a complex manual because you may never see the end. Well remembered basics will help the remaining knowledge easily fit in Stick to the minimum information principle - if you continue forgetting an item, try to make it as simple as possible. If it does not help, see the remaining rules (cloze deletion, graphics, mnemonic techniques, converting sets into enumerations, etc.) Cloze deletion is easy and effective - completing a deleted word or phrase is not only an effective way of learning. Most of all, it greatly speeds up formulating knowledge and is highly recommended for beginners Use imagery - a picture is worth a thousand words Use mnemonic techniques - read about peg lists and mind maps. Study the books by Tony Buzan. Learn how to convert memories into funny pictures. You won't have problems with phone numbers and complex figures Graphic deletion is as good as cloze deletion - obstructing parts of a picture is great for learning anatomy, geography and more Avoid sets - larger sets are virtually un-memorizable unless you convert them into enumerations! Avoid enumerations - enumerations are also hard to remember but can be dealt with using cloze deletion Combat interference - even the simplest items can be completely intractable if they are similar to other items. Use examples, context cues, vivid illustrations, refer to emotions, and to your personal life Optimize wording - like you reduce mathematical equations, you can reduce complex sentences into smart, compact and enjoyable maxims Refer to other memories - building memories on other memories generates a coherent and hermetic structure that forgetting is less likely to affect. Build upon the basics and use planned redundancy to fill in the gaps Personalize and provide examples - personalization might be the most effective way of building upon other memories. Your personal life is a gold mine of facts and events to refer to. As long as you build a collection for yourself, use personalization richly to build upon well established memories Rely on emotional states - emotions are related to memories. If you learn a fact in the sate of sadness, you are more likely to recall it if when you are sad. Some memories can induce emotions and help you employ this property of the brain in remembering Context cues simplify wording - providing context is a way of simplifying memories, building upon earlier knowledge and avoiding interference Redundancy does not contradict minimum information principle - some forms of redundancy are welcome. There is little harm in memorizing the same fact as viewed from different angles. Passive and active approach is particularly practicable in learning word-pairs. Memorizing derivation steps in problem solving is a way towards boosting your intellectual powers! Provide sources - sources help you manage the learning process, updating your knowledge, judging its reliability, or importance Provide date stamping - time stamping is useful for volatile knowledge that changes in time Prioritize - effective learning is all about prioritizing. In incremental reading you can start from badly formulated knowledge and improve its shape as you proceed with learning (in proportion to the cost of inappropriate formulation). If need be, you can review pieces of knowledge again, split it into parts, reformulate, reprioritize, or delete. See also: Incremental reading, Devouring knowledge, Flow of knowledge, Using tasklists
I don't know if this question will help:
What is the least-bad way of doing the thing you want to do that you can think of?
(apologies I can be no help because I don't anki; but I wonder if answering this question will help you)
If you think you have been infected or potentially infected with HIV, IMMEDIATELY go to an emergency department and explain your situation. You can get a treatment that can stop you getting HIV! Here's more information relevant to Australians. Yes, science has come this far!
Also, if you are engaging in risky sexual behaviour like having sex without a condom, guys get some of your foreskin chopped off. It reduces your HIV risk. Women note, it doesn't reduce your risk of getting infected from an infected male.
CBT is becoming less effective and (by the article author' insinuation) is creating disability
For SSC fans, here's an article that's probably about the same thing, but I can't bring myself to read the inane story at the start.
According the the first article's author, the declining efficacy effect is seen in psychiatry in particularly, but also in medicine more generally. Interesting.
How does one deliver Interpersonal psychotherapy? It's just as effective as CBT without the psychobabble. I can't find information on what is actually done, however.
If you can't find information on what's done why do you think there less psychobabble than in CBT?
What's in the way of large scaleprospective placebocontrolled trial of preexposure HIV prophelaxis?
Do western civilizations owe something to those civilizations that were disadvantaged as a result of imperialism? A common reaction of national conservatives to this idea is that what happened during imperialism is time-barred and each country is responsible for their citizens.
Do all other civilizations owe something to western civilization for the benefits they gained stemming from western science and technology?
Meh, companies did clearly got rich on exporting western technology (and they often didn't export our ethical standards to maximize profit).
Capturing only a tiny fraction of the value they created, and that's just the for-proft companies, not to mention all the scientists and charitable organizations that gave out western science and technology for free.
I would love to see some statistics on that, but it's probably too hard to measure; also how much % of the exported technology was charity.
This seems to be clearly an ethical question to me, and the field of ethics is far from scientific. What kind of answer are you looking for?
My system of ethics would suggest that developed nations are morally obligated to help poorer nations (at least in so far as significant human suffering is caused by limited resources), and that this is the only relevant factor. So help disadvantaged peoples yes, but the cause (imperialism or otherwise) is irrelevant in determining the need.
If you would like a different answer, I can surely construct an argument pointing in the direction you prefer.
But the cause is relevant to determining the incentives created by your help.
I get the feeling that "national conservatives" is the name of some specific political movement or affiliation in your own country. It is not a phrase I have heard before. What specifically does it refer to? The movement discussed in the Wiki article appears to be of significance mainly in the former-communist European countries, and even there consists mainly of minority parties. These countries are not the ones for which an argument is being made for post-imperial reparations.
I meant people from the right nationalist, conservative spectrum, not a particular group with that name. It's just that I've read that argument often expressed by people who I've associated with this spectrum.
I think that people in a position to actually do something about it generally take a similar view, but not so loudly, preferring the idea to just go away, while avoiding the media storm that would result from saying straight out, "We've got ours, deal with it." That is something that can only be said by those who are not in a position to do anything but talk.
The opposite view, "all of the developed world's prosperity was extorted from the rest and should be restored in full" is of the same nature. No-one can say it and get into power to do it.
Is anywhere on Earth inhabited by the descendants of the humans who first moved in?
Off the top of my head Iceland for sure, Māori-inhabited areas, and possibly the Basque Country. But yes, that's pretty much the exception.
I'm not sure about "first moved in" but there are families in England who have been there for a very long time.
I think that framing "Imperialism" as belonging to the past is inaccurate.
Many of the problemmatic behaviours grouped together into the term "Imperialism" have not actually stopped. There are Western developed countries that are doing horrible things to non-Western developing countries right now, and doing horrible things to their own people too.
I think a good first step would be to stop doing the horrible stuff now. If the problemmatic behaviour stopped, the topic of redress for past wrongs could be considered from a better vantage point. "I'm sorry I killed your ancestors and stole their stuff 100 years ago" tastes like ashes when coming from someone who is killing your family and stealing your things now, or who is doing something more subtle but equally awful.
"Disadvantaged" is a word that glosses over the damage done. Also, the whole question could benefit from being more specific and defining terms better.
How much does Mongolia owe Russia? How much do North African countries owe Europe for the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into the Arab slave trade in north Africa? The notion is itself ridiculous.
It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word "owes" is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.
Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb "decides" to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying "a group decides" simply obscures this fact.
Concerning the word "owe", even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word "owe" in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word "owe" from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.
"Western civilizations" is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb "owes" is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word "owe" entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.
In addition to that "being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism" is very dissimilar from "having a window broken by a neighbour", it is not a concrete thing. The central example of "owing something" is "owing a concrete and well defined thing". Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).
In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as "western civilizations" owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb "owes". I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply "new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones", while some of them wouldn't, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.
Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: "owns", "chooses", "decides", "prefers" (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.
No.
Could you explain why you see it this way? Our wealth is partly based on exploitation. Wouldn't it be fair to fix the damage we've done to exploited people? This could perhaps be also justified in terms of utilitarianism, as fairness might bring people closer together which prevents wars.
Not to any significant extent. Most colonized places were net money-losers for the colonizer for most of their history. In addition, I doubt most western-colonized countries were made substantially worse off compared to non-colonized countries, since the Europeans introduced some level of infrastructure, medicine, etc.
First of all, who is this "we" you speak of? More importantly, there are a few "control-group" countries which were not colonized while their neighbors were, like Siam (modern Thailand) and Ethiopia, and they don't seem better off than their neighbors. Unlike most African countries, which abolished slavery when the Europeans took control, Ethiopia banned slavery only in 1942--under pressure from the British, who were a bit embarrassed to be allied with a slave state.
But then why did people keep conquering and colonizing new lands?
There is also Japan, which was better off than its neighbors. In 1905 Japan was strong enough to win a war against Russia.
Because conquering new lands helps spread the meme that one should conquer as much as one can.
Because the people directly responsible for the colonization profited, even if their nation as a whole did not. To go back further in history, the general of a roman legion often came home from a campaign fabulously wealthy, while the people back home saw far less of the plunder. And asking modern italians to pay spain for what ceasar looted is kind of absurd
Is that true? I can think of examples, like Cecil Rhodes arranging for the British Empire to pay for the Boer Wars for his personal enrichment, but is that typical? The East India Companies were profitable, but they paid their own military costs and used a light touch. I think the question at hand is the 19th century, when European states claimed vast swaths of land.
(I don't like the comparison to Caesar. I believe that he paid to outfit his army, so the Romans as a whole made a profit, in contrast to knb's claim about European colonialism, which I believe is correct.)
Yeah, the 'light touch' thing is just not true. For all the history Moldbug reads, nRxs seem pretty unaware of the nightmare true corporate governance was historically.
A light touch compared to 19th century state colonialism, which is the context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
Light touch indeed. They fucked it up so badly, the Crown had to come in and take over directly.
Compared to what?
Money is not the only motivator. Power is another one.
That is a very good question on which books have been written. Some of this was about religion and prestige, and competition with others. Some of it was various sovereigns being convinced to fund dubious (in retrospect) ventures by good marketing.
We have our biases and our cultural zeitgeist, and folks in the past had theirs. After the Otman Turks conquered Constantinople and killed off the Roman empire for good, the Portuguise started looking for an alternative route to do spice trading (and also look for Prester John, the mythical Christian king in the east). "We are looking for spices and Christians" was the motto.
The English had complicated reasons to start colonizing that were not all about money. A lot of the times it felt like colonial things happened for complex reasons (e.g. having to do w/ what was happening w/ Christianity at the time), and the Crown tried to find ways to make money off it.
It was the case that at some point the sugar trade became very valuable (e.g. to Napoleon the tiny sugar-producing possessions of France were worth much more than the entirety of Louisiana), but this happened much later -- there wasn't a "master imperialist plan" at all.
I don't see any basis for this claim. More explicitly, I don't see any reasonable and consistent legal/moral theory which would justify such a claim. Note that I do not consider the popular "deep pockets" legal theory to be reasonable.
I would only count debts toward the specific peoples directly affected; e.g. the Spanish Empire lived off Bolivian silver, the Belgians worked the Congolese to death, and the United States is literally built on stolen Native land. Those examples and many others allow for a case in favor of reparations.
However, the passage of time sometimes blurs the effects of exploitation and aggression. Should the UK sue Denmark for the Norman Conquest? Should Italy sue Germany because Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire? Should Hungary sue Mongolia for what the Golden Horde did to them? I admit I don't know how to answer to that in a way that is consistent with my first paragraph.
Related: A British answer.
If you focus on utilitarianism the question doesn't come up. The important thing isn't who "owes" but how we can produce utility. If that means the best way is to give betnets to African's than that's the thing to do, regardles of the concept of "owing".
Disabled people can benefit from sex. Presumably, some disabled people cannot access sex without paying for it (including neurodevelopmentally disabled, mentally ill, etc). There are barriers to sex workers providing for disabled clients. Unfortunately, there are compelling misconceptions that criminalizing the buying of sex is helpful to society when the evidence appears overwhelmingly on the other side, not to mention the stigma and access to the information about the rewards of sexual experience for sex worker's clients. Further, existing advocacy for sex workers and their client's rights outside of Europe is overly gentle, rarely attacking the other side. I hypothesise that it's because an extremely small minority of people have both the pre-requisite compassion, steadfastness against stigma and endurance against low-status to do something that is good but won't 'look' good.
It's not a straightforward subject. Legalized prostiution in Germany results in a situation where it likely would be good if the majority of brothels don't exist http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficking-persists-despite-legality-of-prostitution-in-germany-a-902533.html because they are abusive to the women in them.
On the other hand there are people doing body work for whom the lines between sexual and nonsexual are pretty fluid. For those people a law forbidding sexual contact makes little sense.
I don't know the details, but from reading the article seems to me that "legalization" is this case simply meant saying "okay, it is no longer illegal", instead of treating it as any other employment.
For example the article mentions prostitutes under 14. Did they have an employment contract? If no, then the whole situation was illegal, even if prostitution per se is legal. Keeping prostitutes locked in the basement; again, would the same situation be legal if the locked "employees" would be e.g. programmers? Etc.
Legalizing prostitution should mean treating the prostitutes as standard employees with standard employee rights (and duties: taxes, insurance), not just ignoring the whole business. The employees should be able to sue their employers, if necessary, and get legal assistance.
Simply the whole situation should be treated exactly the same way as if some organizations would decide that it is cheaper to kidnap programmers and keep them locked in basement, making them write Java code for food, and torturing them if they refuse. We would not have a debate about whether we should make programming illegal, or merely buying Java applications illegal, or any similar frequently proposed "solution".
Treating every situation the same way basically means that you want to ignore the empiric reality of how different situations differ from each other. It means not optimizing for the way different situations differ from each other.
The problem is that you have women in the brothels who are under the threat of force and therefore won't tell the police that their rights are violated.
Of course they can do that, the legal framework gives them the possibility. A person who's physically abused and afraid to speak out still doesn't do this in practice.
Programmers can't work if you drug them in a way from preventing them to think clearly. As a result you simply don't have reactions where organizations put programmers in a similar state.
But they can work if they are kidnapped, imprisoned, threatened with force, afraid of police, disapproved of by much of the population, etc.; almost none of what's special about (many) prostitutes' situation couldn't happen to software developers. So Viliam's thought experiment is a good one: what would and should we do if it did?
I'm not sure it's so obvious that people wouldn't be calling for criminalization it, say, half of all software was made by imprisoned blackmailed kidnapped slaves. (Note: I have no idea what fraction of prostitutes are actually in such a situation and wouldn't be surprised if anti-prostitution campaigners exaggerated it on account of disapproval with a different real source.) So I don't find Viliam's thought experiment conclusive.
Programming involves a lot of judgment. Enslaving programmers would lead to the programmers programming very inefficiently on purpose, and there would be no way for the slaveowner to punish only the programmers guilty of slacking off. The slaveowner could try to punish all programmers who don't produce much, but the slaveowner can't tell the difference between a slacking programmer and a programmer just given a difficult or inappropriate job, so in the long run that wouldn't work.
Also, the mental activity involved in programming doesn't work well if the programmer is psychologically stressed by other things, and enslavement and blackmail tends to cause such stress.
Yes, Viliam made an extremely poor example. No, this doesn't affect his main point, because he could have made a better example instead. Sweatshops do exist and yet AFAIK nobody's ever proposed to ban selling clothes for money.
Prostitution has an unusual feature: for a given level of need for money, the ratio of "how much would most people who have X have to get paid in order to be willing to sell X" to "how much money would X get if sold on the market" is extremely large, compared to a similar ratio for, say, selling one's labor as a janitor. The dynamics of things with large ratios of this type lead to slavery and mistreatment much more often than the dynamics of things with smaller ratios of this type.
That doesn't mean that people in other jobs can't be mistreated; obviously, sweatshops do exist. But it does mean that mistreatment is less central for those other jobs, and is less relevant to banning them.
I don't see why this is so.
Note that in your setup there is a market and that market, presumably, clears. This means that at the prevailing price point the supply and the demand are balanced. The observation that there could be a lot more supply at a much higher price seems irrelevant to me.
In my setup the market "clears" by there being no sales by most of the people who have X, because they are not willing to sell X at its market price. As the need for money increases, the price at which people are willing to sell X goes down, but on the average, janitorial work (for instance) reaches the point where sales happen long before prostitution does.
I agree that enslaved programmers would probably make worse software, and make it slower, than not-enslaved programmers. Perhaps this is one reason why programmers are not commonly kidnapped and enslaved, or why people who have been kidnapped and enslaved are not usually then compelled to write software. (I can think of others.)
But I'm not sure how this is relevant. We already know that the world of Viliam's thought experiment is not the real world, and it shouldn't be a surprise that there are reasons why it isn't. We can still ask "what would and should happen if somehow it were?".
If you're suggesting that Viliam's hypothetical world is so ridiculous -- because obviously slaves would make rotten programmers -- that there's no point asking that question, though, I can't agree. I don't think it's any more obvious that slaves would make rotten programmers than that slaves would make rotten prostitutes, and for quite similar reasons. Sex, like programming, doesn't work best under conditions of extreme stress.
Yes, slaves would make rotten programmers, barring some kind of society-wide slave system like the Romans had where certain types of slaves could benefit from their skills and even buy themselves out of slavery.
While it doesn't work best, the fact that it is a physical activity sharply limits how much worse it becomes.
Isn't there some "Uber for escorts" app in Germany that mostly solves that problem?
Why should an uber like app solve the problem? When women get drugged and get beaten if the don't engage in prostitution having an App to connect them to buyers doesn't solve much.
By eliminating the necessity of the brothels as an intermediary/broker for sex
That doesn't change the fact that the majority of woman who work as a prostitute do so, because they are forced. The availability of an app that allows a woman to sell her body simply doesn't encourage much normal woman to sell themselves as a prostitute.
Source?
The article I linked to contains the passage:
In addition to reading about the subject I also talked to someone who years ago wanted to start a brothel in Germany for some time and who did background research into how the industry operates. That conversation shifted my own views on the subject because he's not simply a feminist with a political agenda where I don't trust the person to accurately represent reality but his views are the product of contact with the ground reality.
I wonder what you would find if you surveyed ordinary workers and asked how many would stop working immediately if they could?
"Would get out immediately if they could" might mean that they're being kept prisoner at gunpoint. Or that they are addicted to a drug that they can only get from the pimp who's insisting that they keep working as prostitutes. Or that they don't have any other way to earn as much money as they need (or want). Or just that like many other people they don't like their job much.
I suspect there's quite a lot of the third of those; in such cases I suggest that the underlying problem is poverty more than it's prostitution, and maybe legalizing and destigmatizing prostitution makes those people's lives better by giving them one more viable way to earn a living. (Only maybe: it could be, e.g., that prostitution is in almost all cases a much worse way to earn a living than it seems from outside, in which case making it an easier option could be doing them a big disservice.)
Someone changed the password on the Username public throwaway account. It's a shame a troll finally got to it after several years.
Then nuke the account and recreate it with the old password.
I always assumed that was just one person. I feel like someone died. (Not really. But, how was I supposed to know it was an open account?)
The beauty of the account laid in the fact that it was not publicized, so only people who were long-time lurkers would know about it.
I actually meant to ask at some point whether the Username account would have protection against people changing passwords willy-nilly, but I didn't because, you know... information hazards and all that. Didn't want to give people the idea. But now that it's happened, I suppose I could ask retrospectively: how come nobody ensured some protection against that?
Because in general a forum that's designed to allow anonymous comments would allow anonymous comments and not let people go through the hack of using a separate account for it. The account wasn't created by any moderator but simple by a using who thinks that such an account would be good to have.
While being in infohazard territory: It's not only possible to change passwords. It's also possible to delete accounts.
It's worth contacting a moderator and seeing whether they can do anything about it.
Even if they set the password it's a nature of a public account that the PW can always be set differently.
How about make the password reset automatically every X minutes ?
Far out, that was an excellent account and several people had clearly used it to make important contributions.
It would be nice if there was a way to memorialize the posts or something externally. Or, perhaps the moderators could implement an 'official' throw-away to protect against this.
I have been a beneficiary of comments from the Username account and believe it does...or did a true service to the community. Thank you for taking it upon yourself to report this and making a new account.
While I had no objection to the existence of the account and in fact used it several times myself, it was a bit annoying to me that someone was using it as his personal account rather than bothering to create his own.
I'm looking for for a high quality parenting blog, one with relatively frequent well written content and which might accept guest contribution - or one with a discussion forum that's not just gossiping. Can be English speaking or German. I'd like to try my hand on some posts before opening my own blog. Any ideas?
Something which may prove interesting to somebody here:
A tentative list of internal states (certainly incomplete), divided into emotions and mental states. I distinguish between emotions and mental states on the basis of something I can't quite put my finger on, but I'm reasonably certain there -is- a difference, something like the difference between color photographs and black-and-white photographs. (It's quite fuzzy in some places, though, so not everything neatly fits in one or the other. Suspicious/paranoid, for example, I quibble about the placement of.) I've done a few passes at combining emotions I suspect are identical except for context and intensity. You'll notice emotions like "Happy" and "Angry" aren't present - unless somebody can correct me, I think these aren't distinct emotions in and of themselves, but simplifications of a broad range of more complex emotions. (A couple permutations of "Angry" show up under "Rage"). Some words show up multiple times, where the word appears to refer to more than one emotional state, with clarifications.
Out of the emotions listed, I experience somewhere around a third of them, which makes it hard to evaluate how distinct they actually are, and in other places leads me to incorrectly consider them separate internal states. Of the mental states, I experience most of them (which is why I think the sorting criteria isn't -entirely- arbitrary). Of the uncertain - I have no idea whether those things are actually distinct feelings, or just ways people describe other people's behavior, so it's safe to say, if they are experiencable, they're in those things I don't experience.
The list is largely comprised of entries from the following list: https://robbsdramaticlanguages.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/vocabulary-expand.jpg.
Some I've omitted as being, as far as I can tell, embellishments. I've added others, as well.
Emotions:
Mental States:
Uncertain:
This is useful. Do you have experience with Focusing? Part of the workflow is to sit with your emotional state and gently try to discern what label applies to it. This can be hard because sometimes the feeling is complex or unclear, but I expect part of the difficulty lies in a simple lack of vocabulary with which to label the feeling.
The biggest issue from my perspective is that the labels don't immediately connect to any kind of easily-communicable qualia, so even if you know the correct label, you don't necessarily have a good way of connecting the label to the feeling. (That said, the only emotion I required outside assistance to identify was a generalized anxiety, which didn't feel at all like I expected it to. I expected anxiety to be definitively unpleasant, and it was merely ambiguously so.)
I would like to point out a concept that has recently entered into my life.
Sometimes these emotions are generated internally and often the word for the emotion is one that is about an emotion that "pulls" you to feel that way. An example is; "Appreciated" where something else gives you a feeling of being appreciated. It's not an emotion you can give to yourself. (only recognise it) where distress can be from yourself; or hesitation.
Not sure how that adds to the list exactly.
I make a spreadsheet of how often I think I experience each one - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lkOftycrnhjSdbC6cExawoiyX-Jbn9wuxg2GlCjGeh4/edit?usp=sharing on a scale of 1-10, nothing is 9 or 10 because that would imply I experience it all the time.
Scheming! That emotion definitely belongs on the list. WRT Disappointment/Disheartened/Discouraged, which would you separate? (Or are all three distinct?)
There is a sense that some of these are... very self-inflicted. I suspect some people have a fine degree of control over that, and others have no control over the distress, or hesitation, they experience. (I don't feel "Appreciated", so I can't comment on that example, but there are similar external emotions I do, such as annoyance, which is one I'm incapable of feeling towards myself, in pretty much exactly the same way I couldn't tickle myself.)
Equanimity is... a bit broader than "cool and collected", at least in my personal experience. Cool and collected is a good description for the outer-state of it - what is directly experienced in most situations. There's an inner component to it, too - it's... a capacity for dealing with emotions. It's the capacity to remain cool and collected, whatever emotions are hurled at you. When my equanimity is low, I feel like I'm on the top of an immensely tall column that is swaying haphazardly, and will topple in the slightest emotional breeze. When my equanimity is high, there's an inner stability, like a hurricane of emotion couldn't budge it - I describe that state as "centered".
I would separate Disappointment from Discouraged. As distinctly things that don't have to have each other there to happen. Disappointment also doesn't have to be disheartening. Dishearten/Discourage are similar and could probably be left close by.
Looking good. Not sure how to use it; but if it stays up - I will think about it...
Done!
No idea what any of those three are supposed to feel like. I imagine the inverse of relief?
Disheartened ~= "soulcrushing" Discouraged ~= I am running a race against my peers and I don't seem to be able to keep up. After a month of training; they seem to be getting faster and I seem to not be keeping up at the same grade. "All this effort for nothing" Disappointed ~= I was expecting chocolate spread on my sandwich but it was only jam. (slightly in the direction of "something I expected but did not quite estimate right")
Talos Principle has an AI singularity plot. In the the final test to pass is an anti-friendliness test. However upon experiencing the story this doesn't seem especially repugnant. Is friendliness in conflict with moral autonomy?
I'm looking for a good demonstration of Aumann's Agreement Theorem that I could actually conduct between two people competent in Bayesian probability. Presumably this would have a structure where each player performs some randomizing action, then they exchange information in some formal way in rounds, and eventually reach agreement.
A trivial example: each player flips a coin in secret, then they repeatedly exchange their probability estimates for a statement like "both coin flips came up heads". Unfortunately, for that case they both agree from round 2 onwards. Hal Finney has a version that seems to kinda work, but his reasoning at each step looks flawed. (As soon as I try to construct a method for generating the hints, I find that at each step when I update my estimate for my opponent's hint quality, I no longer get a bounded uniform distribution.)
So, what I'd like: a version that (with at least moderate probability) continues for multiple rounds before agreement is reached; where the information communicated is some sort of simple summary of a current estimate, not the information used to get there; where the math at each step is simple enough that the game can be played by humans with pencil and paper at a reasonable speed.
Alternate mechanisms (like players alternate communication instead of communicating current states simultaneously) are also fine.
Bridge, the card game. Bidding is the process of two players exchanging information about the cards they hold via the very limited communications channel (bids). The play itself is also used to transfer more information about which cards remain in the hand.
I don't know if that will work as a demonstration of the Aumann's Theorem, though, bridge gets very complicated very fast :-/
That's an excellent practical example, though it doesn't really have the explicit probability math I was hoping for.
In particular, I like that you'll see stuff like which player thinks the partnership has the better contract flips back and forth, especially around auctions involving controls, stops, or other specific invitational questions. The concept of evaluating your hand within a window ("My hand is now very weak, given that I opened") is also explicitly reasoning about what your partner infers based on what you told them.
I think the most important thing here might be that bridge requires multiple rounds because bidding is limited bandwidth, whereas giving a full-precision probability estimate is not.
If you want explicit probability math, you might be able to construct some kind of cooperative poker (for example, allow two partners to exchange one card from their hands following some very restricted negotiations). The probabilities in poker are much more straightforward and amenable to calculation.
The two-coins example might be useful as a first step, even if you then present a more difficult one.
Based on simple coin flip; other games:
I am sure there are more small games that have a similar "known" problem space.
What change would you make that results in multiple rounds being required?
For example, if each player flips multiple coins, and then we share probability estimates for "all coins heads" or "majority of coins heads" or expectations for number of heads, in each case the first time I share my summary, I am sharing info that exactly tells the other player what information I have (and vice versa). So we will agree exactly from the second round onwards.
example I was thinking:
each player flips 3(? 10) coins of their own. (giving them various possibilities on what they think the whole coin-space looks like) They present their 90%, 99% confidence intervals on there being more than 4 (9) heads. Round 2 repeat. (also make statements based on what they think the state of play is ++ try to get to the answer before the other person. So make statements that can be misleading maybe?)
Not sure how easy it is to tease out that information for a human. maybe a computer could solve it. but not so much a human...
"I flipped 10 coins; My 90% confidence that there are at least 7 of each heads and tails is 90%. 99% confidence is 60%."
confidence for "at least 10 heads and 6 tails" etc.
Here's how that goes. I flip 3 coins. Say I get 2 heads. My probability estimate for "there are 4+ heads total" is now 4/8 (the probability that 2 or 3 of your coins are heads). For the full set of outcomes I can have, the options are: (0H, 0/8) (1H, 1/8) (2H, 4/8) (3H, 7/8). You perform the same reasoning. Then we each share our probability estimates with the other. Say that on the first round, we each share estimates of 50%. Then we can each deduce that the other saw exactly two heads, and on the second round (and forever after) both our estimates become 100%. For all possible outcomes, my first round probability tells you exactly how many heads I flipped, and vice versa; as soon as we share probabilities once, we both know the answer and agree.
(Also, you're not using "confidence interval" in the correct manner. A confidence interval is defined over an expectation, not a posterior probability.)
I still don't see any version of this that's simpler than Finney's that actually makes use of multiple rounds, and when I fix the math on Finney's version it's decidedly not simple.
My version of making this work would be choosing to only share limited information.
i.e. estimates of 33% heads. or estimates of >10% heads and >80% tails. Where they don't sum to 100%, and will be harder to work out the "unknown space" in the middle. Limiting the prediction set to partial information. Also playing with multiple people should make it more complicated. Also an optional number of coin flips (optional to the person flipping coins and unknown to others within parameters)
How about some variation on Bulls and Cows?
That seems like fertile ground for exploration, but no probability / agreement variation immediately springs to mind. Did you have something specific in mind?
Have several people try to guess the same number, with everyone able to see everyone's guesses and results.
But then everyone has the exact some information, right? I'm specifically looking for something that's like Hal Finney's game, in that the different players have different information, and communicate some different set of information (some sort of knowledge about the state of the world, like their posteriors on the joint data).
Are there any advocacy groups with sex buyers or 'johns'? They're an affluent bunch, and their interests include easily influenced poor settings, and they're not neccersarily constrained by the scrupolosity that advocates for say sex worker's rights may have. It suprises me that they don't exist, when advocacy groups for smokers and other vices exist, when only advocacy groups for the suppliers and workers in the sex trade seem to exist.
Cigratte companies manage to fund advocacy groups for smokers. Mafia that runs brothels on the other hand doesn't fund advocacy groups.
Being a sex buyer is low status. Being in an oppressed group such as sex workers is high status in many political contexts.
Hence the term "status whore."
That depends. Being a john is low-status. Inviting girls over to your yacht for champagne and caviar is high-status.
That really depends. A whore is not a high-status professsion.
I wonder what is the lesson here.
"If you want to buy sex for money, you better have a lot of money, or it will reflect poorly on you."
Or perhaps:
"Doing things in a way which demonstrates that you have a lot of money can make almost anything high-status."
Or: be classy, not crass. Form and style matter.
It is, of course, easier to be classy when you have a yacht stocked with champagne and caviar on hand... X-/
Counter-example: Donald Trump. A dictionary counter-example: nouveau riche :-)
That's not being a "sex buyer" within the context of needing advocacy for sex buying.
Thus, "in many political contexts".
From memory: Amnesty International has come out in favor of legalizing prostitution. They were grudging about admitting that, while they aren't going to call it human rights, they have to support something like human rights for prostitutes' customers and agents.
I read the Amnesty paper and it didn't said something about rights for customers or agents.
SNP's are not independent - tag SNP's 'represent a region fo hiily correlated SNP's.
So, can the correlations be used to correct the reported risks in promethease to identify overall risk for a particular thing?
Does 23andme test for highly correlated SNP's, or does it exclude them cause unnecersary???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkage_disequilibrium
In digital markets with extremely quick liquidity like the stock exchange, Is investing based on macroeconomic factors and megatrends foolhardy? Is it only sensible to invest when one has privellaged information including via analysis of public data at a level no one else has done?
Unpack the question. What do you mean by "foolhardy"? What is your next-best option for your money?
In almost all cases, you should opt not to make a wager on a topic where you are at an information disadvantage. However, investments are not purely a wager - they're also direction of capital and sharing of risk (and reward) with for-profit organizations. It's quite possible that you can lose the wager part of your investment and still do fairly well on the long-term rewards of corporate shared ownership.
One shouldn't expect to systematically beat the market without privileged information. But even "trying to beat the market" (depending on what exactly that strategy entails) or doing what you describe is often better than what most people do in terms of actually growing their savings. Financial securities (especially stocks) have high enough long-run expected returns such that a "strategy" of routinely accidentally slightly overpaying for them and holding them still results in a lot more money than not investing at all.
Not investing is far worse than shoving your money into random stocks and committing to reinvest all dividends for the next 50 years.
Is there absolute utilitty maximisation in portfolio diversification or is that just a risk control mechanism? Could I pick one random stock and put a whole lot of money in it? I suspect I may be commiting the law of large numbers here (or the gambler's fallacy).
If you're not familiar with it, you should check out www.bogleheads.com for investment/finance advice.
(Not trying to discourage you from discussing this here... just that if you don't know bogleheads, it's quite valuable)
Look at Kelly Betting for some information on why "risk control" is utility maximization.
Presuming you have declining marginal utility for money, picking one random stock gives you the same average/expected monetary outcome, but far lower utility.
It's purely for risk control, but most people are extremely loss averse and so do well to diversify.
You could. It's a bet with positive expectation and a really risky one. But people do much dumber things with their money. Having said that, I'd recommend an index fund instead if you're plopping a whole lot of money in.
This was a productive use of my time - a panel with Peter Thiel, Audrey de Grey (who I don't know) and Eliezer Yudhowsky.
Does anyone else have trouble with people who openly display their intelligence or attempt to be smart about something? High-school and media have somehow ingrained a hostility towards that and I find it surprisingly hard to overcome. I think it is some sort of empathy response, similar to vicarious embarrassment.
For me the most annoying aspect of "displaying intelligence openly" is the following:
Imagine that you have an average person A, an intelligent person B, and a super-intelligent person C. More precisely, imagine that there are 100 As, 10 Bc, and 1 C, because most people are at the center of the bell curve.
From A's point of view, both B and C are smarter than him, and he cannot really compare them. All he can say is that he kinda understands what B says, but a lot of what C says is incomprehensive.
The experience of B is that most people are either A or B. Add some political or other mindkilling, and B may quickly develop a heuristic "everyone who agrees with me is a B, and everyone who disagrees is A and a huge waste of time".
Now once in a while B and C meet and disagree about something. B, using their long-practiced heuristics says "lol, you're an idiot".
An observer A looks at their interaction and thinks "B is probably right, since I know B to be a smart person; and C also seems kinda smart, but not as smart as B, and B says he is wrong, so he probably is".
From my point of view, B is "cheating" in this process, using both his intelligence and his lack of even higher intelligence to create an advantage over C. Thus I applaud the norms which prevent this, even if they were created for other reasons.
"attempt to" is a key phrase in your question. I don't see much trouble with openly displayed intelligence, as long as it's actually intelligent (correct, and directed to an agreed shared goal). Nobody much cares for show-offs or useless knowledge.
I do see a bit of resistance to "weird", which often comes with analysis. Much of the time, but not always, that's because the supposed-intelligent participant has done only a superficial analysis and not really attempted to understand the equilibrium that is the status quo.
High-school is ... unrelated to the real world, for which I am grateful. Don't extrapolate from what is effectively a Robbers Cave experiment that kids impose on each other in the absence of any meaningful effort/skill rewards.
I think the ingrained hostility doesn't come from high school and media, but from human nature which doesn't like it when people are trying to raise their status relative to you.
But anyway, the motive of speaking the truth is different from the motive of displaying intelligence, so to the degree that someone has the second motive that is likely enough to hinder the first. So if someone has the second motive, that isn't a good reason to be hostile, but it is a good reason to take what they say with a grain of salt.
I openly display my intelligent all the time. Nobody would -describe- it as that, however. They'd describe me as giving advice, suggesting solutions, or similar -specific- activities, and only in appropriate situations. (If you don't know when advice is desired - which is, critically, not whenever somebody mentions a problem they have - don't give it unless asked.)
"Openly displaying your intelligence", as an activity in itself, is merely -bragging-, and is just as annoying, and for precisely the same reason, as the guy who will tell anyone who will listen about how he's a motorcycle racer who could easily win any race he ever entered, but he just enjoys riding his motorcycle for the fun of it.
It's worth distinguishing a number of things.
Actually and visibly being really smart, and pretty much always right in their domain of expertise.
Trying to look really smart and right, over and above merely being so.
Arrogance in dealing with people who are wrong.
Arrogance in dealing with people disagreeing with oneself.
(1) is a great virtue, (2) and (4) are mortal sins of rationality, and (3) merely a venial one. I will overlook a lot of arrogance in someone who is actually pretty much always right, especially if it isn't me they're being arrogant at.
People who are insecure around smart people often read actually being right and knowing it (1 and 3) as pretending to be right and intimidating others (2 and 4).
seconded. nothing to add.
That's what the little thumbs-up button is for.
I find it good to be clear as to add support for the original idea; and also tell the person they have agreement not just "that was a thing that I felt like +1 to.
but I could have been more lazy...
I don't think we have a problem on LW with too much people writing messages that they agree with other people.
I hypothesise that there are several topics for which you can reliably expect upvotes or downvotes depending your position, regardless of your content.
. Additional points missed are that there are no agricultural subsidies, and there are some other things mentioned in the comments.