If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
This week on the slack: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mpq/lesswrong_real_time_chat/
I recently laid myself out on train tracks but chickened out on getting struck by a train out of concern that train might be designed to mangle trespasses without killing them. My new antidepressants don't seem to be doing particularly anything, I don't enjoy basically anything and I feel hollow constantly. I just want to feel. And the thought that motivates most things I do creeps up and says: 'why don't you try something new? maybe it will change things?'. And I blindly follow that thought into a new dilemma. Later that night (incidentally, bi awareness ...
What Does the Future Hold for Kim Suozzi's Cryogenically Frozen Brain?
http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/what-does-future-hold-kim-suozzis-cryogenically-frozen-brain
Where can one find information on the underlying causes of phenomena? I have noticed that most educational resources discuss superficial occurrences and trends but not their underlying causes. For example, this Wikipedia article discusses the happenings in the Somali Civil War but hardly discusses the underlying motivations of each side and why the war turned out how it did. Of course, such discussions are often opinionated and have no clear-cut answers, perhaps making Wikipedia a sub-optimal place for them.
I know LW might not be the best place to ask thi...
Possibly the most enthusiastic / impressive endorsement I've ever seen for a rationality-type book:
Every country should scrap a year or two of math education and require all citizens to read this book instead.
Jonathan Haidt praising Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard Nisbett
Anybody read the book? Do you agree with Haidt?
Very interesting paper: Eric Schwitzgebel, 1% Skepticism. What's the probability that some form of radical skepticism is correct? And can that have any practical ramifications?
Some interesting information about omega-3 in the diet: it seems that the Inuit (whose traditional diet includes huge amounts of omega-3) have genetic adaptations in their fatty acid metabolism.
[Link] Scott Adams' The Persuasion Reading List
Scott Adams' apparently has a his own version of the sequences and even has structured it into steps that bridge the inferential gap to the points he wants to get across. I notice that there is some self-promotion but overall it seems like a sensible list. What do you think?
What literature is available on who will be given moral consideration in a superintelligence's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV), and how much weight each agent will be given?
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence mentions that it is an open problem as to whether AIs, non-human animals, currently deceased people, etc should be given moral consideration, and whether the values of those who aid in creating the superintelligence should be given more weight than that of others. However, Bostrom does not actually answer these questions, other than slightly advoca...
How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix The Prison System
here’s one way we could rebuild the prison system:
Step 1: Soylent
Step 2: Oculus Rift
Step 3: Health and hygiene
Step 4: A simulation that rewards good behavior
Step 5: Administration
Excerpt:
...Prisoners have cellmates and gym time and free time in the prison yard because solitary confinement makes you go nuts. You need human contact if you don’t want to pop out of prison a crazy person. The problem is these places are where all the violence happens.
However, you could take the fear factor out of prisons by s
I'm curious which of the two major political parties in the US (and left wing vs. right wing parties more generally) people think is most likely to reduce existential risk. My current view is that the Democrats (and parties of the left) are since they're more likely to favor policies which reduce the threat of climate change (a tail end existential risk and a potential destabilizing force) and are more likely to favor nuclear non-proliferation. However, I know my own opinions might be biased by the fact that I agree with left wing parties on most other less important issues. Which party do you think would do the most to reduce existential risk and how substantial do you think the difference is?
the two major political parties in the US (...) people think is most likely to reduce existential risk
No comment on the main question, but if you really care about an issue you should try like hell to prevent it from becoming a wedge issue. There's no longer any meaningful discussion of AGW in the US, because it's now a wedge issue. Even if you observe a huge correlation between political tribal affiliation and getting the "right answer", you should never point this out. Once people start to absorb their position on a topic into their self-image, they will never change their minds about it.
Answers to this are going to have to depend on politically sensitive judgements, I think, because most of the impact of politicians on existential risk will be indirect and involve things like the overall prosperity of the nation they're leading. Let's look at some classes of existential risk:
I would also add the Cuban Missile Crisis to the list of things to fear, where (as I perceive it) the Soviets thought the Americans would fold, and then the Americans escalated. Being tough but not being perceived as tough is a serious failure mode!
Two more ways of saying the same thing:
The success of a particular mainstream political party in the US is not a variable that noticeably affects existential risk. None of the parties would do much anything to reduce the existential risk.
Mu
Brave New World, Chapter 17:
ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"
"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God–before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."
"Well …" The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shado...
I have a casual interest in religious conversion as an empirical psychological phenomenon. The philosopher William James makes the case for studying religious experience empirically in one of his books published over a century ago - The Varieties of Religious Experience - so the idea has circulated for quite a while.
I think we might have an example of an internet figure undergoing an Augustinian sort of spiritual crisis documented online, namely the pickup artist Roosh Valizadeh. Roosh has posted and said lately that he doesn't enjoy his sexual conquests a...
we have empirical evidence
No, we have only some correlations where obvious third factors (e.g. IQ) are involved. If you want to take this approach, just being black strongly "damages ... ability to form stable marriages".
It seems that "correlation != causation" hasn't been repeated enough X-/
P.S. Not to mention that "stable marriages" doesn't look like a terminal goal to me. If that's all you want, just forbid divorce.
Oh, I forgot to add to the post below another source of my science-fictional view of sexual relationships: Robert Ettinger's nonfiction book Man Into Superman, which I read at the impressionable age of 14 in 1974. Scroll down to page 68, "Transsex and Supersex":
http://www.cryonics.org/images/uploads/misc/ManIntoSuperman.pdf
I made a grab for some low-hanging knowledge on the counterfactual question by looking at the first couple of pages of a Google Scholar search for articles I could access which offered background on the topic. (I don't have the time or the interest to do anything like a real literature review, but I expect even a cursory Google Scholar search to be more reliable than a lone NewsBusters article.) Ignoring the books and paywalled Foreign Affairs articles I can't read, I got
Michael J. Mazarr's 1995 "Going Just a Little Nuclear: Nonproliferation Lessons from North Korea" in International Security
Larry A. Niksch's 2005 Congressional report "North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program"
Stephen M. Walt's 2000 "Two Cheers for Clinton's Foreign Policy" in Foreign Affairs (accessible only because Walt mirrors it on his Harvard website)
Andrew Mack's "A Nuclear North Korea: The Choices Are Narrowing" in the summer 1994 issue of World Policy Journal
The 1999 "Review of United States Policy Toward North Korea: Findings and Recommendations", by a "North Korea policy review team, led by Dr William J. Perry"
I haven't perused these from start to finish, and even if I had I couldn't discuss them comprehensively in a blog comment. So I have to give a radically compressed (hence necessarily selective) digest of the bits I saw which shed light on the counterfactual question.
First, Mazarr's essay. It summarizes itself, but even the summary won't fit here, so I skip to its p. 104, where Mazarr referred to NK's "alleged one or two nuclear weapons" (fitting NBC's report that NK had a nuclear weapon), and quote a longer block from the same page:
Mazarr adds that, in practice, the US "always resorts" to the softer approach "in cases of hard-core proliferation", having "accepted ambiguous proliferation in India and Israel for many years", and likewise didn't pursue an all-out approach against India & Pakistan. Further along, on p. 110, in the section on sanctions:
The section on sanctions was generally pessimistic, though Mazarr granted that "the de facto sanction of existing trade restrictions" could help shape "a proliferant's motives" (p. 111), and that NK seemed to have an interest "in avoiding condemnation and sanctions as voted by the Security Council" (p. 112). Mazarr was even more doubtful that military action would "have offered a definitive answer to the North Korean nuclear challenge" because it could have "led directly to a Korean war" and "military strikes [...] probably would not work" anyway (p. 113).
Mazarr's essay was most optimistic about the kind of approach represented by Clinton's '94 agreement: "a broad-based policy of incentives built around the offer of a package deal" (p. 114). Even a rejected package deal "would have its uses" because it "would force North Korea to make a clear choice, deprive it of excuses, and seize the political high ground, firming up a political consensus (including China) for UN sanctions" (p. 117).
Niksch's report doesn't seem useful for the counterfactual question at issue, because the report is mainly about the (second) Bush administration's goals & actions. My skimming revealed a description of the US's obligations under the '94 Agreed Framework, but no substantial, explicit evaluation of alternatives to the Framework.
Walt's article is a general assessment of Clinton's foreign policy. From its paragraph about the 1994 NK deal, on pages 72-73:
Mack's essay reminds me of Mazarr's in its scepticism about sanctions (e.g. p. 32: "What all this suggests is that imposing sanctions will be far more problematic than their more naive proponents in the West realize"), and Mack was at least as negative as Mazarr about military action, writing on p. 33 that "[t]he idea of resolving the nuclear issue by 'taking out' the Yongbyon nuclear facilities suffers from three fatal defects". Those three, briefly: (1) "it is by definition impossible to hit unknown targets" potentially kept secret by a "paranoid" regime; (2) "'surgical strikes' against Yongbyon might not only fail to destroy all of the North's nuclear program, they would also unleash a very unsurgical war against the South"; and (3) "it would be politically impossible to pursue the military option until the less risky alternatives of persuasion and sanctions had [...] failed. But sanctions would likely take years to have the desired effect". Ultimately, Mack was not sure anything would work. From p. 35:
The 1999 Perry et al. review reads to me as broadly positive about the Agreed Framework, asserting on p.2 that it
The review team behind the report recommended on p. 6 that the Agreed Framework "be preserved and implemented" as one recommendation of six:
Insofar as these sources are accurate and I've understood and digested them properly, it's not only possible but likely that Clinton did about as well on this count as a different president could've. If so, then (even if NK didn't already have a nuclear weapon in '94) I'd think it unfair to assert that "Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons" as if there were an alternative decision Clinton could've taken to delay North Korea's first nuclear test for 13+ years.
(2/2)