Addendum to applicable advice
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/addendum-to-applicable-advice/
(part 1: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/)
If you see advice in the wild and think somethings along the lines of "that can't work for me", that's a cached thought. It could be a true cached thought or it could be a false one. Some of these thoughts should be examined thoroughly and defeated.
If you can be any kind of person - being the kind of person that advice works for - is an amazing skill to have. This is hard. You need to examine the advice and decide how that advice happened to work, and then you need to modify yourself to make that advice applicable to you.
All too often in this life we think of ourselves as immutable. And our problems fixed, with the only hope of solving them to find a solution that works for the problem. I propose it's the other way around. All too often the solutions are immutable, we are malleable and the problems can be solved by applying known advice and known knowledge in ways that we need to think of and decide on.
Is it really the same problem if the problem isn't actually the problem any more, but rather the problem is a new method of applying a known solution to a known problem?
(what does this mean) Example: Dieting - is an easy example.
This week we have been talking about Calories in/Calories out. It's pretty obvious that CI/CO is true on a black-box system level. If food goes (calories in) in and work goes out (calories out - BMR, incidental exercise, purposeful exercise), that is what determines your weight. Ignoring the fact that drinking a litre of water is a faster way to gain weight than any other way I know of. And we know that weight is not literally health but a representation of what we consider healthy because it's the easiest way to track how much fat we store on our body (for a normal human who doesn't have massive bulk muscle mass).
CICO makes for terrible advice. On one level, yes. To modify the weight of our black box, we need to modify the weight going in and the weight going out so that it's not in the same feedback loop as it was (the one that caused the box to be fat). On one level CICO is exactly all the advice you need to change the weight of a black box (or a spherical cow in a vacuum).
On the level of human systems: People are not spherical cows in a vacuum. Where did spherical cows in a vacuum come from? It's a parody of what we do in physics. We simplify a system down to it's basic of parts and generate rules that make sense. Then we build up to a complicated model and try to find how to apply that rule. It's why we can work out where projectiles are going to land because we have projectile motion physics (even though often air resistance and wind direction end up changing where our projectile lands, we still have a good guess. And we later build estimation systems based on using those details for prediction too).
So CICO is a black-box system, a spherical cow system. It's wrong. It's so wrong when you try to apply it to the real world. But that doesn't matter! It's significantly better than nothing. Or the blueberry diet.
The applicable advice of CICO
The point of applicable advice is to look at spherical cows and not say, "I'm no spherical cow!". Instead think of ways in which you are a spherical cow. Ways in which the advice is applicable. Places where - actually if I do eat less, that will improve the progress of my weight loss in cases where my problem is that I eat too much (which I guarantee is relevant for lots of people). CICO might not be your silver bullet for whatever reason. It might be grandma, it might be Chocolate bars, It might be really really really delicious steak. Or dinner with friends. Or "looking like you are able to eat forever in front of other people". If you take your problem. Add in a bit of CICO, and ask, "how can I make this advice applicable to me?". Today you might make progress on your problem.
And now for some fun from Grognor: Have you tried solving the problem?
Meta: this took 30mins to write. All my thoughts were still clear after recently writing part 1, and didn't need any longer to process.
Part 1: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/
(part 1 on lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nu3/applicable_advice/)
Applicable advice
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/applicable-advice/
Part 2: http://bearlamp.com.au/addendum-to-applicable-advice/
Part 2 on lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nuf/addendum_to_applicable_advice/
Einstein said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions."
The Feynman Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think real hard.
Write down the solution.
There is a lot of advice out there on the internet. Any topic you can consider; there is probably advice about. The trouble with advice is that it can be just as often wrong as it is right. Often when people write advice; they are writing about what has worked for them in a very specific set of circumstances. I'm going to be lazy and use an easy example several times here - weight loss, but the overarching concept applies to any type of advice.
Generic: "eat less and exercise more" (obvious example is obvious)
Dieting as a problem is a big and complicated one. But the advice is probably effective to someone. Take any person who is looking to lose weight and this advice is probably applicable. Does this make it good advice? Heck no! It's atrocious. If that's all the dieting advice we needed we wouldn't invent diets like Atkins, Grapefruit, 2&5, low carb and more.
So what does, "starve for two days a week", have to it that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't? Why does the damn advice exist?
Advice like, "eat less and exercise more", is likely to work on someone in the situation of:
1. Eating too much
and
2. not exercising enough.
and
3. having those behaviours for no reason
and
4. having the willpower and desire to change those behaviours
and
5. never do them again.
and
6. the introspection to identify the problem as that, and start now.
With this understanding of the advice, you can say that this advice applies to some situations and not others. Hence the concept of "applicable advice".
Given that the advice, "eat less and exercise more" exists, if you take the time to understand why it exists and how it works; you can better take advantage of what it offers.
Understand that if this advice worked for someone there was a way that it worked for that someone. And considering if there is a way to make it work for someone, you can maybe find a way to make it work for you too.
How not to use Applicable advice
When you consider that some advice will be able to be adapted, and some will not, you will sometimes end up in a failure mode of using an understanding of why advice worked to explain away the possibility of it working for you.
Example: "you need to speak your mind more often". Is advice. If I decide that this advice is targeted at introverted people who like to be confident before they share what they have to say, but who often say nothing at all because of this lack of confidence. I then assume that if I am not an introverted person then this advice is not applicable to me and should be ignored.
This is the wrong way to apply applicable advice. First; the model of "why this advice worked", could be wrong. Second, this way of applying applicable advice is looking at the scientific process wrong.
Briefly the scientific method:
- Observe
- Hypothesis/prediction
- test
- analyse
- iterate
- conclude
Compared to the failure mode:
- You noticed the advice worked for someone else
- You came up with an explanation about why that advice worked and why it won't work for you
- You decided not to test it because you already concluded it won't work for you
- you never analyse
- you never iterate
- you never confirm your conclusion but still concluded the advice won't work.
How to use applicable advice
Use the scientific method*. As above:
- Observe
- Hypothesis/prediction
- test
- analyse
- iterate
- conclude
Method:
- Observe advice working
- Come up with an explanation for why it worked. What world-state conditions are needed for successfully executing said advice, search for how it can be applicable to you.
- Try to make the world into a state such that this advice is applicable
- Evaluate if it worked
- Repeat a few times
- Decide if you can make it work.
*yes I realise this is a greatly simplified form of the scientific method.
Map and territory
Our observable difference - in how you should and should not be using applicable advice - comes from an understanding of what you are trying to change. The map is what we carry around in our head to explain how the world works. The territory is the real world. Just by believing the sky is green I can't change the sky. But if I believed the sky is green, I could change my belief to be more in line with reality.
If you assume the advice you encounter is applicable to someone, AKA the advice suited their map and how it applied to their territory to successfully be useful. Then when you compare your territory and their territory - they do not match. Instead of concluding that your territory is immune - that the advice does not apply, you can try to modify your own map to make the advice work for your territory.
Questions:
- Where have you concluded that advice will not; or does not work for you?
- Is that true? And can you change yourself to make that advice apply?
- Have other people ever failed to take your advice? What was the advice? and why do you think they didn't take the advice?
- Have you recently not taken advice given to you? (What was it? and) Why? Is there a way to make that advice more useful?
Epistemic status: trying not to do it wrong.
Meta: I have been trying to write this for months and months. Owing to my new writing processes, I am seeing a lot more success. Writing this out has only taken 2 hours today, but that doesn't count the 5 hours I had put into earlier versions that I nearly entirely deleted. It also doesn't count that passive time of thinking about how to explain this over the months and months that I have had this idea floating around in my head. Including explaining it at a local Dojo and having a few conversations about it. For this reason I would put the total time spent on this post at 22 hours.
Request for advice: high school transferring
UPDATE 3/16/16: I decided to go to public school, because I was tired of all the little annoying stuff at my current school--especially the entitled kids and the entitled attitude in general. Everybody acts like they deserve something. It's very irritating.
The other reason I came to that decision was "exploration value". By moving to a new situation I learn whether I really am better off in the kind of environment offered by the public high school; even if it ends up being worse for me, at least I know what to avoid. If it's good, I know it's good; and if it makes no difference, I know that, too.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I attended public middle school with the same group of kids, so I won't have to worry too much about getting to know new people. I am still in occasional contact with my old friends. I talked to one of them for several hours just yesterday.
(I'm new here, though I've lurked, so if I break any rules or otherwise do something detrimental, please let me know and I will try to correct my mistake)
I currently go to a rather nice independent high school. I'm on significant financial aid, so I can afford it. The academics there are outstanding. However, being a boarding school (I go as a day student) it requests a lot of our free time. We are required to participate in adult-sanctioned activities at least six or seven hours a week, in addition to normal classes. This means that 1. I get home from school around 6pm and 2. (more importantly) it's very hard to socialize when you don't board at the school, and there's really very little besides drama or sports (neither of which I like very much) that people do after school and actually enjoy/make friends in.
I'm strongly considering transferring to my public school, which is unusually good for a public school, as a junior next year. The academics are not as great (classes are less discussion-based and there are not as many APs offered) but there is a strong amount of participation in stuff I might actually enjoy after school (math team, etc.) because we're not required to do anything after school. I've noticed that when people tell me I have to do things, I enjoy them much, much less. Also, I won't have a commute, which would be nice.
Everything else about the schools is more or less comparable.
I'm sure when I think about this decision I am biased in some way. I'm probably succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy (sometimes I think if I'd been at the public school the last two years, I'd rather be at the private school) or something like that. If not, I'm facing the problem of Buridan's Ass.
My question to you: should I transfer or not? I have thought very hard and consulted several intelligent people, and have not been able to come to any sort of conclusion.
Why capitalism?
Note: I'm terrible at making up titles, and I think that the one I gave may give the wrong impression. If anyone has a suggestion on what I should change it to, it would be much appreciated.
As I've been reading articles on less wrong, it seems to me that there are hints of an underlying belief which states that not only is capitalism a good economic paradigm, it shall remain so. Now, I don't mean to say anything like 'Capitalism is Evil!' I think that capitalism can, and has, done a lot of good for humanity.
However, I don't think that capitalism will be the best economic paradigm going into the future. I used to view capitalism as an inherent part of the society we currently live in, with no real economic competition.
I recently changed my views as a result of a book someone recommended to me 'The zero marginal cost society' by Jeremy Rifkin. In it, the author states that we are in the midst of a third industrial revolution as a result of a new energy/production and communications matrix i.e. renewable energies, 3-D printing and the internet.
The author claims that these three things will eventually bring their respective sectors marginal costs to zero. This is significant because of a 'contradiction at the heart of capitalism' (I'm not sure how to phrase this, so excuse me if I butcher it): competition is at the heart of capitalism, with companies constantly undercutting each other as a result of new technologies. These technological improvement allow a company to produce goods/services at a more attractive price whilst retaining a reasonable profit margin. As a result, we get better and better at producing things, and it lets us produce goods at ever decreasing costs. But what happens when the costs of producing something hit rock bottom? That is, they can go no lower.
3D printing presents a situation like this for a huge amount of industries, as all you really need to do is get some designs, plug in some feedstock and have a power source ready. The internet allows people to share their designs for almost zero cost, and renewable energies are on the rise, presenting the avenue of virtually free power. All that's left is the feedstock, and the cost of this is due to the difficulty of producing it. Once we have better robotics, you won't need anyone to mine/cultivate anything, and the whole thing becomes basically free.
And when you can get your goods, energy and communications for basically free, doesn't that undermine the whole capitalist system? Of course, the arguments presented in the book are much more comprehensive, and it details an alternative economic paradigm called the Commons. I'm just paraphrasing here.
Since my knowledge of economics is woefully inadequate, I was wondering if I've made some ridiculous blunder which everyone knows about on this site. Is there some fundamental reason why Jeremy Rifkin's is a crackpot and I'm a fool for listening to him? Or is it more subtle than that? I ask because I felt the arguments in the book pretty compelling, and I want some opinions from people who are much better suited to critiquing this sort of thing than I.
Here is a link to the download page for the essay titled 'The comedy of the Commons' which provides some of the arguments which convinced me:
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1828/
A lecture about the Commons itself:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf
And a paper (?) about governing the commons:
http://www.kuhlen.name/MATERIALIEN/eDok/governing_the_commons1.pdf
And here is a link to the author's page, along with some links to articles about the book:
http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/pages/Milestones.cfm
http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/pages/Press--Articles.cfm
An article displaying some of the sheer potential of 3D printers, and how it has the potential to change society in a major way:
http://singularityhub.com/2012/08/22/3d-printers-may-someday-construct-homes-in-less-than-a-day/
Edit: Drat! I forgot about the stupid questions thread. Should I delete this and repost it there? I mean, I hope to discuss this topic with others, so it seems suitable for the DISCUSSION board, but it may also be very stupid. Advice would be appreciated.
Translating bad advice
While writing my Magnum Opus I came across this piece of writing advice by Neil Gaiman:
“When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
And it struck me how true it was, even in other areas of life. People are terrible at giving advice on how to improve yourself, or on how to improve anything really. To illustrate this, here is what you would expect advice from a good rationalist friend to look like:
1) “Hey, I’ve noticed you tend to do X.”
2) “It’s been bugging me for a while, though I’m not really sure why. It’s possible other people think X is bad as well, you should ask them about it.”
3) Paragon option: “Maybe you could do Y instead? I dunno, just think about it.”
4) Renegade option: “From now on I will slap you every time you do X, in order to help you stop being retarded about X.”
I wish I had more friends who gave advice like that, especially the renegade option. Instead, here is what I get in practice:
1) Thinking: Argh, he is doing X again. That annoys me, but I don’t want to be rude.
2) Thinking: Okay, he is doing Z now, which is kind of like X and a good enough excuse to vent my anger about X
3) *Complains about Z in an irritated manner, and immediately forgets that there’s even a difference between X and Z*
4) Thinking: Oh shit, that was rude. I better give some arbitrary advice on how to fix Z so I sound more productive.
As you can see, social rules and poor epistemology really get in the way of good advice, which is incredibly frustrating if you genuinely want to improve yourself! (Needless to say, ignoring badly phrased advice is incredibly stupid and you should never do this. See HPMOR for a fictional example of what happens if you try to survive on your wits alone.) A naïve solution is to tell everybody that you are the sort of person who loves to hear criticism in the hope that they will tell you what they really think. This never works because A) Nobody will believe you since everyone says this and it’s always a lie, and B) It’s a lie, you hate hearing real criticism just like everybody else.
The best solution I have found is to make it a habit to translate bad advice into good advice, in the spirit of what Neil Gaiman said above: Always be on the lookout for people giving subtle clues that you are doing something wrong and ask them about it (preferably without making yourself sound insecure in the process, or they’ll just tell you that you need to be more confident). When they give you some bullshit response that is designed to sound nice, keep at it and convince them to give you their real reasons for bringing it up in the first place. Once you have recovered the original information that lead them to give the poor advice, you can rewrite it as good advice in the format used above. Here is an example from my own work experience:
1) Bad advice person: “You know, you may have your truth, but someone else may have their own truth.”
2) Me, confused and trying not to be angry at bad epistemology: “That’s interesting. What makes you say that?”
3) *5 minutes later*. “Holy shit, my insecurity is being read as arrogance, and as a result people feel threatened by my intelligence which makes them defensive? I never knew that!”
Seriously, apply this lesson. And get a good friend to slap you every time you don’t.
I'd like advice from LW regarding migraines
So, I read a post a little while ago saying that asking the community for advice on personal problems was okay, and no one seemed to disagree strongly with this. Therefore, I'll just ask for some advice, and hope that I'm not accidentally going past some line. If I do, I apologise
I have had migraines for quite a while now. They started when I was a child, but were infrequent in those days. They got progressively worse as time went on, and things started to get quite bad when I was about 12. A few years down the line, I would have headaches for months at a time, with migraines popping up for a few days a month. It got worse from there. Now, I have had migraine-like symptoms for 10 months now. I say migraine-like because part of the definition of a migraine is that it lasts from about 3 hours to a few days. According to a neurologist I recently went to, I have transformative migraines, or wording similar to that. So I have all the symptoms of migraines, except they last for inordinate amounts of time. I've had an MRI, and it showed nothing wrong with my brain. According to the World Health Organisation, this is more disabling than blindness, and as bad as acute psychosis: http://www.migrainetrust.org/chronic-migraine You can see why its rather important to me that I get rid of/deal with this.
Now, I've tried quite a lot of things over the years, especially in the last two or so. NSAIDs do very little, and thing like migraleve (paracetamol with codeine) are a little better. Sumatriptan provides some relief, but it doesn't get rid of the migraine. At best it will knock me down to a weak migraine. I've tried taking propanalol (160mg) for half a year, and it does little to help. I was prescribd Amitiptyline (10mg) a week ago, but it hasn't had much effect. I was told to increase by 10mg it every two weeks until I hit 30mg. I've also tried cutting things out like chocolates, and dairy for a month. It didn't have any effect. I also don't have any caffeine. So this eliminates some common causes of migraines. My migraines sometimes respond to heat/cold applied to my head, but this is only some of the time, due to my migraines shifting in nature. Further, it only takes the edge of them. I've also tried taking magnesium supplements, but they had a negative effect on me i.e. strange dreams and insomnia. That just made my problems worse. Also, I've ruled out medication overuse.
So, does anyone have any recommendations? There should be a few people who have had experience with this level of migraines, and I expect they might be able to provide some advice. I'm not too optimistic, but I really need something that works.
Wisdom for Smart Teens - my talk at SPARC 2014
I recently had the privilege of a 1-hour speaking slot at SPARC, a yearly two-week camp for top high school math students.
Here's the video: Wisdom for Smart Teens
Instead of picking a single topic, I indulged in a bunch of mini-topics that I feel passionate about:
- Original Sight
- "Emperor has no clothes" moments
- Epistemology is cool
- Think quantitatively
- Be specific / use examples
- Organizations are inefficient
- How I use Bayesianism
- Be empathizable
- Communication
- Simplify
- Startups
- What you want
I Want To Believe: Rational Edition
Relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k7h/a_dialogue_on_doublethink/
I would like this conversation to operate under the assumption that there are certain special times when it is instrumentally rational to convince oneself of a proposition whose truth is indeterminate, and when it is epistemically rational as well. The reason I would like this conversation to operate under this assumption is that I believe questioning this assumption makes it more difficult to use doublethink for productive purposes. There are many other places on this website where the ethics or legitimacy of doublethink can be debated, and I am already aware of its dangers, so please don't mention such things here.
I am hoping for some advice. "Wanting to believe" can be both epistemically and instrumentally rational, as in the case of certain self-fulfilling prophecies. If believing that I am capable of winning a competition will cause me to win, believing that I am capable of winning is rational both in the instrumental sense that "rationality is winning" and in the epistemic sense that "rationality is truth".
I used to be quite good at convincing myself to adopt beliefs of this type when they were beneficial. It was essentially automatic, I knew that I had the ability and so applying it was as trivial as remembering its existence. Nowadays, however, I'm almost unable to do this at all, despite what I remember. It's causing me significant difficulties in my personal life.
How can I redevelop my skill at this technique? Practicing will surely help, and I'm practicing right now so therefore I'm improving already. I'll soon have the skill back stronger than ever, I'm quite confident. But are there any tricks or styles of thinking that can make it more controllable? Any mantras or essays that will help my thought to become more fluidly self-directed? Or should I be focused on manipulating my emotional state rather than on initiating a direct cognitive override?
I feel as though the difficulties I've been having become most pronounced when I'm thinking about self-fulfilling prophecies that do not have guarantees of certainty attached. The lower my estimated probability that the self-fulfilling prophecy will work for me, the less able I am to use the self-fulfilling prophecy as a tool, even if the estimated gains from the bet are large. How might I deal with this problem, specifically?
Financial Effectiveness Repository
Follow-Up to: A Guide to Rational Investing Financial Planning Sequence (defunct) The Rational Investor
What are your recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness?
This post is created in response to a comment on this Altruistic Effectiveness post and thus may have a slight focus on EA. But it is nonetheless meant as a general request for financial effectiveness information (effectiveness as in return on invested time mostly). I think this could accumulate a lot of advice and become part of the Repository Repository (which surprisingly has not much advice of this kind yet).
I seed this with a few posts about this found on LessWrong in the comments. What other posts and links about financial effectiveness do you know of?
Rules:
- Each comment should name a single recommendation.
- You should give the effectiveness in percent per period or absolute if possible.
- Advice should be backed by evidence as usual.
General Advice (from Guide to Rational Investing):
Capital markets have created enormous amounts of wealth for the world and reward disciplined, long-term investors for their contribution to the productive capacity of the economy. Most individuals would do well to invest most of their wealth in the capital market assets, particularly equities. Most investors, however, consistently make poor investment decisions as a result of a poor theoretical understanding of financial markets as well as cognitive and emotional biases, leading to inferior investment returns and inefficient allocation of capital. Using an empirically rigorous approach, a rational investor may reasonably expect to exploit inefficiencies in the market and earn excess returns in so doing.
So what are your recommendations? You may give advanced as well as simple advice. The more the better for this to become a real repository. You may also repeat or link advice given elsewere on LessWrong.
How to write an academic paper, according to me
Disclaimer: this is entirely a personal viewpoint, formed by a few years of publication in a few academic fields. EDIT: Many of the comments are very worth reading as well.
Having recently finished a very rushed submission (turns out you can write a novel paper in a day and half, if you're willing to sacrifice quality and sanity), I've been thinking about how academic papers are structured - and more importantly, how they should be structured.
It seems to me that the key is to consider the audience. Or, more precisely, to consider the audiences - because different people will read you paper to different depths, and you should cater to all of them. An example of this is the "inverted pyramid" structure for many news articles - start with the salient facts, then the most important details, then fill in the other details. The idea is to ensure that a reader who stops reading at any point (which happens often) will nevertheless have got the most complete impression that it was possible to convey in the bit that they did read.
So, with that model in mind, lets consider the different levels of audience for a general academic paper (of course, some papers just can't fit into this mould, but many can):
Want to work on "strong AI" topic in my bachelor thesis
Hello,
I currently study maths, physics and programming (general course) on CVUT at Prague (CZE). I'm finishing second year and I'm really into AI. The most interesting questions for me are:
- what formalism to use for connecting epistemology questions (about knowledge, memory...) and cognitive sciences with maths and how to formulate them
- find principles of those and trying to "materialize" them into new models
- I'm also kind of philosophy-like questions about AI
How Not to Make Money
Sarcastic Practical Advice Series: 1 How Not to Make Money
I'm calling this a series because I would like it to be a series, feel free to write your own post on "how not to do something many people want to do", especially you, future me.
I'm very good at not making money, and maybe this is a skill you have found yourself needing to perfect.
But worry not. Stop rationalizing! I'll teach you some of the craft before you can say all the palindromes in the Finnish language.
(1) Be one of those people who actually turn knowledge, general knowledge, into personally designed actions/policies. The kind of people who, upon learning that driving is more dangerous than being attacked by spiders, and experiencing the first person evolved fear of spiders, understands that he should be as afraid of driving badly as he is of spiders, or much more, and drives accordingly.
(2) Understand that there is no metaphysical Self, only a virtual center of narrative gravity (Read Dennett), whose manner of discounting time is hyperbolic (Read George Ainslie), weirdly self-representative (Read GEB), and basically a mess.
(3) Read Reasons and Persons, by Parfit, and really give up on your Naïve intuitions about personal identity over time. Using (1) act accordingly, i.e. screw future retired you.
(4) Go through a university program in the humanities, so no one tempts you by throwing money at you after you graduate - This has happened to an academically oriented friend of mine who graduated a Medical Doctor, but actually wanted to be in the lab playing with brains. - If you can make into Greek Mythology, or Iranian Literature, good for you, Philosophy is ok, as are social sciences, as long as you do theory and don't get into politics or institutional design later on. If you go to psychology, you are dangerously near Human Resources, so be sure to be doing it for the reasons Pinker would do it, because you want to understand our internal computer, not to treat people.
(5) Have some cash: This seems obvious, but it’s worth reminding if you are a machine discounting hyperbolically, you'd better be safe for the next two months.
(6) Study research on happiness and money: Money doesn't buy happiness, and when it does, it's by buying things to others, regardless of Price. Giving a bike, a Porsche, or a Starbucks coffee to your friends provides you the same amount of fuzzies. Use (1) act accordingly.
(7) Be curious: If you are the kind of person who knows by heart that the Finish language is more propense to palindromization, you are in a great route not to make money. If you get really excited about space, good for you. If you are so moved by curiosity you can't sleep before you finally figure it out, worry not, money ain't coming your way. Don’t forget all those really cool books you want to read.
(8) Avoid being Anhedonic: Anhedonia is one of the great enemies of those who don't want to make money. If all feels more or less the same to you, there is great incentive to go after the gold, it won't harm you much, and it will afford you the number one value of the Anhedonic, a false sense of security, and the illusion that happiness lies somewhere ahead of you in the future. If you can be thrilled or excited by the latest Adam Sandler movie, if a double rainbow will make you cry like a baby even in a video, and if you watch this sax video with a young, healthy, fertile female more than once because it’s a good video, rest assured, you’ll be fine.
(9) What do you care what other people think?:
Feynman nailed this aspect of the no-money making business. You may not have noticed but everyone, especially your family, thinks you should make money, Graham says
All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences. - How to do what you love.
It’s not just parents; everyone gets more shares of your money than of your excitement. If this was not the case, Effective Altruists would be advocating roller coasters and volcano lairs with cat people, not high income careers.
(10) Couchsurf and meet couchsurfers and world travelers: If you never did it, go around couchsurfing for a while. As it happens, due to many factors, travelling all the time, a dream of the majority, is cheaper than staying in one spot. Meeting world travelers like 1Mac Madison, 2Puneet Sahani, 3Frederico Balbiani, and 4Rand Hunt made me realize, respectively, that: 1 It’s possible to travel 2/3rd of the time as a CS major; 2 Indian Citizenship and zero money won’t stop you; 3 Not speaking English or wanting to work with what gave you degrees doesn’t stop you; 4 Spending 90 dollars in 100 days is possible. You’ll feel much less pressure to make money after meeting similar people and being one of them.
(11) Don’t experience Status Anxiety: The World suffers from an intense affliction. Alain de Botton named it Status Anxiety. You are not just richer than most people nowadays. You are unimaginably, unbelievably wealthy (in term of resources you can use) in comparison to everyone that ever lived. But the point is, the less time you spend comparing, regardless of who you are comparing with, the happier you feel.
(12) Be persuadable by intellectuals outside traditional science, like De Botton and Alan Watts, but not by really terrible The Secret style self-help.
(13) Consider money over-valued: In economics, the price of things is determined by the supply and demand of that particular thing. The interesting thing is that demand is not measured by how many people want something how badly, but this multiplied by each person’s wealth… If so many (wealthy) people value Rolex watches, they will be overpriced for you, especially if they are paying in luck, inheritance, or interest, and you are paying in work (though both use money as a medium).
Money is a medium of trade, how could it be over-valued?
Simple, there are many other mediums of trade (being nice, becoming more attractive, being a good listener, going to the “right place at the right time”, knowledge, enviable skills, prestige, dominance, strength, signaling, risk – i.e. stealing, Vegas, or bitcoin - , sex, time, energy). If you think these items are cheaper than money, you go for them as your medium of trade. And indeed they are cheaper than money, because everyone knows that money is valuable, and nearly no one thought consciously of the trade value of those things.
(14) Fake it till you don’t make it: My final advice would be to try out not spending money. Do it for a month (I did it for two), set a personal unbearably low barrier according to your standards. Dine before going to dinner with friends, by bike, of course. Carry water instead of buying it. Deny any social activity that would be somewhat costly and substitute it for some personal project, internet download, or analogous near-free alternative. Exercise outside, not in the gym. Take notes on how good your days were, you may find out, as did Kingsley that: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” Furthermore, with Barry Schwartz, you may find out that less is more, and when you have fewer options of what to do, this gives you not only happiness, but extra capacity to use your psychological attention to actually do what you want to do, do as Obama did, save your precious share of mindspace.
There, I hope you feel more fully equipped not to make money, should you ever need this hard earned, practical life-skill. You’re welcome.
Dealing with a Major Personal Crisis
This is the earlier promised post about Dealing with a Major Personal Crisis. Please continue reading there but comment here.
The reasons for posting it this way are explained at the end of the link. I hope this approach does what I want it to.
Request for Advice: Unschool or High School?
I have not made significant progress in my life since I started reading Less Wrong. I was always really enthusiastic to improve myself, especially after I learned about all these new ideas and projects several months ago.
However, I didn't seem to be able to get myself to work on anything useful.
I believed my inability to get things done was the major contributing factor to my lack of success until recently. Akrasia is still a big problem in my life, but I noticed an interesting trend: every day I was effortlessly working on projects that would make me more effective with no problems, but I had severe procrastination when I had to do homework.
I realized that I was not really procrastinating because I did not want to work on my goals, rather I wanted to work on my goals but I knew I was "supposed" to finish my academic work first. I procrastinate on homework, which takes up time, and that stops me from working on my goals.
I could be wrong, but that made since, especially after I cut my main projects like reading The Sequences once school started although I had plenty of time.
I currently want to create a large positive impact on the world, but I did not wake up one morning and decide that school was the best way to accomplish that goal. Instead, like most students, I was never given a choice and instead shoved into the system. I never thought there could be a different way even though I really disliked school. Attempts to share the idea of unschool were met with strong resistance. Learning about Less Wrong and the Effective Altruism community was the push I needed to break out of my beliefs of how to become successful and influence the world.
I would still be willing to subject myself to what I see as unhelpful and inefficient activities if it helps me help others later on in life, as unappealing as it seems. My question is: Is staying in high school the best way to improve the world while still having financial stability, or is unschooling during high school then applying to a top college a better way to learn useful skills and get all the benefits of college admissions, or is dropping out all together and working on Your Most Valuable Skill 24/7 the best way to get on the path of world improvement? A significant obstacle to unschooling is that unfortunately my parents will not tolerate an idea as risky as that.
I'm not sure what to do...
But I am ready to go beyond tsuyoku naritai and Make an Extraordinary Effort. May the wisdom of Less Wrong lead me to take the best course of action!
Edit: Please choose one option and support your answer:
1. High school and then admission to a top college
2. Unschool during high school, hope to get into a good college (is it likely?)
3. Drop out completely, work only on useful world saving skills
Living in the shadow of superintelligence
Although it regularly discusses the possibility of superintelligences with the power to transform the universe in the service of some value system - whether that value system is paperclip maximization or some elusive extrapolation of human values - it seems that Less Wrong has never systematically discussed the possibility that we are already within the domain of some superintelligence, and what that would imply. So how about it? What are the possibilities, what are the probabilities, and how should they affect our choices?
Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex
Returned to original title, for the good reasons given here
There was a recent post in Discussion which at time of this writing held staggering 454 commentaries, which inclined me to write an evolutionary psychology and social endocrinology derived post on courtship, and Mating Intelligence, to share some readings on recent discussions and evidence coming from those areas. I've been meaning to do this for a while, and a much longer version could have been written, with more specific case studies and citations and an academic outlook, yet I find this abridged personal version more adequate for Lesswrong. In no area more disclaimers are desirable than when speaking about evolutionary drives for mating. It touches emotions, gender issues, morality, societal standards, and it speaks of topics that make people shy, embarrassed, angry and happy on a weekly basis, so I'll begin with a few paragraphs of disclaimers.
I'll try to avoid saying anything that I can remember having read in a Pick Up Artist book, and focus on using less known mating biases to help straight women and men find what they look for in different contexts. This post won't work well for same-gender seduction. If you object irrevocably to evolutionary psychology, just so stories, etc... I suggest you refrain from commenting, and also reading, why bother?
Words of caution on reading people (me included) talking about evolutionary psychology, specially when applied to current people: Suspicious about whether there is good evidence for it? Read this first, then if you want Eliezer on the evolutionary-cognitive difference, and this if your feminist taste buds activate negatively. If you never heard of Evolutionary Psychology (which includes 8 different bodies of data to draw from), check also an Introduction with Dawkins and Buss.
When I say "A guy does D when G happens" please read: "There are statistically significant, or theoretically significant reasons from social endocrinology, or social and evolutionary psychology to believe that under circumstances broadly similar to G, human males, on average, will be inclined towards behaving in manners broadly similar to the D way. Also, most tests are made with western human males, tests are less than 40 years old, subject to publication bias, and sometimes done by people who don't understand math well enough to do their statistics homework, they have not been replicated several times, and they are less homogenous than physics, because psychology is more complex than physics."
If you couldn't care less for theory, and just want the advice, go to the Advice Session.
Misconceptions
Thusfar in Evolutionary Psychology it seems that our genes come equipped with two designs that become activated through environmental cues to think about mating.
Short-term mating
Long-term mating
Knowing this is becoming mainstream. The state of the art term is Mating Intelligence, and it has these two canonical modes that can be activated, depending on factors as diverse as being informed that X is leaving town in two days, and detecting X's level of testosterone, accounting for his height and status, and calculating whether his genes are worth more or less than his future company. If you choose to read the linked books, then you'll delve in this much deeper than I have, so stop reading this, and write a post of your own afterwards.
I'll list some main misconceptions, then suggest how to use either the misconceptions, or the theory mentioned while explaining them to optimize for whatever you want from the opposite gender individuals at a particular moment.
Misconception 1: Guys do Short-term, Girls do Long-term, unless they don't have this option.
This is false. Guys are very frequently pair bonded, most times even before women are, both have oxytocin levels going up after sex, and both have high levels of oxytocin during relationships. Girls only have less frequent causal intercourse because it is hard to find males worthy of the 2 year raising a baby period, or in the case in which they are pair-bonded already, because of the risk of the cuckolded "father" leaving, fighting her, or recognizing the baby ain't his. Obviously, no one's brain has managed to completely catch up with condoms and open relationships yet.
Misconception 2: Women go for the bad guys (if I remember my American Pie's correctly, also called jocks in US) and good guys, nerds, and conventionals are left last.
'Bad guys' is a popular name for high testosterone, risk taking, little routine individuals. And indeed when a woman's short-term mating intelligence program is activated, which happens particularly when she is ovulating and young (even when she's close married/relationshiped) she does exhibit a preference for such types. When optimizing for long-term partners, the reverse is true.
Misconception 3: Guys just go for looks, Girls just go for status.
Toned down reality: Guys in short-term mating mode go for looks, Girls in long-term mating mode care substantially for the difference between lower than average status and average status, then marginal utility decreases and more status is defeated by other desirable traits.
Women in short-term mode do not optimize for status, they'll take a bus-boy who shows through size, melanin, symmetry and chin that he survived local pathogens despite his high testoterone, she's after resistant genes, not resources. Men in long term mode still optimize for looks, but not that much, kindness and emotional stability take over when marginal returns for more beauty start subsiziding.
Misconception 4: When genders optimize for Status, Status=Money.
Unlike all known primate and cetacean species, Humans daily deal with being high, low, and medium status in different hierarchical situations. This should be as obvious as not to be worth mentioning, but sadly there are strong media incentives, and for some reason I don't understand well strong reasons within English and American culture to pretend that women go for status, status=money, therefore women go for money, and men should make more money. It may be a selection effect, the societies that financially took over the world believed that being financially powerful was the best way to get laid, or marry. It may just be that marketing these things together (using sexy women to sell cars) created a long-term pavlovian association. Fact is that it unfortunately happened, and people believe it, despite it being false. Women who begin believing it sometimes force themselves into doing it even more.
Status has no universal measure. If you met someone in Basketball team, status will be how good that person is plus their game attitude. If in a class at university, maybe it will be how well spoken the person is in the relevant topic. Status can be how much food the person usually shares with groups, or how much they can ask for others without being very apologetic. It can be how many women sleep with a man, or how many he can afford to reject. It can be how many purses a woman has, or how she can show thrift and a sense of belonging to a community that identifies as anti-consumerist. Some minds assign status based on location of birth, race, hair color etc... (In my city, Japanese women, all the 400.000, are commonly assumed to be high status). Finally, men do optimize for the trait people think as status, explained below, in long-term mates.
Even in the case where status plays the largest role, women when activating long-term reasoning, status is only one factor out of four multiplicants that are important for the same reason, and detected, in a prospective male mate:
Kindness*Dependability*(Ambition-Age)*Status = How many resources a man is expected to share with you and your hypothetical kids.
And this does not even begin to account for any physical trait, nor intelligence, humour, energy levels etc... If you take one thing out of this text, take this: Make your beliefs about what status is pay rent. Test if status is what people think it is, or something that only roughly correlates with that. Sophisticate your status modules, they may have been corrupted.
Misconception 5: Once you learn what your mind is doing when it selects mates, you should make it get better at that.
Let's begin by reaffirming the obvious: We live in a world that has nothing to do with savannahs where our minds spent a long time. We can access thousands, if not millions of people, during a lifetime. We have condoms and contraceptives. We live in an era of abundance compared to any other time in history, and in societies so large, that the moral norms constraining what "everyone will know" do not apply anymore.
So the last thing you want to do is to make your mind really sharp and accurate when judging a potential mate through its natural algorithms. What you want to do, to the extent that it is possible, is to override your algorithms with something that is better, and better is one of these two things:
1) Increasing your likelihood of mating with the individual (or class of individuals) you want to mate with in a matched time-horizon (long if you want long, for instance).
2) Enlarging the scope of individuals you want to mate with to include more people you actually do, will or can get to know.
Advice
To give better advice, I'll first mention general advice anyone can use, and then specific advice for the four quadrants. For those who will say this is the Dark Arts, I say it would be if we lived in a Savannah without condoms, heating, medicine, houses or internets. Now it looks to me more like causing one-self, and one's beloved, to be more epistemically rational.
General Advice
Women, be confident: If you are a woman, be more confident, way more confident, when approaching a guy, don't be aggressive, just safe, you mind is tuned with who knows how many trigger devices that may make you afraid of a no, of being thought of as slutty, of losing face, and of the guy not raising your kids. Discount for all that, twice. Don't do it if everyone really will know, or if you actually want kids from that guy.
Use your best horizon features: If you have a trait that the other gender optimizes for more in short-term, lure them by acting short-term, even if later you'll attempt to raise their oxytocin to the long-term point. If you have goods and ills on both time horizons, switch back and forth until you grasp what they want.
Discount for population size: There are two ways of doing that, one is to reason to yourself "I may not be as attractive as Natalie Portman or Brad Pitt, but our minds are tuned to trying to get the best few achievable mates out of a group of 100-1000, not of hundreds of millions, so I do stand a very good chance" The other is nearly opposite: "I may think that I should only marry a prince, or sleep with Iron Man, but in fact my world is much smaller than this, and my mind will be totally okay to mate with Adam, that cool guy."
Be hedonistic: For men and women alike, the main way evolution got us into intercourse was by making it fun. The reasons it got us out are related to unlikelihood of leaving great-grandchildren, energy waste, disease, and lowered status. Of those, only a subset of lowered status is still significant in a world full of condoms. Other than women when aiming at long-term only, everyone is completely under-calibrated for sex, since we substantially reduced the risks without reducing the hedonic benefits nearly as much.
Use fetishes and peculiarities: There are things each particular person is attracted to more than everyone else (for me that's freckles, red/orange/blue/purple hair, upper back, and short women). Use that in your favour, less competition, as simple as that.
Go places: There are better and worse places to find mates. Short-terming males (a temporary condition in which any male may find himself, not a kind of male) abound in dancing clubs, military facilities and sports areas, not to mention OkCupid. Long-terming females (same) abound on courses and classes of yoga, dancing, cooking, languages, etc... Long-terming males usually have more of a routine, so are more frequent on saturdays and fridays than on a tuesday late evening, they'll be more frequent wherever no one naturally would go to find a one night stand, or in groups that are preselected for strong emotions (low thresholds for falling in love) Short-terming females may exist in dancing clubs, bars and other related areas, but are very high value due to comparative scarcity when in these areas, someone looking for them is better off in groups with a small majority of women, where social tension and hierarchies don't scale up in either gender.
Specific Advice
Note: The advice is about things you should do in addition to what you naturally tend to do in those situations, you already have the algorithms, and should just improve calibration, unless when explicited, the suggestion is not to substitute what you naturally tend to do, or this would be a book all by itself explaining 4 kinds of human courtship.
For Long-terming Men: Stop freaking out about financial status. Find a place where you are among the great ones in something, specially kindness, dependability, physical constitution, and symmetry which guys think of less frequently than Successful startups or Tennis worldchampions. If you are hot, use short-term, women are particularly more prone to switching from short to long-term. Get a dog, show you are able and willing to take care of something unspeakably cute and adorable. Be ambitious in your projects, show passion. While ambitious and passionate, also make sure she realizes (truly) that you notice things about her no one else does, find out her values, talk about shared ones, and be non aggressively curious about all of them. Show her kindness in small gestures that need not cost a lot, such as time consuming hand-made presents. Test OkCupid and see if it works for you. Memorize details about her personality, assure her you can be loving specifically to her. Postpone sex a little bit. May sound hard, but is a reliable indicator that you won't change her for the next that quickly. Rationally override any emotion you may have regarding her sexual behavior, show you are not agressive and jealous, thus making her "(be) (a)lieve unconsciously" that you will not kill her in an assault of hatred when she sleeps with hypothetical another man whose child will never exist and get some years of schooling from you. If you think you can tell the wheat from the chaff, separate the PUA stuff that works for long-term, if not, read softer confidence/influence/seduction material. Use oxytocin inducing media (TV series and romantic movies). Rest assured, there are more women looking for long-term men than the opposite, aid the odds by going places. Show sympathy, kindness (to others as well) and dependability whenever you can.
For Long-terming Women: If you've been convinced by financial status gospel, stop freaking out about it. If you just account for the 4 factors in the equation above, you'll be way ahead of everyone within the gospel trance, then there are still all the other things you look for in a guy, which by themselves are very important. Sure, a classic indicator is how much other women in your social group like him, and, good as it is, it is defined in terms of competition, try to discount this one, after all, it is partially just made of a conformity bias, a bad bias to have when looking for a long-term mate. Be very nice and kind, and almost silly near the guy. The kinds of guys who are Long-terming most of the time are those who won't approach you that frequently. Also, older guys obviously have less chaos on in their minds and lives, so are more likely to want to settle down for a few years. Postpone sex in proportion to how much you suspect the guy is Short-terming. The importance of this cannot be overstated. By postponing sex (and sex alone) you make sure Short-termers still have a good reason to be around you until suddenly there is a hormonal overload and they fall in love with you (not that romantic, but mildly accurate), love's trigger is activated by many factors, when they sum above a threshold. The most malleable of these factors is time investment, give a guy mixed short long signals, and you'll increase likelihood of surpassing the threshold. Also, give known guys a second chance, many times your algorithms friendzoned (sorry for the term) them for reasons as silly as "he didn't touch me the first time we met, and I didn't feel his smell, because the table was wide" or "That day I was in Short-term mode and this other guy had more easily detectable attractive features, leaving John on the omega mental slot". Forget romantic comedies and princess tales where your role is passive. A man's love is actively conquered by a woman, you are the one who will fight dragons - frequently RPG dragons - for the guy in the beggining, not the opposite, the opposite comes later as a prize.
For Short-terming Guys: Read Pick Up Artist books, actually do the exercises, as in don't find excuses for why you can't, do them. Don't do anything that disgusts you morally, which may be nearly all of it, but do all the rest. Other than that?... Some few things, very few indeed, were left out of those books. Optimize more than anything for your fetishes and specific desires to avoid competition. Use mildly tense situations which can be confounded with arousal (narrow bridges get you more dates than wide bridges). Woman's attractiveness peaks at approximately 1,73cm 5 feet 8 inches, shorter women are more likely to have had less home stability and developmental stability when young, which triggers more frequent short-terming, looking for testosterone indicators (square chin, prominent forehead, and specially having a ring-finger longer than index-finger) also helps, and it is fun because you can claim to read hands and actually make good predictions out of it.
For Short-terming Girls: I'll start with easy stuff, and escalate quickly to extremely high probability even in tough cases, such as he's not on the mood, tired, really shy, or (you think) not excited. Quite likely the main obstacle is inside your mind, not your clothes, either fear of rejection, or fear of reputational cost or something else. Be confident. Few guys will reject a subtle, feminine, discrete and firm sex "offer" (notice how language itself puts it). Look at him, smile, touch him while you speak, look intensely at his mouth while slowly approaching, make sure to try do this where he is unlikely to be paying some reputational cost (not on his aunt's marriage). If feeling clumsy, mention you do. When short-terming, men really do optimize for looks, so decrease light levels, and avoid available-female company, like asking him out to check a bookstore, or to see a movie. Sit near him while touching him, cut the conversation at some point, kiss him (remember to do that where neither of you may get embarrassed with anyone else). Before, talk about sexuality naturally and imagetically, say how it is important to you to be embraced, desired, enticed, penetrated, transformed inside, and arise re-energized the next day to go back to your life. If you are sure he is short-terming, make yourself scarce by mentioning time constraints. Carry condoms and pick them up while making up if he is still hesitant whether you want sex or not. But be cozy and reassure him "It's okay" if it feels like he nervous. If you are confortable with that, use the web, there are tons of Short-terming guys, and if you feel embarassed to meet a man who would reject you, you are safeguarded by being filtered beforehand through your pictures and description or by the bang with friends app. On the web, be upfront about your intentions, and assure them you are not a scam/bot/adv. When almost there, if he is not excited, it is not because you are not attractive to him, don't be passive, slowly touch and rub his genital, quite likely he's just nervous and you are disputing against his sympathetic system, when you and the parasympathetic win, he'll be excited and relaxed, and the party is on. If you live in a large urban area, go to swing places alone or with acquaintances, not friends - nowhere else there will be that many guys willing to have sex right there, right now, and the necessary infrastructure for it, in a safe environment with security guards, other high-class women etc... to make sure you are not getting into trouble - In short, guarantee situations in which neither him nor you pay reputational costs, be active yet reassuring, lower light levels, avoid competition and make sure there is infrastructure for the act.
The saying goes that you can't achieve happiness by trying to be happy (thought you can if you optimize for happiness, i.e. by reading positive psychology and acting on it). To some extent, it is also true that a lot of what goes on during courtship does not take place while actively and consciously focusing on courtship. It is one thing to keep those misconceptions and advices in mind, and a whole different thing to be obsessed about them and use them as cognitive canonical maxims for behaving, the point of writing this is to help, if it stops being helpful, stop using it.
Edit: Scrambled sources:
How to tell apart science from pseudo-science in a field you don't know ?
First, a short personal note to make you understand why this is important to me. To make a long story short, the son of a friend has some atypical form of autism and language troubles. And that kid matters a lot to me, so I want to become stronger in helping him, to be able to better interact with him and help him overcome his troubles.
But I don't know much about psychology. I'm a computer scientist, with a general background of maths and physics. I'm kind of a nerd, social skills aren't my strength. I did read some of the basic books advised on Less Wrong, like Cialdini, Wright or Wiseman, but those just give me a very small background on which to build.
And psychology in general, autism/language troubles in particular, are fields in which there is a lot of pseudo-science. I'm very sceptical of Freud and psychoanalysis, for example, which I consider (but maybe I am wrong?) to be more like alchemy than like chemistry. There are a lot of mysticism and sect-like gurus related to autism, too.
So I'm bit unsure on how from my position of having a general scientific and rationality background I can dive into a completely unrelated field. Research papers are probably above my current level in psychology, so I think books (textbooks or popular science) are the way to go. But how to find which books on the hundreds that were written on the topic I should buy and read? Books that are evidence-based science, not pseudo-science, I mean. What is a general method to select which books to start in a field you don't really know? I would welcome any advise from the community.
Disclaimer: this is a personal "call for help", but since I think the answers/advices may matter outside my own personal case, I hope you don't mind.
Admissions Essay Help?
I need help writing a college application essay that will maximize my chances of getting into a school that the world considers prestigious. (17 years old, preparing to enter 12th grade at a central California high school as of this writing.)
Throughout high school, I resisted being over-scheduled, and basically eschewed all extracurricular activities in favor of having time to think and read. Even when my parents pushed me into things like tennis, dance, or debate clubs (ugh), I was secure in the belief that I could forgo them and rely on my grades and test scores to get me into a college that was good enough to earn a useful engineering degree and find a few interesting friends. (I was right.)
However, my priorities have changed, and I’m starting to really value the extra leverage prestige can bring me. I plan to start a Less Wrong/80,000 Hours club at whatever university I end up attending. I would have access to more intelligent, interested people at Stanford than at, say, UC Irvine. Perhaps more importantly, the club itself would have a better standing in the outside world if it were founded in Stanford. (This in addition to the fact that Stanford already has a world-class Decisions and Ethics Center that may be able to help.)
This is not to say I now regret not being an officer in a dozen useless clubs or participating in endless extracurricular activities. I do, however, regret not doing at least one really impressive, externally-verifiable thing like writing a book. Nothing in my life would make someone say, “Wow, how the hell did she do that?” If admissions officers could scan my brain, they would find a lot that would make them say, “How the hell could she think that?” – but not much of it would be positive.
So my question is, how do I write a personal statement essay, 250-500 words, that will leave an impression in an admissions officer’s mind, without lying or plagiarizing, given that my adolescence was spent thinking and reading, not *doing*? Each university then has 2-4 follow-up prompts (<= 250 words), such as these from Stanford:
- Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
- Virtually all of Stanford’s undergraduates live on campus. What would you want your future roommate to know about you? Tell us something about you that will help your roommate—and us—know you better.
- What matters to you, and why?
The problem with answering these is that all of my *best* answers for these questions (“Newcomblike problems,” “Hey, do you want to join this rationality club I want to start?”, and “optimal philanthropy,” respectively) would take way more than 250 words to explain.
The focus on Stanford, by the way, is because my parents would be extremely unwilling to send me to a university on the East Coast, even if it were really prestigious. But feel free to give me general advice or advice specific to another university. :) If it actually happens, I'll be in a better position to convince them.
May Be Relevant:
I once tutored a girl in Algebra 1 over a period of three months, bringing her grades up from a D to a B. She stopped needing help and I didn’t go looking for another tutee.
I completed NaNoWriMo my freshman year – yeah, it was pretty bad.
I’ve been writing a daily essay on 750 words since December 2010, and have written over 518,000 words in 562 days – writing something 98% of the time, and completing my words 95% of the time. (Although a lot of the missed days were due to glitches in the early website eating my words.)
I entered the Science Fair with a couple friends, hated it because it crushed the spirit of curious inquiry under a predetermined experimental procedure with a predetermined result, and unsurprisingly didn’t win – although we got a certificate from the US Army.
I joined a community service club, hated it because we were just unpaid labor for rich people who didn’t need much help, but stayed anyway because my friends were in it.
General SAT: Reading and Writing scores slightly above the median for most prestigious universities, Math score slightly below. 800's on SAT Math II (Pre-calculus), SAT Biology Molecular, and SAT US History.
5's on AP Calculus AB, AP English Language, and other, less relevant AP's. Five AP classes so far taken, received A's, planning to take 6 more next year.
High probability of a good letter of recommendation from APUSH and Calculus teachers.
Thank you!
Edit: Fixed the hyperlink formatting.
Advice- Places to live
Hi!
I have been wondering (the last few days) on where would be a good place to live and work. This is not a "I-am-moving-out-in-two-months" type of idea, but a long term, far goal. Basically, when I graduate college (or even a couple years after that- I need to save up money, first!) I may want to move away from my hometown to someplace that is a bit more... *forward* thinking. I've been doing searches on google, but so far have not found what I need.
What am I looking for:
At the moment, I am considering being a biologist, specifically a molecular biologist, though that might change. For this post, I am going to assume I keep this goal. Are there any place in the US that have a market or need for biologists? Is there a science-centric, or place where science-minded people live? I know that is vague, but I'm not sure how else to put it. I just recognize that if I were to have a discussion about science or cogsci or anything similar in my current community, I would get strange looks, and lose status.
If such a place exists, a bonus would be an active LW community.
I'm not sure if I will or won't like moving, so moving multiple times is something I am not really considering at the moment, and since I do eventually (far far down the road) plan on having children, and those children would require a really *really* good education, I would want someplace that has a good education system. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, since my educational experience was so awful, so I am dedicated to making sure that does *not* happen to my (far far in the future) family. (Yes, I do know that a lot of educational issues stem from a whole combination of things, and I know a good school system is not a fix-all, but it would help.)
I've never moved before, so I wouldn't even know where to begin. My family doesn't even go on vacations. I've never been on a plane, nor do I know any protocol for moving between states, or moving in general. The most moving I've ever experienced was the move to college, and that is only 20 minutes from home. Thinking about it makes it seem stressful, so the more information I have, the better I can plan, and the less stressful this will eventually be for me.
Thanks for the help!
What useful skills can be learned in three months?
This September I'll start college aiming for a computer science degree, and I want to use the summer for self-improvement. I'm very uncertain about what skills I should try to learn, though, and recommendations would help.
Lesswrong Community's How-Tos and Recommendations
The Lesswrong community is often a dependable source of recommendations, network help, and advice. When I'm looking for a book or learning material on a topic I'll often try and search here to see what residents have found useful. Similarly, social advice, anecdotes and explanations as seen from the point of view of the community have regularly been insightful or eye-opening. The prototypical examples of such articles are, on top of my head :
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/453/procedural_knowledge_gaps/
the topics of which are neatly listed on
http://lesswrong.com/lw/a08/topics_from_procedural_knowledge_gaps/
And lately
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/c6y/why_do_people/
the latter prompted me to write this article. We don't keep track of such resources as far as I know. This probably belongs in the wiki as well.
Other potentially useful resources were:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/12d/recommended_reading_for_new_rationalists/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2kk/book_recommendations/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ua/recommended_reading_for_friendly_ai_research/
math learning
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9qq/what_math_should_i_learn/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8js/what_mathematics_to_learn/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/a54/seeking_education/
misc learning
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4yv/i_want_to_learn_programming/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3qr/i_want_to_learn_economics/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3us/i_want_to_learn_about_education/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8e3/which_fields_of_learning_have_clarified_your/
social
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ey/learning_how_to_explain_things/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/818/how_to_understand_people_better/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/6tb/developing_empathy/
community
http://lesswrong.com/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_network/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7hi/free_research_help_editing_and_article_downloads/
Employment
http://lesswrong.com/lw/43m/optimal_employment/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qp/virtual_employment_open_thread/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/38u/best_career_models_for_doing_research/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ad/optimal_employment_open_thread/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/626/job_search_advice/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8cp/any_thoughts_on_how_to_locate_job_opportunities/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7yl/more_shameless_ploys_for_job_advice/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/a93/existential_risk_reduction_career_network/
Entertainment
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/tag/recommendations/?sort=new
Teaching Bayesian statistics? Looking for advice.
I am considering trying to get a job teaching statistics from a Bayesian perspective at the university or community college level, and I figured I should get some advice, both on whether or not that's a good idea and how to go about it.
Some background on myself: I just got my Masters in computational biology, to go along with a double Bachelors in Computer Science and Cell/Molecular Biology. I was in a PhD program but between enjoying teaching more than research and grad school making me unhappy, I decided to get the Masters instead. I've accumulated a bunch of experience as a teaching assistant (about six semesters) and I'm currently working as a Teaching Specialist (which is a fancy title for a full time TA). I'm now in my fourth semester of TAing biostatistics, which is pretty much just introductory statistics with biology examples. However, it's taught from a frequentist perspective.
I like learning, optimizing, teaching, and doing a good job of things I see people doing badly. I also seem to do dramatically better in highly structured environments. So, I've been thinking about trying to find a lecturer position teaching statistics from a Bayesian perspective. All of the really smart professors I know personally who have an opinion on the topic are Bayesians, Less Wrong as a community prefers Bayesianism, and I prefer it. This seems like a good way to get paid to do something I would enjoy and raise the rationality waterline while I'm at it.
So, the first question is whether this is the most efficient way to get paid to promote rationality. I did send in an application to the Center for Modern Rationality but I haven't heard back, so I'm guessing that isn't an option. Teaching Bayesian statistics seems like the second best bet, but there are probably other options I haven't thought of. I could teach biology or programming classes, but I think those would be less optimal uses of my skills.
Next, is this even a viable option for me, given my qualifications? I haven't taken any education classes to speak of (the class on how to be a TA might count but it was a joke). My job searches suggest that community colleges do hire people with Masters to teach, but universities mostly do not. I don't know what it takes to actually get hired in the current economic climate.
I'm also trying to figure out if this is the best career option given my skillset (or at least estimate the opportunity cost in terms of ease of finding jobs and compensation). I have a number of other potential options available: I could try to find a research position in bioinformatics or computational biology, or look for programming positions. Bioinformatics really makes "analyzing sequence data" and that's something I've barely touched since undergrad; my thesis used existing gene alignments. I could probably brush up and learn the current tools if I wanted, but I have hardly any experience in that area. Computational biology might be a better bet, but it's a ridiculously varied field and so far I have not much enjoyed doing research.
I could probably look for programming jobs, but they would mostly not leverage my biology skills; while I am a very good programmer for a biologist, and a very good biologist for a programmer, I'm not amazing at either. I can actually program: my thesis project involved lots of Ruby scripts to generate and manipulate data prior to statistical analysis, and I've also written things like a flocking implementation and a simple vector graphics drawing program. Everything I've written has been just enough to do what I needed it to do. I did not teach myself to program in general, but I did teach myself Ruby, if that helps estimate my level of programming talent. Yudkowsky did just point out that programming potentially pays REALLY well, possibly better than any of my other career options, but that may be limited to very high talent and/or very experienced programmers.
Assuming it is a good idea for me to try to teach statistics, and assuming I have a reasonable shot at finding such a job, is it realistic to try to teach statistics from a Bayesian perspective to undergrads? Frequentist approaches are still pretty common, so the class would almost certainly have to cover them as well, which means there's a LOT of material to cover. Bayesian methods generally involve some amount of calculus, although I have found an introductory textbook which uses minimal calculus. That might be a bit much to cram into a single semester, especially depending on the quality of the students (physics majors can probably handle a lot more than community college Communications majors).
Speaking of books, what books would be good to teach from, and what books should I read to have enough background? I attempted Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science but it was a bit too high level for me to fully understand. I have been working my way through Bolstad's Introduction to Bayesian Statistics which is what I would probably teach the course from. Are there any topics that Less Wrong thinks would be essential to cover in an introductory Bayesian statistics course?
Thanks in advance for all advice and suggestions!
Please advise the Singularity Institute with your domain-specific expertise!
The Singularity Institute would benefit from having a team of domain-specific advisors on hand. If you'd like to help the Singularity Institute pursue its mission more efficiently, please sign up to be a Singularity Institute advisor!
If you sign up, we will occasionally ask you questions. You may be able to answer our questions or at least point us in the right direction. We may also request to schedule a quick chat with you.
Domains of expertise we especially need:
- Nearly all subfields of economics, maths, computer science & AI, statistics, cognitive science, physics, biology, and naturalistic philosophy.
- U.S. & California law
- Non-profit development and tax compliance
- Marketing & social media
- U.S. government and military processes (lobbying, security, infrastructure, etc.)
- Computer security
- Large-scale logistics
- Event planning
- Executive coaching/training
- Motivational speaking, social skills training
- Publishing
- Running workshops and meetups
- Nuclear security, bio-security, disease control
Working Through the Controlled Demolition Conspiracy
I hope I'm not breaking any taboos here. It's been a while since I've come onto the discussion section and I admit I'm not too up to date on the topics.
I'm having difficulty responding to someone who is convinced that 7WTC was brought down by controlled demolition on September 11th, 2001. They're referencing the controlled-looking destruction of 7WTC and various other incriminating looking things. Thermite and thermite waste products seem to come up a lot.
Now, I have definitely noticed I'm confused here. While I hold the opinion that the towers went down because of the planes/fires (i.e. the standard explanation) I have difficulty seeing how the falsity of controlled demolition is the slam-dunk folks seem to think it is. Could somebody walk me through this?
[EDIT: About a million edits later, I have finally worked through the problem with my link: I needed it to be in HTML and not in the comment format.]
Request for advice- Reading on politics
I've become adept at navigating the bureaucracy of my public high school. I've dropped environmental science as an AP (because it was painfully slow and replete with busywork) and am now taking an "independent study" in government. I'm going to be using this mainly as a way to study environmental science at my own pace, but I also have to read and write some about standard political issues. the requirements of the independent study are pretty vague. In order to get approved, I've got to BS some reason why I should be granted an independent study. I'm obviously not going to speak plainly. I'll probably say something about my interests in seasteading, environmentalism, and education reform. What books do you recommend on the politics of these subjects given that it is the mindkiller? Also, the main focus is on environmentalism, not on education or seasteading. I've done a bit of research regarding seasteading, but there's not much that I know about
I was particularly interested in this point brought up in the seasteading book:
Let’s consider several different levels on which we could discuss politics:
· Policy. For example, a debate about whether to criminalize drug use, attempt to reduce the harm of use, or completely legalize it. What are the effects of each specific policy? Which does the most net good? Who is hurt, and who is helped?
· System. What types of policies does a specific political system tend to generate? For example, in a democracy, a special interest group can easily coordinate to influence legislation which benefits them, but costs everyone a little bit. If every consumer loses a dollar a year from a policy, it just isn’t worth anyone’s time to fight it. Hence we expect democracies to frequently produce policies which steal small amounts from many and give them to a few. And indeed, tariffs, farm subsidies, and bailouts, just to name a few, fit this model quite well. This type of argument is at a level of generality above any specific policy, and it can offer enormous insight at consistent errors made by current governments. But to fix those problems, we need to rise further yet.
· Meta-system. At the level we want, we think about the entire industry of government. What types of systems does it produce? How can it be changed to produce better systems (that is, systems which produce better policies)? What influences how well the governments of the world serve their citizens? How can we increase competition between governments? This level is the most abstract and the most complex, which can make it difficult to get a handle on, but if we can grasp that handle, it gives us the most leverage to change the world.
They also recommend a reading list:
Machinery of Freedom (David Friedman)
Game Theory and the Social Contract (Ken Binmore)
Mancur Olson - stuff
Myth of the Rational Voter (Bryan Caplan)
Economics In One Lesson (Henry Hazlitt) ?
In regards to environmentalism, I was thinking about focusing on the relationships between government funding for green businesses as green entrepreneurship is of interest to me. I'd probably have to talk about the Solyndra scandal at some point.
As a side note, if the requirements aren't too stringent and I can just write about whatever I feel like so long as it vaguely relates to politics (like in my independent study in psychology), I may just go meta and write about Americans Elect.
Edit: I do think that there is a difference between descriptive politics ( e.g.describing the workings of the EPA or a standard civics class) and and normative (woo liberatarians!). I'm more interested in descriptive politics.
Advice Request: Baconmas Website
The Gist: I started this blog to get people excited about a science-themed holiday. I want your suggestions before I advertise it to everyone I know!
Two years ago, I came up with the idea of celebrating Sir Francis Bacon's birthday (Jan. 22) as a festive science-themed holiday called Baconmas. (The name has the additional bonus that it's easy to convince people to come to a party if there will be bacon there.) I had a good Baconmas party in 2010 and a better one in 2011, and now I want to let other people in on the fun.
It's currently "in beta"; I wrote a couple of preparatory things, but haven't yet shown it to the vast majority of my friends. I want to maximize the chance that it goes a bit viral when I do, because a science-themed holiday really needs to exist. So I'd like any suggestions you have, before I go "alpha" with it. So as to not cause anchoring, I'll put down in the first comment the things I already plan to do- if you could make all your original suggestions first, then read those plans and others' comments, then add more suggestions, that should maximize the good ideas. Thanks!
(Oh, and it goes without saying that you should celebrate Baconmas if at all possible. It's been a lot of fun for me.)
If You Were Brilliant When You Were Ten...
(If I do anything wrong here, please tell me. I don't know what I'm doing and would benefit from being told what I've got wrong, if anything. I've never made a top-level post here before.)
So, it seems like most people here are really smart. And a lot of us, I'm betting, will have been identified as smart when we were children, and gotten complimented on it a lot. And it's pretty common for that to really mess you up, and then you don't end up reaching your full potential. Admittedly, maybe only people who've gotten past all that read Less Wrong. Maybe I'm the exception. But somehow I doubt that very much.
So here's the only thing I can think of to say if this is your situation: ask stupid questions.
Seriously, even if it shows that you have no clue what was just said. (Especially if it shows that. You don't want to continue not understanding.) You can optimize for being smart, you can optimize for seeming smart, but sometimes you need to pick which one to optimize for. It may make you uncomfortable to admit to not knowing something. It may make you feel like the people around you will stop thinking you're all-knowing. But if you don't know how to ask stupid questions, and you just keep pretending to understand, you'll fall behind and eventually be outed as being really, really stupid, instead of just pretty normal. Which sounds worse?
Here, let me demonstrate: so, what tags go on this post and how would I know?
So, anyone else know of any similar things to do, to get back to optimizing for being smart instead of for seeming smart?
Best Intro to LW article for transhumanists
Summary: if you could show a page of LW to a random student who was interested in science, but couldn't otherwise communicate with them, which page would you choose?
The Oxford University Transhumanist Society is a student society who arrange speakers on transhumanist topics - ranging from cognitive enhancement to AI to longevity to high-impact careers to Xrisk to brain-machine interfaces. The audience is a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students, mostly scientists, who are interested in the future of science and technology, but by no means self-describe as transhumanists.
This week we're finally getting organised and producing membership cards. We intend to put a URL in a QR code on them, because people expect cool techy stuff from the Transhumanist society. It'd be nice if the link was something slightly more imaginative than just H+ or the facebook page. Naturally, I thought it should point to LW; but where specifically? The About page, a very good article from the Sequences, something from Eliezer's website, MoR...? A well chosen page, showcasing what LW has to offer, could well draw someone into LW.
Suggestions welcome. One article (or very similar set of articles) per top-level comment please, so people can upvote suggestions in a targetted manner.
Can't Pursue the Art for its Own Sake? Really?
Can anyone tell me why it is that if I use my rationality exclusively to improve my conception of rationality I fall into an infinite recursion? EY say's this in The Twelve Virtues and in Something to Protect, but I don't know what his argument is. He goes as far as to say that you must subordinate rationality to a higher value.
I understand that by committing yourself to your rationality you lose out on the chance to notice if your conception of rationality is wrong. But what if I use the reliability of win that a given conception of rationality offers me as the only guide to how correct that conception is. I can test reliability of win by taking a bunch of different problems with known answers that I don't know, solving them using my current conception of rationality and solving them using the alternative conception of rationality I want to test, then checking the answers I arrived at with each conception against the right answers. I could also take a bunch of unsolved problems and attack them from both conceptions of rationality, and see which one I get the most solutions with. If I solve a set of problems with one, that isn't a subset of the set of problems I solved with the other, then I'll see if I can somehow take the union of the two conceptions. And, though I'm still not sure enough about this method to use it, I suppose I could also figure out the relative reliability of two conceptions by making general arguments about the structures of those conceptions; if one conception is "do that which the great teacher says" and the other is "do that which has maximal expected utility", I would probably not have to solve problems using both conceptions to see which one most reliably leads to win.
And what if my goal is to become as epistimically rational as possible. Then I would just be looking for the conception of rationality that leads to truth most reliably. Testing truth by predictive power.
And if being rational for its own sake just doesn't seem like its valuable enough to motivate me to do all the hard work it requires, let's assume that I really really care about picking the best conception of rationality I know of, much more than I care about my own life.
It seems to me that if this is how I do rationality for its own sake — always looking for the conception of goal-oriented rationality which leads to win most reliably, and the conception of epistemic rationality which leads to truth most reliably — then I'll always switch to any conception I find that is less mistaken than mine, and stick with mine when presented with a conception that is more mistaken, provided I am careful enough about my testing. And if that means I practice rationality for its own sake, so what? I practice music for its own sake too. I don't think that's the only or best reason to pursue rationality, certainly some other good and common reasons are if you wanna figure something out or win. And when I do eventually find something I wanna win or figure out that no one else has (no shortage of those), if I can't, I'll know that my current conception isn't good enough. I'll be able to correct my conception by winning or figuring it out, and then thinking about what was missing from my view of rationality that wouldn't let me do that before. But that wouldn't mean that I care more about winning or figuring some special fact than I do about being as rational as possible; it would just mean that I consider my ability to solve problems a judge of my rationality.
I don't understand what I loose out on if I pursue the Art for its own sake in the way described above. If you do know of something I would loose out on, or if you know Yudkowsky's original argument showing the infinite recursion when you motivate yourself to be rational by your love of rationality, then please comment and help me out. Thanks ahead of time.
Job Search Advice
Some background about me. I currently live in seaside,ca. Have a bs in psychology and an A.A.S in information technology network administration. I currently am a cashier at a gas station but want to find a better job for many reasons. I want a job that will fulfill my high need for analytical thought(high in need for cognition if you know what that means) and problem solving and that hopefully maximizes the amount of time i can be with my wife (who is in the military and "works" 7-3. I am pretty new to the job search thing because i spent 6 years in college with the same job as basically a system admin. (note of worry about all jobs have already developed carpal tunnel and had surgery and my symptoms may be returning
also i'd like to add some interests of mine. During college I was active in my atheist group (after i became one) and have been a pretty big activist since starting college. I try to be as involved as i can think to be in the skeptical/atheist/lesswrong community.
So my question is given this information what are the best methods/ resources to help me in my job search. What i have been doing is applying online using multiple job banks but have not even landed a interview for anything related to computers I tried looking my self but was overwhelmed by what seemed to be contradictory messages. Any help i can get will be appreciated.
Edit:Thanks to advice from nickernst i will break down the above to a more manageable set of questions
- what types of jobs will i enjoy that i would have a chance at given my background
- related to one is there anything i could add that would let me get a job that i will really love
- what jobs are avaiable to me
- what would you suggest for the "process" of job searching to increase the likelihood of interviews
- What are some common failure modes of people in the same situation?
Advice request: Buying a car
So I'm looking at buying a car. At the moment I am using my parents' old car, however when I move out of home I will not be able to take it with me, and it also lacks some of the features I would like (cruise control in particular).
I'm looking at buying a small car, probably a hatchback. At the moment I have saved around AU$12,000. My parents are willing to lend me some amount, probably up to $5000, and I work for a bank which can give me a loan at a very favourable staff rate. I earn a bit over $325 per week at the moment and I have few living expenses beyond luxuries, that income is bolstered semifrequently when I can work extra shifts. At the beginning of 2013 I will be seeking a full time job as a high school teacher.
Looking at a few car websites (in particular carsales.com.au) it appears I can buy a fairly good second hand car for around $15,000, or a brand new car that seems quite good for around $24,000. This is a very rough guide to local prices.
I am aware that my decision process in this judgement is very fallible because I don't know much about buying cars, e.g. the potential pitfalls of a second hand one, and any other things I need to take into account.
Being as this is by far the most money I will ever have spent on a single thing and it is likely to last me for most of a decade at least, I am strongly motivated to make this decision rationally.
Does anybody have any advice they can give on how I can decide how much money to spend, or things I should consider when comparing potential cars?
Link: Why and how to debate charitably
Even though this was written by a current Less Wrong poster (hi, pdf23ds!), I don't think it has been posted here: Why and how to debate charitably (pg. 2, comments). (Edit: The original pdf23ds.net site has sadly been lost to entropy – Less Wrong poster MichaelBishop found a repost on commonsenseatheism.com. He also provides this summary version.)
I was linked to this article from a webcomic forum which had a low-key flamewar smouldering in the "Serious Business" section. (I will not link to it here; if you can tell from the description which forum it is, I would thank you not to link it either.) Three things struck me about it:
- I have been operating under similar rules for years, with great success.
- The participants in the flamewar on the forum where it was posted were not operating under these rules.
- Less Wrong posters generally do operate under these rules, at least here.
The list of rules is on pg. 2 - a good example is the rule titled "You cannot read minds":
As soon as you find someone espousing seemingly contradictory positions, you should immediately suspect yourself of being mistaken as to their intent. Even if it seems obvious to you that the person has a certain intent in their message, if you want to engage them, you must respond being open to the possibility that where you see contradictions (or, for that matter, insults), none were intended. While you keep in mind what the person’s contradictory position seems to be, raise your standards some, and ask questions so that the person must state the position more explicitly—this way, you can make sure whether they actually hold it. If you still have problems, keep raising your standards, and asking more specific questions, until the person starts making sense to you.
If part of their position is unclear or ambiguous to you, say that explicitly. Being willing to show uncertainty is an excellent way to defuse the person’s, and your own, defensiveness. It also helps them to more easily understand which aspects of their position they are not making clear enough.
The less their position makes sense to you, the more you should rely on interrogative phrase and the less on declarative. Questions defuse defensiveness and are much more pointed and communicative than statements, because they force you to think more about the person’s arguments, and to really articulate what it about their position you most need clarification on. They help to keep the discussion moving, and help you to stop arguing past each other. Phrase the questions sincerely, and use as much of the person’s own reasoning (putting in the best light) as you can. This requires that you have a pretty good grasp on what the person is arguing—try to understand their position as well as you can. If it’s simply not coherent enough, the case may be hopeless.
Random advice: Teenage U.S. LW-ers should probably be taking more AP exams
If you're a smart young teenager who plans on attending college, consider taking lots of AP Exams.
Q: What has Rationality Done for You?
So after reading SarahC's latest post I noticed that she's gotten a lot out of rationality.
More importantly, she got different things out of it than I have.
Off the top of my head, I've learned...
- that other people see themselves differently, and should be understood on their terms (mostly from here)
- that I can pay attention to what I'm doing, and try to notice patterns to make intervention more effective.
- the whole utilitarian structure of having a goal that you take actions to achieve, coupled with the idea of an optimization process. It was really helpful to me to realize that you can do whatever it takes to achieve something, not just what has been suggested.
- the importance/usefulness of dissolving the question/how words work (especially great when combined with previous part)
- that an event is evidence for something, not just what I think it can support
- to pull people in, don't force them. Seriously that one is ridiculously useful. Thanks David Gerard.
- that things don't happen unless something makes them happen.
- that other people are smart and cool, and often have good advice
Where she got...
- a habit of learning new skills
- better time-management habits
- an awesome community
- more initiative
- the idea that she can change the world
I've only recently making a habit out of trying new things, and that's been going really well for me. Is there other low hanging fruit that I'm missing?
What cool/important/useful things has rationality gotten you?
College Selection Advice
I, and a lot of other people my age, are currently facing a pretty big life decision -- where to go to college. Since this is probably going to have a pretty big impact on my life, I'd like to get some more information on this.
Seeing as a lot of people here have probably made this choice already, gone through with some of the consequences of it, and are rational, I decided to ask here.
My current considerations are:
- Academic rigor
- Money (i.e. if a school gives me a full ride, should I go there rather than plunk down $250k over 4 years)
- Ability to do undergrad research
- Flexibility
- Likelihood to meet cool people
- Novelty (this one's a lot weaker though)
- Accepted to MIT, University of Southern California, University of Maryland, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Harvard, and CMU
- Getting some form of scholarships at USC and UMD, amount TBD
- Not likely to receive that much need-based financial aid
- Probably going to start in Engineering, might double major with Comp Sci, Statistics, or maybe Math. If I go to CMU, probably Engineering and Public Policy
- I also like and am competent in Economics, History, and English (though, definitely not getting a degree in the last 2)
- Maryland is my home state, and I would know a lot of people at UMD
Go Try Things
So this isn't quite done, and its late here so I don't quite trust my judgements about writing at this hour. I've never done a top-level post before, so I wanted to get some feedback first.
Failure isn’t that Bad
You’ve probably read about how to properly turn information into beliefs, and how to squeeze every last bit from your data. What seems not to have received as much attention is the importance of just going and getting data.
For precise and well-defined fields and problems, clear thinking and reasoning will get you really far. Mathematics departments don’t use that much equipment, and they’ve been going fine for hundreds of years.
For more mundane day-to-day concerns, getting data is probably more important than being rational. Where Rationality helps you get an accurate model of the world based on the data, Data gets you well, data. And practice. Your human brain can’t rederive social rules in a vacuum, no matter how smart you are, so you have to go out and get information about it. But rationality with data is far better than either alone.
Sometimes you have to get your data by actually trying. Some things are just hard to explain in words and video. Your brain has all of this built in hardware for detecting and interpreting emotions and body language, but people are comparatively terrible at talking about it. This makes learning about different social or mood-variant things online difficult. Motions are also hard to teach online. I can kind of visualize how to do a front handspring, but I really can’t transmit what it feels like to someone else without just asking them to try it. Note: I’m not saying that asking others is useless, but I am saying that its mostly only effective as a complement to actually trying.
Practice is important. As any akrasiatic or novice would know, knowledge in a field or domain doesn’t translate directly to success in it. Like muscle memory, you need practice in order to get your brain to incorporate what you know to the point that you can use it automatically. Consciously thinking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it tends to cause lag and awkwardness, and in some fields (like conversation or physical activities) is a pretty large detriment.
I had/have the problem of hesitating on acting until I’m sure that whatever I’m considering attempting is going to be successful. I’m afraid of it not working, and am willing to do anything short of doing it in order to ensure success.
This kind of hesitation though, is pretty useless. In many cases failure to act is about the same as your action failing. It avoids doing things that you regret, but it also avoids doing things in general. And if your hesitation doesn’t result in a well thought-out plan to guarantee success in the future, then not only do you fail it that one time you hesitate, you’re not going to make progress on succeeding in the future.
Sometimes failure is actually a problem (like you’ll break something if you try extreme parkour tricks and fail), but I feel like in most instances I grossly overestimate how bad failing is. To combat this I do a few things:
- Consider a failure to act as an implicit failure. Not trying is as bad as trying and failing, except for whatever costs a failed attempt incur.
- Not regret failing. As long as I learn from my mistakes then making them results in a net gain. In the long term having failed at something and learning what to do is better than not attempting it.
- Attempt to minimize the cost of a failed attempt. I hesitate a lot with social things. If I fail with a stranger and never see them again, it’s not that big of a deal. They might be annoyed, but as long as I didn’t do something super horrible to them then they’re probably going to forget about it.
So long story short, try things out. Improvement is hard unless you do, and failure seriously isn’t that bad.
Request for Widely Applicable Quantitative Methods
I'm going to be competing in the Moody's Mega Math Challenge, and I was wondering if there was anything in particular I should brush up on.
If you look at previous problems, you can see that they're pretty varied. I want to know if there's any widely applicable math that we could study (in a fairly short amount of time) to maximize the odds of us knowing something useful for the competition.
Our math backgrounds include:
- Statistics (taught by a frequentist, mostly just probability theory and p, z, chi-squared, etc. tests)
- Calculus (single variable and multivariable)
- Linear Algebra
- Numerical Methods
Currently we're looking into Causality by Judea Pearl, and Linear Programming. Should we look at these? Anything else we should know?
Edit:
I suppose we could also use a genetic algorithm, but those don't seem particularly suited to the competition.
Advice for a Budding Rationalist
Most people in the US with internet connections who are reading this site will at some point in their lives graduate high school. I haven't yet, and it seems like what I do afterwards will have a pretty big effect on the rest of my life.*
Given that, I think I should ask for some advice.
Generally,
Any advice? Anything you wish you knew? Disagreement with the premise? (If you disagree, please explain what to do anyway.)
More specific to the site,
Any advice for high schoolers with a rationalist and singularitarian bent? Who are probably looking at going to college?
Anything particularly effective for working against existential risk?
Any fields particularly useful for rationalists to know?
Any fields in which rationalists would be particularly helpful?
This is intended to be a pretty general reference for life advice for the young ones among us. With a college selection bent, probably. If you're in high school and have a specific situation that you want help with/advice for, please reply to this post with that. I think that a most people have specific skills/background they could leverage, so a one-size-fits all approach seems to be somewhat simplistic.
*I understand that I can always change plans later, but there are many many things that seem to require some level of commitment, like college.
Edit:
As Unnamed pointed out, also look at this article about undergraduate course selection.
Rationality and advice
Giving advice is one of those common human behaviors which doesn't get examined much, which means a little thought might improve understanding of what's going on.
The evidence-- that giving advice is much more common than asking for it or following it-- suggests that giving advice is more a status transaction than a practical effort to help, and I speak as a person who's pretty compulsive about giving advice.
So, here's some advice about advice, assuming that you don't want to just raise your status on unwilling subjects.
Do what you can to actually understand the situation, including the resources the recipient is willing to put into following advice.
The idea that men give unwelcome advice to women, when the women just want to vent but can solve their problems themselves, is an oversimplification. There are women who give advice (see above). There are men who are patient with venting. I think the vent vs. want advice distinction is valuable, but ask rather than assuming gender will give you the information you need.
I have a friend who I've thanked for giving me advice, and his reaction was "but you didn't follow it!". Sometimes it helps to give people ideas to bounce off of.
Pjeby (if I understand him correctly) has been very good about the way people can reinterpret advice in light of their mental habits-- for example, hearing "find goals that inspire you" as "beat yourself up for not having achieved more".
Eliezer on Other-Optimizing-- it's from the point of view of being given lots of advice (mostly inappropriate), rather from the point of view of giving advice.
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Buss Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology 2004
Pinker - Family Values and Love chapters on How The Mind Works
Mating Intelligence, the one from 2007 and the 2011 ones, many authors (including Helen Fisher) both linked above.
Robert Trivers theory of parental investment, conflict etc... - 197x
Lots of conversations with dozens to a hundred friends about their current sex lives.
PUA - Mistery Method - Rules of The Game - The Layguide (assumption: the older ones had less economic incentive to create vocabulary and new complexity out of the blue, therefore are more accurate and less Bullshitty)
Helen Fisher (presentations, vidoes, some articles)
Lots of conversations with a friend who read lots of evopsych and would spend the pomodoro intervals explaining the article he just read to me.
Personal experience.
The Eternal Child, Clive Broomhall
The Mind in the Cave - forgot author
MIT The Cognitive Neurosciences III (2004)
Primate sexuality (1999)
This video is also great, Why do Women Have Sex? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8
Edit: This was originally posted to main and downgraded to Discussion by Eliezer claiming that it didn't have many upvotes. It did have lots of downvotes (37%), as I'd expect from any controversial topic, but also had more than 50 upvotes at the time. I submit a proposal that controversial topics should not be downgraded, and that total number of votes be a relevant factor, not only difference between ups and downs, to avoid death spirals, and conformity bias. If policy changes, notice this DOES NOT benefit me in any way, since I don't plan on writing for about a semester, and this text will be long gone.
It is hard to unscramble it all to give specific citations, but that is a list of stuff I've read that deals with related issues that come to mind.