This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of November 27th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Hi LessWrong! I'm a LWer from Melbourne, Australia, and I'm taking a 3 month road trip (with a friend) through parts of the United States. I figure I'd enjoy hanging out with some fellow rationalists while I'm over here! 

I attended the May Rationality minicamp in San Francisco (and made some friends who I'm hoping to meet up with again), but I've also heard good things about the LessWrong groups all over the United States. I'd like to meet some of the awesome people involved in these communities!

We've been planning this trip for a while now and have accommodation pretty much everywhere except for the second half of San Francisco. 

Itinerary

• 17th-21st Nov - Los Angeles, CA
• 21st-28th Nov - San Francisco, CA
• 28th Nov-1st Dec - Las Vegas, NV
• 2nd-3rd Dec - Flagstaff, AZ
• 3rd-7th Dec - Phoenix, AZ
• 7th-9th Dec - Santa Fe, NM
• 9th-10th Dec - El Paso, TX
• 10th-13th Dec - San Antonio, TX
• 13th-21st Dec - Austin, TX
• 21st-26th Dec - Dallas, TX
• 26th-29th Dec - San Antonio, TX
• 29th Dec-2nd Jan - New York City, NY
• 2nd-3rd Jan - San Antonio, TX
• 3rd-6th Jan - Houston, TX
• 6th-9th Jan - New Orleans, LA
• 9th-12th Jan - Memphis, TN
• 12th-15th Jan - Nashville, TN
• 15th-18th Jan - Atlanta, GA
• 18th-22nd Jan - Miami, FL
• 22nd-26th Jan - Orlando, FL
• 26th Jan-1st Feb - Washington DC
• 1st-4th Feb - Philadelphia, PA
• 4th-6th Feb - New York City, NY
• 6th-9th Feb - Mount Snow, VT
• 9th-13th Feb - Boston, MA
• 13th-15th Feb - New York City, NY
• 15th-26th Feb - Columbus, OH

If you're in one of these locations when I am, contact me! Either ahead of time or at short notice is fine. I'll be checking meetup posts and mailing lists for events that I can make it to as well, but if you happen to know of an event or meetup happening that fits the schedule, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Message or call me on 4242 394 657, email me at shokwave.sf@gmail.com - or you can leave a toplevel comment on this post, or message my LW account directly. Looking forward to meeting any and all of you!

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 29th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

I have never been on a Lesswrong meetup because they tend to take place too far away from my range in terms of distance and budget. Because of that, I don't know if those perform this function to everyone's satisfaction in such a way that what I'm suggesting here doesn't seem worth the effort. I hear that they're a lot of fun, and involve quite a bit of silliness, though; I find those cruelly lacking on Lesswrong proper, whether it be in main posts or discussion posts, and their relevant threads. 

That's why I think it would be nice to have a forum, a place to have normal discussions, where you don't have to watch that you don't say anything stupid or out-of-line lest you unexpectedly lose karma. A place to exchange jokes, frivolities, and entertainment. A place to talk about stuff that isn't rationality or singularity-related. A place to relax and enjoy the company of like-minded folks. A place to take a more personal approach to communication, with sequential rather than branching conversations. A place to make and be friends.

Don't you think having that would be nice?

EDIT: Also, if this place does already exist and I'm not aware of it, I humbly request that you provide me a link, for which I would be most grateful.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 29th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Related to: Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia, Intellectual insularity and productivity, I Stand by the Sequences, Why don't people like markets?

Looking at some of the more recent arguments against them showing up in discussions I've been quite disappointed, they seem betray a sort of lack of background knowledge or opinions built up from a bottom line of "markets are baaad therefore prediction markets are baaad". The casual arguments for them are lacking as well. I will say the same of other discussions on economic, since it is apparently suddenly too mind-killing or too political to talk about markets and similar things at all. We didn't use to have tribal alerts flying up in our brains discussing such matters.

The Overcoming Bias community started with an assumption of certain kinds of background knowledge, this included economics and things like game theory. In the early days of LessWrong/Overcoming Bias Eliezer did a whole sequnece on filling in people on Quantum mechanics which despite his claims to the contrary doesn't seem that vital (if still important).  

We now have a different demographic that we used to. Not only that, we  now have young people basically using the sequences as their primary source for education on matters of human rationality, quite different from the autodidacts exploring the literature on their own terms who where common in previous years. We've recognized this to a certain extent. We wrote a series of introductory sequences and articles to fill in such background knowledge explicitly such as Yvain's recent one on Game Theory. Also part of the reason we now have a norm of more citations that EY originally did is to give study and research aids to people. Indeed I think adding comments to old articles featuring more citations or editing those in would be wise so as to avoid misconceptions.

I think we need several sequences on economics, and a good one to start would be one systematically investigating prediction markets. To a certain extent just reading Robin Hanson's relevant posts on this topic would do much the same, but unfortunately we don't have an organized series of sequences by him (beyond the tags he uses on his articles). I still hope Karmakaiser or someone else will one day undertake a project of writing up summary articles that organize links to RH's posts into sequences so new members will read them as well.

I'd write these myself but I just don't have a good background in what works and studies influence the positions of early key LW authors on economics and its relevance to rationality. I'm also only beginning my studies in that area since my background is in the hard sciences with only some half-serious opinions formed from Moldbuggian insights and 20th century social science.   

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 15th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern, myself and others have provided 132 academic papers for the LessWrong community (out of 152 requests, a 87% success rate) through the Free research, editing and articles thread. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.

If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.

Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.

Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.

If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, Google Reader will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly). 

If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.

An article from the Wall Street Journal. The original title might be slightly mind-killing for some people, but I found it moderately interesting especially considering that many LessWrongers formed part of the data set for the study the article talks about and a large fraction of us identified as libertarian on the last survey.  

Inside the Cold, Calculating Libertarian Mind

An individual's personality shapes his or her political ideology at least as much as circumstances, background and influences. That is the gist of a recent strand of psychological research identified especially with the work of Jonathan Haidt. The baffling (to liberals) fact that a large minority of working-class white people vote for conservative candidates is explained by psychological dispositions that override their narrow economic interests.

In tests, libertarians displayed less emotion, empathy and disgust than conservatives or liberals.

In his recent book "The Righteous Mind," Dr. Haidt confronted liberal bafflement and made the case that conservatives are motivated by morality just as liberals are, but also by a larger set of moral "tastes"—loyalty, authority and sanctity, in addition to the liberal tastes for compassion and fairness. Studies show that conservatives are more conscientious and sensitive to disgust but less tolerant of change; liberals are more empathic and open to new experiences.

 

But ideology does not have to be bipolar. It need not fall on a line from conservative to liberal. In a recently published paper, Ravi Iyer from the University of Southern California, together with Dr. Haidt and other researchers at the data-collection platform YourMorals.org, dissect the personalities of those who describe themselves as libertarian.

These are people who often call themselves economically conservative but socially liberal. They like free societies as well as free markets, and they want the government to get out of the bedroom as well as the boardroom. They don't see why, in order to get a small-government president, they have to vote for somebody who is keen on military spending and religion; or to get a tolerant and compassionate society they have to vote for a large and intrusive state.

The study collated the results of 16 personality surveys and experiments completed by nearly 12,000 self-identified libertarians who visited YourMorals.org. The researchers compared the libertarians to tens of thousands of self-identified liberals and conservatives. It was hardly surprising that the team found that libertarians strongly value liberty, especially the "negative liberty" of freedom from interference by others. Given the philosophy of their heroes, from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it also comes as no surprise that libertarians are also individualistic, stressing the right and the need for people to stand on their own two feet, rather than the duty of others, or government, to care for people.

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed "effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks" more than others do.

The researchers found that libertarians had the most "masculine" psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which "may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."

All Americans value liberty, but libertarians seem to value it more. For social conservatives, liberty is often a means to the end of rolling back the welfare state, with its lax morals and redistributive taxation, so liberty can be infringed in the bedroom. For liberals, liberty is a way to extend rights to groups perceived to be oppressed, so liberty can be infringed in the boardroom. But for libertarians, liberty is an end in itself, trumping all other moral values.

Dr. Iyer's conclusion is that libertarians are a distinct species—psychologically as well as politically.

A version of this article appeared September 29, 2012, on page C4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Inside the Cold, Calculating Libertarian Mind.

The original paper.

Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology

Abstract: Libertarians are an increasingly vocal ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they are understudied compared to liberals and conservatives. Much of what is known about libertarians is based on the writing of libertarian intellectuals and political leaders, rather than surveying libertarians in the general population. Across three studies, 15 measures, and a large web-based sample (N = 152,239), we sought to understand the morality of selfdescribed libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of psychological predispositions in the organization of political attitudes.

A post from Gene Expression by Razib Khan who some of you may also know from the old gnxp site or perhaps from his BHTV debate with Eliezer. Some thoughts on the problem of trying to optimize your interactions to help you be less wrong. Your time is quite limited. Expect trade-offs.

A few days ago I was having drinks with some friends, and it came up that some of them had only recently become conscious of the fact that I leaned more toward the Republican party than the Democratic (I had remarked that my wife preferred that I keep my sideburns, as otherwise I would look too much like a Republican…though I sort of was one!). More shockingly for them was that I did not consider myself a liberal. I was somewhat bemused by the whole situation because it isn’t as if I’m particularly shy about expressing my various politically-incorrect opinions on any specific topic at work or play (these are people who I have met within the past ~2 years).

I assume that the problem here is that I violated a cognitive schema: liberal people are smarter than conservative people. Since I was conservative, they were, logically, smarter than me. The reality is probably not so convenient for the theory in this case, generating some dissonance. In the course of conversation I expressed frankly what I actually do hold to be a rough & ready approximation of my attitude toward discussion: I have almost no interest in persuading anyone of the truth of my particular views on any issue. This was relevant in that context because on occasion people try and draw me out as to the details of my disagreement with the consensus on an array of topics, when I often have no interest in expending the mental energy to do any such thing. It isn’t that I’m worried about getting into any argument with everyone else in the room. My friends are mostly natural scientists so I am very confident that I can alone hold my ground on any topic having to do with history and quantitative social science. Rather, the problem is my worry as to the point of it all. Who exactly is being edified by such exchanges? I never learn anything, as I am well acquainted with the standard arsenal of conventional Left-liberal talking points, while my interlocutors are often too amazed as my incomprehensible existence (i.e., not stupid, but not right-thinking) to really take in anything I’m saying.

Yet on a one-on-one basis I am much more likely to be open to a deep and thorough exchange. Why? The dynamic of signalling and group conformity is strongly dampened by removing third party observers from the interaction. With that tension removed I myself often feel less irritated if I have to invest a great deal of background information to make my own position clearer. Similarly, I often feel that my interlocutors are much less likely to trot out hackneyed and unpersuasive, but group approved, arguments.* There is quite often idiocy in crowds.

Ultimately we have to take a step back and reflect on what the point of it all is. For me the answer is rather easy: the point of it all is to understand the shape of reality as best as I can. It is impossible to do such a thing sitting back in an armchair and reflecting as an individual. Learning is a social process. You need feedback from others, and you need to mine and cull appropriate data and analyses from those who are more well versed in a given topic than you are. This is not easy, and time is finite. Avoiding stupid people is easy. The more difficult trick, at least for me, is avoiding smart people who offer stupid opinions on topics with which they are absolutely unfamiliar.** Creationist engineers are classic cases of the power of ignorance in the hands of the intelligent.

This brings me to learning more generally. Obviously I have no problem with people being autodidacts. Today the ability for one to be an autodidact has greatly expanded, but with power comes responsibility, and the necessity of prudence. I’m speaking obviously about the internet. But now we have the rise of online education. Recently MRUniversity opened, and Khan Academy is already rather famous. Tyler Cowen and Alex Taborrak’s endeavor has already received some praise:

MRU is ultimately aiming for a better actual education, not a better means of signaling. Cowen and Tabarrok are betting that there is an extraordinary amount of dead weight in current university classes (for example, on MRU the professor need not repeat himself as he inevitably must during live lectures, because if a student requires repetition, she can just watch the video again). “You can think of this,” Cowen says, laughing for the only time during our phone conversation and only lightly, “as a marginal attempt—a marginal revolution, so to speak—to get education to be more about learning.”

I am moderately skeptical, but I also think such experiments are necessary. Over the long term it seems likely that new forms of educational delivery and assessment with replace the middle and lower tiers of American higher education, and modify even the elite levels. But I don’t think we know yet what the exact nature of the information ecology is going to be.

Here is what I’d really like in the future: an app which analyzes someone’s stream of assertions and immediately assesses whether they are full of crap or not.*** There are many domains where I can do this analysis myself, and know to tune someone out because I know they’re signalling to ignorant people. But, there are many, many, more domains where I am ignorant and lost, and may fall prey to the bluffs and assertions of high caliber signalers, who have fashioned the simulacrum of intelligence. More concretely, people who are trying to impress without deep knowledge often fumble on many facts, something which could be run through an application such as WolframAlpha.

Of course things have changed a great deal. Over the past few years smartphones have cast a pall over the skills of the professional bullshitter. I think that there has been a qualitative change for the better.  Bullshitters known that they need to be cautious, so there is a preemptive effect.

* I am never in social circumstances where the political context is conservative.

** You also need to avoid socializing only with your own ideological set. This is easy for me since I don’t socialize with anyone who shares my politics or metaphysical opinions.

*** Looking things up manually is time consuming.

Debating group consensus with the group is less productive than debating it with individuals making up that group. Avoiding smart people who offer stupid opinions on topics with which they are absolutely unfamiliar is expensive. The internet has made this somewhat harder. We should like make an app to fix this or something.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 1st. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 17th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

A week ago Google launched an open source project called Course Builder it packages the software and technology used to build their July Class Power Searching with Google. The discussion forum for it is here. Tomorrow is the first live hangout where he will be answering questions about MOOC design and technical aspects of using Course Builder. The live hangout will is scheduled for the 26th of September.

Helping the World to Teach

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

In July, Research at Google ran a large open online course, Power Searching with Google, taught by search expert, Dan Russell. The course was successful, with 155,000 registered students. Through this experiment, we learned that Google technologies can help bring education to a global audience. So we packaged up the technology we used to build Power Searching and are providing it as an open source project called Course Builder. We want to make this technology available so that others can experiment with online learning.

The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction. We hope to continue development along these lines, but we wanted to make this limited code base available now, to see what early adopters will do with it, and to explore the future of learning technology. We will be hosting a community building event in the upcoming months to help more people get started using this software. edX shares in the open source vision for online learning platforms, and Google and the edX team are in discussions about open standards and technology sharing for course platforms.

We are excited that Stanford University, Indiana University, UC San Diego, Saylor.org, LearningByGivingFoundation.org, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and a group of universities in Spain led by Universia, CRUE, and Banco Santander-Universidades are considering how this experimental technology might work for some of their online courses. Sebastian Thrun at Udacity welcomes this new option for instructors who would like to create an online class, while Daphne Koller at Coursera notes that the educational landscape is changing and it is exciting to see new avenues for teaching and learning emerge. We believe Google’s preliminary efforts here may be useful to those looking to scale online education through the cloud.

Along with releasing the experimental open source code, we’ve provided documentation and forums for anyone to learn how to develop and deploy an online course like Power Searching. In addition, over the next two weeks we will provide educators the opportunity to connect with the Google team working on the code via Google Hangouts. For access to the code, documentation, user forum, and information about the Hangouts, visit the Course Builder Open Source Project Page. To see what is possible with the Course Builder technology register for Google’s next version of Power Searching. We invite you to explore this brave new world of online learning with us.

A small group of us has been working on related matters but we are far from done reviewing the relevant literature. Not having any good questions yet, I thought what harm might there be in asking for the broader community to come up with a few questions! If Norvig has answered your questions in some of his other existing material that I've reviewed I'll respond with a link.

I've been reading a lot of the recent LW discussions on politics and gender, and noticed that people rarely bring up or explicitly acknowledge that different people affected by some political or gender issue have different values/preferences, and therefore solving the problem involves a strong element of bargaining and is not just a matter of straightforward optimization. Instead, we tend to talk as if there is some way to solve the problem that's best for everyone, and that rational discussion will bring us closer to finding that one best solution.

For example, when discussing gender-related problems, one solution may be generally better for men, while another solution may be generally better for women. If people are selfish, then they will each prefer the solution that's individually best for them, even if they can agree on all of the facts. (It's unclear whether people should be selfish, but it seems best to assume that most are, for practical purposes.)

Unfortunately, in bargaining situations, epistemic rationality is not necessarily instrumentally rational. In general, convincing others of a falsehood can be useful for moving the negotiated outcome closer to one's own preferences and away from others', and this may be done more easily if one honestly believes the falsehood. (One of these falsehoods may be, for example, "My preferred solution is best for everyone.") Given these (subconsciously or evolutionarily processed) incentives, it seems reasonable to think that the more solving a problem resembles bargaining, the more likely we are to be epistemicaly irrationality when thinking and talking about it.

If we do not acknowledge and keep in mind that we are in a bargaining situation, then we are less likely to detect such failures of epistemic rationality, especially in ourselves. We're also less likely to see that there's an element of Prisoner's Dilemma in participating in such debates: your effort to convince people to adopt your preferred solution is costly (in time and in your and LW's overall sanity level) but may achieve little because someone else is making an opposite argument. Both of you may be better off if neither engaged in the debate.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 3rd. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Following the news that Kim Suozzi has terminal brain cancer and wants to be cryopreserved, many of us have donated to help her out, while others, including me, planned to donate when CI set up a fund to receive donations on her behalf. Now the Society for Venturism has set up a fund, and it is time for us to follow through on those plans. (Unless you are really insisting that the fund be managed by CI specifically.)

(ETA: Kim has posted on this herself.)

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 20th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Saw this on reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ydsy5/reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_in_dying_young_im/

Less Wrong was created to produce rationalists, so that many causes could benefit from the efforts of those rationalists. The point is not just to have nice place to talk about rationality, but to really make ourselves stronger, to apply the lessons that we learn here to improve our own lives, and to improve the world.

80,000 Hours is an organization created to provide direct domain specific help to people who want to support charitable causes, the same causes Less Wrong is supposed to produce rationalists to support. 80,000 Hours has goals clearly aligned with ours. Provided we think they are pursuing their aligned goals effectively, we should be excited about this. We should be happy when they reach out to us, to see how we can work together.

So, I am very disappointed to see the negative reception of a Less Wrong post by 80,000 Hours member Benjamin Todd, asking us what questions we would like 80,000 Hours to answer for us. They are basically offering to do free research for us on things that we care about, because our goals are aligned. And yet, as of this writing, that post has a score of -7, and it has received comments complaining that it is an ad. To be clear, ads of the sort that we want to avoid do not offer free services relevant to a core purpose of our community. I won't argue whether or not the post was an ad, but I will say that it belongs on Less Wrong and we should give it a good reception.

I would like to thank Benjamin Todd and others at 80,000 hours for their work in helping people be more effective philanthropists and otherwise support important causes, and for engaging Less Wrong in this project. I also thank everyone who responded to post with their actual questions about making a difference.

And, please, can we be nice to people who help us?

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 6th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.

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 12^th 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:

1. Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
2. 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.
3. 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.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
• If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Luke/SI asked me to look into what the academic literature might have to say about people in positions of power. This is a summary of some of the recent psychology results.

The powerful or elite are: fast-planning abstract thinkers who take action (1) in order to pursue single/minimal objectives, are in favor of strict rules for their stereotyped out-group underlings (2) but are rationalizing (3) & hypocritical when it serves their interests (4), especially when they feel secure in their power. They break social norms (5, 6) or ignore context (1) which turns out to be worsened by disclosure of conflicts of interest (7), and lie fluently without mental or physiological stress (6).

What are powerful members good for? They can help in shifting among equilibria: solving coordination problems or inducing contributions towards public goods (8), and their abstracted Far perspective can be better than the concrete Near of the weak (9).

1. Galinsky et al 2003; Guinote, 2007; Lammers et al 2008; Smith & Bargh, 2008
2. Eyal & Liberman
3. Rustichini & Villeval 2012
4. Lammers et al 2010
5. Kleef et al 2011
6. Carney et al 2010
7. Cain et al 2005; Cain et al 2011
8. Eckel et al 2010
9. Slabu et al; Smith & Trope 2006; Smith et al 2008

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of July 23rd. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit
• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves.  Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Last week's diary; archive of prior diaries.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of July 9th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit
• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves.  Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Academian put up a wiki page with links to the prior May and June threads for reference.  Good idea, thanks!

Kaj Sotala said:

[I]f you punish yourself for trying and failing, you stop wanting to try in the first place, as it becomes associated with the negative emotions. Also, accepting and being okay with the occasional failure makes you treat it as a genuine choice where you have agency, not something that you're forced to do against your will.

So maybe we should celebrate failed attempts more often ... I for one can't think of anything I've failed at recently, which is probably a sign that I'm not trying enough new things.

So, what specific things have you failed at recently?

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that exposure to LW ideas makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres, which I was apparently too dumb to do.
• If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

In the very back of Kaj's excellent How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group booklet, he has a recommended reading section, including the classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It just so happens that not only have I read the book myself, but I have written up a concise summary of the core advice here. Kaj suggested that I post this on the discussion section because others might find it useful, so here you go!

I suspect that more people are willing to read a summary of a book from the 1930s than an actual book from the 1930s. What I will say about reading the long-form text is that it can be more useful for internalizing these concepts and giving examples of them. It is far too easy to abstractly know what you need to do, much harder to actually take action on those beliefs...

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 25th. (Based on the rate of participation in prior threads, I thought it might be a good idea to start posting every other week instead of every week.  Only so much new stuff happens in a week.) It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit
• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves.  Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

(Previously: 5/14/12, 5/21/12, 5/28/12, 6/4/12, 6/11/12)

List of members of Less Wrong who are on Twitter:

Related to: Wikifying the Blog List

LessWrong posters and readers are generally pretty cool people. Maybe they are interesting bloggers too. And I'm not just talking about rationalist material, that we'd ideally like to be cross posted on LessWrong, no gardening blogs are also fair game. I'm making this a discussion level post so more people can see the list. Please share links to blogs by former or current LWers. Surely the authors wouldn't mind, who wouldn't like more readers? Original list here.

Anyone who wants to suggest a new blog for the list please follow this link.

Blogs by LWers:

• RobinHanson --- Overcoming Bias (Katja Grace and Robert Wiblin post here as well)
• Katja Grace --- Meteuphoric (very cool old posts and summaries)
• muflax --- muflax' mindstream, daily
• TGGP --- Entitled To An Opinion
• Yvain --- Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz
• juliawise --- Giving Gladly, Radiant Things
• James_G --- Writings
• steven0461 --- Black Belt Bayesian
• James Miller --- Singluarity Notes
• Jsalvati --- Good Morning, Economics
• Will Newsome --- Computational Theology
• clarissethorn --- Clarrise Thorn
• Zack M. Davis --- An Algorithmic Lucidity
• Kaj_Sotala --- A view to the gallery of my mind
• SilasBarta --- Setting Things Straight
• tommcabe --- The Rationalist Conspiracy
• Alicorn --- Irregular Updates By An Irregular Person
• MBlume --- Baby, check this out; I've got something to say.
• ciphergoth --- Paul Crowley's blog (mostly about cryonics), Paul Crowley
• XiXiDu --- Alexander Kruel
• Aurini --- Stares At The World
• jkaufman --- Jeff Kaufman
• Bill_McGrath --- billmcgrathmusic
• Sister Y --- the view from hell
• PaulWright --- Paul Wright's blog
• _ozymandias --- http://ozyfrantz.com/
• mstevens --- stdout
• HughRistik --- Feminist Critics
• Julia_Galef --- Measure of Doubt
• NancyLebovitz --- Input Junkie
• David Gerard --- a bunch of them
• Jayson_Virissimo --- Jay, Quantified
• kpreid --- Kevin Reid's blog
• hegemonicon --- Coarse Grained 
• Villiam_Bur --- bur.sk
• Emile --- The Rational Parent
• lukeprog --- Common Sense Atheism
• Grognor --- Grognor's Blog
• CarlShulman --- Reflective Disequilibrium
• OrphanWilde --- Aretae
• Alexei --- Bent Spoon Games Blog
• TimS --- Georgia Special Education Law Blog 
• loup-valliant --- @ Loup's
• RolfAndreaseen --- Yngling Saga
• arundelo --- Aaron Brown
• peter_hurtford --- Greatplay.net
• brilee --- Modern Descartes
• gwern --- gwern.net
• erratio --- The merry-go-round of life
• jimmy --- The Art and Science of Cognitive Engineering
• alexvermeer --- alexvermeer.com
• sark --- sarkology
• gjm --- Scribble, scribble, scribble
• Giles --- Prince Mm Mm
• Chris Hallquist --- The Uncredible Hallq
• EricHerboso --- EricHerboso.org
• Eneasz - Death Is Bad
• Tuxedage - Essays and other Musings
• Federico - studiolo
• Trevor Blake - OVO, editor-Dora Marsden, lead judge-George Walford International Essay Prize
• Pablo_Stafforini -- Pablo's miscellany

List of LWers on Twitter

Note: Anyone just digging for interesting blogs they would like to read but dosen't care if they are written by LWers or not should check out this thread or maybe this one. Did you guys know we have a wiki article with external resources? We do. Check that out as well. Maybe once we figure out which LWer blogs related to rationality on this list are particularly good we can add a few of them there too.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 11th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit
• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves.  Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

(Previously: 5/14/12, 5/21/12, 5/28/12, 6/4/12)

Guys I'd like your opinion on something.

Do you think LessWrong is too intellectually insular? What I mean by this is that we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong. For example all I can think of is some of Robin Hanson's and Paul Graham's stuff. But I don't think Robin Hanson really counts as Overcoming Bias used to be LessWrong.

The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here. The only major examples fellow LWers brought up in conversation where works that Eliezer cited as great or influential. :/

Another thing, I could be wrong about this naturally, but it seems to clear that LessWrong has not grown. I'm not talking numerically. I can't put my finger to major progress done in the past 2 years. I have heard several other users express similar sentiments. To quote one user:

I notice that, in topics that Eliezer did not explicitly cover in the sequences (and some that he did), LW has made zero progress in general.

I've recently come to think this is probably true to the first approximation. I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy blog since the author doesn't make new updates any more. Originally the man had high hopes for the site. He wanted to build something that could keep going on its own, growing without him. It turned out to be a community mostly dedicated to studying the scrolls he left behind. We don't even seem to do a good job of getting others to read the scrolls. 

Overall there seems to be little enthusiasm for actually systematically reading the old material. I'm going to share my take on what is I think a symptom of this. I was debating which title to pick for my first ever original content Main article (it was originally titled "On Conspiracy Theories") and made what at first felt like a joke but then took on a horrible ring of:

Over time the meaning of an article will tend to converge with the literal meaning of its title.

We like linking articles, and while people may read a link the first time, they don't tend to read it the second or third time they run across it. The phrase is eventually picked up and used out the appropriate of context. Something that was supposed to be shorthand for a nuanced argument starts to mean exactly what "it says". Well not exactly, people still recall it is a vague applause light. Which is actually worse.

I cited precisely "Politics is the Mindkiller" as an example of this. In the original article Eliezer basically argues that gratuitous politics, political thinking that isn't outweighed by its value to the art of rationality, is to be avoided. This soon came to meant it is forbidden to discuss politics in Main and Discussion articles, though it does live in the comment sections.

Now the question if LessWrong remains productive intellectually, is separate from the question of it being insular. But I feel both need to be discussed. If our community wasn't growing and it wasn't insular either, it could at least remain relevant.

This site has a wonderful ethos for discussion and thought. Why do we seem to be wasting it?

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 4th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

• Established a useful new habit
• Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
• Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
• Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
• Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
• Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
• Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
• Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves.  Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

(Previously: 5/14/12, 5/21/12, 5/28/12)

Admitting to being wrong isn't easy, but it's something we want to encourage.

So ... were you convinced by someone's arguments lately? Did you realize a heated disagreement was actually a misunderstanding? Here's the place to talk about it!

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.