You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Three (Mental Health, Basilisk, Blogs and Media)

15 ingres 25 June 2016 03:40AM

2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis

Overview


Mental Health

We decided to move the Mental Health section up closer in the survey this year so that the data could inform accessibility decisions.

LessWrong Mental Health As Compared To Base Rates In The General Population
Condition Base Rate LessWrong Rate LessWrong Self dx Rate Combined LW Rate Base/LW Rate Spread Relative Risk
Depression 17% 25.37% 27.04% 52.41% +8.37 1.492
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder 2.3% 2.7% 5.6% 8.3% +0.4 1.173
Autism Spectrum Disorder 1.47% 8.2% 12.9% 21.1% +6.73 5.578
Attention Deficit Disorder 5% 13.6% 10.4% 24% +8.6 2.719
Bipolar Disorder 3% 2.2% 2.8% 5% -0.8 0.733
Anxiety Disorder(s) 29% 13.7% 17.4% 31.1% -15.3 0.472
Borderline Personality Disorder 5.9% 0.6% 1.2% 1.8% -5.3 0.101
Schizophrenia 1.1% 0.8% 0.4% 1.2% -0.3 0.727
Substance Use Disorder 10.6% 1.3% 3.6% 4.9% -9.3 0.122

Base rates are taken from Wikipedia, US rates were favored over global rates where immediately available.

Accessibility Suggestions

So of the conditions we asked about, LessWrongers are at significant extra risk for three of them: Autism, ADHD, Depression.

LessWrong probably doesn't need to concern itself with being more accessible to those with autism as it likely already is. Depression is a complicated disorder with no clear interventions that can be easily implemented as site or community policy. It might be helpful to encourage looking more at positive trends in addition to negative ones, but the community already seems to do a fairly good job of this. (We could definitely use some more of it though.)

Attention Deficit Disorder - Public Service Announcement

That leaves ADHD, which we might be able to do something about, starting with this:

A lot of LessWrong stuff ends up falling into the same genre as productivity advice or 'self help'. If you have trouble with getting yourself to work, find yourself reading these things and completely unable to implement them, it's entirely possible that you have a mental health condition which impacts your executive function.

The best overview I've been able to find on ADD is this talk from Russell Barkely.

30 Essential Ideas For Parents

Ironically enough, this is a long talk, over four hours in total. Barkely is an entertaining speaker and the talk is absolutely fascinating. If you're even mildly interested in the subject I wholeheartedly recommend it. Many people who have ADHD just assume that they're lazy, or not trying hard enough, or just haven't found the 'magic bullet' yet. It never even occurs to them that they might have it because they assume that adult ADHD looks like childhood ADHD, or that ADHD is a thing that psychiatrists made up so they can give children powerful stimulants.

ADD is real, if you're in the demographic that takes this survey there's a decent enough chance you have it.

Attention Deficit Disorder - Accessibility

So with that in mind, is there anything else we can do?

Yes, write better.

Scott Alexander has written a blog post with writing advice for non-fiction, and the interesting thing about it is just how much of the advice is what I would tell you to do if your audience has ADD.

  • Reward the reader quickly and often. If your prose isn't rewarding to read it won't be read.

  • Make sure the overall article has good sectioning and indexing, people might be only looking for a particular thing and they won't want to wade through everything else to get it. Sectioning also gives the impression of progress and reduces eye strain.

  • Use good data visualization to compress information, take away mental effort where possible. Take for example the condition table above. It saves space and provides additional context. Instead of a long vertical wall of text with sections for each condition, it removes:

    • The extraneous information of how many people said they did not have a condition.

    • The space that would be used by creating a section for each condition. In fact the specific improvement of the table is that it takes extra advantage of space in the horizontal plane as well as the vertical plane.

    And instead of just presenting the raw data, it also adds:

    • The normal rate of incidence for each condition, so that the reader understands the extent to which rates are abnormal or unexpected.

    • Easy comparison between the clinically diagnosed, self diagnosed, and combined rates of the condition in the LW demographic. This preserves the value of the original raw data presentation while also easing the mental arithmetic of how many people claim to have a condition.

    • Percentage spread between the clinically diagnosed and the base rate, which saves the effort of figuring out the difference between the two values.

    • Relative risk between the clinically diagnosed and the base rate, which saves the effort of figuring out how much more or less likely a LessWronger is to have a given condition.

    Add all that together and you've created a compelling presentation that significantly improves on the 'naive' raw data presentation.

  • Use visuals in general, they help draw and maintain interest.

None of these are solely for the benefit of people with ADD. ADD is an exaggerated profile of normal human behavior. Following this kind of advice makes your article more accessible to everybody, which should be more than enough incentive if you intend to have an audience.1

Roko's Basilisk

This year we finally added a Basilisk question! In fact, it kind of turned into a whole Basilisk section. A fairly common question about this years survey is why the Basilisk section is so large. The basic reason is that asking only one or two questions about it would leave the results open to rampant speculation in one direction or another. By making the section comprehensive and covering every base, we've pretty much gotten about as complete of data as we'd want on the Basilisk phenomena.

Basilisk Knowledge
Do you know what Roko's Basilisk thought experiment is?

Yes: 1521 73.2%
No but I've heard of it: 158 7.6%
No: 398 19.2%

Basilisk Etiology
Where did you read Roko's argument for the Basilisk?

Roko's post on LessWrong: 323 20.2%
Reddit: 171 10.7%
XKCD: 61 3.8%
LessWrong Wiki: 234 14.6%
A news article: 71 4.4%
Word of mouth: 222 13.9%
RationalWiki: 314 19.6%
Other: 194 12.1%

Basilisk Correctness
Do you think Roko's argument for the Basilisk is correct?

Yes: 75 5.1%
Yes but I don't think it's logical conclusions apply for other reasons: 339 23.1%
No: 1055 71.8%

Basilisks And Lizardmen

One of the biggest mistakes I made with this years survey was not including "Do you believe Barack Obama is a hippopotamus?" as a control question in this section.2 Five percent is just outside of the infamous lizardman constant. This was the biggest survey surprise for me. I thought there was no way that 'yes' could go above a couple of percentage points. As far as I can tell this result is not caused by brigading but I've by no means investigated the matter so thoroughly that I would rule it out.

Higher?

Of course, we also shouldn't forget to investigate the hypothesis that the number might be higher than 5%. After all, somebody who thinks the Basilisk is correct could skip the questions entirely so they don't face potential stigma. So how many people skipped the questions but filled out the rest of the survey?

Eight people refused to answer whether they'd heard of Roko's Basilisk but went on to answer the depression question immediately after the Basilisk section. This gives us a decent proxy for how many people skipped the section and took the rest of the survey. So if we're pessimistic the number is a little higher, but it pays to keep in mind that there are other reasons to want to skip this section. (It is also possible that people took the survey up until they got to the Basilisk section and then quit so they didn't have to answer it, but this seems unlikely.)

Of course this assumes people are being strictly truthful with their survey answers. It's also plausible that people who think the Basilisk is correct said they'd never heard of it and then went on with the rest of the survey. So the number could in theory be quite large. My hunch is that it's not. I personally know quite a few LessWrongers and I'm fairly sure none of them would tell me that the Basilisk is 'correct'. (In fact I'm fairly sure they'd all be offended at me even asking the question.) Since 5% is one in twenty I'd think I'd know at least one or two people who thought the Basilisk was correct by now.

Lower?

One partial explanation for the surprisingly high rate here is that ten percent of the people who said yes by their own admission didn't know what they were saying yes to. Eight people said they've heard of the Basilisk but don't know what it is, and that it's correct. The lizardman constant also plausibly explains a significant portion of the yes responses, but that explanation relies on you already having a prior belief that the rate should be low.


Basilisk-Like Danger
Do you think Basilisk-like thought experiments are dangerous?

Yes, I think they're dangerous for decision theory reasons: 63 4.2%
Yes I think they're dangerous for social reasons (eg. A cult might use them): 194 12.8%
Yes I think they're dangerous for decision theory and social reasons: 136 9%
Yes I think they're socially dangerous because they make everybody involved look foolish: 253 16.7%
Yes I think they're dangerous for other reasons: 54 3.6%
No: 809 53.4%

Most people don't think Basilisk-Like thought experiments are dangerous at all. Of those that think they are, most of them think they're socially dangerous as opposed to a raw decision theory threat. The 4.2% number for pure decision theory threat is interesting because it lines up with the 5% number in the previous question for Basilisk Correctness.

P(Decision Theory Danger | Basilisk Belief) = 26.6%
P(Decision Theory And Social Danger | Basilisk Belief) = 21.3%

So of the people who say the Basilisk is correct, only half of them believe it is a decision theory based danger at all. (In theory this could be because they believe the Basilisk is a good thing and therefore not dangerous, but I refuse to lose that much faith in humanity.3)

Basilisk Anxiety
Have you ever felt any sort of anxiety about the Basilisk?

Yes: 142 8.8%
Yes but only because I worry about everything: 189 11.8%
No: 1275 79.4%

20.6% of respondents have felt some kind of Basilisk Anxiety. It should be noted that the exact wording of the question permits any anxiety, even for a second. And as we'll see in the next question that nuance is very important.

Degree Of Basilisk Worry
What is the longest span of time you've spent worrying about the Basilisk?

I haven't: 714 47%
A few seconds: 237 15.6%
A minute: 298 19.6%
An hour: 176 11.6%
A day: 40 2.6%
Two days: 16 1.05%
Three days: 12 0.79%
A week: 12 0.79%
A month: 5 0.32%
One to three months: 2 0.13%
Three to six months: 0 0.0%
Six to nine months: 0 0.0%
Nine months to a year: 1 0.06%
Over a year: 1 0.06%
Years: 4 0.26%

These numbers provide some pretty sobering context for the previous ones. Of all the people who worried about the Basilisk, 93.8% didn't worry about it for more than an hour. The next 3.65% didn't worry about it for more than a day or two. The next 1.9% didn't worry about it for more than a month and the last .7% or so have worried about it for longer.

Current Basilisk Worry
Are you currently worrying about the Basilisk?

Yes: 29 1.8%
Yes but only because I worry about everything: 60 3.7%
No: 1522 94.5%

Also encouraging. We should expect a small number of people to be worried at this question just because the section is basically the word "Basilisk" and "worry" repeated over and over so it's probably a bit scary to some people. But these numbers are much lower than the "Have you ever worried" ones and back up the previous inference that Basilisk anxiety is mostly a transitory phenomena.

One article on the Basilisk asked the question of whether or not it was just a "referendum on autism". It's a good question and now I have an answer for you, as per the table below:

Mental Health Conditions Versus Basilisk Worry
Condition Worried Worried But They Worry About Everything Combined Worry
Baseline (in the respondent population) 8.8% 11.8% 20.6%
ASD 7.3% 17.3% 24.7%
OCD 10.0% 32.5% 42.5%
AnxietyDisorder 6.9% 20.3% 27.3%
Schizophrenia 0.0% 16.7% 16.7%

 

The short answer: Autism raises your chances of Basilisk anxiety, but anxiety disorders and OCD especially raise them much more. Interestingly enough, schizophrenia seems to bring the chances down. This might just be an effect of small sample size, but my expectation was the opposite. (People who are really obsessed with Roko's Basilisk seem to present with schizophrenic symptoms at any rate.)

Before we move on, there's one last elephant in the room to contend with. The philosophical theory underlying the Basilisk is the CEV conception of friendly AI primarily espoused by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Which has led many critics to speculate on all kinds of relationships between Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Basilisk. Which of course obviously would extend to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a project to develop 'Friendly Artificial Intelligence' which does not implement a naive goal function that eats everything else humans actually care about once it's given sufficient optimization power.

The general thrust of these accusations is that MIRI, intentionally or not, profits from belief in the Basilisk. I think MIRI gets picked on enough, so I'm not thrilled about adding another log to the hefty pile of criticism they deal with. However this is a serious accusation which is plausible enough to be in the public interest for me to look at.

 

Percentage Of People Who Donate To MIRI Versus Basilisk Belief
Belief Percentage
Believe It's Incorrect 5.2%
Believe It's Structurally Correct 5.6%
Believe It's Correct 12.0%

Basilisk belief does appear to make you twice as likely to donate to MIRI. It's important to note from the perspective of earlier investigation that thinking it is "structurally correct" appears to make you about as likely as if you don't think it's correct, implying that both of these options mean about the same thing.

 

Sum Money Donated To MIRI Versus Basilisk Belief
Belief Mean Median Mode Stdev Total Donated
Believe It's Incorrect 1365.590 100.0 100.0 4825.293 75107.5
Believe It's Structurally Correct 2644.736 110.0 20.0 9147.299 50250.0
Believe It's Correct 740.555 300.0 300.0 1152.541 6665.0

Take these numbers with a grain of salt, it only takes one troll to plausibly lie about their income to ruin it for everybody else.

Interestingly enough, if you sum all three total donated counts and divide by a hundred, you find that five percent of the sum is about what was donated by the Basilisk group. ($6601 to be exact) So even though the modal and median donations of Basilisk believers are higher, they donate about as much as would be naively expected by assuming donations among groups are equal.4

 

Percentage Of People Who Donate To MIRI Versus Basilisk Worry
Anxiety Percentage
Never Worried 4.3%
Worried But They Worry About Everything 11.1%
Worried 11.3%

In contrast to the correctness question, merely having worried about the Basilisk at any point in time doubles your chances of donating to MIRI. My suspicion is that these people are not, as a general rule, donating because of the Basilisk per se. If you're the sort of person who is even capable of worrying about the Basilisk in principle, you're probably the kind of person who is likely to worry about AI risk in general and donate to MIRI on that basis. This hypothesis is probably unfalsifiable with the survey information I have, because Basilisk-risk is a subset of AI risk. This means that anytime somebody indicates on the survey that they're worried about AI risk this could be because they're worried about the Basilisk or because they're worried about more general AI risk.

 

Sum Money Donated To MIRI Versus Basilisk Worry
Anxiety Mean Median Mode Stdev Total Donated
Never Worried 1033.936 100.0 100.0 3493.373 56866.5
Worried But They Worry About Everything 227.047 75.0 300.0 438.861 4768.0
Worried 4539.25 90.0 10.0 11442.675 72628.0
Combined Worry         77396.0

Take these numbers with a grain of salt, it only takes one troll to plausibly lie about their income to ruin it for everybody else.

This particular analysis is probably the strongest evidence in the set for the hypothesis that MIRI profits (though not necessarily through any involvement on their part) from the Basilisk. People who worried from an unendorsed perspective donate less on average than everybody else. The modal donation among people who've worried about the Basilisk is ten dollars, which seems like a surefire way to torture if we're going with the hypothesis that these are people who believe the Basilisk is a real thing and they're concerned about it. So this implies that they don't, which supports my earlier hypothesis that people who are capable of feeling anxiety about the Basilisk are the core demographic to donate to MIRI anyway.

Of course, donors don't need to believe in the Basilisk for MIRI to profit from it. If exposing people to the concept of the Basilisk makes them twice as likely to donate but they don't end up actually believing the argument that would arguably be the ideal outcome for MIRI from an Evil Plot perspective. (Since after all, pursuing a strategy which involves Basilisk belief would actually incentivize torture from the perspective of the acausal game theories MIRI bases its FAI on, which would be bad.)

But frankly this is veering into very speculative territory. I don't think there's an evil plot, nor am I convinced that MIRI is profiting from Basilisk belief in a way that outweighs the resulting lost donations and damage to their cause.5 If anybody would like to assert otherwise I invite them to 'put up or shut up' with hard evidence. The world has enough criticism based on idle speculation and you're peeing in the pool.

Blogs and Media

Since this was the LessWrong diaspora survey, I felt it would be in order to reach out a bit to ask not just where the community is at but what it's reading. I went around to various people I knew and asked them about blogs for this section. However the picks were largely based on my mental 'map' of the blogs that are commonly read/linked in the community with a handful of suggestions thrown in. The same method was used for stories.

Blogs Read

LessWrong
Regular Reader: 239 13.4%
Sometimes: 642 36.1%
Rarely: 537 30.2%
Almost Never: 272 15.3%
Never: 70 3.9%
Never Heard Of It: 14 0.7%

SlateStarCodex (Scott Alexander)
Regular Reader: 1137 63.7%
Sometimes: 264 14.7%
Rarely: 90 5%
Almost Never: 61 3.4%
Never: 51 2.8%
Never Heard Of It: 181 10.1%

[These two results together pretty much confirm the results I talked about in part two of the survey analysis. A supermajority of respondents are 'regular readers' of SlateStarCodex. By contrast LessWrong itself doesn't even have a quarter of SlateStarCodexes readership.]

Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson)
Regular Reader: 206 11.751%
Sometimes: 365 20.821%
Rarely: 391 22.305%
Almost Never: 385 21.962%
Never: 239 13.634%
Never Heard Of It: 167 9.527%

Minding Our Way (Nate Soares)
Regular Reader: 151 8.718%
Sometimes: 134 7.737%
Rarely: 139 8.025%
Almost Never: 175 10.104%
Never: 214 12.356%
Never Heard Of It: 919 53.06%

Agenty Duck (Brienne Yudkowsky)
Regular Reader: 55 3.181%
Sometimes: 132 7.634%
Rarely: 144 8.329%
Almost Never: 213 12.319%
Never: 254 14.691%
Never Heard Of It: 931 53.846%

Eliezer Yudkowsky's Facebook Page
Regular Reader: 325 18.561%
Sometimes: 316 18.047%
Rarely: 231 13.192%
Almost Never: 267 15.248%
Never: 361 20.617%
Never Heard Of It: 251 14.335%

Luke Muehlhauser (Eponymous)
Regular Reader: 59 3.426%
Sometimes: 106 6.156%
Rarely: 179 10.395%
Almost Never: 231 13.415%
Never: 312 18.118%
Never Heard Of It: 835 48.49%

Gwern.net (Gwern Branwen)
Regular Reader: 118 6.782%
Sometimes: 281 16.149%
Rarely: 292 16.782%
Almost Never: 224 12.874%
Never: 230 13.218%
Never Heard Of It: 595 34.195%

Siderea (Sibylla Bostoniensis)
Regular Reader: 29 1.682%
Sometimes: 49 2.842%
Rarely: 59 3.422%
Almost Never: 104 6.032%
Never: 183 10.615%
Never Heard Of It: 1300 75.406%

Ribbon Farm (Venkatesh Rao)
Regular Reader: 64 3.734%
Sometimes: 123 7.176%
Rarely: 111 6.476%
Almost Never: 150 8.751%
Never: 150 8.751%
Never Heard Of It: 1116 65.111%

Bayesed And Confused (Michael Rupert)
Regular Reader: 2 0.117%
Sometimes: 10 0.587%
Rarely: 24 1.408%
Almost Never: 68 3.988%
Never: 167 9.795%
Never Heard Of It: 1434 84.106%

[This was the 'troll' answer to catch out people who claim to read everything.]

The Unit Of Caring (Anonymous)
Regular Reader: 281 16.452%
Sometimes: 132 7.728%
Rarely: 126 7.377%
Almost Never: 178 10.422%
Never: 216 12.646%
Never Heard Of It: 775 45.375%

GiveWell Blog (Multiple Authors)
Regular Reader: 75 4.438%
Sometimes: 197 11.657%
Rarely: 243 14.379%
Almost Never: 280 16.568%
Never: 412 24.379%
Never Heard Of It: 482 28.521%

Thing Of Things (Ozy Frantz)
Regular Reader: 363 21.166%
Sometimes: 201 11.72%
Rarely: 143 8.338%
Almost Never: 171 9.971%
Never: 176 10.262%
Never Heard Of It: 661 38.542%

The Last Psychiatrist (Anonymous)
Regular Reader: 103 6.023%
Sometimes: 94 5.497%
Rarely: 164 9.591%
Almost Never: 221 12.924%
Never: 302 17.661%
Never Heard Of It: 826 48.304%

Hotel Concierge (Anonymous)
Regular Reader: 29 1.711%
Sometimes: 35 2.065%
Rarely: 49 2.891%
Almost Never: 88 5.192%
Never: 179 10.56%
Never Heard Of It: 1315 77.581%

The View From Hell (Sister Y)
Regular Reader: 34 1.998%
Sometimes: 39 2.291%
Rarely: 75 4.407%
Almost Never: 137 8.049%
Never: 250 14.689%
Never Heard Of It: 1167 68.566%

Xenosystems (Nick Land)
Regular Reader: 51 3.012%
Sometimes: 32 1.89%
Rarely: 64 3.78%
Almost Never: 175 10.337%
Never: 364 21.5%
Never Heard Of It: 1007 59.48%

I tried my best to have representation from multiple sections of the diaspora, if you look at the different blogs you can probably guess which blogs represent which section.

Stories Read

Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Whole Thing: 1103 61.931%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 145 8.141%
Partially And Abandoned: 231 12.97%
Never: 221 12.409%
Never Heard Of It: 81 4.548%

Significant Digits (Alexander D)
Whole Thing: 123 7.114%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 105 6.073%
Partially And Abandoned: 91 5.263%
Never: 333 19.26%
Never Heard Of It: 1077 62.29%

Three Worlds Collide (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Whole Thing: 889 51.239%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 35 2.017%
Partially And Abandoned: 36 2.075%
Never: 286 16.484%
Never Heard Of It: 489 28.184%

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (Nick Bostrom)
Whole Thing: 728 41.935%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 31 1.786%
Partially And Abandoned: 15 0.864%
Never: 205 11.809%
Never Heard Of It: 757 43.606%

The World of Null-A (A. E. van Vogt)
Whole Thing: 92 5.34%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 18 1.045%
Partially And Abandoned: 25 1.451%
Never: 429 24.898%
Never Heard Of It: 1159 67.266%

[Wow, I never would have expected this many people to have read this. I mostly included it on a lark because of its historical significance.]

Synthesis (Sharon Mitchell)
Whole Thing: 6 0.353%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 2 0.118%
Partially And Abandoned: 8 0.47%
Never: 217 12.75%
Never Heard Of It: 1469 86.31%

[This was the 'troll' option to catch people who just say they've read everything.]

Worm (Wildbow)
Whole Thing: 501 28.843%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 168 9.672%
Partially And Abandoned: 184 10.593%
Never: 430 24.755%
Never Heard Of It: 454 26.137%

Pact (Wildbow)
Whole Thing: 138 7.991%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 59 3.416%
Partially And Abandoned: 148 8.57%
Never: 501 29.01%
Never Heard Of It: 881 51.013%

Twig (Wildbow)
Whole Thing: 55 3.192%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 132 7.661%
Partially And Abandoned: 65 3.772%
Never: 560 32.501%
Never Heard Of It: 911 52.873%

Ra (Sam Hughes)
Whole Thing: 269 15.558%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 80 4.627%
Partially And Abandoned: 95 5.495%
Never: 314 18.161%
Never Heard Of It: 971 56.16%

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Optimal (Iceman)
Whole Thing: 424 24.495%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 16 0.924%
Partially And Abandoned: 65 3.755%
Never: 559 32.293%
Never Heard Of It: 667 38.533%

Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens (Chatoyance)
Whole Thing: 217 12.705%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 16 0.937%
Partially And Abandoned: 24 1.405%
Never: 411 24.063%
Never Heard Of It: 1040 60.89%

Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
Whole Thing: 1177 67.219%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 22 1.256%
Partially And Abandoned: 43 2.456%
Never: 395 22.559%
Never Heard Of It: 114 6.511%

[This is the most read story according to survey respondents, beating HPMOR by 5%.]

The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
Whole Thing: 440 25.346%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 37 2.131%
Partially And Abandoned: 55 3.168%
Never: 577 33.237%
Never Heard Of It: 627 36.118%

Consider Phlebas (Iain Banks)
Whole Thing: 302 17.507%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 52 3.014%
Partially And Abandoned: 47 2.725%
Never: 439 25.449%
Never Heard Of It: 885 51.304%

The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect (Roger Williams)
Whole Thing: 226 13.232%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 10 0.585%
Partially And Abandoned: 24 1.405%
Never: 322 18.852%
Never Heard Of It: 1126 65.925%

Accelerando (Charles Stross)
Whole Thing: 293 17.045%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 46 2.676%
Partially And Abandoned: 66 3.839%
Never: 425 24.724%
Never Heard Of It: 889 51.716%

A Fire Upon The Deep (Vernor Vinge)
Whole Thing: 343 19.769%
Partially And Intend To Finish: 31 1.787%
Partially And Abandoned: 41 2.363%
Never: 508 29.28%
Never Heard Of It: 812 46.801%

I also did a k-means cluster analysis of the data to try and determine demographics and the ultimate conclusion I drew from it is that I need to do more analysis. Which I would do, except that the initial analysis was a whole bunch of work and jumping further down the rabbit hole in the hopes I reach an oasis probably isn't in the best interests of myself or my readers.

Footnotes


  1. This is a general trend I notice with accessibility. Not always, but very often measures taken to help a specific group end up having positive effects for others as well. Many of the accessibility suggestions of the W3C are things you wish every website did.

  2. I hadn't read this particular SSC post at the time I compiled the survey, but I was already familiar with the concept of a lizardman constant and should have accounted for it.

  3. I've been informed by a member of the freenode #lesswrong IRC channel that this is in fact Roko's opinion, because you can 'timelessly trade with the future superintelligence for rewards, not just punishment' according to a conversation they had with him last summer. Remember kids: Don't do drugs, including Max Tegmark.

  4. You might think that this conflicts with the hypothesis that the true rate of Basilisk belief is lower than 5%. It does a bit, but you also need to remember that these people are in the LessWrong demographic, which means regardless of what the Basilisk belief question means we should naively expect them to donate five percent of the MIRI donation pot.

  5. That is to say, it does seem plausible that MIRI 'profits' from Basilisk belief based on this data, but I'm fairly sure any profit is outweighed by the significant opportunity cost associated with it. I should also take this moment to remind the reader that the original Basilisk argument was supposed to prove that CEV is a flawed concept from the perspective of not having deleterious outcomes for people, so MIRI using it as a way to justify donating to them would be weird.

[Link] How I Escaped The Darkness of Mental Illness

5 Gleb_Tsipursky 04 February 2016 11:08PM
A deeply personal account by aspiring rationalist Agnes Vishnevkin, who shares the broad overview of how she used rationality-informed strategies to recover from mental illness. She will also appear on the Unbelievers Radio podcast today live at 10:30 PM EST (-5 UTC), together with JT Eberhard, to speak about mental illness and recovery.

**EDIT** Based on feedback from gjm below, I want to clarify that Agnes is my wife and fellow co-founder of Intentional Insights.


Anxiety and Rationality

32 helldalgo 19 January 2016 06:30PM

Recently, someone on the Facebook page asked if anyone had used rationality to target anxieties.  I have, so I thought I’d share my LessWrong-inspired strategies.  This is my first post, so feedback and formatting help are welcome.  

First things first: the techniques developed by this community are not a panacea for mental illness.  They are way more effective than chance and other tactics at reducing normal bias, and I think many mental illnesses are simply cognitive biases that are extreme enough to get noticed.  In other words, getting a probability question about cancer systematically wrong does not disrupt my life enough to make the error obvious.  When I believe (irrationally) that I will get fired because I asked for help at work, my life is disrupted.  I become non-functional, and the error is clear.

Second: the best way to attack anxiety is to do the things that make your anxieties go away.  That might seem too obvious to state, but I’ve definitely been caught in an “analysis loop,” where I stay up all night reading self-help guides only to find myself non-functional in the morning because I didn’t sleep.  If you find that attacking an anxiety with Bayesian updating is like chopping down the Washington monument with a spoon, but getting a full night’s sleep makes the monument disappear completely, consider the sleep.  Likewise for techniques that have little to no scientific evidence, but are a good placebo.  A placebo effect is still an effect.

Finally, like all advice, this comes with Implicit Step Zero:  “Have enough executive function to give this a try.”  If you find yourself in an analysis loop, you may not yet have enough executive function to try any of the advice you read.  The advice for functioning better is not always identical to the advice for functioning at all.  If there’s interest in an “improving your executive function” post, I’ll write one eventually.  It will be late, because my executive function is not impeccable.

Simple updating is my personal favorite for attacking specific anxieties.  A general sense of impending doom is a very tricky target and does not respond well to reality.  If you can narrow it down to a particular belief, however, you can amass evidence against it. 

Returning to my example about work: I alieved that I would get fired if I asked for help or missed a day due to illness.  The distinction between believe and alieve is an incredibly useful tool that I immediately integrated when I heard of it.  Learning to make beliefs pay rent is much easier than making harmful aliefs go away.  The tactics are similar: do experiments, make predictions, throw evidence at the situation until you get closer to reality.  Update accordingly.  

The first thing I do is identify the situation and why it’s dysfunctional.  The alief that I’ll get fired for asking for help is not actually articulated when it manifests as an anxiety.  Ask me in the middle of a panic attack, and I still won’t articulate that I am afraid of getting fired.  So I take the anxiety all the way through to its implication.  The algorithm is something like this:

  1.       Notice sense of doom
  2.       Notice my avoidance behaviors (not opening my email, walking away from my desk)
  3.       Ask “What am I afraid of?”
  4.       Answer (it's probably silly)
  5.       Ask “What do I think will happen?”
  6.       Make a prediction about what will happen (usually the prediction is implausible, which is why we want it to go away in the first place)

In the “asking for help” scenario, the answer to “what do I think will happen” is implausible.  It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll get fired for it!  This helps take the gravitas out of the anxiety, but it does not make it go away.*  After (6), it’s usually easy to do an experiment.  If I ask my coworkers for help, will I get fired?  The only way to know is to try. 

…That’s actually not true, of course.  A sense of my environment, my coworkers, and my general competence at work should be enough.  But if it was, we wouldn’t be here, would we?

So I perform the experiment.  And I wait.  When I receive a reply of any sort, even if it’s negative, I make a tick mark on a sheet of paper.  I label it “didn’t get fired.”  Because again, even if it’s negative, I didn’t get fired. 

This takes a lot of tick marks.  Cutting down the Washington monument with a spoon, remember?

The tick marks don’t have to be physical.  I prefer it, because it makes the “updating” process visual.  I’ve tried making a mental note and it’s not nearly as effective.  Play around with it, though.  If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of anxieties to experiment with. 

Usually, the anxiety starts to dissipate after obtaining several tick marks.  Ideally, one iteration of experiments should solve the problem.  But we aren’t ideal; we’re mentally ill.  Depending on the severity of the anxiety, you may need someone to remind you that doom will not occur.  I occasionally panic when I have to return to work after taking a sick day.  I ask my husband to remind me that I won’t get fired.  I ask him to remind me that he’ll still love me if I do get fired.  If this sounds childish, it’s because it is.  Again: we’re mentally ill.  Even if you aren’t, however, assigning value judgements to essentially harmless coping mechanisms does not make sense.  Childish-but-helpful is much better than mature-and-harmful, if you have to choose.

I still have tiny ugh fields around my anxiety triggers.  They don’t really go away.  It’s more like learning not to hit someone you’re angry at.  You notice the impulse, accept it, and move on.  Hopefully, your harmful alief starves to death.

If you perform your experiment and doom does occur, it might not be you.  If you can’t ask your boss for help, it might be your boss.  If you disagree with your spouse and they scream at you for an hour, it might be your spouse.  This isn’t an excuse to blame your problems on the world, but abusive situations can be sneaky.  Ask some trusted friends for a sanity check, if you’re performing experiments and getting doom as a result.  This is designed for situations where your alief is obviously silly.  Where you know it’s silly, and need to throw evidence at your brain to internalize it.  It’s fine to be afraid of genuinely scary things; if you really are in an abusive work environment, maybe you shouldn’t ask for help (and start looking for another job instead). 

 

 

*using this technique for several months occasionally stops the anxiety immediately after step 6.  

Gamified psychiatry

-1 Clarity 12 January 2016 12:16AM

I have been thinking about the gamification of psychiatry and the rise of mental health apps as a means to motivate behaviours that improve mental health and flourishing. I put together some indications and left a diagram here for my good friends Anne Osognosia and Alex Ithemyia who want to upgrade elements of their mental health based on my personal experience rather than population-based evidence.

Initially I wanted to create a skill tree of sorts and may return to it if some people with app-building experience and an interest in this raise their hands. That would be for evidence-based skills rather than this proof of concept.

Speculative rationality skills and appropriable research or anecdote

3 Clarity 21 July 2015 04:02AM

Is rationality training in it's infancy? I'd like to think so, given the paucity of novel, usable information produced by rationalists since the Sequence days. I like to model the rationalist body of knowledge as superset of pertinent fields such as decision analysis, educational psychology and clinical psychology. This reductionist model enables rationalists to examine the validity of rationalist constructs while standing on the shoulders of giants.

CFAR's obscurantism (and subsequent price gouging) capitalises on our [fear of missing out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out). They brand established techniques like mindfulness as againstness or reference class forecasting as 'hopping' as if it's of their own genesis, spiting academic tradition and cultivating an insular community. In short, Lesswrongers predictably flouts [cooperative principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle).

This thread is to encourage you to speculate on potential rationality techniques, underdetermined by existing research which might be a useful area for rationalist individuals and organisations to explore. I feel this may be a better use of rationality skills training organisations time, than gatekeeping information.

To get this thread started, I've posted a speculative rationality skill I've been working on. I'd appreciate any comments about it or experiences with it. However, this thread is about working towards the generation of rationality skills more broadly.

The Wrongness Iceberg

20 alfredmacdonald 04 February 2013 09:02AM

As soon as I got out of college I got a job at a restaurant. At the time I had never had a job at a restaurant, but my mom had known the owners and I felt obligated to avoid performing badly. Yet inevitably I did perform badly, and how this performance was evaluated would greatly affect my way of perceiving my mistakes.

If you're entrenched in an organization, there's a good chance you have an idea of what it is you're supposed to do and what mistakes you will or will not be making. But suppose you're in a position like this one: by way of your ignorance you know you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and it's just a question of when and how much. Further, you know that if you make too many mistakes, you make people you care about look bad. And finally, there are a lot of unknown unknowns: you don't know what possible mistakes and acts of ignorance exist to begin with, so many mistakes you've made you will be blind to.

The proactive thing to do, naturally, is to try to minimize how many mistakes you make.

There are two key ways to gauge the depth of being told you have made a mistake. The first way is to take mistakes literally, as if no other mistake exists, and any other mistake would be pointed out to you. So if you correct this mistake, everything else should be fine. This is how you'd expect to take mistakes if you were, say, under the supervision of an editor.

But the second kind is where the title of this writeup comes in. Not everyone is literal, or critical enough to notice every mistake. Much of the time, you'll only receive news of a mistake if many other mistakes are already afoot, and this mistake just happens to stand out from the set of mistakes you've already made. And since you don't know what mistakes you could be making, you don't know if there are many more mistakes under your level of awareness that you could be correcting for, but aren't.

In short, you're tasked with avoiding a wrongness iceberg: a mistake indicative of a nautical mile of mistakes below the surface and your level of awareness.

This is a debilitating position to be in, because your mental map of your performance prior to discovering the iceberg needs to be completely rewritten; in addition to accounting for all of the new areas you need to work on, you will likely account for the embarrassment of realizing that you have opened up a new frontier of mistakes to reflect on from your period of unaware incompetence.

While I don't think it's impossible that people exist who have never been in a situation like this, I think anyone who dives into a new field or skill is familiar, at least, with this feeling of brief yet total incompetence. And if you're in a field with enough depth and subjective calls to allow for a wrongness iceberg scenario, there might not be much you can do to prevent it. The most you can do is provide adequate resistance for the inevitable.

That's why I've created this mental model to think about it constructively. In every situation where I've faced a wrongness iceberg, the anxiety has been catastrophic. If you can at least deal with it, you can realize why it is you're anxious and what's going on with your assessment of your own mistakes. From experience, knowing that I'm worried about making this kind of iceberg-revealing mistake is helpful for mitigating my stress. And if you can somehow preempt an iceberg, that's even better.

side note: I've extended this concept to other domains, and it works well. A "dishonesty iceberg" is when one person's lie reveals a nautical mile of lies below the surface, and an "attraction iceberg" is when one person's expression of attraction toward you are indicative of a much greater level of internal attraction.

Mental Clarity; or How to Read Reality Accurately

-10 Hicquodiam 12 April 2012 06:18AM

 

Hey all - I typed this out to help me understand, well... how to understand things:

 

Mental clarity is the ability to read reality accurately. 

 

I don't mean being able to look at the complete objective picture of an event, as you don't have any direct access to that. I'm talking about the ability to read the data presented by your subjective experience: thoughs, sights, sounds, etc. Once you get a clear picture of what that data is, you can then go on and use it to build or falsify your ideas about the world.


This post will focus on the "getting a clear picture" part.


I use the word "read" because it's no different than reading from a book, or from these words. When you read a book, you are actually curious as to what the words are saying. You wouldn't read anything into it that's not there, which would be counterproductive to your understanding.

 

You just look at the words plainly, and through this your mind automatically recognizes and presents the patterns: the meaning of the sentences, their relation to the topic, the visual imagery associated with them, all of that. If you want to know a truth about reality, just look at it and read what's there.


Want to know what the weather's like? Look outside - read what's going on.


Want to know if the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice versa? Look at the movement of the planets, read what they're doing, see which theory fits better.


Want to check if your beliefs about the world are correct? Take one, read the reality that the belief tries to correspond to, and see how well they compare.


This is the root of all science and all epiphanies.


But if it's so simple and obvious, why am I talking about it?


It's not something that we as a species often do. For trivial matters, sure, for science too, but not for our strongly-held opinions. Not for the beliefs and positions that shape our self-image, make us feel good/comfortable, or get us approval. Not for our political opinions, religious ideas, moral judgements, and little white lies.


If you were utterly convinced that your wife was faithful, moreso, if you liked to think of her in that way, and your friend came along and said she was cheating on you, you'd be reluctant to read reality and check if that's true. Doing this would challenge your comfort and throw you into an unknown world with some potentially massive changes. It would be much more comforting to rationalize why she still might be faithful, than to take one easy look at the true information. It would also more damaging.


Delusion is reading into reality things which aren't there. Telling yourself that everything's fine when it obviously isn't, for example. It's the equivalent of looking at a book about vampires and jumping to the conclusion that it's about wizards.


Sounds insane. You do it all the time. You'll catch yourself if you're willing to read the book of your own thoughts: flowing through your head, in plain view, is a whole mess of opinions and ideas of people, places, and positions you've never even encountered. Crikey!


That mess is incredibly dangerous to have. Being a host to unchecked or false beliefs about the world is like having a faulty map of a terrain: you're bound to get lost or fall off a cliff. Reading the terrain and re-drawing the map accordingly is the only way to accurately know where you're going. Having an accurate map is the only way to achieve your goals.



So you want to develop mental clarity? Be less confused, or more successful? Have a better understanding of the world, the structure of reality, or the accuracy of your ideas? 


Just practice the accurate reading of what's going on. Surrender the content of your beliefs to the data gathered by your reading of reality. It's that simple.

 

It can also be scary, especially when it comes to challenging your "personal" beliefs. It's well worth the fear, however, as a life built on truth won't crumble like one built on fiction.

 

Truth doesn't crumble.

 

Stay true.



Further reading:


Stepvhen from Burning true on truth vs. fantasy.


Kevin from Truth Strike on why this skill is important to develop.

 

Help Request: How to maintain focus when emotionally overwhelmed

5 throwaway 07 December 2010 11:29PM

So my personal life just got very interesting. In a net-positive way, certainly, but still, I am, as Calculon put it, "filled with a large number of powerful emotions!" -- some of which are anxious and/or panicky.

This is making it annoyingly difficult to focus at work. I am an absolutely textbook "Attention Deficit Oh-look-a-squirrel!" case at the best of times, and this seems to have made it much, much worse. I can handle small tasks, but anything where I'm going to have to spend an hour solving multiple problems before producing results, I can hardly make myself start.

Has anyone dealt with the problem of maintaining productive focus while emotionally overwhelmed/exhausted, and if so, do you have any pointers?