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Earning money with/for work in AI safety

7 rmoehn 18 July 2016 05:37AM

(I'm re-posting my question from the Welcome thread, because nobody answered there.)

I care about the current and future state of humanity, so I think it's good to work on existential or global catastrophic risk. Since I've studied computer science at a university until last year, I decided to work on AI safety. Currently I'm a research student at Kagoshima University doing exactly that. Before April this year I had only little experience with AI or ML. Therefore, I'm slowly digging through books and articles in order to be able to do research.

I'm living off my savings. My research student time will end in March 2017 and my savings will run out some time after that. Nevertheless, I want to continue AI safety research, or at least work on X or GC risk.

I see three ways of doing this:

  • Continue full-time research and get paid/funded by someone.
  • Continue research part-time and work the other part of the time in order to get money. This work would most likely be programming (since I like it and am good at it). I would prefer work that helps humanity effectively.
  • Work full-time on something that helps humanity effectively.


Oh, and I need to be location-independent or based in Kagoshima.

I know http://futureoflife.org/job-postings/, but all of the job postings fail me in two ways: not location-independent and requiring more/different experience than I have.

Can anyone here help me? If yes, I would be happy to provide more information about myself.

(Note that I think I'm not in a precarious situation, because I would be able to get a remote software development job fairly easily. Just not in AI safety or X or GC risk.)

Buying happiness

-2 gjm 16 June 2016 05:08PM

There's a semi-famous paper by Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson: "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right". (Proper reference: Dunn, E.W., Gilbert, D.T., and Wilson, T.D., If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right, Journal of Consumer Psychology, vol 21, issue 2, April 2011, pp. 115–125.) It's been referenced a few times on LW but curiously never written up properly here. The purpose of this post is to remedy that.

There is an earlier LW post called "Be Happier" which among other things references this paper and quotes some things it says, but that post is monstrously long and covers a lot more ground (hence, less details on the material in this paper).

Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson (hereafter "DGW") offer eight principles to follow. Here they are.

1. Buy experiences instead of things.

Many studies have asked people to reflect on past "material" and/or "experiential" purchases and have consistently found that they report greater happiness from (and are made happier by recalling) the latter than the former.

Why? DGW propose 5 reasons. First, deliberately sought-out experiences encourage us to focus on the here and now (something shown to increase happiness substantially); second, when things don't change we adapt to them rapidly, and "material" purchases like cars and tables tend to be pretty stable (whereas ongoing experiences are more varied); third, it turns out that people spend more time anticipating experiences before they happen and recalling them afterwards than they do for material purchases. Fourth, experiences are less directly comparable to alternatives than material things, and therefore less subject to post-purchase regret. Fifth, experiences are often shared, and other people are a great source of happiness.

2. Help others instead of yourself.

Prosocial spending correlates better to happiness than personal spending. If you give random people money and either tell them to spend it on themselves or to spend it on someone else, the latter makes them happier. Reflecting on past spending-on-others makes people happier than reflecting on past spending-on-self. (I am a little skeptical about that one: the right point of comparison would be not the past spending but the past enjoyment of whatever you spent the money on.)

Why? DGW propose two reasons. First, prosocial spending is good for relationships and relationships are good for happiness. Second, when you spend on someone else you get to feel like a good person.

Most people have wrong intuitions about this: they expect spending on themselves to make them happier. Most people are wrong.

3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones.

As we saw above under #1, we quickly adapt to changes. Therefore, a larger number of varied small pleasures may be a better buy than a single big one. There is some evidence for this (though to my mind it seems to bear less directly on DGW's principle than in the other cases we've considered so far). If you correlate people's happiness with their positive experiences, the correlation with how frequent those experiences are is stronger than the correlation with how intense they are. The optimal (for happiness) number of sexual partners to have over a year is one, perhaps because that gets you more sex even if individual instances are less exciting. (I find this less than convincing; individual instances might be better because partners learn what works well for them.)

The other reason DGW suggest why more smaller things should be better is diminishing marginal utility: half a cookie is more than half as good as a whole cookie. (This is, I think, partly because of adaptation, but that isn't the whole story.)

DGW suggest that this is one reason why the relationship between wealth and happiness isn't stronger: "wealth promises access to peak experiences, which in turn undermine the ability to savor small pleasures".

4. Buy less insurance.

We adapt to bad things as well as good, which means that bad things are less bad than we are liable to expect. Our overestimation of the impact of adverse occurrences is one reason why we buy insurance, which notoriously is always negative-expectation in monetary terms.

DGW cite various studies showing that people expect to be made markedly unhappier by losses than they actually are if the losses occur, and that people expect to regret bad outcomes more than they actually do (we overestimate how much we will blame ourselves, because we underestimate how good we are at blaming anything and anyone else for our misfortunes).

5. Pay now and consume later.

The opposite of the bargain proposed by credit cards! Besides the purely financial problems that arise from overspending (which are large and widespread), DGW suggest that "consume now, pay later" is bad for our happiness because it eliminates anticipation. We may derive a lot of pleasure even from anticipating something that we don't enjoy very much when it happens. "People who devote time to anticipating enjoyable experiences report being happier in general."

You might think that moving an experience later would simply mean more anticipation (good) but less reminiscence (bad), but it turns out that anticipation generally brings more happiness. (And, for unpleasant events, more pain.)

DGW suggest two other benefits of delaying consumption. First, we may make better choices (meaning, in this case, ones yielding more happiness overall, even if less in the very short term) when we make them a little way ahead. Second, the delay may increase uncertainty, which may keep attention focused on the thing we're buying, which may reduce adaptation. (This seems a little convoluted to me; DGW cite some research backing it up but I'm not sure it backs up the "by reducing adaptation" part of it.)

6. Think about what you're not thinking about.

That is: when choosing what to spend on, take some time to consider less obvious aspects that you'd otherwise be tempted to neglect. "The bigger home may seem like a better deal, but if the fixer-upper requires trading Saturday afternoons with friends for Saturday afternoons with plumbers, it may not be such a good deal after all." And: "consumers who expect a single purchase to have a lasting impact on their happiness might make more realistic predictions if they simply thought about a typical day in their life." (Rather than considering only the small bits of that day that will be impacted by their purchase.)

7. Beware of comparison shopping.

Comparison shopping, say DGW, focuses attention on the features that most clearly distinguish candidate purchases from one another, whereas other more-common features may actually have much more impact on happiness. It may also focus attention on more-concrete differences; for instance, if you ask people whether they would more enjoy a small heart-shaped chocolate or a large cockroach-shaped one, they generally prefer the former, but if you ask them to choose one of the two they tend to focus on the size and choose the latter.

DGW also point out that the context during comparison-shopping tends to be different from that during actual consumption, which can skew our evaluations.

8. Follow the herd instead of your head.

DGW cite research supporting de la Rochefoucauld's advice: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it." Others' actual experiences of a thing are likely to be better predictors of our enjoyment than our theoretical estimates: we may know ourselves better, but they know the thing better.

They also suggest (and I don't think this really fits their heading) looking to others for advice on how we would enjoy something we are considering buying. The example they give is of research in which subjects were shown some foods and asked to estimate how much they would enjoy them, after which they ate them and evaluated their actual enjoyment. The wrinkle is that they were also observed, at the moment of being shown the foods, by other observers, who rated their immediate facial reactions -- which turned out to be better predictors of their enjoyment than the subjects' own assessments. So "other people may provide a useful source of information about the products that will bring us joy because they can see the nonverbal reactions that may escape our own notice".

"Announcing" the "Longevity for All" Short Movie Prize

19 infotropism 11 September 2015 01:44PM

The local Belgian/European life-extension non-profit Heales is giving away prizes for whoever can make an interesting short movie about life extension. The first prize is €3000 (around $3386 as of today), other prizes being various gifts. You more or less just need to send a link pointing to the uploaded media along with your contact info to info@heales.org once you're done.

While we're at it you don't need to be European, let alone Belgian to participate, and it doesn't even need to be a short movie anyway. For instance a comic strip would fall within the scope of the rules as specified here : (link to a pdf file)(or see this page on fightaging.org). Also, sure, the deadline is by now supposed to be a fairly short-term September the 21st, 2015, but it is extremely likely this will be extended (this might be a pun).

I'll conclude by suggesting you read the official pdf with rules and explanations if you feel like you care about money or life-extension (who doesn't ?), and remind everyone of what happened last time almost everyone thought they shouldn't grab free contest money that was announced on Lesswrong (hint : few enough people participated that all earned something). The very reason why this one's due date will likely be extended is because (very very) few people have participated so far, after all.

(Ah yes, the only caveat I can think of is that if the product of quality by quantity of submissions is definitely too low (i.e. it's just you on the one hand and on the other hand that one guy who spent 3 minutes drawing some stick figures, and your submission is coming a close second), then the contest may be called off after one or two deadline extensions (also in the aforementioned rules).).

Is there a list of cognitive illusions?

1 DonaldMcIntyre 06 May 2015 04:25AM

After I posted my great idea that "Determinism Is Just A Special Case Of Randomness" because "if not I don't see how there could be free will in a deterministic universe" I was positively guided by the LW community to read the Free Will Sequence so I am learning more about our biases and how we build illusions like free will and randomness in our minds.

But I don't see a list on LW or Wikipedia of a list of cognitive illusions and I think it would be great to have one of those just as it is useful for many people to visit the List Of Cognitive Biases page as a study reference or even to use in day to day life.

I think these are some cognitive illusions that are normally discussed as such:

- Free will

- Randomness/probability

- Time

- Money

There must be many more, but I don't find a list with summaries and that would great (to help me avoid writing posts like my "great idea" above!).

EDIT: The majority of comments below are about questioning if they are illusions or not and if they should be called cognitive illusions.

I guess there is no list of cognitive illusions because there is no academic agreement about these issues like in cognitive biases which are generally accepted as such!

Thx for the comments!

How to save (a lot of) money on flying

8 T3t 03 February 2015 06:25PM

I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.

 

If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money.  The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin.  Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz.  While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense).  However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc).  I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin).  These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.

 

Relevant warnings by gwillen:

You should be EXTREMELY CAREFUL when using this strategy. It is, at a minimum, against airline policy.

If you have any kind of airline status or membership, and you do this too often, they will cancel it. If you try to do this on a round-trip ticket, they will cancel your return. If the airlines have any means of making your life difficult available to them, they WILL use it.

Obviously you also cannot check bags when using this strategy, since they will go to the wrong place (your ostensible, rather than your actual, destination.) This also means that if you have an overhead-sized carryon, and you board late and are forced to check it, your bag will NOT make it to your intended destination; it will go to the final destination marked on your ticket. If you try to argue about this, you run the risk of getting your ticket cancelled altogether, since you're violating airline policies by using a ticket in this way.

 

Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has.  This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.

 

That is all.

How Not to Make Money

-3 diegocaleiro 24 January 2014 08:36PM

Sarcastic Practical Advice Series: 1 How Not to Make Money

I'm calling this a series because I would like it to be a series, feel free to write your own post on "how not to do something many people want to do", especially you, future me. 

 

I'm very good at not making money, and maybe this is a skill you have found yourself needing to perfect

But worry not. Stop rationalizing! I'll teach you some of the craft before you can say all the palindromes in the Finnish language. 

 

(1) Be one of those people who actually turn knowledge, general knowledge, into personally designed actions/policies. The kind of people who, upon learning that driving is more dangerous than being attacked by spiders, and experiencing the first person evolved fear of spiders, understands that he should be as afraid of driving badly as he is of spiders, or much more, and drives accordingly.

(2) Understand that there is no metaphysical Self, only a virtual center of narrative gravity (Read Dennett), whose manner of discounting time is hyperbolic (Read George Ainslie), weirdly self-representative (Read GEB), and basically a mess

(3) Read Reasons and Persons, by Parfit, and really give up on your Naïve intuitions about personal identity over time. Using (1) act accordingly, i.e. screw future retired you

(4) Go through a university program in the humanities, so no one tempts you by throwing money at you after you graduate - This has happened to an academically oriented friend of mine who graduated a Medical Doctor, but actually wanted to be in the lab playing with brains. - If you can make into Greek Mythology, or Iranian Literature, good for you, Philosophy is ok, as are social sciences, as long as you do theory and don't get into politics or institutional design later on. If you go to psychology, you are dangerously near Human Resources, so be sure to be doing it for the reasons Pinker would do it, because you want to understand our internal computer, not to treat people. 

(5) Have some cash: This seems obvious, but it’s worth reminding if you are a machine discounting hyperbolically, you'd better be safe for the next two months. 

(6) Study research on happiness and money: Money doesn't buy happiness, and when it does, it's by buying things to others, regardless of Price. Giving a bike, a Porsche, or a Starbucks coffee to your friends provides you the same amount of fuzzies. Use (1) act accordingly. 

(7) Be curious: If you are the kind of person who knows by heart that the Finish language is more propense to palindromization, you are in a great route not to make money. If you get really excited about space, good for you. If you are so moved by curiosity you can't sleep before you finally figure it out, worry not, money ain't coming your way. Don’t forget all those really cool books you want to read.

(8) Avoid being Anhedonic: Anhedonia is one of the great enemies of those who don't want to make money. If all feels more or less the same to you, there is great incentive to go after the gold, it won't harm you much, and it will afford you the number one value of the Anhedonic, a false sense of security, and the illusion that happiness lies somewhere ahead of you in the future.  If you can be thrilled or excited by the latest Adam Sandler movie, if a double rainbow will make you cry like a baby even in a video, and if you watch this sax video with a young, healthy, fertile female more than once because it’s a good video, rest assured, you’ll be fine.

(9) What do you care what other people think?:
Feynman nailed this aspect of the no-money making business. You may not have noticed but everyone, especially your family, thinks you should make money, Graham says

All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences. - How to do what you love.

It’s not just parents; everyone gets more shares of your money than of your excitement. If this was not the case, Effective Altruists would be advocating roller coasters and volcano lairs with cat people, not high income careers.

(10) Couchsurf and meet couchsurfers and world travelers: If you never did it, go around couchsurfing for a while. As it happens, due to many factors, travelling all the time, a dream of the majority, is cheaper than staying in one spot. Meeting world travelers like 1Mac Madison, 2Puneet Sahani, 3Frederico Balbiani, and 4Rand Hunt  made me realize, respectively, that: 1 It’s possible to travel 2/3rd of the time as a CS major; 2 Indian Citizenship and zero money won’t stop you; 3 Not speaking English or wanting to work with what gave you degrees doesn’t stop you; 4 Spending 90 dollars in 100 days is possible. You’ll feel much less pressure to make money after meeting similar people and being one of them.

(11) Don’t experience Status Anxiety: The World suffers from an intense affliction. Alain de Botton named it Status Anxiety. You are not just richer than most people nowadays. You are unimaginably, unbelievably wealthy (in term of resources you can use) in comparison to everyone that ever lived.  But the point is, the less time you spend comparing, regardless of who you are comparing with, the happier you feel.

(12) Be persuadable by intellectuals outside traditional science, like De Botton and Alan Watts, but not by really terrible The Secret style self-help.

(13) Consider money over-valued: In economics, the price of things is determined by the supply and demand of that particular thing. The interesting thing is that demand is not measured by how many people want something how badly, but this multiplied by each person’s wealth…  If so many (wealthy) people value Rolex watches, they will be overpriced for you, especially if they are paying in luck, inheritance, or interest, and you are paying in work (though both use money as a medium).
Money is a medium of trade, how could it be over-valued?
Simple, there are many other mediums of trade (being nice, becoming more attractive, being a good listener, going to the “right place at the right time”, knowledge, enviable skills, prestige, dominance, strength, signaling, risk – i.e. stealing, Vegas, or bitcoin - , sex, time, energy). If you think these items are cheaper than money, you go for them as your medium of trade. And indeed they are cheaper than money, because everyone knows that money is valuable, and nearly no one thought consciously of the trade value of those things.

(14) Fake it till you don’t make it: My final advice would be to try out not spending money. Do it for a month (I did it for two), set a personal unbearably low barrier according to your standards. Dine before going to dinner with friends, by bike, of course. Carry water instead of buying it. Deny any social activity that would be somewhat costly and substitute it for some personal project, internet download, or analogous near-free alternative. Exercise outside, not in the gym. Take notes on how good your days were, you may find out, as did Kingsley that: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”  Furthermore, with Barry Schwartz, you may find out that less is more, and when you have fewer options of what to do, this gives you not only happiness, but extra capacity to use your psychological attention to actually do what you want to do, do as Obama did, save your precious share of mindspace.

 

There, I hope you feel more fully equipped not to make money, should you ever need this hard earned, practical life-skill. You’re welcome. 

Decision Auctions aka "How to fairly assign chores, or decide who gets the last cookie"

35 [deleted] 21 January 2014 09:13PM

After moving in with my new roomies (Danny and Bethany of Beeminder), I discovered they have a fair and useful way of auctioning off joint decisions. It helps you figure out how much you value certain chores or activities, and it guarantees that these decisions are worked out in a fair way. They call it "yootling", and wrote more about it here.

A quick example (Note: this only works if all participants are of the types of people who consider this sort of thing a Good Idea, and not A Grotesque Parody of Caring or whatnot):

 

Use Case: Who Picks up the Kids from Grandma's?

D and B are both busy working, but it's time to pick up the kids from their grandparents house. They decide to yootle for it.

B bids $100 (In a regular Normal Person exchange, this would be like saying "I'm elbows deep in code right now, and don't want to break flow. I'd really rather continue working right now, but of course I'll go if it's needed.")

D bids $15 (In a regular Normal Person exchange this would be like saying "I don't mind too much, though I do have other things to do now...")

So D "wins" the bid, and B pays him $15 to go get the kids from their grandma's.

Of course.... it would be a pain in the butt to constantly be paying each other, so instead they have a 10% chance of paying 10x the amount, and a 90% chance to pay nothing, using a random number generator.

 

This is made easier by the fact that we have a bot to run this, but before that they would use the high-tech solution of Holding Up Fingers.

We may do this multiple times per day, whenever there’s a good that we have shared ownership of and one of us wants to offload their shares onto the other person. The goods can be anything, e.g. the last brownie, but they’re more often “bads” like who will get up in the middle of the night with a vomiting child, or who will book plane tickets for a trip.

We find this an elegant means of assigning loathed tasks. The person who minded least winds up doing the chore, but gets compensated for it at a price that by their own estimation was fair.


Some other ways it can be implemented:

Joint purchase auction

The decision auction and variants are about allocating shared or partially shared resources to one person or the other, or picking one person to do something. Once in a while you have the opposite problem: deciding on a joint purchase.

Suppose Danny thinks we need a new sofa (this is very hypothetical). I think the one we have is just fine thank you. After some discussion I concede that it would be nice to have a sofa that was less doggy. Danny, being terribly excited about getting a new sofa does a bunch of research and finds his ideal sofa. I think it is a bit overpriced considering it is going to be a piece of gymnastics equipment for the kids for the next 6 years. Conflict ensues! I could bluff that I’m not interested in a new sofa at all and that he can buy it himself if he wants it that badly. But he probably doesn’t want it that bad, and I do want it a little. If only we could buy the sofa conditional on our combined utility for it exceeding the cost, and pay in proportion to our utilities to boot. Well, thanks to separate finances and the magic of mechanism design, we can! We submit sealed bids for the sofa and buy it if the sum of our bids is enough. (And, importantly, commit to not buying it for at least a year otherwise.) Any surplus is redistributed in proportion to our bids. For example, if Danny bid $80 and I bid $40 to buy a hundred dollar sofa, then we’d buy it, with Danny chipping in twice as much as me, namely $67 to my $33.


Generosity without sacrificing social efficiency

“The payments are simply what keep us honest in assessing that.”
If you’re thinking “how mercenary all this is!” then, well, I’m unclear how you made it this far into this post. But it’s not nearly as cold as it may sound. We do nice things for each other all the time, and frequently use yootling to make sure it’s socially efficient to do so. Suppose I invite Danny to a sing-along showing of Once More With Feeling (this may or may not be hypothetical) and Danny doesn’t exactly want to go but can see that I have value for his company. He might (quite non-hypothetically) say “I’ll half-accompany you!” by which he means that he’ll yootle me for whether he goes or not. In other words, he magnanimously decides to treat his joining me as a 50/50 joint decision. If I have greater value for him coming than he has for not coming, then I’ll pay him to come. But if it’s the other way around, he will pay me to let him off the hook. We don’t actually care much about the payments, though those are necessary for the auction to work. We care about making sure that he comes to the Buffy sing-along if and only if my value for his company exceeds his value for staying home. The payments are simply what keep us honest in assessing that. The increased fairness — the winner sharing their utility with the loser — is icing.

[LINK] Mr. Money Mustache on Back of the Napkin Calculations and Financial Planning

-2 Petruchio 24 June 2013 05:14PM

A new Mr. Money Mustache article for those who enjoyed my sequence on financial planning and extreme early retirement.

When the Back of the Napkin can be Worth Millions

Karma as Money

0 diegocaleiro 02 June 2013 01:46AM

How do you gather a theory of Counterfactuals, Karma, and Economics, into a revised algorithm for thinking about Lesswrong?

Thinking of Karma as money. 

There are a lot of things that one may consider worth saying on Lesswrong. Things that go against the agenda, things that may make people unconfortable, things that are different from what the high-ranking officials would prefer to read here. But we don't do it, because we don't want to "loose" precious Karma points. Each Karma point loss is felt as an insecurity, as a tiny arrow penetrating the chest.  But should it be that way? 

Here is the alternative: Think of Karma as money. You work hard for getting a few karma points by writing interesting stuff on superintelligence and whatnot, society rewards you by paying some karma points. Then you go there and write something you think people need to hear, but will downvote for sure, at least initially. Some people by now will be very rich, which affords them the opportunity of saying a lot of things that they are not sure will get themselves upvoted, but are sure should be posted.

Citizen: Wait, you said counterfactuals...

Yes, just like your State doesn't really care or like you going out in your hovercraft through the river and using equipment to climb a mountain, so the people here may not care about putting attention into that idea which you think they should hear. Thus, they dowvote it. They make you pay for their attention. If you mentalize it as "they are drawing my soul and life is worthless if karma is negative", then you are much less likely to end up posting something controversial that may be counterfactually relevant

Just like efficient charity donation works because the vast majority of people are not paying to effectively cause others into being happier, using karma as money works because the vast majority of people are afraid their soul is being sucked every time a downvote comes. But it isn't, this is just the price people charge for their attention, if you think the way I'm tentatively suggesting.  It is just a test worth trying, not necessarily something that I fully endorse. I like the idea, and have been using it since forever. Every post linked here, or an earlier subpart of it, has been negative at some point, and from before posting, I knew it would be a "costly one".  Try it, if you are rich, you may have nothing much to loose, and more controversial but useful stuff will show up with time.  

Let's see how much this costs. 

Maximizing Financial Utility and Frugality

15 Petruchio 23 May 2013 03:55PM

The past few days have seen an increase of chatter concerning retirement and financial planning. One of us is even putting out a prospectus for a rational financial planning sequence. Some others have derided the concept of saving for retirement, as there is a probability of death before that time.

I am of the Extreme Early Retirement group. The idea is to save and invest 60-90% of your income, and you will have enough money to retire within a decade rather than four decades of the normal working career. This requires you to exercise your frugality muscle (such as cutting cable, biking to work, eating out less), but due to hedonistic adaptation, you will come out no less unhappy.

The sequences have already spoken on how spending money does not make us happier (after our basic needs are met). A Rational Financial plan should take this into account, even if a majority of people would not want to consider it.

I am just a beginner, so I linked the two big names in EEA, Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme. You can find their journeys towards financial independence here and here.

ERE is an austerity heavyweight, while MMM lives a pretty luxurious lifestyle, but still spends much less than his former coworkers. He just spends on what is important to him, such as travelling with his family and eating organic food, and not on anything frivolous, such as cable or eating out. He lives very far from a deprived lifestyle which the average person would shy away from. It takes a paradigm shift and some grit, but the people of LessWrong are not the type to reject munchkin ideas because it takes a little bit of mental effort.

If I were to make a compilation of posts for a Rational Financial Planning sequence, it will go as such…

How Little Money you need to Retire ?
Basic Retirement Math
Rationalist Spending 
Maximizing Utilons per Dollar
Utilons Free Of Charge
Investing Rationally Basics

These are just the basics. Investment advice is scare, and the above does not talk about many fianacial aspects, such as insurance, children, career choice. The authors do speak about them on their blog’s, but I omitted them for brevity. Read and follow these posts however, and you will be better off than 90% of your peers, and well on the road to Extreme Early Retirement.

[Edit] This idea of cutting your expenses and maximizing your savings obviously do not apply only to early retirement. Other financial goals, such as saving for a house, building up capital for a business, or giving more money to charity all will be more quickly accomplished if you learn to cut excesses from your life. The driving idea is the cost to live is very small, you are not made any happier by spending money on the extras, and you should put this money where it matters to you the most.

Petruchio

Preparing for a Rational Financial Planning Sequence

21 elharo 22 May 2013 11:48AM

What follows is a rough outline for a possible rational financial planning sequence that was inspired by some other recent discussion here. I'm not sure how useful this would be to how many people. I know there are some LessWrongers who would enjoy and learn from this; but I don't know if there are 5, 50, or 500. If you'd like to read it, let me know. If 500 people tell me they can't wait for this, I'll probably write it. If 5 people say maybe they'll glance at it, then probably not.

 


 

Part I: Preliminaries:

    Financial Rationality
    Multiplying uncertainties
    The inside and outside views
    Interpolation is reliable; extrapolation isn't

Part II: This is important:

  • Why to save for retirement
  • Dying alone in a hole: the story of Jane.   
  • Why compound interest is cool
  • 65-year old you will not want to live like a grad student
  • 65-year old you will not want to work like 35-year old you
  • Existential risk does not defeat personal risk
  • Existential success does not defeat personal risk


Part III: Analyzing Your Life

    (This section needs a lot more fleshing out, and thought)

    Personal satisfaction and happiness: do what you love, and adjust your financial expectations accordingly
    How much do you need to retire?
    When do you want to retire?
    How much do you need to live on today?
    Big expenses you need to plan for
    Increasing Income
    College the best financial decision you'll ever make or the worst?
    Choosing a career: what is your comparative advantage?
    Switching careers
    Career Decisions
        equity vs salary; steady singles or home run hitter
        employee or owner
    Career Tactics
        Salary negotiation
        promotion
        when to change jobs
    Cutting Expenses
    Save more tomorrow
    Inheritance

Part IV: The Practical How-to Advice:

Emergency Cash
Credit cards: the good, the bad, and the criminal
Banking
Where to save (tax advantaged accounts)
The importance of fees
401K matching: the highest return you'll ever see
Social Security
Pensions
What to invest in (index funds)
    diversification
    stock vs bond funds
    domestic vs. international
    target retirement funds
    Comic books are not a retirement plan (but a comic book store might be)
   
Avoiding hucksters and doomsayers
Investment Advisors
What if the shit hits the fan?
Can smart, rational investors beat the market?
Good debt; bad debt
Cars and other expensive purchases
Cutting out the middleman: making money on Craig's list, amazon, eBay and AirB&B
Buying a house
Renting vs. owning a house; rental parity
Student loans
Health Insurance
Life Insurance
Auto Insurance
Your Spouse: the most important financial decision you'll ever make
    Diamonds are forever, but most women would rather have a house.
    One or two incomes?
    Live longer, be happier, get married

Children
Charity

 


If there are any topics you'd like to see covered that aren't here (wills? lawyers? the financial press?), let me know. Similarly, if you think there's a section that doesn't belong and should be dropped, let me know that too.

 

One caveat: while some sections are fairly generic, others will be very U.S. centric. The most specific advice will not be applicable to non-U.S. citizens and residents. That does limit the audience, but there's not too much I can do about that. Perhaps if it's successful I can seek out co-authors to do UK, Canadian, or other country editions.

A question for people who are interested in financial planning material: If this were available as a complete book (electronic and paper) today, how likely do you think it is that you would buy this book instead of one of the other available books on the subject? What would you pay for such a book?  If this were available as both a book and a sequence on LessWrong, how might that change your decision?

For now, this discussion thread is just a minimum viable product (MVP) to find out if a sequence is worth the time it would take me to complete. If the MVP pans out, I'll write and post one or two of these chapters to further gauge interest. If the MVP doesn't look promising, I'll drop it and move on to my next book idea.

Cryocrastinating? Send me (or someone else) money!

14 Stuart_Armstrong 17 April 2013 01:08PM

I know from personal experience how hard it is to actually go through the final process to sign up for cryonics - no matter how theoretically in favour one is. For me, it was Robin Hanson's offer of an hour of chat that sealed the deal - it seemed much easier to focus on getting to that interview, than on potentially saving the whole of my future :-)

Anyway, I'm offering my services to help out others who might want to get that final push over the line. What am I offering? Well, the opportunity to send me money! Simply pledge something like "if I don't get signed up for cryonics by such and such a date, I will send Stuart Armstrong $X".

This sounds incredibly mercenary - I'm offering you the possibility of sending me money? This seems to be a misunderstanding of the whole meaning of the word "offering". Well, for a start, I'm certain that I will never receive that money - if someone pledges "in a year's time, I will have signed up for cryonics, or I will send Stuart Armstrong $200", then I read that as "in a year's time, I will have signed up for cryonics". Because no-one likes losing money they could keep by doing something they want to (want to) do. So what I'm offering is the possibility to make yourself sign up for cryonics.

In fact, I'll do it this way: if I ever get any money from such a pledge, I'll redistribute that money to other people who took the pledge and did sign up. If it's not too many people, I can probably offer one hour chats as well, for those interested.

Of course, this works just as well if you pledge to give money to someone else, not just me, so I encourage you to pledge to whoever you like! Just make sure that:

  1. You don't pledge the money to a charity you approve of - you should have no justification for avoiding signing up. Failure is a failure, not an act of generosity.
  2. You pledge the money to someone who will take the money from you if you fail - or else the whole thing doesn't work at all. I promise to do so!
  3. You bear in mind that these things take longer than you expect (planning fallacy and all that). Pledge a year, aim to have it done in six months.

I already have one person pledged for £100 in a year's time, and I'm fully confident they'll be signed up before that. If I have their permission, I'll let you know as soon as it happens.

 

Gauging of interest: LW stock picking?

7 simplicio 01 January 2013 06:36AM

EDIT: Based on criticism below, I am reconsidering how to proceed with this idea (or something in the neighbourhood).

A topic that has been on my mind recently is where, in our complicated lives, there might be low-hanging fruit ready to be picked by a motivated rationalist. Actual, practical, dollars-and-cents fruit.

In possibly-related news, here is how the writer of About.com's beginner's guide to investing describes the stock market:

Imagine you are partners in a private business with a man named Mr. Market. Each day, he comes to your office or home and offers to buy your interest in the company or sell you his [the choice is yours]. The catch is, Mr. Market is an emotional wreck. At times, he suffers from excessive highs and at others, suicidal lows. When he is on one of his manic highs, his offering price for the business is high as well, because everything in his world at the time is cheery. His outlook for the company is wonderful, so he is only willing to sell you his stake in the company at a premium. At other times, his mood goes south and all he sees is a dismal future for the company. In fact, he is so concerned, he is willing to sell you his part of the company for far less than it is worth. All the while, the underlying value of the company may not have changed - just Mr. Market's mood.

I have heard this narrative many times before, and I'd like to test whether it is accurate - and in particular, whether LWers can consistently beat the market.

The skeptic may well ask: why should LWers have an advantage? Why not go to the professionals - investment advisors? Also, isn't there a whole chapter in Kahneman about how even smart people suck at picking stocks? And what do you, simplicio, know about this anyway?

LWers may have an advantage by virtue of being educated about such topics as cognitive biases, sunk cost fallacy, probabilistic prediction, and expected utility - topics with which investment advisors et al. may or may not be familiar on a gut level. I am not sure if we're any better, but I'd like to test it. Also, if LW turns out to be any good at offering such advice, that advice would presumably be free, unlike that of yon advisor (fees tend to kill returns on investment - just ask anybody who uses Intrade). As for what I personally know - not very much yet. But I find competition very stimulating.

Accordingly, my proposal is for a contest: over the course of 2013, I will set up & maintain a Google Drive spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will be shared with contest participants. Each participant will have say $5,000 of play money to use "buying" (or "selling") stocks on the exchange of their choice. Contestants will record the date of purchase or sale, quantity, and preferably provide comments regarding why they are buying or selling.

At the end of this contest (Dec 31, 2013?), I will commit to Paypal the winner (defined as the person with the highest market valuation of play assets as of midnight on that date) the equivalent of $50 CAD in their local currency. In the unlikely event that I win, I will donate that $50 to the Against Malaria Foundation. (Above commitment does not take effect until I actually gauge interest in this contest, figure out an end date & rules etc., and decide to proceed. If anyone else wants to throw money in the pot, please do.)

The purposes of this post are therefore:

  • to find out who is interested - please leave a comment below, and e-mail me at ispollock [at] gmail.com if you want in;
  • to solicit constructive and destructive criticism of the project, especially from any local experienced investors (in particular, perhaps a one-year timeframe is too short for a meaningful contest? Also, real-world experience of transaction costs in buying and selling would be extremely helpful);
  • to ask if anyone knows of a better software platform for the contest than Google Drive, or knows of any extremely helpful resources I should be reading/linking to.
I am probably just being naive, but I am rather excited about what LW could accomplish here. Even an abject failure would be instructive, if not inspiring.

Incentives to Make Money More Effectively, Should We List Them?

0 diegocaleiro 30 October 2012 12:28AM

There is a bit of nice and recent discussion going on about money here, "money" in the sense of the common peasant "I want more money" not in the senses of "Unit of caring" "Utilon buyer" "Trade-able entity unavailable for acausal trade" etc...

There is also, on the web, and in your local store, hundreds of thousands of advices on how to make money: fast, more, passively, selling your body, or brain, or virtual structures. 

People who have money (entrepreneurs, owners), study money (economists) or focus on money (stockbrokers) have a lot to tell you about something closely related. Incentives. They studied and understand when incentives work and when they don't. Some have become masters of creating the right incentives, for employees, customers, CEOs, everyone.

I wont lie, usually, the incentive is money. Pure, abstract, trade-able, feeling-of-power causing, money. Sometimes (Citibank, Safra Bank) also travelling.

What I don't see around a lot, and would like to ask you to help me brainstorm, and list (later I'll edit by adding suggestions and maybe commenting) are the incentives to make money themselves that work, and those that don't.

There are a lot of LWers, I know, who excel at domain X and are emotionally averse to making money, out of X, or sometimes, at all. Money-making is, in a word, impure! Item 6 will deal with that.

I'll say some random unconventional things and open the discussion for those with more experience:

1)Belonging to a society that lacks money and money making altogether is a very powerful incentive for wanting money. The Indians of Brazil (my homeland) frequently engage in juridic battles and bureaucracy to obtain more money from governmental organs, more time than they would dedicate to get medical attention, for instance.

2)I've heard that having a lot of money is an incentive to make more, by making it easier to do so. Spiteful Billionaire meme makes fun of this hypothesis

3)Also heard that not having money is a great incentive to make more. This seems more logical. When you see the empty plate in the horizon, or being thrown in the streets, some sort of alarm must trigger. (If you have experience with this, relate it please)

Yet, I find that even though there is a strong correlation (within the brazilian cultural elite I hang around with) between having a job and not having money at ages 18-28, there is no correlation at all between not having money and efficiency of making money (by either already be making a lot, or in a career with such prospect). It is as if the emergency button can get you to hike a hill, but not to climb a mountain.

4)Morals against munching on others. Traditional, moral or religious frameworks of mind will make an individual believe (probably truly) that munching on friends, family, couchsurfers, franciscans, altruists and other exploitable folk is a bad/undesirable thing to do. One who doesn't want to munch has a stronger incentive to get his own money.

5)Pride. Lots of people are very very proud of having money, theirs or familial. I never understood that, but here it is, just a fact, stated.

6)Nobility times. My mum points out frequently that in our day and age (in Brazil, but also in the states) there is an idealization of making money. Sometimes it is great, sometimes it is nauseating. Her point though is that during the medieval ages when social class was fundamentally determined from birth, working was seen as a lower activity. It was nearly opposite of Self-Madesmanship. Only the needy, with little status shall work. Same view was held by Aristotle, who, in his conception of working, never worked a day in his life. Something like how we see manual tough labour nowadays, but looking down on every worker. Some people, her and me included, were raised somehow in this anomic (mislocated) environment which persists in many European colonies and perhaps among the descendants, within Europe, of past nobles. Worse for them in a changing world.

7) Your suggestions will be listed here soon...

I ask you to suggest things which are incentives for, or against making money. And I don't mean "Good Reasons" and "Bad Reasons" I mean which incentives, in economic jargon, work effectively as an incentive for people to make more money. Then after that you can write about their goodness and badness.

 

 

The Craft And The Community: Wealth And Power And Tsuyoku Naritai

3 [deleted] 23 April 2012 04:06PM

In this post, I'll try to tackle the question of whether this community and its members should focus more efforts and resources on improving their strength as individuals and as a community, than on directly tackling the problem of singularity. I'll start off with a personal anecdote, because, while I know it's not indispensable, I think anecdotes help the reader to think in near rather than far mode, and this post's topic is already too easily thought of in far mode in the first place.

The other day, I was in an idle conversation with a cab driver when he asked me: What would you do if you won the lottery? Is there some particular dream you have, such as travelling the world or something? I said (and I apologize in advance for the grandiosity and egotism of what follows, mostly because it might show a poor appraisal of my own competence and ability)

Well, it's not like I would ever play at the lottery, but if I did, and somehow won, I would

  • Pay myself the very best tutors and the very best education (I'm thinking Master's Degrees, PhD, and so on, that's all pretty damned expensive depending on where you take it) in my chosen speciality.
  • Pay myself the best aid in achieving peak sustainable physical, mental, and emotional condition (as optimized for the struggles and stresses of a daily life of extreme academic exertion, not for, say, performing in the battlefield, the olympics, or competitive chess). Coaches, gurus, chemicals, whatever it takes.
  • Spend one or two or even three years around the world learning as many "important" languages as I can. Not in order of ease or priority: Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and Turkish and Arabic and Hebrew and their Ancient variants, because of all the doors these could open... and Basque and Navajo (those two would be just for the hell of it). (I already know English, Spanish, French, and a fair amount of German and Arabic).
  • With the acquired technical knowledge and skills, and the help of the contact network and the better understanding of human nature that learning so many languages and exploring so many cultures and travelling so much will have netted me, use the remaining money to start a business, one that involves as many people as possible in a way such that I can train them to be a Chaos Legion.
  • Hopefully, once I have achieved enough profits to make the growth of my business secure, donate a constant stipendium to my favourite nonprofits.
  • In my old age, use the returns from all the previous efforts to found a school (actually an integral education system, think something between Summerhill School and the Mahora Academy Complex) which would be optimized for great justice and the rigorous use and promotion and exponential spread of modern rationality

 

 

My reply surprised both of us. Him, because it was atypical (apparently most people would spend them on luxury items and so on, that is, they would spend their newfound money in signalling that they have it... I think the mistake comes from seeing rich people doing it and then assuming that that's what you should do if you become rich, the only other option apparently being saving it up in an account). That a modern rationalist came up with an atypical answer to such a question is only to be expected.

But I was surprised too, because I found it strange that what I thought I ought to do and what I wanted to do coincided so perfectly. I wasn't even expecting those last two points, they sort of naturally came out in the spur of the moment. Upon further thought, I was also surprised that this turned out to be merely an exaggeration and heavy of my pre-existing plan, which I am already attempting to follow with far less material means. That is to say, the dramatic change in money did not fundamentally change what I wanted to do with my (currently limited) lifetime.

But then I asked myself: if my priority is reducing existential risk, why am I not giving all the money to my favourite nonprofits immediately?

And that's where it hit me: I wanted to make myself stronger. And the point I'm trying to make is that, well, so should we all. Why?

There's a strong selfish component to that (not that there's anything wrong with healthy selfishness), but, for someone who considers existential risk an extremely important factor, enlightened self-interest might still be on the side of donating immediately.

But it might also be a sound strategy, sounder, perhaps, to exponentially increase our ability to help fight existential risk, in terms of fear, and improve the general level of human rationality, in terms of desire (I understand that we would all be happier in a world with more rational people, for many, many reasons, not all of which are altruistic). So, how would we go about this? I submit to you this tentative strategy draft.

 

  • Step Zero: Improve our own physical and mental condition. We need the best possible hardware to operate on. This will give us raw ability. The ability to gain abilities, so to speak. This includes making ourselves happy (which itself overlaps with and is enabled by some of the following points: it's a virtuous cycle).
  • Step One: Increasing our own personal, intrinsic worth: buying with our money goods that improve our ability to both obtain and enjoy more goods, and that could never be taken away from us by economic transaction. While we could teach ourselves those with only the cost of opportunity of not spending that time earning wages, well thought out and carefully applied expenditure can significantly accelerate and smooth the process. This will make us powerful, useful tools, for our own goals and for the goals of those that would associate with us (employers, allies, and so on). This will give us authority. We become acknowledged experts on or at a socially useful field. Scientists, Engineers, Artists and other highly skilled folks are on this level: they can already get a lot done, and change the world but, as the Creationism issue proves, among others, it isn't nearly enough. You often don't get to choose what to work on or how many resources are made available to you, you don't have any control on the fruit of your work once it's done and released, and you may always have trouble getting people to follow your advice, no matter how much you think you know better. Step one is the step of Intrinsic Power.
  • Step Two: Increasing our ability to take advantage of social status: learning and perfecting languages, social skills, communication and manipulation tools, dress sense and sense of signalling, dancing, romantic an sexual intelligence and skill (how many powerful people had their careers and/or reputations ruined forever because of badly handled sex and romance?)... That is, we will learn and master the rules of the game, the game we are all playing all the time by virtue of associating with other human beings, and avoid defecting by accident, among other possible mistakes. This will give us urbanity. Together with authority, it already means both credit and influence. At this level, you can actually get a lot more stuff done, because you're much better at persuading people to want to follow your suggestions out of their own volition.
    • This includes the ability to delegate, divide work and manage specialists, empower and motivate people to help you, helping them grow themselves in the process, etc. Step Two is the step of Soft Power.

A lot of effort has already been expended by the community in working on these first steps. But there's a third step that isn't getting worked on much, perhaps because of aesthetic values, perhaps because it's one of the most dangerous to wield, both to the world and to ourselves and our own personal integrity:

  • Step Three: Increase how much coercive power we hold over how many of our fellow human beings: the ability to make them do things or else. My impression is that economic power (both affluence and assets) is much more secure and far less vulnerable than other sources such as, say, media influence or political clout, or social power brokering (which is greatly enhanced by joining support groups or becoming one ourselves), (although the feedback between these tends to be positive, on average, and overlap and migration between them is hardly unheard of). This power is increased exponentially, and is much easier to maintain, by having both Step One (you actually know what you're doing or at least where to get the information, and are more able to judge it) and Two (you know what not to do and how to achieve the greatest results with the minimal expenditure of your power) under your belt, and of course all three steps profit from Step Zero. At this level, to a certain extent, people will do what you want them to, their own feelings, initiatives and desires factoring far less into the actions they end up choosing than they otherwise would.

 

Those are partly selfish goals unto themselves: power means freedom to do what you want, and that and high social status are already very enjoyable for their own sake. Additionally, the more of us achieve them (and the larger the capacity in which they achieve them), the more resources they can get assigned and the more support they can gather (or force) for the sake of efforts towards preventing existential risk. But I suggest that they be mainly planned, optimized and instrumentalized for Step Four, the most dangerous of all:

 

  • Step Four: Use the gained knowledge, skills, assets, and position to improve the overall level of both cognitive and instrumental rationality of humanity.

 

Which has the following advantages I can think of, listed without regard for altruism or selfishness:

 

  • Humans are enabled to be far more successful in the pursuit of happiness, whatever that is, and in otherwise improving themselves, their lives, and the world around them. Their liberty in terms of choices is also greatly increased, once free of akrasia and with an enhanced ability to identify and accurately assess choices.
  • We as rationalists feel far less isolated and vulnerable and far more at home in a world where there are more people like us and where people are more like us (not quite the same thing). Life will generally be more fun and interesting.
  • We'll get a much wider pool of potential candidates from which people with the ability to help prevent existential risk, and the cost and difficulty of gathering more support and resources will be greatly diminished. In other words, we'll be much more effective at preventing existential risk.

 

Does achieving Step Four mean humanity will actually be in less of a danger of self-destructing at that point? It's not a rhetorical question, and I don't think its answer is trivial: in particular, having many half rationalists (I might well still be one myself) running around might represent a considerable danger, which could be sustained in time. However, projects such as Methods of Rationality or The Centre for Modern Rationality, as well as this site's very existence seem to hint that some of the smartest among us are willing to take the risk.

So, the immediate question I ask of you in earnest, the whole point of this post: How do we go about spending our money and effort in the most effective way to prevent existential risk? How much to de expend in directly attacking the problem as we are, how much do we expend in actually making ourselves stronger?

In sillier terms: Should the Z Warriors go and try to confront Cell right now, before he grows too strong to beat, or should they avoid the fight and go train instead? (assume that they do nothing with their lives but be in fights, train to prepare for fights, or run away from fights they are not prepared for yet)

[Link]: GiveWell is aiming to have a new #1 charity by December

19 Normal_Anomaly 29 November 2011 03:11AM

GiveWell, LessWrong's most cited organization for optimal philanthropy, is currently re-evaluating its charity rankings with the goal of naming a new #1 charity by December 2011. Essentially, VillageReach (the current top charity) has met all of its short-term funding needs, to the point where it no longer has the greatest marginal return.

Our current top-rated charity is VillageReach. In 2010, we directed over $1.1 million to it, which met its short-term funding needs (i.e., its needs for the next year or so).

VillageReach still has longer-term needs, and in the absence of other giving opportunities that we consider comparable, we’ve continued to feature it as #1 on our website. However, we’ve also been focusing most of our effort this year on identifying and investigating other potential top-rated charities, with the hope that we can refocus attention on an organization with shorter-term needs this December. (In general, the vast bulk of our impact on donations comes in December.) We believe that we will be able to do so. We don’t believe we’ll be able to recommend a giving opportunity as good as giving to VillageReach was last year, but given VillageReach’s lack of short-term (1-year) room for more funding, we do expect to have a different top recommendation by this December.

EDIT: The new charities are up! They are the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.

NIH Solicitation: Basic research on decision making

11 PhilGoetz 21 September 2011 03:56PM

The NIH recently announced a solicitation for Basic Research on Decision Making: Cognitive, Affective, and Developmental Perspectives.  This is an R01, which means you aren't going to get it unless you have a team, with members who already have a bunch of publications in refereed journals.  It's possible that SIAI could go after this as a prime - unlikely that they would win, but possible.  OppNet intends to commit approximately $3,000,000 in FY 2012 to fund 5 to 15 grants in response to this FOA.  Applications budgets may not exceed $500,000 direct costs per year. Letter of intent due December 18, 2011.

exists(max(performance(pay)))

-3 PhilGoetz 29 July 2011 07:52PM

US Congresspeople don't make a lot of money in salary - most make $174,000/yr.  They could easily make several times that much as consultants.  They do, however, have insider information giving them very large returns on the stock market.  For that, or other reasons, many of our representatives care more about keeping their jobs than about not wrecking the economy.

Most discussion of incentivizing assumes that higher pay leads to higher performance.  The logic is that higher pay leads to wanting more to keep the job, which leads to higher performance.  But the second link in this chain is weak.  Sometimes higher motivation to keep the job leads to lower performance.  CEOs are motivated to hide losses with accounting tricks, military officers are motivated to deny and cover up abuse by their subordinates, teachers are motivated to inflate their students' test scores.

General Bitcoin discussion thread (June 2011)

4 SilasBarta 10 June 2011 11:21PM

We've started a habit of creating periodic Bitcoin threads to confine discussion thereof to those threads and prevent excessive proliferation of Bitcoin topics in the discussion section.  Here is a link to the last one, which links the other discussions.  Lot's to talk about, and another bounce in Bitcoin's value (up to 33 then down to 24), so share your links and thoughts!

Seeking advice on a moral dilemma

5 michaelcurzi 10 May 2011 06:00AM

I just found 120 Euro (about $172) on the floor in the hallway in a hostel in Berlin. What should I do, and why?

 

  • It's not inconceivable that the hostel might just take the money if I turn it in.
  • I'll be at this hostel for about two more days.

 

Looking for companies affiliated with transhumanism

1 michaelcurzi 21 April 2011 06:28AM

I want to make a list of companies that are affiliated with transhumanism. I'm looking for companies pursuing transhumanist goals (ex: VR, gene sequencing) or built by transhumanists themselves (ex: arguably Elon Musk).

What places do you know of? Which look like cool places to work? Extra points if you've worked there.

Aside from my personal reasons for seeking those companies (internships, research for future projects), I think a list of transhumanist companies will be a good thing to keep around for other future endeavors.

Also: The Seasteading Institute, SIAI, BioCurious, etc are all incredibly cool, but I'm not looking for non-profits. 

My list so far:

  • The obvious ones to start with are anything connected with Peter Thiel and the Founders' Fund.
  • Tesla Motors and SpaceX are projects of Elon Musk. Tesla Motors is making electric cars and SpaceX is chasing private space flight.
  • Luke Nosek, who worked on PayPal with Elon Musk, has started a company called Halcyon Molecular and is also connected with Pathway Genomics. The first does gene sequencing, the second offers personal genetics reports.
  • Novamente LLC is working on "intelligent virtual agents for virtual worlds, computer games, and simulations." Ben Goertzel leads it.

What am I missing?

On The Effectiveness of Ferriss

4 diegocaleiro 03 February 2011 09:52AM

Tim Ferriss has been systematically quoted on Less Wrong.

How to make money to donate utilons and show you care is a persistent topic on Less Wrong.

No one here seems to either have tried, or accessed the feasibility of Tim Ferrissing life (for instance accessing by checking for people who tried without the obvious survivor bias displayed in Ferriss`s own website)

A probability 30% of earning $12.000 per month working for 10 hours per week after a build-up time of 4 months working 10 hours a day to get it started (having fun while figuring out how does capitalism work anyway) seems like a fair bet.

My prior for the above paragraph feasibility is about 15%.

Should my posterior be above the 30% threshold?

Data anyone?

Different prior anyone?

Lone bystander bias,everyone?

When you are your own favorite charity

3 PhilGoetz 04 January 2011 03:11AM

If you think that SIAI is the best charity, and you work for SIAI, should you give any money to charity?