Nate Soares recommends pairing up when studying, so I figured it would be useful to facilitate that.

If you are looking for a study partner, please post a top-level comment saying:

• What you want to study
• Your level of relevant background knowledge
• If you have sources in mind (MOOCs, textbooks, etc), what those are
• Your time zone

[Update]: I received 720+ responses to the survey. Thanks everyone who helped! I have also concluded the statistical analysis (factor analysis, mediation analysis, clustering and prediction). I have not, however, done the writeup. This may take some time since I just started working. It will be done :) I just wanted to let people know this is the current stage. 

Hello everyone!

My name is Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and I'm the former president of the Stanford Transhumanist Association. I just graduated from Stanford with a masters in computational psychology (my undergraduate degree was in Symbolic Systems, the major with the highest LessWronger density at Stanford and possibly of all universities).

I have a request for the LessWrong community: I would like as many of you as possible to fill out this questionnaire I created to help us understand what causes the diversity of values in transhumanism. The purpose of this questionnaire is twofold:

1. Characterize the state-space of background assumptions about consciousness
2. Evaluate the influence of beliefs about consciousness, as well as personality and activities, in the acquisition of memetic affiliations

The first part is not specific to transhumanism, and it will be useful whether or not the second is fruitful. What do I mean by the state-space of background assumptions? The best way to get a sense of what this would look like is to see the results of a previous study I conducted: State-space of drug effects. There I asked participants to "rate the effects of a drug they have taken" by selecting the degree to which certain phrases describe the effects of the drug. I then conducted factor analysis on the dataset and extracted 6 meaningful factors accounting for more than 50% of the variance. Finally, I mapped the centroid of the responses of each drug in the state-space defined, so that people could visually compare the relative position of all of the substances in a normalized 6-dimensional space. 

I don't know what the state-space of background assumptions about consciousness looks like, but hopefully the analysis of the responses to this survey will reveal them.

The second part is specific to transhumanism, and I think it should concerns us all. To the extent that we are participating in the historical debate about how the future of humanity should be, it is important for us to know what makes people prefer certain views over others. To give you a fictitious example of a possible effect I might discover: It may turn out that being very extraverted predisposes you to be uninterested in Artificial Intelligence and its implications. If this is the case, we could pin-point possible sources of bias in certain communities and ideological movements, thereby increasing the chances of making more rational decisions.

The survey is scheduled to be closed in 2 days, on July 30th 2015. That said, I am willing to extend the deadline until August 2nd if I see that the number of LessWrongers answering the questionnaire is not slowing down by the 30th. [July 31st edit: I extend the deadline until midnight (California time) of August 2nd of 2015.]

Thank you all!

Andrés :)

Here are some links about my work in case you are interested and want to know more:

Survey link

Qualia Computing

Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research 

Psychedelic Perception of Visual Textures

The Psychedelic Future of Consciousness

A Workable Solution to the Problem of Other Minds

So, here's the study¹:

It's veterans' day in Canada. As any good Canadian knows, you're supposed to wear a poppy to show you support the veterans (it has something to do with Flanders Field). As people enter a concourse on the university, a person there does one of three things: gives them a poppy to wear on their clothes; gives them an envelope to carry and tells them (truthfully) that there's a poppy inside; or gives them nothing. Then, after they've crossed the concourse, another person asks them if they want to put donations in a box to support Canadian war veterans.

Who do you think gives the most?

...

If you guessed that it's the people who got the poppy inside the envelope, you're right. 78% of them gave, for an overall average donation of $0.86. That compares to 58% of the people wearing the poppy, for an average donation of $0.34; and 56% of those with no poppy, for an average of $0.15.

Why did the envelope holders give the most? Unlike the no-poppy group, they had been reminded of the expectation of supporting veterans; but unlike the poppy-wearers, they hadn't been given an easy, cost-free means of demonstrating their support.

I think this research has obvious applications, both to fundraising and to self-hacking. It also validates the bible quote (Matthew 6:3) which is the title of this article.

¹ The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action; K Kristofferson, K White, J Peloza - Journal of Consumer Research, 2014

For reasons mentioned in So8res article as well as for other reasons: studying with a partner can be very good.

So if you're looking for a study partner for an online course, reading a manual or else (whether it's in the MIRI course list or not) tell others in the comment section.

The past threads about finding a study partner can be found under the tag study_thread. However, you have higher probability of finding a study partner in the most recent thread. If you haven't found a study partner last month, you are welcome to post the same comment again here.

This is the monthly thread to find a study partner.

For reasons mentioned in So8res article as well as for other reasons: studying with a partner can be very good.

So if you're looking for a study partner for an online course, reading a manual or else (whether it's in the MIRI course list or not) tell others in the comment section.

The past treads about finding a study partner can be found under the tag study_thread. However, you have higher probabilities of finding a study partner in the most recent thread. If you haven't found a study partner last month, you are welcome to post the same comment again here.

This is the monthly thread to find a study partner.

For reasons mentioned in So8res article as well as for other reasons: studying with a partner can be very good.

So if you're looking for a study partner for an online course, reading a manual or else (whether it's in the MIRI course list or not) tell others in the comment section.

The past treads about finding a study partner can be found under the tag study_thread. However, you have higher probabilities of finding a study partner in the most recent thread. If you haven't found a study partner last month, you are welcome to post the same comment again here.

For reasons mentioned in So8res article as well as for other reasons: studying with a partner can be very good. In November, Adele_L had posted an article for people wanting to find a study partner. It got 17 comments, but only 1 since November 16th. So I thought we (I) should make a monthly thread on this instead of constantly going back to an old article which people might (seem to) forget about. If people seem to agree with that, I will make a post about it every month.

So if you're looking for a study partner for an online course or reading a manual (whether it's in the MIRI course list or not) tell others in the comment section.

I'm not sure this is something that can be consciously done, but in this post I want to prime you to consider whether something you do is really, totally, completely wacky and absurd. 

We have trained ourselves a lot to notice when we are wrong. We trained ourselves even more to notice when we are confused and to tell word confusion from substance confusion. 

But here is the tale of what happened to me today, and I don't think it qualifies as any of those:

I had a serious motivational problem yesterday, and got absolutely nothing done. So today I thought I should do things in a different manner, so as to decrease probability of two bad days in a row. One of the most effective things for me is going into the LW Study Hall (the password is in the group's description when you click this link). A very nice place to work that I recommend for everyone to check out, and do one or two pomo's every now and then.  

And I did, I gave myself ten minutes observing others working, and I noticed something remarkable: The property of the LW chat that causes me to be motivated is "Presence of long haired people". Yes.  Presence of people with a long hair. For weeks I had been trying to work out why it was efficient sometimes and not others. The most obvious initial alternative was that when there was a woman, I would feel more driven. I assumed that was the case. But I started getting false negatives and false positives. Today I finally came to terms with the fact. I am motivated by the presence of people whose hair goes to their shoulders. Women or Men. 

Now why did I not notice this before? Seems to me that basically it was such a far fetched hypothesis that I simply had no prior for it. In vain hopes of being rational, I would read about how we fear the twinge of starting, how to beat procrastination, and how to get things done, and valid as those were and are, they would never have given me a complete picture of the unbelievable things my brain thinks behind my back.

Maybe there is something similar taking place in your mind. Even if there isn't, just update with me on the fact that this is true at least for someone, and how there may be millions of other tiny absurd facts controlling people's actions way beyond the scope of imagination of any economist or psychologist.

I have now one more piece of understanding about what is it like to be me, about how to tame and steer my future behavior, and specially one more thing to tell people in awkward silence moments to break the ice and face the absurdity of reality. 

For obvious reasons, if you have long hair, I'd like to make an even stronger case for you to try to work and do pomos at the LW study hall. It's not only yourself that you'll be helping!  

I wrote this post up and circulated it among my rationalist friends. I've copied it verbatim. I figure the more rationally inclined people that can critique my plan the better.

--

TL;DR:

* I'm going to commit to biomedical engineering for a very specific set of reasons related to career flexibility and intrinsic interest.
* I still want to have computer science and design arts skills, but biomedical engineering seems like a better university investment.
* I would like to have my cake and eat it too by doing biomedical engineering, while practicing computer science and design on the side.
* There are potential tradeoffs, weaknesses and assumptions in this decision that are relevant and possibly critical. This includes time management, ease of learning, development of problem solving solving abilities and working conditions.

I am posting this here because everyone is pretty clever and likes decisions. I am looking for feedback on my reasoning and the facts in my assumptions so that I can do what's best. This was me mostly thinking out loud, and given the timeframe I'm on I couldn't learn and apply any real formal method other than just thinking it through. So it's long, but I hope that everyone can benefit by me putting this here.

--
So currently I'm weighing going into biomedical engineering as my major over a major in computer science, or the [human-computer interaction/media studies/gaming/ industrial design grab bag] major, at Simon Fraser University. Other than the fact that engineering biology is so damn cool, the relevant decision factors include reasons like:

1. medical science is booming with opportunities at all levels in the system, meaning that there might be a lot of financial opportunity in more exploratory economies like in SV;
2. the interdisciplinary nature of biomedical engineering means that I have skills with greater transferability as well as insight into a wide range of technologies and processes instead of a narrow few;
3. aside from molecular biology, biomedical engineering is the field that appears closest to cognitive enhancement and making cyborgs for a living;
4. compared to most kinds of engineering, it is more easy to self-teach computer science and other forms of digital value-making (web design or graphical modelling) due to the availability of educational resources; the approaching-free cost of computing power; established communities based around development; and clear measurements of feedback. By contrast, biomedical engineering may require labs to be educated on biological principles, which are increasingly available but scarce for hobbyists; basic science textbooks are strongly variant in quality; and there isn't the equivalent of a Github for biology making non-school collaborative learning difficult.

The two implications here are that even if I am still interested in computer science, which I am, and although biomedical engineering is less upwind than programming and math, it makes more sense to blow a lot of money on a more specialized education to get domain knowledge while doing computer science on the side, than to spend money on an option whose potential cost is so low because of self study. This conjecture, and the assumptions therein, is critical to my strategy.

So the best option combination that I figure that I should take is this:

1. To get the value from Biomedical Engineering, I will do the biomedical engineering curriculum formally at SFU for the rest of my time there as my main focus.
2. To get the value from computer science, I will make like a hacker and educate myself with available textbooks and look for working gigs in my spare time.
3. To get the value from the media and design major, I will talk to the faculty directly about what I can do to take their courses on human computer interaction and industrial design, and otherwise be mentored. As a result I could seize all the real interesting knowledge while ignoring the crap.

Tradeoffs exist, of course. These are a few that I can think of:

• I don't expect to be making as much as an entry level biomedical engineer as I would as a programmer in Silicon Valley, if that was ever possible; nor do I believe that my income would grow at the same rate. As a counterpoint, my range of potential competencies will be greater than the typical programmer, due to an exposure to physical, chemical, and biological systems, their experimentation, and product development. I feel that this greater flexibility could help with companies or startups that are oriented towards health or technological forecasting, but this is just a guess. In any case that makes me feel more comfortable, having that broader knowledge, but one could argue that programming being so popular and upwind makes it the more stable choice anyway. Don't know.
• It's difficult to make money as an undergraduate with any of the skills I would pick up in biomedical engineering for at least a few years. This is important to me because I want to have more-than-minimum wages jobs as a way of completing my education on a debit. While web and graphic designers can start forming their own employment almost immediately, and while programmers can walk into a business or a bank and hustle; doing so with physics, chemistry or biology seems a bit more difficult. This is somewhat countered by co-op and work placement, and the fact that it doesn't seem to take too much programming or web design theory and practice before being able to start selling your skills (i.e. on the order of months).
• Biomedical Engineering has few aesthetic and artistic aspects, the two of which I value. This is what attracted me to the media and design program in the first place. Instead I get to work with technologies which I know will have measurable and practical use, improving the quality of life for the sick and dying. Expressing myself with art and more free-wheeling design is not super urgent, so I'm willing to make this trade. I still hope to be able to orient myself for developing beautiful and useful data visualizations in practical applications, like this guy, and to experiment with maker hacking.

There is still the issue of assuring more-than-dilettante expertise in computer science and design stuff (see Expert Beginner syndrome: http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner). I am semi-confident in my ability to network myself into mentorships with members of faculty [at SFU] that are not my own, and if I'm not good at it now I still believe that it's possible. In addition, my dad has recently become a software consultant and is willing to apprentice me, giving a direct education about software engineering (although not necessarily a good one, at least it's somewhat real).

There are potential weaknesses in my analysis and strategy.

• The time investment in the biomedical engineering faculty as SFU is very high. The requirements are similar to those of being a grad student, complete with a 3.00 minimum GPA and research project. The faculty does everything in its power to allay the burden while still maintaining the standard. However, this crowding out of time reduces the amount of potential time spent learning computer science. This makes the probability of efficient self-teaching go down. (that GPA standard might lead to scholarship access which is good, but more of an externality in this case.)
• While we're on the conscientiousness load: conscientiousness is considered to be an invariant personality trait, but I'm not buying it. The typical person may experience on average no change in their conscientiousness, but typical people don't commit to interventions that affect the workload they can take on either by strengthening willpower, increasing energy, changing thought patterns (see "The Motivation Hacker") or improving organization through external aids. Still, my baseline level of conscientiousness has historically been quite low. This raises the up front cost of learning novel material I'm not familiar with, unlike computing, of which I have a stronger familiarity due to lifelong exposure; this lets me cruise by in computing courses but not necessarily ace them. Nevertheless, that's a lower downside risk.
• Although medical problems are interesting and I have a lot of intrinsic interest in the domain knowledge, there are components of research that interest me while others that I don't currently enjoy as much as evidenced from my current exposure. I can seem myself getting into the data processing and visualization, drafting ergonomic wearable tech, and circuit design especially wrt EEGs. Brute force labwork would be less engaging and takes more out of me, despite systems biology principles being tough but engaging. So there's the possibility that I would only enjoy a limited scope of biomedical engineering work, making the major not worth it or unpleasant.
• Due to the less steep learning curve and more coherent structure of the computer science field, it seems easier to approach the "career satisfaction" or "work passion" threshold with CS than for BME. Feeling satisfied with your career depends on many factors, but Cal Newport argues that the largest factor is essentially mastery, which leads to involvement. Mastery seems more difficult to guage with the noisy and prolonged feedback of the engineering sciences, so the motivations with the greatest relative importance might be the satisfaction of turning out product, satisfying factual curiosity or curiosity about established/canon models (as opposed to curiosity which is more local to your own circumstances or you figuring things out), and in the case of biomed, saving lives by design. With mathematics and programming the problem space is such that you can do math and programming for their own sakes.
• Most instances of biomedical engineering majors around the world are mainly graduate studies. The most often reported experience is that when you have someone getting a PhD in biomedical engineering, it's in addition to their undergraduate experience as a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer or a computer scientist. The story goes that these problem solving skills are applied to the biology after being developed - once again a case of some fields being more upwind than others. By contrast, an undergradute in bioengineering would be taking courses where they are not developing these skills, as our current understanding of biology is not strongly predictive. After talking to one of the faculty heads, the person who designed the program, he is very much aware of problems such as these in engineers as they are currently educated. This includes overdoing specialization and under-emphasizing the entire product development process, or a principle of "first, do no harm". He has been working on the curriculum for thirty years as opposed to the seven years of cases like MIT - I consider this moderate evidence that I will not be missing out on the necessary mental toolkit over other engineers.
• In the case where biomedical engineering is less flexible than I believed, I would essentially have a "jack of all trades" education meaning engineering firms in general would pass over me in favor of a more specialized candidate. This is partially hedged against by learning the computer science as an "out", but in the end it points to the possibility that the way I'm perceiving this major's value is incorrect.

So for this "have cake and eat it to" plan to work there are a larger string of case exceptions in the biomedical option than the computing options, and definitely the media and design option. The reward would be that the larger amount of domain specific knowledge in a field that has held my curiosity for several years now, while hitting on. I would also be playing to one of SFU's comparative advantages: the quality of the biomedical faculty here is high relative to other institutions if the exceptions hold, and potentially the relative quality of the computer science and design faculties as well. (This could be an argument for switching institutions if those two skillsets are a "better fit". However, my intuition is that the cost for such is very high and probably wouldn't be worth it.)

Possible points of investigation:

• What is hooking me most strongly to biomedical engineering were the potentials of cognitive enhancement research and molecular design (like what they have going on at the bio-nano group at Autodesk: http://www.autodeskresearch.com/groups/nano). If these were the careers I was optimizing towards as an ends, it might make more sense to actual model what skills and people will actually be needed to develop these technologies and take advantage of them. After writing this I feel less strongly about these exact fields or careers. Industry research still seems like a good exercise.
• I will have to be honest that after my experience doing lab work for chemistry at school, I was frustrated by how exhausted I am at the end of each session, physically and mentally. This doesn't necessarily reflect on how all lab work will be, especially if it's more intimately tied with something else I want to achieve. And granted, the labs are three hours long of standing. It does make me question how I would be like in this work environment, however, and that is worth collecting more information for.
• To get actual evidence of flexibility in skillset it would be worth polling actual alumni from the program, to see if any of the convictions about the program are true.

--

Thoughts, anyone?

I've been looking for reliable evidence of a claim I've heard a few times. The claim is that the closing of sweatshops (by anti-globalization activists) has resulted in many of the child workers becoming prostitutes. The idea is frequently proffered as an example of do-gooder foolishness ignoring basic economics and screwing people over.

However, despite searching for a while, I can't find anything to indicate that this actually happened.

Some guy at the Library of Economics and Liberty mentions it here:

In one famous 1993 case U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam a large number of them became prostitutes.

But in the article, Paul Krugman mentions the Oxfam study without citation:

In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.

I looked at some Oxfam stuff, but couldn't find the study.

A similar claim is made in The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization by Tomas Larsson (go here and use the search tool for the word 'prostitution'), but doesn't mention the Oxfam study:

Keith E. Maskus, an economist at the University of Colorado, has studied the issue... He concludes that... "The celebrated French ban of soccer balls sewn in Pakistan for the World Cup in 1998 resulted in significant dislocation of children from employment. Those who tracked them found that a large proportion ended up begging and/or in prostitution,"

I looked for a paper or something by Maskus but came up empty.

I was taught this fact at a Poli Sci class in college, but I'm starting to think it's more likely to be an information cascade. Can anyone do a better job than me?

Thanks in advance.

Update: There is now an online sign up to groups with workflowy, based on subject and current ability. You do not have to be signed up to Facebook to join a group, but do add an email address so that the group can contact you:  https://workflowy.com/shared/cf1fd9ca-885f-c1b9-c2e8-e3a315f70138/

The recent Main article, searching for interest in LWers studying maths together, had many comments showing enthusiasm, but nothing really happened.

On an aside, I think that on LessWrong, we tend not to work together all that well. The wiki isn't kept bright and shiny, and most of the ideas we search for are in loose blog posts that often take a while to find. However, I think having a single place in which to work together on a specific topic, might encourage effect groups. Especially if it's in a place that you get fairly regular reminders from.

So, here's a Less Wrong Study Group Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/131607983690959/

Rixie suggested that we could split into smaller groups, based on age. I was thinking perhaps ability. Maybe even a group leader. However, before sitting and pondering this for eternity (just until we have a perfect structure), perhaps we should 'just try it'.

So, who exactly do I think should join the group?

Well, if you're interested in learning maths, and think that being surrounded by LWers might enhance your learning, this group is intended for you. If you're interested in learning maths, but you think that reading a textbook on your own is daunting, or you've tried and had difficulty previously, then this group is intended for you.

Also, if you're interested in learning other LessWrongy subjects (perhaps some cognitive science, or more economics-y stuffs) then this group could do that. If ten people join who want a basic idea economics, then they can work together. This isn't specificly maths, it's whatever we make it.

Personally, when I read a textbook, there's often a paragraph describing a key idea, and the author's words fly right over my head. I've often thought the best thing for me, would to have someone else who I could talk through that bit with. Maybe he or she would see it easily. Maybe I'd see something they wouldn't get.

I also wouldn't worry about level of prior knowledge. Mainly, because mine is zilch :)

So, what are you waiting for?

(No seriously. Just try it.)

Edit: It is true that anonymity is difficult to preserve on Facebook. I am entirely unfamiliar with google, and I certainly would have to make that regular effort to check it there too. If you do wish to join but have issues with public knowledge, please PM me, and I'll keep in contact with you through email (or other if you prefer). I will discuss with you there how to best take part in a study group.

I am currently running a study on depression, in collaboration with Shannon Friedman (http://lesswrong.com/user/ShannonFriedman/overview/). If you are interested in participating, the study involves filling out a survey and will take a few minutes of your time (half an hour would be very generous), most likely once a week for four weeks. Send me an email at mdixo100@uottawa.ca, and I can give you more details. 

Thank you!

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2012/07/prepared-to-wait-new-research.html

The old idea that we make decisions like rational agents has given way over the last few decades to a more realistic, psychologically informed picture that recognises the biases and mental short-cuts that sway our thinking. Supposedly one of these is hyperbolic discounting - our tendency to place disproportionate value on immediate rewards, whilst progressively undervaluing distant rewards the further in the future they stand. But not so fast, say Daniel Read at Warwick Business School and his colleagues with a new paper that fails to find any evidence for the phenomenon.

There is, of course, Kahn Academy for fundamentals. We have already had a discussion on How to learn math.

What resources exist detailing which mathematics to learn in what order? What resources exist that explain the utility of different mathematical subfields for the purpose of directing studies?

Stanford has decided to offer a few classes online, for free. These include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The classes include videos of the same lectures that the Stanford students received, quizzes, homework, and exams that are graded automatically. They start on October 10.

I'm guessing that more than a few LWers will sign up for these. How many people would like to form a study group? Should we just have a discussion thread for it, or is there a better option?

I just found a link to a paper written in 2003 by Geoffrey L. Cohen of Yale University.

"Party over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs"

Abstract:

Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people’s blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one’s political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy’s objective content and participants’ ideological beliefs (Studies 1–3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.

That's written in journal-ese, so I'll post a translation from the article I found that contained the link:

My favorite study (pdf) in this space was by Yale’s Geoffrey Cohen. He had a control group of liberals and conservatives look at a generous welfare reform proposal and a harsh welfare reform proposal. As expected, liberals preferred the generous plan and conservatives favored the more stringent option. Then he had another group of liberals and conservatives look at the same plans, but this time, the plans were associated with parties.

Both liberals and conservatives followed their parties, even when their parties disagreed with their preferences. So when Democrats were said to favor the stringent welfare reform, for example, liberals went right along. Three scary sentences from the piece: “When reference group information was available, participants gave no weight to objective policy content, and instead assumed the position of their group as their own. This effect was as strong among people who were knowledgeable about welfare as it was among people who were not. Finally, participants persisted in the belief that they had formed their attitude autonomously even in the two group information conditions where they had not.”

Also, the final study conducted had subjects write editorials either in support of or against a single policy proposal. The differences in how people responded in the "no group information" condition and the "my political party supports / opposes" conditions are also illuminating...

Full disclosure: This has already been discussed here, but I see utility in bringing it up again. Mostly because I only heard about it offline.

The Paper:

Some researchers were interested if, in the same way that there's a general intelligence g that seems to predict competence in a wide variety of tasks, there is a group intelligence c that could do the same. You can read their paper here.

Their abstract:

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emerges from the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

Basically, groups with higher social sensitivity, equality in conversational turn-taking, and proportion of females are collectively more intelligent. On top of that, those effects trump out things like average IQ or even max IQ.

I theorize that proportion of females mostly works as a proxy for social sensitivity and turn-taking, and the authors speculate the same.

Some thoughts:

What does this mean for Less Wrong?

The most important part of the study, IMO, is that "social sensitivity" (measured by a test where you try and discern emotional states from someone's eyes) is such a stronger predictor of group intelligence. It probably helps people to gauge other people's comprehension, but based on the fact that people sharing talking time more equally also helps, I would speculate that another chunk of its usefulness comes from being able to tell if other people want to talk, or think that there's something relevant to be said.

One thing that I find interesting in the meatspace meetups is how in new groups, conversation tends to be dominated by the people who talk the loudest and most insistently. Often, those people are also fairly interesting. However, I prefer the current, older DC group to the newer one, and there's much more equal time speaking. Even though this means that I don't talk as much. Most other people seem to share similar sentiments, to the point that at one early meetup it was explicitly voted to be true that most people would rather talk more.

Solutions/Proposals:

Anything we should try doing about this? I will hold off on proposing solutions for now, but this section will get filled in sometime.