In light of SDR's comment yesterday, instead of writing a new post today I compiled my list of ideas I wanted to write about, partly to lay them out there and see if any stood out as better than the rest, and partly so that maybe they would be a little more out in the wild than if I hold them until I get around to them.  I realise there is not a thesis in this post, but I figured it would be better to write one of these than to write each in it's own post with the potential to be good or bad.

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/many-draft-concepts/

I create ideas at about the rate of 3 a day, without trying to.  I write at about a rate of 1.5 a day.  Which leaves me always behind.  Even if I write about the best ideas I can think of, some good ones might never be covered.  This is an effort to draft out a good stack of them so that maybe it can help me not have to write them all out, by better defining which ones are the good ones and which ones are a bit more useless.

With that in mind, in no particular order - a list of unwritten posts:

How to write a dating ad - A suggestion to include information that is easy to ask questions about (this is hard).  For example; don't write, "I like camping", write "I like hiking overnight with my dog", giving away details in a way that makes them worth inquiring about.  The same reason applies to why writing "I'm a great guy" is really not going to get people to believe you, as opposed to demonstrating the claim. (show, don't tell)

How to give yourself aversions - an investigation into aversive actions and potentially how to avoid collecting them when you have a better understanding of how they happen.  (I have not done the research and will need to do that before publishing the post)

How to give someone else an aversion - similar to above, we know we can work differently to other people, and at the intersection of that is a misunderstanding that can leave people uncomfortable.

Lists - Creating lists is a great thing, currently in draft - some considerations about what lists are, what they do, what they are used for, what they can be used for, where they come in handy, and the suggestion that you should use lists more. (also some digital list-keeping solutions)

Choice to remember the details - this stems from choosing to remember names, a point in the conversation where people sometimes tune out.  As a mindfulness concept you can choose to remember the details. (short article, not exactly sure why I wanted to write about this)

What is a problem - On the path of problem solving, understanding what a problem is will help you to understand how to attack it.  Nothing more complicated than this picture to explain it.  The barrier is a problem.  This doesn't seem important on it's own but as a foundation for thinking about problems it's good to have  sitting around somewhere.

How to/not attend a meetup - for anyone who has never been to a meetup, and anyone who wants the good tips on etiquette for being the new guy in a room of friends.  First meetup: shut up and listen, try not to be too much of an impact on the existing meetup group or you might misunderstand the culture.

Noticing the world, Repercussions and taking advantage of them - There are regularly world events that I notice.  Things like the olympics, Pokemon go coming out, the (recent) spaceX rocket failure.  I try to notice when big events happen and try to think about how to take advantage of the event or the repercussions caused by that event.  Motivated to think not only about all the olympians (and the fuss leading up to the olympics), but all the people at home who signed up to a gym because of the publicity of the competitive sport.  If only I could get in on the profit of gym signups...

leastgood but only solution I know of - So you know of a solution, but it's rubbish.  Or probably is.  Also you have no better solutions.  Treat this solution as the best solution you have (because it is) and start implementing it, as you do that - keep looking for other solutions.  But at least you have a solution to work with!

Self-management thoughts - When you ask yourself, "am I making progress?", "do I want to be in this conversation?" and other self management thoughts.  And an investigation into them - it's a CFAR technique but their writing on the topic is brief.  (needs research)

instrumental supply-hoarding behaviour - A discussion about the benefits of hoarding supplies for future use.  Covering also - what supplies are not a good idea to store, and what supplies are.  Maybe this will be useful for people who store things for later days, and hopefully help to consolidate and add some purposefulness to their process.

list of sub groups that I have tried - Before running my local lesswrong group I partook in a great deal of other groups.  This was meant as a list with comments on each group.

If you have nothing to do – make better tools for use when real work comes along - This was probably going to be a poetic style motivation post about exactly what the title suggests.  Be Prepared.

what other people are good at (as support) - When reaching out for support, some people will be good at things that other people are not.  For example - emotional support, time to spend on each other, ideas for solving your problems.  Different people might be better or worse than others.  Thinking about this can make your strategies towards solving your problems a bit easier to manage.  Knowing what works and what does not work, or what you can reliably expect when you reach out for support from some people - is going to supercharge your fulfilment of those needs.

Focusing - An already written guide to Eugine Gendlin's focusing technique.  That needs polishing before publishing.  The short form: treat your system 1 as a very powerful machine that understands your problems and their solutions more than you do; use your system 2 to ask it questions and see what it returns.

Rewrite: how to become a 1000 year old vampire - I got as far as breaking down this post and got stuck at draft form before rewriting.  Might take another stab at it soon.

Should you tell people your goals? - This thread in a post.  In summary: It depends on the environment, the wrong environment is actually demotivational, the right environment is extra motivational.

Meta: this took around 4 hours to write up.  Which is ridiculously longer than usual.  I noticed a substantial number of breaks being taken - not sure if that relates to the difficulty of creating so many summaries or just me today.  Still.  This experiment might help my future writing focus/direction so I figured I would try it out.  If you see an idea of particularly high value I will be happy to try to cover it in more detail.

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/changing-time-zones/

With a few of my new organisation and time management prediction algorithms I have found that I can plan down to a few minutes accurately.  I noticed something today that surprised me.

I wear two watches.  The history of this goes back more than 10 years, but today I wear two watches because one of them is analog and never runs out of battery and the other is digital and tracks heart rate, skin temp, perspiration and other metrics while also being a smart digital watch and telling the time, but only has a 4 day long battery life.

My digital watch updates to whatever time my phone is set to, which updates to global servers etc. so that watch is the right time.  I accidentally set my analog watch fast and then noticed I would get places just on time, or quite very exactly on time instead of 5 minutes late.  I really lucked out with this behaviour, because it took me a while to figure out what is happening.  Or what I think is happening.

When I am running late, I check the time in a system 1 way, which means I glance at my watch and continue about my day.  Then my brain takes the information granted by the visual angle of the hands and converts that into time for me to work out if I am running late or on time.  By having my analog watch fast, I will take actions that involve assumptions that the time is actually faster than it is.  For example, deciding to leave my house because I "should have left already", instead of spending another 5 minutes on whatever I am doing.

If I am planning tasks for the future, or doing other time-checking behaviour, I do it using system 2, I naturally check both my watches so that I get an accurate feel for the time now.

Surprise

Today I was struck by the idea I was suddenly running late.  Which is not a feeling I was expecting given that I was in fact running squarely on time.  Where what actually transpired was that I was looking at computer time when I decided to go in the shower, and when I got out of the shower I looked at analog time.  Which put me squarely past the "running right on time" and into the "definitely running late". In other words I changed time zone on myself.

This whole post is to note that noticing when things surprise you is an excellent habit to have.  This case was pretty cut and dry as I analysed why I was late and concluded that I in fact was not.  But the next thing to surprise me might not be so obvious.

Question: What has surprised you recently?  What happened, how did your map of the world fail to explain what was going to happen?

Meta: this took an hour to write.

Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/productivity-list-notch-system/

This is a write up of my current to do list system.  My system and the method of this write up is based on Mark Forster's to do lists.  If you are familiar with The Final Version Perfected you will be able to recognise elements from that system. 

It's not perfect, but it has been working for a few weeks now.  I have difficulty often with tasks of variable "size" and variable "time" (these are both a measure of "getting it done").  I started with the FVP and modified as I felt like it.  This is my Notch system.

I am confident, and I have not yet written about it - as far as I can tell, telling someone your final system is a bit like giving to someone in the pre-industrial revolution, "a working 2010 car" and expecting them to use that to build their own.  If they are a very very good engineer they will work out how to take it apart and how to put it back together so that they can build their own and get driving.  Of course systems are not that complicated, and maybe it's not so hard to give someone a to-do list system and hope they can make use of it.  I also don't credit myself for using a working car in contrast to being in the pre-industrial revolution era.

I believe the trick that underpins systems, the one that doesn't get mentioned often enough when we talk about systems that do or don't work for us, is the underlying meta-system of trying things and iterating on the results.

Having said all that about cars and underlying iterative systems...  This is where I am today.

To start, make a list of all the tasks that you want to do today in any order that they come to mind.  If you are confident that things cannot be done today, they don't belong on the list.  i.e. tasks requiring a specific geographic location that you are not intending on visiting today.  Consider things that might be due, things that are large are acceptable.  

--I make assumptions that significantly small tasks of under 5 minutes don't belong on the list, and regular activities don't need reminding (i.e. dinner with friends).

Example list:
Dogs
Space
write
Sanding
Emails
Battery blocks

Next to each task, write how long you predict it will take.  These will be wrong, that's okay - one of the things we are training is predictive power over future tasks, another is acceptance of the total time you do or do not have in your day.

Example list:
Dogs - 1.5hr
Space - 20mins
write - 1hr
Sanding - 3hrs
Emails - 5hrs
Battery blocks - 3hrs

An important thing that time-estimates can reveal is whether you were planning to surprise yourself by completing more than 24 hours of "expected work" in an 8 hour work day.  With that in mind it might be worthwhile planning what you wont to do today.  Hold onto this thought for now.  (my example list has 13hrs and 50 mins on it)

Look down the list and decide either what you will do first, or what you will do last (or both) and number them accordingly.  

Example list:
Dogs - 1.5hr
Space - 20mins
2. write - 1hr
6. Sanding - 3hrs
1. Emails - 5hrs
Battery blocks - 3hrs

Example list:
4. Dogs - 1.5hr
1. Space - 20mins
3. write - 1hr
5. Sanding - 3hrs
2. Emails - 5hrs
4. Battery blocks - 3hrs

If you find that two tasks are equal, number them the same number.  It doesn't really matter.  Do either of them first!  You can decide later when you get to that number.  If they are equally important then doing either of them is winning at deciding what to do.

After the list is numbered, do the first thing.  If you don't want to do that, you can reconsider the numbers, or just do the next thing instead.

After some period of time you might find yourself bored of whatever task you are on, or for whatever reason doing something else.  (I will sometimes do a bit of email while taking a moment from other tasks).  Don't worry!  This system has you covered.  Any time you feel like it - look to your list and put a notch next to tasks that you have done.

Example list:
4. Dogs - 1.5hr 
1. Space - 20mins - |
3. write - 1hr - ||
5. Sanding - 3hrs
2. Emails - 5hrs - ||
4. Battery blocks - 3hrs

I did the number 1 and I finished so I crossed it out, but I didn't finish 2.  What I did was do one "notch" of work on 2, and then do a notch on 3, then go back to 2 for another "notch", and go ahead and do another notch on 3.  

I use notches because sometimes I don't finish a task but I put a volume of effort into it.  In either time or in depth of work required.  Sometimes a notch will be a really hard 10 minute stretch, or a really easy two hour streak.  The notch time is the time it takes you to come back to the list and consider doing the other tasks.

This seems to be effective for tasks that will need a break, you still get some credit for a notch but you don't get to cross it out yet.  A notch is up to you.  but really it's just a way to keep track of how much of the thing you hacked away.  Some tasks take 5 notches, some take 1.  If it's the end of the day and a task is incomplete but has 4 notches done - you get to feel like you did complete 4 notches even though other tasks were completed in 1 notch.  This task is clearly bigger and harder to complete.

I like that this listing permits larger tasks to be on the same list as "one notch" sized tasks.  In the sense that you can still track the productivity and progress even without completing the tasks.

Where this system fails:

• On days like today, where I don't feel like writing out the list (most of my day is ugh, getting out of bed was hard).  Happens about once a month for me.  But also a workaround seems to be to write a list the night before, or look at yesterdays list for clues about where to begin.  Still - failure mode happens.
  
• On days with other fixed appointments - sometimes it's hard to decide what to do in the limited time frame, but that's where estimates come in, as well as thinking backwards for time management, as described in that post.
• For really really big tasks.  I have a task that is likely to take at least 20 hours over two days and it requires me to be in a set place and work on nothing else during that time.  That task has not made it onto this list system and probably never would.  In the mean time, lots of small tasks are getting done.
  

Meta: this took 2 hours to write.  Today has been a day full of suck and I don't know why but at least I wrote this out.

Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/time-management-and-do-your-tasks-in-a-different-order/

I have been trying out some (new for me) time management techniques.  Various people tell me that they do this naturally, but I had to learn it manually.

This one involves:

1. noticing that you don't really know what you are doing right now.
2. looking up when and where is the next fixed appointment.
3. Calculating how long between now and then.
4. Working out what you want to do before the appointment.
5. Counting down the rest of the time and work out how much spare time you have.

In a worked example:

1. It's 8am and I don't really know what I have to do next.
2. I have a meeting at 12am.
3. that's 4 hours away
4. Before that meeting I want to:
   
   • check facebook
   • check my emails
   • Have breakfast
   • write a post
     
   • travel to the appointment
   • Shower and dress for the appointment
5. In time calculations that is:
   • check facebook - unknown
     
   • check my emails - I could spend 30mins on it.
     
   • Have breakfast - 15mins
     
   • write a post - 2 hours
     
   • Shower and dress for the appointment - 20mins
   • travel to the appointment - 20mins

Total: 3hrs 25mins + facebook time.

In this example; if my facebook time takes 35mins I have literally no wiggle room on my estimates.  But more importantly - if I do my facebook time first - and then fail to stop at 35mins, it means that I will either be running late for the rest of the day OR I will have to cut something short.  The old me would probably cut the last task in the list short.  Which might mean running late to the appointment, and it might mean not finishing writing a post on that day, and leaving it as a draft.

Recently I have been trying out a new factor on this system.  To change the order of the tasks.  Some tasks have fixed lengths in time.  Some tasks are more flexible.  For example, the amount of time it takes to shower and get ready is relatively fixed in time.  However the amount of time it takes to write a post can vary extensively.

With this in mind, I will change the order of the tasks.  Where I used to have a shower last, just as I am rushing out - so that I am fresh clean and ready for a meeting (a great idea if I do say so myself). I will now do something like this:

• Shower and dress for the appointment - 20mins
  
• write a post - 2 hours
• check my emails - I could spend 30mins on it.
  
• Have breakfast - 15mins
  
• Shower and dress for the appointment - 20mins
  
• travel to the appointment - 20mins
• check facebook - unknown

Or even:

• Shower and dress for the appointment - 20mins
  
• write a post - 2 hours
• Have breakfast - 15mins
  
• Shower and dress for the appointment - 20mins
• travel to the appointment - 20mins
  
• check my emails - I could spend 30mins on it.
• check facebook - unknown

Do the fixed tasks all in a row and then do the flexible tasks last.  This means I might have got to my appointment 65 minutes early in the 2nd order, or 35 minutes early in order 1, and worked there on the FB or email.

This also means that if any task has to get cut, truncated or shortened due to a failure of myself to account for time, or some blip happening, like traffic, difficulty finding parking, a blog post taking longer to write or any number of other possibilities - The least important task (of checking facebook) gets cut.  Not one of the more important ones.

Today is not a day to work on cutting down or cutting out of facebook, or sending strategic emails that reduce my email workload.  Today is just a day to do things in a different order.  See how that goes, and make incremental progress on the problem.

Meta: this took 21 minutes to write and I am nearly running late to my next appointment.

Cross posted to lesswrong: 

I was asked to write up a pithy summary of the upshot of this paper. This is the best I could manage.

One of the most remarkable features of the world we live in is that we can make measurements that are consistent across space and time. By "consistent across space" I mean that you and I can look at the outcome of a measurement and agree on what that outcome was. By "consistent across time" I mean that you can make a measurement of a system at one time and then make the same measurement of that system at some later time and the results will agree.

It is tempting to think that the reason we can do these things is that there exists an objective reality that is "actually out there" in some metaphysical sense, and that our measurements are faithful reflections of that objective reality. This hypothesis works well (indeed, seems self-evidently true!) until we get to very small systems, where it seems to break down. We can still make measurements that are consistent across space and time, but as soon as we stop making measurements, then things start to behave very differently than they did before. The classical example of this is the two-slit experiment: whenever we look at a particle we only ever find it in one particular place. When we look continuously, we see the particle trace out an unambiguous and continuous trajectory. But when we don't look, the particle behaves as if it is in more than one place at once, a behavior that manifests itself as interference.

The problem of how to reconcile the seemingly incompatible behavior of physical systems depending on whether or not they are under observation has come to be called the measurement problem. The most common explanation of the measurement problem is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which postulates that the act of measurement changes a system via a process called wave function collapse. In the contemporary popular press you will often read about wave function collapse in conjunction with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which is usually referred to as "spooky action at a distance", a phrase coined by Einstein, and intended to be pejorative. For example, here's the headline and first sentence of the above piece:

More evidence to support quantum theory’s ‘spooky action at a distance’

It’s one of the strangest concepts in the already strange field of quantum physics: Measuring the condition or state of a quantum particle like an electron can instantly change the state of another electron—even if it’s light-years away." (emphasis added)

This sort of language is endemic in the popular press as well as many physics textbooks, but it is demonstrably wrong. The truth is that measurement and entanglement are actually the same physical phenomenon. What we call "measurement" is really just entanglement on a large scale. If you want to see the demonstration of the truth of this statement, read the paper or watch the video or read the original paper on which my paper and video are based. Or go back and read about Von Neumann measurements or quantum decoherence or Everett's relative state theory (often mis-labeled "many-worlds") or relational quantum mechanics or the Ithaca interpretation of quantum mechanics, all of which turn out to be saying exactly the same thing.

Which is: the reason that measurements are consistent across space and time is not because these measurements are a faithful reflection of an underlying objective reality. The reason that measurements are consistent across space and time is because this is what quantum mechanics predicts when you consider only parts of the wave function and ignore other parts.

Specifically, it is possible to write down a mathematical description of a particle and two observers as a quantum mechanical system. If you ignore the particle (this is a formal mathematical operation called a partial trace of an operator matrix ) what you are left with is a description of the observers. And if you then apply information theoretical operations to that, what pops out is that the two observers are in classically correlated states. The exact same thing happens for observations made of the same particle at two different times.

The upshot is that nothing special happens during a measurement. Measurements are not instantaneous (though they are very fast ) and they are in principle reversible, though not in practice.

The final consequence of this, the one that grates most heavily on the intuition, is that your existence as a classical entity is an illusion. Because measurements are not a faithful reflection of an underlying objective reality, your own self-perception (which is a kind of measurement) is not a faithful reflection of an underlying objective reality either. You are not, in point of metaphysical fact, made of atoms. Atoms are a very (very!) good approximation to the truth, but they are not the truth. At the deepest level, you are a slice of the quantum wave function that behaves, to a very high degree of approximation, as if it were a classical system but is not in fact a classical system. You are in a very real sense living in the Matrix, except that the Matrix you are living in is running on a quantum computer, and so you -- the very close approximation to a classical entity that is reading these words -- can never "escape" the way Neo did.

As a corollary to this, time travel is impossible, because in point of metaphysical fact there is no time. Your perception of time is caused by the accumulation of entanglements in your slice of the wave function, resulting in the creation of information that you (and the rest of your classically-correlated slice of the wave function) "remember". It is those memories that define the past, you could even say create the past. Going "back to the past" is not merely impossible it is logically incoherent, no different from trying to construct a four-sided triangle. (And if you don't buy that argument, here's a more prosaic one: having a physical entity suddenly vanish from one time and reappear at a different time would violate conservation of energy.)

Gott famously estimated the future time duration of the Berlin wall's existence:

“Gott first thought of his "Copernicus method" of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand. Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he didn't think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life. Based on its age in 1969 (8 years), Gott left the wall with 75% confidence that it wouldn't be there in 1993 (1961 + (8/0.25)). In fact, the wall was brought down in 1989, and 1993 was the year in which Gott applied his "Copernicus method" to the lifetime of the human race”. “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Richard_Gott

The most interesting unknown in the future is the time of creation of Strong AI. Our priors are insufficient to predict it because it is such a unique task. So it is reasonable to apply Gott’s method.

AI research began in 1950, and so is now 65 years old. If we are currently in a random moment during AI research then it could be estimated that there is a 50% probability of AI being created in the next 65 years, i.e. by 2080. Not very optimistic. Further, we can say that the probability of its creation within the next 1300 years is 95 per cent. So we get a rather vague prediction that AI will almost certainly be created within the next 1000 years, and few people would disagree with that. 

But if we include the exponential growth of AI research in this reasoning (the same way as we do in Doomsday argument where we use birth rank instead of time, and thus update the density of population) we get a much earlier predicted date.

We can get data on AI research growth from Luke’s post: 

“According to MAS, the number of publications in AI grew by 100+% every 5 years between 1965 and 1995, but between 1995 and 2010 it has been growing by about 50% every 5 years. One sees a similar trend in machine learning and pattern recognition.”

From this we could conclude that doubling time in AI research is five to ten years (update by adding the recent boom in neural networks which is again five years)

This means that during the next five years more AI research will be conducted than in all the previous years combined. 

If we apply the Copernican principle to this distribution, then there is a 50% probability that AI will be created  within the next five years (i.e. by 2020) and a 95% probability that AI will be created within next 15-20 years, thus it will be almost certainly created before 2035. 

This conclusion itself depends of several assumptions: 

•   AI is possible

•   The exponential growth of AI research will continue 

•   The Copernican principle has been applied correctly.

Interestingly this coincides with other methods of AI timing predictions: 

•   Conclusions of the most prominent futurologists (Vinge – 2030, Kurzweil – 2029)

•   Survey of the field of experts

•   Prediction of Singularity based on extrapolation of history acceleration (Forrester – 2026, Panov-Skuns – 2015-2020)

•   Brain emulation roadmap

•   Computer power brain equivalence predictions

•   Plans of major companies

It is clear that this implementation of the Copernican principle may have many flaws:

1. The one possible counterargument here is something akin to a Murphy law, specifically one which claims that any particular complex project requires much more time and money before it can be completed. It is not clear how it could be applied to many competing projects. But the field of AI is known to be more difficult than it seems to be for researchers.

2. Also the moment at which I am observing AI research is not really random, as it was in the Doomsday argument created by Gott in 1993, and I probably will not be able to apply it to a time before it become known.

3. The number of researchers is not the same as the number of observers in the original DA. If I were a researcher myself, it would be simpler, but I do not do any actual work on AI.

Perhaps this method of future prediction should be tested on simpler tasks. Gott successfully tested his method by predicting the running time of Broadway shows. But now we need something more meaningful, but testable in a one year timeframe. Any ideas?

In a post recently someone mentioned that there was a list of "Top 15" posters by karma.  That inspired me to send all of them this note:

Hi,

I am messaging you (now) because you are one of the 15 top contributors of the past 30 days of LW.

I was wondering if you do any time tracking; or if you have any idea how much time you spend on LW. (i.e. rescuetime)

I have made the choice to spend more of my time engaging with LW and am wondering how much you (and your other top peers) spend. And also why?

Maybe you want to rate each of these out of 10; the reasons you partake in LW discussions:

 

1. Make the world better (raising the sanity waterline etc) 
2. Fun (spend my spare time here) 
3. Friends (here because my Real-Life is here; and so I come to hang with my friends - or my internet friends hang out here) 
4. Gather rationality (maybe you still gather rationality from LW; maybe you have gathered most of what you can and now are creating your own craft)
5. here for new ideas (LW being a good place to share new ideas) 
6. here to advertise an idea (promoting a line of thinking from elsewhere - could be anything from; more Effective Altruism; to this book) 
7. Here to create my own craft. (from the craft and the community) 
8. other? (as many other's as you like)

 

In addition do you think people (others) should participate more or less in the ongoing conversation? (or stay about as much as they are?) And would you give any particular message to others?

Do you feel like your time spent is effective?

I wonder if this small sample; once gathered will yield anything useful. with your permission I would like to publish your responses (anonymised for your protection) if either something interesting comes out; or nothing interesting (publish the null result)

Please add as many comments as you can :).

I'd also like to thank you for being a part of keeping the community active. I find it a good garden with many friends.

Sincerely, E

(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to rescue time I just like their tracking system)

As of the time of this post; I have received 10 replies.  I waited an extra week or two and there were no more replies after about 2-3 days.

The funny thing about asking for something is that people don't always answer in the way that you want them to answer.  (Mostly I blame myself and the way I asked; but I think its quite funny really that several replies did not include a rating out of 10)

1. Make the world better.

as was pointed out to me by one of the responses: "Mostly this is low because of ambiguity over "the world"", responses were; 0,2,6,y,y. of which I assume the other 5 were, 0,0,0,0,0.

2. fun.

Several replies included that this was a most productive time sink they could think of.  replies were y,y,y,10,10,8. One other person said they used LW as procrastination.  one said, "it's a reasonably interesting way of killing time".

3. friends

answers: y, 0, "4-more like acquaintances", 5.  Some people mentioned local meetups but also that they don't interact online with those people.  I suppose if you are here for friends you are kinda doing it wrong; here to not get yelled at and to understand things is more accurate of a description.  "I treat LW like a social club and a general place to hang out"

4. learn rationality

y,y but doubt it, 5 - a bit, 5.  I expected most of the top posters to have already achieved a level of rationality where they would be searching elsewhere for it.  I assume the others would be 0/n or close.

5. new ideas

.3,4,8 (assume 7*0). I guess the top don't think innovation happens here.  Which is interesting because I thing it does.

6. advertise ideas

.1,"6 - generally", (assuming 8*0).  I was concerned that the active members might be pushing an agenda or something.  Its entirely possible, but seems to not be the case.

7. create craft

.8,7.  I would have thought someone motivated to be increasing the craft of rationality would be here for that purpose.  I guess not.

" I'm not sure to what extent I'm creating my own craft, but it's a good question. At the very least I'm acquiring a better ability to ask whether something makes sense. "

8. other

Two people mentioned that this is a place of quality, or high thinking, they are here for the reasonableness or lack of unreasonableness of the participants.

open questions:

effective time: most responses to this were in the range of, "better than other rubbish on the internet", and "least bad time sink I can think of".

more or less posts: two people suggested more; one suggested less but of higher quality.  They all understand the predicament of the thing.

Time tracking: several people track, and others estimate between 30mins and 3hours a day.

Bearing in mind that the top posting positions are selected on multiple factors including whether or not people have time, not just relating to their effectiveness or their *most rational* status.  I don't believe this selection of people have said anything much helpful, other than 

some quotes:

" LW gives you the opportunity to share your ideas with a large number of smart people who will help you discard or sharpen them without you having to go to the trouble of maintaining a personal blog. A good post has the opportunity to deliver a lot of value to some very smart and altruistically motivated people. Becoming a respected LW contributor takes a lot of intelligence, thought, research, writing skill, and hard work. Many try but few succeed. "

" I am pretty much an internet discussion board addict"

"Suppose LW is just a forum where a bunch of smart people hang out and talk about whatever interests them, which is frequently potentially-important (effective altruism, AI safety) or intellectually interesting (decision theory, maths of AI safety) or practically useful (akrasia, best-textbooks-on-X threads). That seems to me like enough to be valuable"

"My karma comes from thousands of comments, not from meaningful articles."

"I feel there is a power law distribution to LW contributor value with some people like Eliezer, Yvain, and lukeprog making many high-quality posts. So I think the most important thing is for people like that to get “discovered”. It may take some leveling up for them to get to that point though, and encouragement for them to spend time cranking out lots of posts that are high-quality."

" I feel like if we gave top LW posters more recognition that could incentivize the production of more great content, and becoming a top poster with a high % upvoted genuinely seems like a strong challenge and an indicator of superior potential, if achieved, to me."

"As a rule, though, I do not believe that LW has much to do with refining human rationality."

"I think that written reflection is a useful way to engage with new ideas. LW provides a venue to discuss ideas with smart people who care about published evidence."

"I post on Less Wrong primarily because I'm a forum-poster, and this is the forum most relevant to my interests. If I stopped finding forum-posting satisfying, or found a more relevant forum, I'd probably move there and only rarely check LW."

"I think people should participate more. I view LW as a forum and not as a library."

In summary: what I think I have gathered.

The top posters don't think they or lesswrong is effective at changing the world; however this is a nice place to hang out.  I don't know what an effective place would look like but it is almost certainly not this place.  I don't see LW as being worth quitting or shutting down without a *better* alternative.  As a place striving to propagate rationality; that is debatable.  As a garden of healthy discussions and reasonable people remembering that their opposing factions are also reasonable people with different idea - this place deserves a medal.  If only we could hone the essence of reasonableness and share it around to people.  I feel that might be the value of lesswrong.

LW is a system built of people staying, "while its good" as soon as it is no longer as nice of a garden they will be gone.

I hope this helps someone else as well as me.

In light of the discussions about improving this place; I hope this helps contribute to the discussion.

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!

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This is one of the more minor suggestions, just a small tweak to help solve a specific issue.

Discounting time

The issue is the strange behaviour that agents with discount rates have in respect to time.

Quickly, what probability would you put on time travel being possible?

I hope, as good Bayesians, you didn't answer 0% (those who did should look here). Let's assume, for argument sake, that you answered 0.1%.

Now assume that you have a discount rate of 10% per year (many putative agent designs use discount rates for convergence or to ensure short time-horizons, where they can have discount rates of 90% per second or even more extreme). By the end of 70 years, the utility will be discounted to roughly 0.1%. Thus, from then on (plus or minus a few years), the highest expected value action for you is to search for ways of travelling back in time, and do all you stuff then.

This is perfectly time-consistent: given these premisses, you'd want the "you in a century" to search frantically for a time-machine, as the actual expected utility increase they could achieve is tiny.

If you were incautions enough to have discount rates that go back into the past as well as the future, then you'd already be searching frantically for a time-machine, for the tiniest change of going back to the big bang and having an impact there...

The first greatest good for the greatest number for the greatest number will start "first" (by whatever measurement is applied) but ends before the second greatest good ends and doesn't last as long (in total) as the third greatest good.

The second greatest good for the greatest number will start end "last" (by whatever measurement is applied), but does not last as long as the third greatest good (in total)and doesn't start as soon as the first greatest good.

The third greatest good for the greatest number lasts the longest (in total), but ends before the second greatest good ends and starts after the first greatest good starts.

What within utilitarianism allows for selecting between these three greatest good for the greatest number?

Summary: Is there demand for writing posts about this aspect of decision-making?

And of course, is there offer? Because I didn't see any post about it.

Topics I intended to cover include:

• How much is worth 100$ in few years? Why? Why is it useful?

• Risk-return relationship.

• How is it useful in life outside finance?

And topic I would like, but I am not sure if i should cover:

• How can we apply it to death? (in sense, should I live a happy life or struggle to live endlessly?)

I found that missing in decision analysis, and I think it is very important thing to know, since we don't always choose between "I take A" or "I take B", but also between "I take A" or "I take B in two years", or "should i give A to gain B every year next 100 years?"

Why not simply redirect to some other source?

Well, that can be done either way, but I thought clear basics would not harm and would be useful to people who want to invest less time in it.

As you might know, fractal structures appear in a variety of natural situations and have found many technical applications (see Wikipedia for more information and examples). In this short article I want to ask the question, whether it makes sense to structure various activities according to a 'fractal timetable'?

Cleaning rota

When you have to clean a flat or a house you probably you have seen a list like this before. There are some tasks that one needs to do every day, others come along only once a week or once a month. Aside from those main cleaning tasks, there will be many small things you do several times during a day, like throwing something into the trash bin or washing your hands.

If you analyse the structure of this behaviour, you will find that it looks similar to a one dimensional fractal (compare with the various layers in the construction of the Cantor set, for example).

School Timetables

Most schools that I am familiar with use periodic arrangements for the teaching. You have a weekly timetable and at the same time every week you have the same subject for a whole year. This makes sense from the point of view of teacher and room allocation, but is this the best structure for optimal learning?

My own experience suggests that the quality of my memory strongly depends on my understanding. If I take the time to understand everything, I will remember those things for years and can even reconstruct lost knowledge by using intuition and logical deduction. If I learned something poorly, on the other hand, I sometimes forget it completely in a matter of hours.

Understanding is usually gained by a deep involvement with the topic for a longer period of time. I also find it much easier to learn something if I can focus on it for a certain period of time and examine the object/concept in detail without being disturbed by other matters.

What if the best way of teaching school mathematics (for example) would be to have a 3 week long intense workshop once a year with some other 10 one day sessions allocated once a month and small homework problems evenly distributed throughout the year? The same could be done with the other subjects to fill the full school year.

Other Areas

Our motivation, health and available time fluctuate widely, but most jobs require a periodic commitment. This might be OK for mechanical jobs, but for professions with a substantial amount of creativity and cognitive demand one certainly can do better by playing around with the time/work distribution. (Here is an interesting TED talk about a 'year off'.)

Similar problems/opportunities arise in fitness, personal development and relationships. 

Questions

I don't know, whether there are any existing studies on this topic. A superficial Google search didn't reveal anything interesting. I also would like to know, whether you had similar or contradictory experiences? Maybe I am an exception when it comes to this type of learning.

Do you think that adding the mathematical model of a 'fractal' makes this approach more intuitive/useful or whether 'flexible time management' captures enough of the structure of the problem?

Thanks!

Link to the Question

I haven't gotten an answer on this yet and I set up a bounty; I figured I'd link it here too in case any stats/physics people care to take a crack at it.

Related to: lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/

Why do I find myself at this point in time, configuration space, rather than another point? In other words, why do I have certain expectations rather than others?

I don't expect the U.S. presidential elections to have happened but to happen next, where "to happen" and "to have happened" internally marks the sequential order of steps indexed by consecutive timestamps. But why do I find myself to have that particular expectation rather than any other, what is it that does privilege this point?

So you seem to remember Time proceeding along a single line.  You remember that the particle first went left, and then went right.  You ask, "Which way will the particle go this time?"

My question is why I find myself to remember that the particle went left and then right rather than left but not yet right?

But both branches, both future versions of you, just exist.  There is no fact of the matter as to "which branch you go down".  Different versions of you experience both branches.

Yes, but why does my version experience this point of my branch and not any other point of my branch?

I understand that if this universe was a giant simulation and that if it was to halt and then resume, after some indexical measure of causal steps used by those outside of it, then I wouldn't notice it. Therefore if you remove the notion of an outside world there ceases to be any measure of how many causal steps it took until I continued my relational measure of progression.

But that's not my question. Assume for a moment that my consciousness experience is not a causal continuum but a discrete sequence of causal steps from 1, 2, 3, ... to N where N marks this point. Why do I find myself at N rather than 10 or N+1?