Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/should-you-change-where-you-live-a-worked-how-to-solve-a-question/

It's not a hard question, but it potentially has a lot of moving parts.

This post is going to be two in one.  The first is whether you should move geography, the second is how I go through a problem.  In red.

First up - brainstorm ideas:

Meta-level

• Make a list of relevant factors of staying or going (then google it to check for any I missed)
• Decision making strategies

Object level

• Why did this come up?
• Make a list of things you wish were different with how you live now
• Make a list of features of your current geography
• Make a list of features that you know of in other geographies that you would like to obtain.

relevant factors

• Family
• Friends
• Relationships
• Population density
• Population diversity breakdown
• Local safety (bad neighbourhoods)
• Religion
• Politics, country-scale political climate
• Government structure, public welfare
• public transport
• cost of living
• qualify of food, variation of food, culture of food.
• exchange rate
• Normal temperature/weather/climate (rain, cloud, sun, heat, cold, wind)
• Extreme weather risk.  (i.e. cyclones, earthquakes, bushfires)
• Work (and commute)
• Salary
• Pollution (Light, Air or noise pollution)
• Residential or natural environment, parks, trees, tall buildings...
• Ocean (if you swim, or like beach culture)
• Landmarks
• native plants, animals, diseases.
• culture, art.
• difficulty in moving
• opportunity/plans
• language barrier
• public amenities
• Education
• Dwelling -> upsize, downsize, sidegrade...
• Sleep - are you getting enough of it
• postage costs

Why did this come up?

Usually you are thinking of a seeding factor; a reason why you are moving.  It will help to keep it in mind when planning other things.  Is there something wrong or pushing you out, is the current location stagnant, is something pulling you?  Write that down.    Keep it in mind.  Considering the context of the event may help you make a more informed choice, it's also why it's often hard to ask for advice without being more specific about what seems to be the difficulty.

Factors

When you move you will be exchanging your current set of these factors for a new and different set of these factors.  Sometimes you might move with your family, sometimes you might be moving across town and still have the same public transport network but just pay cheaper rent.

Your job; should you choose to accept it: work out which ones are getting better, which are getting worse, and which are staying the same.  Some of them will do both.

Example: you live in a small town with a few friends. you are moving to a big city where you know nobody but you expect to make many more friends quickly.  friends are getting both worse and better at the same time.

How?

There should be some instruction set to make it easier to actually come to an answer.  Not everyone could have automatically generated this list, and not everyone will know what to do with it now.  So what to do with the information is listed here.

1. Take the list above - best of copied to a spreadsheet, make two copies of the list, for each point; write a few words about what you have now in your current location.
2. If certain points seem irrelevant to you then don't worry.  Cross them out.
   E.g. If the weather doesn't bother you much then you can skip it.
3. For each point, out of 10, rate - how much do you care about this factor?  and also out of 10 - How well do you fulfil this need right now.  (this is where it's necessary to understand which ones you don't care about)
4. On the second copy, fill out the details of the place you want to go.  If you don't yet have a destination; look at the first list and find the things that you care about a lot with a low rating.  to start your search, make a list of places that you expect will have a high rating in those area, or search by that thing (i.e. places of religious significance).

   Of course there are ways to do this badly.  for example, as above - you live in a small town with a few friends. you are moving to a big city where you know nobody but you expect to make many more friends quickly.  friends are getting both worse and better at the same time.  If on pondering you realise that no place ever will have more friends than the place you are now, because everywhere else is foreign, then that makes it a not-great metric to go on.  However (in this example) you might benefit from considering instead where might have the potential to have good friends, (or crazy ideas like taking your friends with you)

5. Use your newly laid out knowledge as a guide on where to go and what to look for.

Consider the inverse proposal

Heuristic thinking strategies that might help you.  There are generic ones for problems and then there are questions that suit certain problems very well.  These are relatively generic but I have heard great success in applying them to moving decisions.

This is very generic.  If you are leaving a place for an obvious reason (for example political unrest), it would take a lot to convince you to stay.  This is where the idea of thinking of the inverse proposal comes in.

Example: your work has offered you a promotion.  It's $20,000 extra.  But you would have to leave your friends and family and work in a city several hours away for at least a year.

Example in reverse:  I am going to offer you a $20,000 pay cut and in exchange you get to live in a town with your friends.

*it can be hard to generate the reverse example from your own perspective.

Some people can easily say, pay "$20k just for my lousy friends, hell no".  Other people can easily say, "listen boss, $50k and you got a deal."

Is there an alternative solution

This is a fully generic question to ask.

Before you convince yourself that the factors are out of your hands, consider if you can take it into your own hands.  If you don't at least ask, you will genuinely never know if it could have gone differently.  Can you take your friends with?  Can you take the pay rise but not move for work?  Can you still have a nice lake even if you don't have an ocean?  Who knows.  At least consider it.

How can you make it easier for yourself?

This is a fully generic strategy for getting things done.

As with many decisions in life, they are big, they are hard, they are scary.  Are there things you can do to make the decision easier for yourself?

Meta: this took three hours to research and write.

Have I missed any factors?  I went through this very fast because I am trying a new productivity method; which means less polish but more posts, but also the understanding that I might have missed something.

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.)

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

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

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

Itinerary

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

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

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

Hello all. I'm still fairly new to the site and I've only posted comments up until now, but this definitely warrants its own topic. Currently I work at Queen's University in Canada as a postdoc studying motor control, but my funding runs out at the end of November. I don't have another job immediately lined up, but I've been in discussions with CFAR about working for them either directly or through UC Berkeley on doing some research into rationality techniques. I attended the June minicamp and had an absolute blast with the people there.

Why am I telling you all this? Well... I've applied for some funding to go work at Berkeley but it won't come through until July 2013 at the earliest, assuming I'm awarded it. In the meantime, I've decided to go travelling through the US, buy a round-the-world ticket from San Francisco and wander for the next few months - and it would be awesome to meet up with some rationalists along the way!

A recent post about the Fermi paradox left me wondering about relative difficulties of getting into space, though I don't think it affects those specific arguments.

People establishing a presence in space is difficult but at least plausible-- I'm talking about biological people as we are now, and being able to live and reproduce indefinitely without returning to Earth.

It would be easier if we were less massive, or our planet was less massive, or if we were more radiation resistant. It would be harder if these qualities were reversed, or if we needed a much denser atmosphere.There might come a point where it just isn't feasible for a species to get itself off its planet.

Is there any reasonable speculation about where we are likely to be on the ease-of-getting-into-space spectrum?