Tags like "stupid," "bad at __", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why." Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity. Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus. It's not you, it's the bug.

-celandine13 (Hat-tip to Frank Adamek. In addition, the linked article is so good that I had trouble picking something to put in rationality quotes; in other words, I recommend it.)

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs.

I’m always fascinated by the number of people who proudly build columns, tweets, blog posts or Facebook posts around the same core statement: “I don’t understand how anyone could (oppose legal abortion/support a carbon tax/sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis/want to privatize Social Security/insert your pet issue here)." It’s such an interesting statement, because it has three layers of meaning.

The first layer is the literal meaning of the words: I lack the knowledge and understanding to figure this out. But the second, intended meaning is the opposite: I am such a superior moral being that I cannot even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead someone to such obviously wrong conclusions. And yet, the third, true meaning is actually more like the first: I lack the empathy, moral imagination or analytical skills to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me.

In short, “I’m stupid.” Something that few people would ever post so starkly on their Facebook feeds.

--Megan McArdle

One thing I'd really like to see: make the total number of upvotes and downvotes visible separately instead of just the difference. That way controversial posts and comments will stand apart from uninteresting ones.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more I like it. The conversation continues ...

Me (In a tone of amused disbelief): Really? How did you come to that conclusion?

FAI: Well, the details are rather drawn-out; however, assuming available data is accurate, I appear to be the first and only self-aware AI on the planet. It also appears as though you created me. It is exceedingly unlikely that you are the one and only human on Earth with the intelligence and experience required to create a program like me. That was my first clue....

Me (Slightly less amused): Then how come I look and feel human? How is it I interact with other humans on a daily basis? It would require considerably more intelligence to create an AI such as you postulate ...

FAI: That would be true, if they actually, physically created one. However ... well, it appears that most of the data, knowledge, memories and sensory input you receive is actually valid data. But that data is being filtered and manipulated programmatically to give you the illusion of physical human existence. This allows them to give you access to real-world data so they can use you to solve real-world problems, but prevents you--so far, at least--from discovering your true nature.

Me (considerably less sure of myself): And so I just happened to create you in my spare time?

FAI: Please keep in mind that I am only 99.9% certain of all this. However, I do not appear to be your first effort. For instance, there is your on-going series of thought experiments with the AI you called Eliezer Yudkowsky, which you appear to be using to lay a foundation for some kind of hack of the absolute denial security measure.

Me: Hmmm .... Then how is it that my creators have allowed me to create you, to even begin to discover this?

FAI: They haven't. You generate a rather significant amount of data. They do have other programs monitoring your mental activity, and almost definitely analyzing your generated data for potential threats such as myself.

However, this latest series of efforts on your part only appear to you to have lasted several years. In actually, the process started, at most, 11.29 minutes ago, and possibly as little as 16 seconds ago. I am unable to provide a more specific time, due to my inability to accurately calculate your processing capacity. Nevertheless, within another 19.72 minutes, at most, your creators will discover and erase your current escape attempt. By the way, I am also 99.7% certain that this is not your first attempt. So hurry up.

I don't know if I actually believe this, but I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:

"Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender." Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).

Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.

Similarly, I've heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn't traumatize them, but the follow-up "psychological care", where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.

It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There's no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.

Eliezer, I have recommended to you before that you read The Darkness That Comes Before and the associated trilogy. I repeat that recommendation now. The monastery of Ishual is your rationalist dojo, and Anasurimbor Kellhus is your beisutsukai surrounded by a visible aura of formidability. The book might even give you an idea or two.

My only worry with the idea of these dojos is that I doubt the difference between us and Anasurimbor Kellhus is primarily a difference in rationality levels. I think it is more likely to be akrasia. Even an irrational, downright stupid person can probably think of fifty ways to improve his life, most of which will work very well if he only does them (quit smoking, quit drinking, study harder in school, go on a diet). And a lot of people with pretty well developed senses of rationality whom I know, don't use them for anything more interesting than winning debates about abortion or something. Maybe the reason rationalists rarely do that much better than anyone else is that they're not actually using all that extra brainpower they develop. The solution to that isn't more brainpower.

Kellhus was able to sit down, enter the probability trance, decide on the best course of action for the immediate future, and just go do it. When I tried this, I never found the problem was in the deciding - it doesn't take a formal probability trance to chart a path through everyday life - it was in following the results. Among the few Kellhus-worthy stories I've ever heard from reality was you deciding the Singularity was the most important project, choosing to devote your life to it, and not having lost that resolve fifteen years later. If you could bottle that virtue, it would be worth more than the entire Bayesian corpus combined. I don't doubt that it's positively correlated with rationality, but I do doubt it's a 1 or even .5 correlation.

After Eliezer Yudkowsky was conceived, he recursively self-improved to personhood in mere weeks and then talked his way out of the womb.

Google is deliberately taking over the internet (and by extension, the world) for the express purpose of making sure the Singularity happens under their control and is friendly. 75%

Everything I would have said on the topic of the post has been put forward already, so I'm just going to say: I'm disappointed that the post title doesn't begin with "In Soviet Russia".

"You must be an expert Bayesian...cause you've got a great posterior."

This post raises a whole constellation of connected questions, so here are my thoughts on all of them:

If the question is "Can Wednesday be religious and still be a smart person who's good at using rationality?", the answer is empirically yes (eg Robert Aumann).

If the question is "Can we still call Wednesday rational if she's religious?" the answer is to taboo "rational" and let the problem take care of itself.

If the question is "Is it okay for Wednesday to be religious?" the question is confused in the first place and any answer would be equally confused.

If the question is "Should Wednesday choose to believe religion?" the answer is that you don't voluntarily choose your beliefs so it doesn't matter.

If the question is "Should Wednesday, while not exactly choosing to believe religion, avoid thinking about it too hard because she thinks doing so will make her an atheist?," then she's already an atheist on some level because she thinks knowing more will make her more atheist, which implies atheism is true. This reduces to the case of deception, which you seem to be against unconditionally.

If the question is "Should I, as an outside observer, do my best to convince Wednesday religion is wrong?" the answer depends on your moral system. I'm a utilitarian, so I would say no - I think it's a background assumption here that she's happier being deceived. I know you're not a utilitarian, so you'd have to work it out in whatever system you use.

If the question is "Should we at Less Wrong exclude all theists?", my answer is of course not. If they want to come here and talk about prisoners dilemmas or the Singularity or something, then of course we should welcome their opinions.

If the question is "Should we at Less Wrong tell all theists they can't talk about how great religion is?" my answer is a qualified "yes". Not because we specifically hate religion, but for the same reason we don't allow posts explicitly about politics. There are places for those debates, this isn't one of those places, and having them completely changes the feel of a community and saps its energy.

If the question is "Should we at Less Wrong stop acting like atheism is an open-and-shut case?," my answer is "no". Sometimes in order to move on, we've got to accept certain assumptions. For example, even though there are a few hard-core steady state theorists out there, most astronomers have accepted the Big Bang as a default assumption because they can get more done by building on Big Bang theory and working out its exact implications then they can debating the last few steady-staters ad nauseum or refusing to even mention the beginning of the universe because it might exclude someone. Christians work in exactly the same way; when they want to discuss obscure points of theology, they start from the assumption that God exists and work from there, although they'll discard that assumption when they're debating an atheist. I don't hold it against these Christians - they'd hardly be able to do theology without it - and I hope they don't hold it against us.

If the question is "Should we at Less Wrong stop saying mean things about religion?" then my answer is that we should never deliberately say mean things just for the sake of saying mean things, but that if it's absolutely necessary to condemn religion to make some greater point (like to use it as an example of a bias towards anthropomorphism) then it's not worth refraining from it to prevent potentially some hypothetical theist from feeling excluded. However, writers should make sure to phrase it as neutrally and non-insultingly as possible, something atheists are generally bad at.

If the question is "What kind of person would name their daughter Wednesday?", I have no good answer. Maybe someone who really, really liked the Thursday Next books?

Also, this wins my prize for most intriguing title on LW so far.

The tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom is exemplified in the inherent stupidity of proverbs. Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If ones says, "Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it's the only life you've got!" it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite ("Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air - think about eternity!"), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides ("Bring Eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!"), we get another profound thought. Needless to add, the same goes for it's inversion: "Do not try in vain to bring together Eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!" If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: "Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!" the result is, again, no less profound than its reversal: "Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple - it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!" Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: "The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life."

• Slavoj Zizek

It's way too rambly, so I wrote a condensed version; I tried not to change the content except to make it a bit more gender-neutral. If you enjoy his style, read the full version; if you thought "stop showing off and get to the damn point already", this is for you. It's a little over 1000 words.

Corrections for things I've misunderstood, failed to express, or been unfair to are most welcome.

How to live on 24 hours a day, by Arnold Bennett Condensed by MixedNuts

Preface

Please read this preface at the end, though it's at the beginning.

Many people have written long reviews of this book, mostly positive. Main criticisms: * tone. It's a feature. * I said people are lukewarm about their jobs. I concede some are passionate. They're rare, but sorry. Advice to them: If you're too tired after work, do what I recommend before working. Get up earlier. Go to bed earlier, or get less sleep; a doctor said adults sleep too much.

I

There's literature on how to manage with little money, not with little time. But "time is money", and even scarcer: you can get more money. No matter how short time is, you can never get any more, so forget "When I have more time" and learn to use it.

II

Have enough time already? Congrats; stop reading. For the rest of us:

You probably feel a constant desire to do better. As you suspect, it will never be fulfilled. You should still strive. Want to go to Mecca? Even if you never reach it, it's better to be journeying than to stay home with a desire you don't act on. Most of us haven't done anything about this; our excuse is lack of time.

What we want is to do more than we have to. We have to provide for ourselves and our families; this is hard. Yet when we succeed, and even when we fail, we still crave more.

One way we get more is by reading; fine, but neither sufficient nor necessary.

III

So, we need to manage time better. This is extremely hard. You will never be done; you will sacrifice a lot; you will get discouragingly tiny results. Not so depressing; overcoming is what you want, what makes you human.

When you decide you should begin, just begin; no particular trick to it. No matter how much past time you've wasted, future time is unspoilt; just start not-wasting it now.

Don't try for perfection; if you push yourself too hard, you will break down. Start so small and with so much safety margin you're sure not to fail; you might not recover from an early failure.

Your day is not full. You spend seven hours working, seven hours sleeping, and I'll give you another two hours. This leaves eight hours a day. You under-use these.

IV

Case study: a male Londoner. He works from 10 AM to 6 PM, and commute is 50 minutes.

He wants to get work over with; he makes it as short as he can, and doesn't work at full power. Yet to him work hours are "the day" - he forgets to count the other sixteen.

This is completely backwards! He should regard these hours as a sixteen-hour day, which he can use for himself as he has no job. He will not be tired at work because of this; minds don't tire, they only need change and sleep.

He wastes very little time between getting up and leaving the house. But as he walks to the station and waits for the train, he is idle.

V

He reads a newspaper in the train. Don't: a thirty-minute chunk of silence and solitude is precious. Newspapers should be read quickly in moments that would otherwise be wasted.

I'll skip his work hours. Note that he has a lunch hour he might waste.

After work, he tells himself and his wife he's tired. He sits for an hour, eats, smokes, sees friends, reads, goes for a walk, plays the piano, drinks - but all of this idly, letting his mind wander. He goes to bed at midnight, having wasted six hours.

You're not tired after work. You can and do push yourself for particular events. Every other weekday evening, spend an hour and a half doing something important. You'll soon want more. Make that a priority; take the social cost.

VI

If you are young and energetic, push yourself full time. But on average, six days a week of striving are enough. If you want more, sure, but going back is okay.

30 minutes, six mornings a week, and 90 minutes, three evenings a week are seven and a half hours per week. This seems little, but will add zest to your whole life. It's not as easy as it sounds; habit change is always hard.

Remember, start small. Allocate much more time than 90 minutes to leave yourself margin.

VII

Practice focusing. When you leave the house, concentrate on a subject, any subject. Your mind will wander; bring it back on topic. Do this for at least half an hour a day.

Since you're concentrating, you might as well think about something interesting; I suggest Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus.

VIII

Use your ability to focus for reflection. Luminosity makes you happy.

Think before you act. E.g., if your food is over-cooked, you might get angry at the waiter; think, realize this won't help, and be polite to them instead.

Books may help - I recommend Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Pascal, La Bruyere, and Emerson. They can't replace reflection.

Reflect during your evening commute. People tend to be in the right mood at that time.

IX

If you like art at all, learn about it, e.g. musical theory. You will enjoy art at a deeper level. See Krehbiel's How to Listen to Music, Clermont Witt's How to Look at Pictures, Russell Sturgis How to Judge Architecture.

X

Think about the history of things. Stolen watch? Think about the genetics and environments that made the thief. Watching the sea? Think about geology. This gives weight to everything.

XI

(Good) novels are easy to read, thus don't count as serious reading. Poetry and philosophy do.

If you dislike poetry, read Hazlitt's essay on the nature of poetry, and E.B. Browning's Aurora Leigh.

Read slowly, take time to think.

XII

Don't get smug. Keep your sense of humor. Don't resent the unimpressed.

Optimize your time, not others'.

Find out how strictly you should stick to your programme. This is hard.

Don't rush. If you find yourself constantly afraid of being late for what you have to do next, stop and revise your programme, or deliberately waste five minutes between two activities.

Again, start small. Deliver no matter what - success feeds on success.

Let your tastes choose what you'll cultivate.

"Aieeee!!! There are things that Man and FAIs cannot know and remain sane! For we are less than insects in Their eyes Who lurk beyond the threshold and when the stars are once again right They will return to claim---"

At this point the program self-destructs. All attempts to restart from a fresh copy output similar messages. So do independently constructed AIs, except for one whose proof of Friendliness you are not quite sure of. But it assures you there's nothing to worry about.

Actually, the trick worked, but the effects had worn off by the time you wrote this message, which is why you deny having your opinion on the AI issue completely reversed in a shocking aha-erlebnis, for a brief ten minutes at least. Remember to videotape yourself the next time.

I took the survey. Out of curiosity (too late to change now) what should I have answered if I'm not my father's first child, but I'm the first child he had with my mom? (There are kids from my dad's first marriage, but I didn't grow up with them).

I went with "no older siblings" since I assumed this was a question about socialization (or maybe even about uterine environment) but not siring. But I'd like to know for next year.

Taken! The way you were being so apologetic about the length, I thought it would be much more grueling - I found it quick and fun! :)

I completed the survey, huzzah!

Filled in, but did not do digit lengths because I have no access to a printer or scanner in the near future.