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Meetup : Less Wrong Dublin
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Dublin
Martin O'Dea would like to talk about his ideas on the Open Ireland Party. Other topics and all welcome. Provisionally I would suggest The Mercantile on Dame Street.
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Dublin
Checklist of Rationality Habits
Schelling fences on slippery slopes
Slippery slopes are themselves a slippery concept. Imagine trying to explain them to an alien:
"Well, we right-thinking people are quite sure that the Holocaust happened, so banning Holocaust denial would shut up some crackpots and improve the discourse. But it's one step on the road to things like banning unpopular political positions or religions, and we right-thinking people oppose that, so we won't ban Holocaust denial."
And the alien might well respond: "But you could just ban Holocaust denial, but not ban unpopular political positions or religions. Then you right-thinking people get the thing you want, but not the thing you don't want."
This post is about some of the replies you might give the alien.
Abandoning the Power of Choice
This is the boring one without any philosophical insight that gets mentioned only for completeness' sake. In this reply, giving up a certain point risks losing the ability to decide whether or not to give up other points.
For example, if people gave up the right to privacy and allowed the government to monitor all phone calls, online communications, and public places, then if someone launched a military coup, it would be very difficult to resist them because there would be no way to secretly organize a rebellion. This is also brought up in arguments about gun control a lot.
I'm not sure this is properly thought of as a slippery slope argument at all. It seems to be a more straightforward "Don't give up useful tools for fighting tyranny" argument.
The Legend of Murder-Gandhi
Previously on Less Wrong's The Adventures of Murder-Gandhi: Gandhi is offered a pill that will turn him into an unstoppable murderer. He refuses to take it, because in his current incarnation as a pacifist, he doesn't want others to die, and he knows that would be a consequence of taking the pill. Even if we offered him $1 million to take the pill, his abhorrence of violence would lead him to refuse.
But suppose we offered Gandhi $1 million to take a different pill: one which would decrease his reluctance to murder by 1%. This sounds like a pretty good deal. Even a person with 1% less reluctance to murder than Gandhi is still pretty pacifist and not likely to go killing anybody. And he could donate the money to his favorite charity and perhaps save some lives. Gandhi accepts the offer.
Now we iterate the process: every time Gandhi takes the 1%-more-likely-to-murder-pill, we offer him another $1 million to take the same pill again.
Maybe original Gandhi, upon sober contemplation, would decide to accept $5 million to become 5% less reluctant to murder. Maybe 95% of his original pacifism is the only level at which he can be absolutely sure that he will still pursue his pacifist ideals.
Unfortunately, original Gandhi isn't the one making the choice of whether or not to take the 6th pill. 95%-Gandhi is. And 95% Gandhi doesn't care quite as much about pacifism as original Gandhi did. He still doesn't want to become a murderer, but it wouldn't be a disaster if he were just 90% as reluctant as original Gandhi, that stuck-up goody-goody.
What if there were a general principle that each Gandhi was comfortable with Gandhis 5% more murderous than himself, but no more? Original Gandhi would start taking the pills, hoping to get down to 95%, but 95%-Gandhi would start taking five more, hoping to get down to 90%, and so on until he's rampaging through the streets of Delhi, killing everything in sight.
Now we're tempted to say Gandhi shouldn't even take the first pill. But this also seems odd. Are we really saying Gandhi shouldn't take what's basically a free million dollars to turn himself into 99%-Gandhi, who might well be nearly indistinguishable in his actions from the original?
Maybe Gandhi's best option is to "fence off" an area of the slippery slope by establishing a Schelling point - an arbitrary point that takes on special value as a dividing line. If he can hold himself to the precommitment, he can maximize his winnings. For example, original Gandhi could swear a mighty oath to take only five pills - or if he didn't trust even his own legendary virtue, he could give all his most valuable possessions to a friend and tell the friend to destroy them if he took more than five pills. This would commit his future self to stick to the 95% boundary (even though that future self is itching to try to the same precommitment strategy to stick to its own 90% boundary).
Real slippery slopes will resemble this example if, each time we change the rules, we also end up changing our opinion about how the rules should be changed. For example, I think the Catholic Church may be working off a theory of "If we give up this traditional practice, people will lose respect for tradition and want to give up even more traditional practices, and so on."
Slippery Hyperbolic Discounting
One evening, I start playing Sid Meier's Civilization (IV, if you're wondering - V is terrible). I have work tomorrow, so I want to stop and go to sleep by midnight.
At midnight, I consider my alternatives. For the moment, I feel an urge to keep playing Civilization. But I know I'll be miserable tomorrow if I haven't gotten enough sleep. Being a hyperbolic discounter, I value the next ten minutes a lot, but after that the curve becomes pretty flat and maybe I don't value 12:20 much more than I value the next morning at work. Ten minutes' sleep here or there doesn't make any difference. So I say: "I will play Civilization for ten minutes - 'just one more turn' - and then I will go to bed."
Time passes. It is now 12:10. Still being a hyperbolic discounter, I value the next ten minutes a lot, and subsequent times much less. And so I say: I will play until 12:20, ten minutes sleep here or there not making much difference, and then sleep.
And so on until my empire bestrides the globe and the rising sun peeps through my windows.
This is pretty much the same process described above with Murder-Gandhi except that here the role of the value-changing pill is played by time and my own tendency to discount hyperbolically.
The solution is the same. If I consider the problem early in the evening, I can precommit to midnight as a nice round number that makes a good Schelling point. Then, when deciding whether or not to play after midnight, I can treat my decision not as "Midnight or 12:10" - because 12:10 will always win that particular race - but as "Midnight or abandoning the only credible Schelling point and probably playing all night", which will be sufficient to scare me into turning off the computer.
(if I consider the problem at 12:01, I may be able to precommit to 12:10 if I am especially good at precommitments, but it's not a very natural Schelling point and it might be easier to say something like "as soon as I finish this turn" or "as soon as I discover this technology").
Coalitions of Resistance
Suppose you are a Zoroastrian, along with 1% of the population. In fact, along with Zoroastrianism your country has fifty other small religions, each with 1% of the population. 49% of your countrymen are atheist, and hate religion with a passion.
You hear that the government is considering banning the Taoists, who comprise 1% of the population. You've never liked the Taoists, vile doubters of the light of Ahura Mazda that they are, so you go along with this. When you hear the government wants to ban the Sikhs and Jains, you take the same tack.
But now you are in the unfortunate situation described by Martin Niemoller:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me, but we had already abandoned the only defensible Schelling point
With the banned Taoists, Sikhs, and Jains no longer invested in the outcome, the 49% atheist population has enough clout to ban Zoroastrianism and anyone else they want to ban. The better strategy would have been to have all fifty-one small religions form a coalition to defend one another's right to exist. In this toy model, they could have done so in an ecumenial congress, or some other literal strategy meeting.
But in the real world, there aren't fifty-one well-delineated religions. There are billions of people, each with their own set of opinions to defend. It would be impractical for everyone to physically coordinate, so they have to rely on Schelling points.
In the original example with the alien, I cheated by using the phrase "right-thinking people". In reality, figuring out who qualifies to join the Right-Thinking People Club is half the battle, and everyone's likely to have a different opinion on it. So far, the practical solution to the coordination problem, the "only defensible Schelling point", has been to just have everyone agree to defend everyone else without worrying whether they're right-thinking or not, and this is easier than trying to coordinate room for exceptions like Holocaust deniers. Give up on the Holocaust deniers, and no one else can be sure what other Schelling point you've committed to, if any...
...unless they can. In parts of Europe, they've banned Holocaust denial for years and everyone's been totally okay with it. There are also a host of other well-respected exceptions to free speech, like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Presumably, these exemptions are protected by tradition, so that they have become new Schelling points there, or are else so obvious that everyone except Holocaust deniers is willing to allow a special Holocaust denial exception without worrying it will impact their own case.
Summary
Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies. Slippery slopes can sometimes be avoided by establishing a "Schelling fence" - a Schelling point that the various interest groups involved - or yourself across different values and times - make a credible precommitment to defend.
Minimum viable workout routine
So you want the longevity benefits of regular exercise but you've hit some snags. Every routine pretty much makes you miserable. In addition, because of all the conflicting information out there, you aren't even sure if you're getting the full benefits. This post is for you. And don't worry about your current physical circumstances. It works equally well for the overweight, the underweight, and women (no you will not turn into a gross she hulk the moment you touch a weight. Those women take steroids and train hard for years)
A sub-optimal plan you stick to is better than the perfect routine you abandon after the first week. This routine is not perfect. This routine is optimized for simplicity and low time/mental effort commitment while still getting excellent results. It is strongly based on the routines from Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert, and some of the principles of Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe both of which have much anecdotal evidence of effectiveness in the training logs of various forums. If you're looking for published research to back up my claims I have some bad news for you, the literature on resistance training is basically worthless. A 5 minute perusal of google scholar will show that atrocious methodology such as having "subjects act as their own control" are common, and accepted by the relevant journals. And that's if you're lucky enough to find studies that aren't about diabetics, or elderly japanese women. But I'm not going to spend excessive time trying to justify this routine, anyone can do it for a month and see that the results are significant. (I'm open to arguing about it in the comments however.)
A note about cardio:
Cardiovascular capacity (V02 max) has shown a high degree of correlation to all cause mortality. Why aren't I recommending cardio? Because the only way to increase V02 max is with high intensity exercise. Between high intensity weight lifting and high intensity cardio, high intensity weightlifting easily wins for a newbie. A newbie, especially a significantly out of shape one, will not be capable of a level of cardio exertion that results in a significant adaptation. This can result in a lot of effort with very little in the way of improvement. This is soul-destroyingly frustrating. They can however lift a weight a few times and this will result in an adaptation that allows them to lift more next time. A few months of a weightlifting routine is going to put any person in a much better position to do longevity affecting cardio if that is their goal. Cardio is also generally a terrible fat burner for the exact same reason.
Edit: there seems to be some confusion about this. The primary problem of exercise is not the optimality of results but instilling the habit of exercising. I believe that cardio is terrible for overcoming this habit forming stage.
The point of the below program is to get you in the habit of exercising and give you immediate results. Once you have achieved some basic measure of fitness (~3 month time frame) you can maintain, or use the fact that exercising is now much easier to move on to any program you want.
The nitty gritty:
You are going to do three exercises 2-3 times per week. Each session will take ~45 minutes to an hour. The exercises are
* 3x5 trap bar deadlift
* 3x5 incline bench press
* 3x5 bent over row (possible substitution for cable rows see below)
What does 3x5 mean?
3 sets of 5 reps each. You will assume the correct form, go through the full range of motion for the exercise 5 times, then rest before repeating twice more.
What weights do I use?
You will start with the empty bar and add 5lbs every workout for the trap bar deadlift and 5lbs every other workout for the incline bench press and bent over row. Many are tempted to increase weights faster than this. You can do what you want but don't come crying when your progress stalls more quickly. A slow progression that continues for a long time beats a fast increase followed by a time wasting plateau.
Why these three exercises?
This routine hits the most muscle mass possible in the smallest number of exercises. All decent routines include hip extension exercises, pushing exercises, and pulling exercise. This ensures that you don't create an imbalance that messes up your posture or limits you unnecessarily. In addition, these exercises require very little in the way of technique coaching, which is really this routine's primary advantage over more popular programs such as starting strength. It took me 8 months to learn to squat well, but I learned to trap bar deadlift in a single session. Similarly with the incline press, it carries with it a much smaller chance of injury from poor form than either the bench press or overhead press that are the mainstays of many programs.
I have no idea what these exercises are, how do I do them?
Here is an article for trap bar deadlift, which is so easy that there aren't really many tutorials online:
http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/the_trap_bar_deadlift
The key is a neutral spine. You take a big breath at the bottom, squeeze everything tight, and stand up pushing through your heels while maintaining the lumbar arch. Note not to use the raised handles that many trap bars have which reduces the range of motion.
Incline is similarly straightforward:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dynoKEIcpoU
note that you DO want to touch your chest at the bottom, but do not bounce the bar off your chest. The cue that works for most is to imagine touching your shirt but not your chest.
Bent over row can feel a little weird, but it's not too hard to learn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boxbOSGwD4U
Note that after more real world testing bent over rows seem to cause the most issues of the three lifts. As the potential for injury is slightly higher with poor form for this exercise than the others I would recommend seated cable rows for those who find they can not perform bent over rows correctly. I'd additionally strongly recommend that if one is forced to make this substitution they should also do some chinups at the end of each workout. The goal of this substitution should be as a temporary measure. One should strive get back to doing bent over rows once physically able to.
Cable row form video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJSVR_63eKM
How do I warmup/cooldown?
the best warmup and cooldown is 5 minutes on the rowing machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0r_ZPXJLtg
But you can also do an exercise bike or treadmill.
After the first couple weeks you should also warmup with the empty bar before jumping to your 3x5 work weight on each exercise. Add additional warmups as the weights get heavier.
e.g.
1x5 45lbs
1x5 75bs
3x5 105lbs
don't worry excessively about this, it's hard to screw up. The key is just to prepare yourself, remind yourself of proper form, and get blood flowing. Don't skip warmups, you're increasing your chance of injury and ensuring that you won't get strong as fast.
Can I do this once week? or sporadically?
You can but you won't see hardly any benefit other than maintenance of your current fitness level. 2 times a week is the bare minimum to disrupt homeostasis to any appreciable degree and 3 is better. Make no mistake, even 2 times a week on this will get you miles ahead of most people fitness wise. You should program it like AxxAxxx or AxAxAxx, where A is a workout session and x is a rest day.
Can I sub in X exercise?
No, the bare minimum nature of this program leaves no room for changes. Any change necessitates more complicated programming. If you want to do that just do Starting Strength. Likewise if you want to add stuff, like ab work. It isn't necessary. Edit: cable row substitution for bent row is permissible but only if one finds they absolutely can not maintain good form with barbell rows.
I didn't complete all my reps this session, what do I do?
Back off the weights by 10-20% and work your way back up. Make sure you're eating and sleeping right. If you keep hitting a wall over and over again it will be time for a more complex routine.
My gym doesn't have a trap bar.
Find a gym that does or do a different program. There is no replacement for the trap bar. One option that is non-obvious is buying a trap bar for your current gym. You might be able to negotiate a free month of membership or something but even if that isn't the case the investment is worth it.
What sort of results can I expect?
Most people should expect to be trap bar deadlifting their body weight within 3 months. This will have several effects.
Strenuous physical activity becomes drastically less taxing.
Chance of injury during said activity reduced.
V02 max increased.
Bone density and joint health improvements.
Increase in lean body mass.
Improved insulin sensitivity.
Improved blood markers and pressure (increases HDL and lowers LDL)
Decreased chance of back problems.
Improved posture.
Mental benefits: Most people find the quality of their sleep improved as well as an increase in general energy levels.
A note on nutrition:
80% of body composition is diet. This won't do much for your body composition if your diet is crappy. Luckily nutrition is fairly easy, there are only 2 rules to follow:
*Calories in calories out
*Eat micronutrient dense foods
if you follow these rules it's actually surprisingly difficult to mess up. Most people also find that following the 2nd one makes following the 1st one much easier.
That's about it, I will answer questions about anything I forgot. I hope this gets some fence sitters exercising.
“No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
-Socrates
If anyone is going to do this recording your results and sharing them would be much appreciated.
As detailed as you want, but even qualitative results would be useful to have.
Habit building:
Speaking of recording your results, logging is helpful for forming habits. Use this link to join the fitocracy LessWrong group.
Fitocracy is a social website for tracking your workouts. Hat tip to jswan for reminding me.
Most transferable skills?
So, transferable skills: skills that, upon improvement, increase your ability in other areas (and also improve other, higher-level skills).
A basic example would be reading/writing. Knowing how to read and write allows one to access a huge amount of other skills and resources which are otherwise unavailable. A less obvious example would be clear speech (enunciation). Ability to speak clearly improves one's prospects in a lot of different areas (e.g. professional advancement, dating, etc.).
I'm looking for additional examples. Which skills did you find to be most transferable? Did you become proficient in X, and then found this helped you in many other areas of your life? Please share.
(I tried to find whether this was discussed before, and failed; if it was, I would appreciate the link.)
[LINK] Cracked provides a humorous primer on the Singularity
Cracked, already known for its lay-person-friendly approach to promoting rationality, now has a quick video that roughly explains the Singularity and why we should be worried about it while being funny and interesting to people who normally wouldn't care. Done in their After Hours series.
http://www.cracked.com/video_18400_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot-uprising-has-already-begun.html
How would you take over Rome?
A recent discussion post has compared the difficulty of an AI destroying modern human civilization to that of a modern human taking over the Roman Empire, with the implication that it is impossible.
The analogy has a few problems: first, modern humans don't have much greater raw intelligence than the Romans, only a bit more knowledge and tools; an AI would have a genuine intelligence advantage. Second, a high-tech civilization like ours offers many more ways for a genius to cause chaos than existed in classical Rome: it's more plausible that you can throw a few existing technologies together to create a superweapon than that Ptolemy could have done likewise, and there's no ancient Roman equivalent to hacking a nuclear launch system.
But taking over ancient Rome might serve as an interesting upper bound on the difficulty of an AI taking over modern civilization. And it's a theme of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that rationalists should be able to come up with creative solutions to seemingly hard problems. So if Professor Quirrell offered it as an extra credit assignment, how would you take over Rome?
Here are the rules:
- You are thrown back in time to the year 1 AD. You can choose to arrive anywhere in the world, but your method of arrival cannot itself give an advantage (you can't appear in a flash of light in the middle of a religious ritual or anything).
- You do not start with Roman citizenship or any other legal record of your existence.
- You keep your original physical characteristics, including sex, height, and fitness. You will appear in period-appropriate dress of your choosing, and can't carry any artifacts with you. You may start with enough money to live a patrician lifestyle for a year.
- You are intellectually near-perfect. You know all human knowledge as of 2012. You speak fluent Latin (and all other languages of the day) and can orate as eloquently as Cicero or Demosthenes. You are a tactical genius of the order of Caesar and Napoleon. And you have infinite willpower and goal-directedness: aside from human necessities like sleep or food, you need never rest.
- You win if you either become Roman Emperor (and are acknowledged as such by most Romans), or if a state you control conquers the city of Rome. You lose if you die, of old age or otherwise, before completing either goal.
Shit Rationalists Say?
I assume everyone has run across at least one of the "Shit X's Say" format of videos? Such as Shit Skeptics Say. When done right it totally triggers the in-group warm-fuzzies. (Not to be confused with the nearly-identically formatted "Shit X's Say to Y's" which is mainly a way for Y's to complain about X's).
What sort of things do Rationalists often say that triggers this sort of in-group recognition which could be popped into a short video? A few I can think of...
You should sign up for cryonics. I want to see you in the future.
…intelligence explosion…
What’s your confidence interval?
You know what they say: one man’s Modus Ponens is another man’s Modus Tollens
This may sound a bit crazy right now, but hear me out…
What are your priors?
When the singularity comes that won’t be a problem anymore.
I like to think I’d do that, but I don’t fully trust myself. I am running on corrupted hardware after all.
I want to be with you, and I don’t foresee that changing in the near future.
…Bayesian statistics…
So Omega appears in front of you…
What would you say the probability of that event is, if your beliefs are true?
Others?
How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
I have a confession to make. My life hasn’t changed all that much since I started reading Less Wrong. Hindsight bias makes it hard to tell, I guess, but I feel like pretty much the same person, or at least the person I would have evolved towards anyway, whether or not I spent those years reading about the Art of rationality.
But I can’t claim to be upset about it either. I can’t say that rationality has undershot my expectations. I didn’t come to Less Wrong expecting, or even wanting, to become the next Bill Gates; I came because I enjoyed reading it, just like I’ve enjoyed reading hundreds of books and websites.
In fact, I can’t claim that I would want my life to be any different. I have goals and I’m meeting them: my grades are good, my social skills are slowly but steadily improving, I get along well with my family, my friends, and my boyfriend. I’m in good shape financially despite making $12 an hour as a lifeguard, and in a year and a half I’ll be making over $50,000 a year as a registered nurse. I write stories, I sing in church, I teach kids how to swim. Compared to many people my age, I'm pretty successful. In general, I’m pretty happy.
Yvain suggested akrasia as a major limiting factor for why rationalists fail to have extraordinarily successful lives. Maybe that’s true for some people; maybe they are some readers and posters on LW who have big, exciting, challenging goals that they consistently fail to reach because they lack motivation and procrastinate. But that isn’t true for me. Though I can’t claim to be totally free of akrasia, it hasn’t gotten much in the way of my goals.
However, there are some assumptions that go too deep to be accessed by introspection, or even by LW meetup discussions. Sometimes you don't even realize they’re assumptions until you meet someone who assumes the opposite, and try to figure out why they make you so defensive. At the community meetup I described in my last post, a number of people asked me why I wasn’t studying physics, since I was obviously passionate about it. Trust me, I had plenty of good justifications for them–it’s a question I’ve been asked many times–but the question itself shouldn’t have made me feel attacked, and it did.
Aside from people in my life, there are some posts on Less Wrong that cause the same reaction of defensiveness. Eliezer’s Mandatory Secret Identities is a good example; my automatic reaction was “well, why do you assume everyone here wants to have a super cool, interesting life? In fact, why do you assume everyone wants to be a rationality instructor? I don’t. I want to be a nurse.”
After a bit of thought, I’ve concluded that there’s a simple reason why I’ve achieved all my life goals so far (and why learning about rationality failed to affect my achievements): they’re not hard goals. I’m not ambitious. As far as I can tell, not being ambitious is such a deep part of my identity that I never even noticed it, though I’ve used the underlying assumptions as arguments for why my goals and life decisions were the right ones.
Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics
Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking.
When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn't ideal for me.
I didn't like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn't like the desperate, codependent 'madness' that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else's sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture's scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn't fit my own goals very well.
I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren't too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that...
Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too!
We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don't automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren't configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one's life. That's why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships.
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