Furthermore, a hard to use text may be significantly less hard to use in the classroom where you have peers, teachers, and other forms of guidance to help digest the material. Recommendations for specialists working at home or outside a classroom might not be the same as the recommendations you would give to someone taking a particular class at Berkeley or some other environment where those resources are available.

A flat out bad textbook might seem really good when it is something else such as the teacher, the method, or the support that makes the book work.

"A directed search of the space of diet configurations" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Thanks for this. I hadn't seen someone pseudocode this out before. This helps illustrate that interesting problems lie in the scope above (callers to tdt_uility() etc) and below (implementation of tdt() etc).

I wonder if there is a rationality exercise in 'write pseudocode for problem descriptions, explore the callers and implementations'.

Doh, I have no idea why my hands type c-y-r instead of c-r-y, thanks.

Metaphysical terminology is a huge bag of stupid and abstraction, but what I mean by mysticism is something like 'characteristic of a metaphysical belief system.' The mysticism tag tells me that a concept is positing extra facts about how the world works in a way that isn't consistent with my more fundamental, empirical beliefs.

So in my mind I have 'WARNING!' tags (intentionally) attached to mysticism. So when I see something that has the mysticism tag attached to it, I approach cautiously and with a big stick. Or to save time or avoid the risk of being eaten I often don't approach at all.

If I find that I have a metaphysical belief or if I detect that a fact/idea may be metaphysical, then I attach the mystical tag to it and go find my stick.

If something in my mind has the mysticism tag attached to it inappropriately, then I want to reclassify that thing -- slightly reduce the size of the tag or create a branch through more specific concept definition and separation.

So I don't really see value in attaching the mysticism tag to things that don't directly warrant it. What you call a mystical litany I'd call a mnemonic technique for reminding yourself of a useful process or dangerous bias. Religions have litanies, but litanies are not inherently religious concepts.

So no, I won't consider mysticism itself as a useful brain hack. Mysticism is allocated the purpose of 'warning sign' . It's not the only warning sign, but it's a useful one.

As an aside, what are IFS and NVC?

Edit: Ah, found links.

IFS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

NVC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

I had a dim view of meditation because my only exposure to meditation prior was in mystic contexts. Here I saw people talk about it separate from that context. My assumption was that if you approached it using Bayes and other tools, you could start to figure out if it was bullshit or not. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that folks interested could explore it and see what turns up.

Would I choose to do so? No. I have plenty of other low hanging fruit and the amount of non-mystic guidance around meditation seems really minimal, so I'd be paying opportunity cost to cover unknown territory with unknown payoffs.

I don't feel oddly attached to any beliefs here. Maybe I'll go search for some research. Right now I feel if I found some good papers providing evidence for or against meditation I would shift appropriately.

I don't see myself updating my beliefs about meditation (which are weak) unduly because of an argument from authority. They changed because the arguments were reasoned from principles or with process I accept as sound. Reasoning like "fairly credible sources like Feynman claim they can learn to shift the perception of the center of self-awareness to the left. (Feynman was also a bullshitter, but let's take this as an example...) What do we think he meant? Is what we think he meant possible? What is possible? Is that reproducible? Would it be useful to be able to do that? Should we spend time trying to figure out if we can do that?" This would be what I consider to be a discussion in the space of meditation-like stuff that is non-mystical and enjoyable. It isn't going to turn me into a mystic any more than Curzi's anecdotes about his buddy's nootropics overdoses will turn me into a juicer.

I didn't take away the message 'meditation is super-useful.' I took away the message 'meditation is something some people are messing with to see what works.' I'm less worried about that than if someone said 'eating McDonalds every day for every meal is something some people are messing with to see what works.' because my priors tell me that is really harmful whereas my priors tell me meditating every day is probably just a waste of time. A possibly non-mystical waste of time.

Now I'm worried comment-readers will think I'm a blind supporter of meditation. It is more accurate to say I went from immediate dismissal of meditation to a position of seeing the act of meditating as separable from a mystic context.

Now my wife is telling me I should actually be MORE curious about meditation and go do some research.

To address your second point first, the -attendees- were not a group who strongly shared common beliefs. Some attended due to lots of prior exposure to LW, a very small number were strong x-risk types, several were there only because of recent exposure to things like Harry Potter and were curious, many were strongly skeptical of x-risks. There were no discussions that struck me as cheering for the team -- and I was actively looking for them!

Some counter evidence, though: there was definitely a higher occurrence of cryonicists and people interested in cryonics than you'd find in any random sample of 30 people. I.e.: some amount >2 vs some amount close to 0. So we weren't a wildly heterogeneous group.

As for the instructors - Anna and Luke were both very open about the fact that the rationality-education process is in its infancy and among the various SIAI members there is discussion about how to proceed. I could be wrong, I interpreted Eliezer as being somewhat skeptical of the minicamp process. When he visited, he said he had almost no involvement related to the minicamp. I believe he said he was mainly a sounding board for some of the ideas. I'm interpreting his involvement in this thread now and related threads/topics as a belief shift on his part toward the minicamp being valuable.

I think your order of magnitude increases well describes a bad conceivable scenario, but poorly describes the scenario I actually witnessed.

Now, for cost, I don't know. I'm attending a guitar camp in August that will be 7 days and cost me $2000. I would put the value of minicamp a fair amount above the value of the guitar camp, but I wouldn't necessarily pay $3000 to attend minicamp. To answer the price question I would ask:

1) What else do I plan to spend the $1500 on? What plans or goals suffer setbacks? What would I otherwise buy?

2) What do I value the information from attending at? I can see how it would be easier to measure the value of information from a guitar camp versus one about something that feels more abstract. So maybe the first step is to find the concrete value you've already gotten out of LW. If you've read the sequences and you think there are useful tools there, you might start with 'what would be the estimated value from being able to clarify the things I'm unsure about." So you take some measurement of value you've already gotten from LW and do some back of the napkin math with that.

3) Consider your level of risk aversion versus the value of minicamp now vs later. If these new minicamps are successful, more people will post about them. Attendees will validate or negate past attendee experiences. It may be that if $1500 is too much for you when measured against your estimation of the pay-off discounted by risks, that you simply wait. Either the camps will be shown to be valuable or they will be shown to be low value.

4) Consider some of the broad possible future worlds that follow from attending minicamp. In A you attend and things go great, you come out with new rationality tools. In B you attend and your reaction is neutral and you don't gain anything useful. In C you attend and have poor experiences or worse suffer some kind of self-damage (ex: your beliefs shift in measurably harmful ways that your prior self would have not agreed to submit to ahead of time). Most attendees are suggesting you'll find yourself in worlds like A. We could be lying because we all exist in worlds like C or we're in B but feel an obligation to justify attending the camp or whatever. Weigh your estimate of our veracity with your risk aversion. Update the connected values.

I would suggest it unlikely that the SIAI be so skilled at manipulation that they've succeeded in subverting an entire group of people from diverse backgrounds and with some predisposition to be skeptical. Look for evidence that some people exist in B or C (probably from direct posts stating as much -- people would probably want to prevent other people from being harmed).

There are other things to put into a set of considerations around whether to spend the money, but these are some.