A worse pun than "JAQing off" for a title, but a nice reminder of a small way not to be stupid.

If you notice yourself making the same arguments over and over, or being accused of saying things irrelevant to the argument, try to stop yourself.

From Medical Daily: Psychologists Discover How People Subconsciously Become Their Favorite Fictional Characters

Psychologists have discovered that while reading a book or story, people are prone to subconsciously adopt their behavior, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses to that of fictional characters as if they were their own.

Experts have dubbed this subconscious phenomenon ‘experience-taking,’ where people actually change their own behaviors and thoughts to match those of a fictional character that they can identify with.

Researcher from the Ohio State University conducted a series of six different experiments on about 500 participants, reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that in the right situations, ‘experience-taking,’ may lead to temporary real world changes in the lives of readers. 

They found that stories written in the first-person can temporarily transform the way readers view the world, themselves and other social groups. 

I always wondered at how Christopher Hitchens (who, when he wasn't being a columnist, was a professor of English literature) went on and on about the power of fiction for revealing moral truths. This gives me a better idea of how people could imprint on well-written fiction. More so than, say, logically-reasoned philosophical tracts.

This article is, of course, a popularisation. Anyone have links to the original paper?

Edit: Gwern delivers (PDF): Kaufman, G. F., & Libby, L. K. (2012, March 26). "Changing Beliefs and Behavior Through Experience-Taking." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0027525

WEIRD may be weirder than you think. We Aren't The World writes of psychological experiments on non-Westerners that give vastly disparate results from results that have been assumed to be hardwired, and the implications of this:

Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.  The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game.

...

To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

...

At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West.

Edit: The actual papers this article writes about are covered in this post by Ciphergoth from a few years ago.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.

Yvain's blog: Epistemic learned helplessness.

A friend in business recently complained about his hiring pool, saying that he couldn't find people with the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don't like it. He told me a good portion of the point of CfAR was to either find or create people who would believe something after it had been proven to them.

And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn't until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went "Wait, no, that would be the worst idea ever."

I don't think I'm overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average high school dropout. Like I mean that on almost any topic, given almost any position, I could totally demolish her and make her look like an idiot. Reduce her to some form of "Look, everything you say fits together and I can't explain why you're wrong, I just know you are!" Or, more plausibly, "Shut up I don't want to talk about this!"

"I started to post a comment, but it got long enough that I’ve turned my comment into a blog post."

So the study of second-order consequences is not logic at all; to tease out all the second-order consequences of your second-order axioms, you need to confront not just the forms of sentences but their meanings. In other words, you have to understand meanings before you can carry out the operation of inference. But Yudkowsky is trying to derive meaning from the operation of inference, which won’t work because in second-order logic, meaning comes first.

... it’s important to recognize that Yudkowsky has “solved” the problem of accounting for numbers only by reducing it to the problem of accounting for sets — except that he hasn’t even done that, because his reduction relies on pretending that second order logic is logic.