All this post says is that some people can maintain a polyphasic sleep cycle. Why is it being upvoted? At first I guessed the votes were just coming from the clique that participated, but the number keeps rising. Does a picture of a rooster elevate a comment in the open thread to a post in Main?

Conscious control over social presentation is a learned skill; it doesn't come in the same box with intelligence or rationality, although either or both might make it easier to pick up. I suspect it's prominent in Methods mainly because it serves the particular type of wheels-within-wheels plotting that Eliezer seems fond of.

We could have a conversation at this point about whether constructed social presentation is unethical or "creepy", but I don't think it'd get us anywhere. Some people have the squick response, some don't.

(Incidentally, I don't feel like Snape's got this in-story. He's certainly got a facade, but it's the sort you build semi-involuntarily when you hate parts of yourself and desperately want to hide them, not the kind you consciously build to optimize social outcomes. Harry does have it, but shouldn't have had the opportunity to develop it; it may be part of his Mysterious Dark Side/possible Harrymort package.)

Quirrell, Dumbledore, Snape, Harry, and (increasingly) Draco have something in common. They are all creepy. These characters are intentionally inauthentic - acting as though they posses the specific beliefs, preferences, and abilities that they want others to attribute to them.

I feel unusually strong revulsion about this kind of deception - more than toward someone hiding their faults to manage their appearance, much more than toward someone being tactful and withholding or biasing sensitive claims to avoid conflict.

When I try to unpack "creepy", my mind suggests it has components of outrage at violations of close interpersonal social norms, distrust of unfamiliar thought patterns, fear of people with motivations that need to be hidden, and a special kind of disgust related to fears of idols, photographs, glassy eyed dolls, humanoid robots, and other simulacra. - the disgust toward an exemplar that doesn't fall clearly in or out of the human-mind category, toward a soul that has been captured in the depiction of a face and deprived of its intelligence and agency.

Are very intelligent people generally creepy like that? If I were a standard deviation smarter, would my peer group consist of people strategically concealing their identities and mutually modelling their mutual modelling up to the nth order of meta? Or is that inauthenticity just an abnormal personality type that doesn't correlate much with intelligence, but does fit nicely into a rationalist literary drama?

(~700 mi/hr, 11000 km/hr)

No.

It would be helpful if this article included a description or definition of Hyperloop.

Why are so many rationalists polyamorous? I don't see why this idea is linked to the LW ideology, unlike transhumanism, atheism, effective altruism, etc. which all seem to follow logically.

"Taking up a serious religion changes one's very practice of rationality by making doubt a disvalue." ~ Orthonormal

Another unsatisfying Nash equilibrium in traffic control I'd like to see analyzed from a modern decision theory perspective is Braess's Paradox.

Previous LW discussion here.

There's something that happens to me with an alarming frequency, something that I almost never (or don't remember) see being referenced (and thus I don't know the proper name). I'm talking about that effect when I'm reading a text (any kind of text, textbook, blog, forum text) and suddenly I discover that two minutes passed and I advanced six lines in the text, but I just have no idea of what I read. It's like a time blackhole, and now I have to re-read it.

Sometimes it also happens in a less alarming way, but still bad: for instance, when I'm reading something that is deliberately teaching me an important piece of knowledge (as in, I already know whathever is in this text IS important) I happen to go through it without questioning anything, just "accepting" it and a few moments later it suddenly comes down on me when I'm ahead: "Wait... what, did he just say 2 pages ago that thermal radiation does NOT need matter to propagate?" and I have again to go back and check that I was not crazy.

While I don't know the name of this effect, I have asked some acquantainces of mine about that, while some agreed that they have it others didn't. I would like very much to eliminate this flaw, anybody knows what I could do to train myself not to do it or at least the correct name so I can research more about it?