For two, that emphasis on the problem of suffering seems very reasonable to me. Buddhism holds that the problem with this world is suffering, and that suffering can be alleviated by methods somewhat similar to the ones in Kaj_Sotala's post.

Take care with psychological techniques oriented towards reducing self-suffering. Suffering is an important signal that something is wrong. Pain is similar. If you ignore or damp down the signal, that is a kind of self-sabotage. Sometimes the paradoxical effect is to increase the number of your long term problems. Instead, it is often best to respect and heed the signal - and track down the causes of the problem it is indicating.

Thanks! I worried for a while about changing my mind too much on the basis of one blog, and I still don't agree with the Less Wrong consensus on everything, but overall I've found them very helpful. Anything specifically you would view with a skeptical eye?

Hello Less Wrong!

I'm 16, female, and a senior in high school. Before I started reading here, I was not particularly interested in math, science, or rationality (which I had never really heard of). I stumbled on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in October, and fell in love immediately. I read through the whole story in one night, and finally made the leap to Less Wrong during Eliezer's hiatus.

I started on Less Wrong by reading Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and within three posts I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people significantly smarter than me. Some people would probably have been excited about that; I was terrified. I promised myself that I wouldn't post - wouldn't even create an account, to avoid the temptation of posting - until I had read all the sequences and understood everything everyone said.

In retrospect, that may have been setting the bar a little too high for myself, especially since seven more sequences were added while I was reading. I eventually revised my standard to "I will not comment until I'm sure I actually have something to add to a discussion, and until I understand the things I have read well enough to explain them convincingly to 4 of my friends."

The fact that I had to set all of those hurdles for myself just to have the self-confidence to create an account probably tells you a little about myself - I'm not ordinarily insecure, but I was so excited to find something like this I was very worried about "messing it up". I've now read about 90% of the sequences and 98% of everything posted on Less Wrong in the last few months, and understood almost all of it (the quantum physics and decision theory sequences still confuse me). I'm not sure "read everything before you start to contribute" is generally a good guideline for new visitors, but for me it was perfect. I changed my mind about a lot of important things along the way - if there's enough interest, I may discuss this in a post about exposing more teenagers to rationality.

So, thank you all for this great site! I hope I'll be able to contribute.

For harder tests, the benefit is in not ignoring low-hanging fruit, and training to look for any opportunity to get better reliability, performing cheap checks and selecting more reliable of any alternative sub-steps. On the other hand, ordinary exams are often such that a well-prepared applicant can solve all problems in half the time or less, and then the failure would be not taking advantage of the remaining time to turn "probably about 90% of solutions are correct" into "95% chance the score is perfect".

I'm just as confused by the lack of instructions.

You should probably have made that clear at the very beginning of the post; when I read it I first assumed you had simply neglected to tell us the instructions.

This test, as I understand it, is the U.S. military "entrance exam"

In that case, I suspect it's probably supposed to be a test of physical intuition -- or more to the point, of whether you're the kind of person who spends enough brain cycles on intuitive physical modeling in order to suspect that's what's being tested.

In which case, A probably does make the most sense, since it seems to represent the most "equilibrium-like" (lowest potential energy) situation, assuming what is being represented is a box with an object tied to it via a string, viewed from the side (not above or below).

Why did I get a -1 for this? I didn't make the puzzle. I'm just as confused by the lack of instructions.

This test, as I understand it, is the U.S. military "entrance exam". This may be from a practice version, unless they let you take it online. I'm guessing you're supposed to pick the answer that shows a line going from point A to point B.

(More necromancy!)

I thought Occam's Razor was justified by the fact that every new proposition involved necessarily increased the number of ways in which the entire explanation could fail. Then you require evidence for yet another belief, and since you cannot be 100% accurate in any of your propositions, your accuracy continually decreases as well.

Not going meta for developing reliability of problem-solving took a lot of points from me. I just relied on the magical intuition, which was good enough to solve some hard problems (to figure out solution method, without knowing how it was being figured out), but not good enough to reliably solve those problems without errors.

As a result, when I was applying to college, I was afraid of the regular admission exams which I couldn't reliably ace (because of technical errors I wouldn't notice, even though solution methods were obvious), and instead used the perfect score given to winners of Moscow math and physics olympiads, which required solving some hard problems but not solving all problems without errors. Which is a pretty stupid predicament. It just never occurred to me that production of perfect scores can be seen as an engineering problem, and I don't recall any high school teachers mentioning that (even smart college professor teachers administering cram school sessions).