Here's a simple problem: there is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are 3^^^3 people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person, Eliezer Yudkowsky, on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the 3^^^3 people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill Yudkowsky. Which is the correct choice?

The answer:

Imagine two ant philosophers talking to each other. “Imagine," they said, “some being with such intense consciousness, intellect, and emotion that it would be morally better to destroy an entire ant colony than to let that being suffer so much as a sprained ankle."

Humans are such a being. I would rather see an entire ant colony destroyed than have a human suffer so much as a sprained ankle. And this isn't just human chauvinism either - I can support my feelings on this issue by pointing out how much stronger feelings, preferences, and experiences humans have than ants do.

How this relates to the trolley problem? There exists a creature as far beyond us ordinary humans as we are beyond ants, and I think we all would agree that its preferences are vastly more important than those of humans.

Yudkowsky will save the world, not just because he's the one who happens to be making the effort, but because he's the only one who can make the effort.

The world was on its way to doom until the day of September 11, 1979, which will later be changed to national holiday and which will replace Christmas as the biggest holiday. This was of course the day when the most important being that has ever existed or will exist, was born.

Yudkowsky did the same to the field of AI risk as Newton did to the field of physics. There was literally no research done on AI risk in the same scale that has been done in the 2000's by Yudkowsky. The same can be said about the field of ethics: ethics was an open problem in philosophy for thousands of years. However, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant don't really compare to the wisest person who has ever existed. Yudkowsky has come closest to solving ethics than anyone ever before. Yudkowsky is what turned our world away from certain extinction and towards utopia.

We all know that Yudkowsky has an IQ so high that it's unmeasurable, so basically something higher than 200. After Yudkowsky gets the Nobel prize in literature due to getting recognition from Hugo Award, a special council will be organized to study the intellect of Yudkowsky and we will finally know how many orders of magnitude higher Yudkowsky's IQ is to that of the most intelligent people of history.

Unless Yudkowsky's brain FOOMs before it, MIRI will eventually build a FAI with the help of Yudkowsky's extraordinary intelligence. When that FAI uses the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity to decide what to do, it will eventually reach the conclusion that the best thing to do is to tile the whole universe with copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain. Actually, in the process of making this CEV, even Yudkowsky's harshest critics will reach such understanding of Yudkowsky's extraordinary nature that they will beg and cry to start doing the tiling as soon as possible and there will be mass suicides because people will want to give away the resources and atoms of their bodies for Yudkowsky's brains. As we all know, Yudkowsky is an incredibly humble man, so he will be the last person to protest this course of events, but even he will understand with his vast intellect and accept that it's truly the best thing to do.

So, I have next to no academic knowledge. I have literally not read or perhaps even picked up any book since eighth grade, which is where my formal education ended, and I turn 20 this year, but I am sitting on some theories pertaining to my understanding of rationality, and procrastinating about expressing them has gotten me here. I'd like to just propose my theory on why censorship is wrong, here. Please tell me whether or not you agree or disagree, and feel free to express anything else you feel you would like to in this thread. I miss bona fide argument, but this community seems way less hostile than the one community I was involved in elsewhere....

Also, I feel I should affirm again that my academic knowledge is almost entirely just not there... I know the LessWrong community has a ton of resources they turn to and indulge in, which is more or less a bible of rationality by which you all abide, but I have read or heard of none of it. I don't mean to offend you with my willful ignorance. Sorry. Also, sorry for possibly incorporating similes and stuff into my expression... I know many out there are on the autistic spectrum and can't comprehend it so I'll try to stop doing that unless I'm making a point.

Okay, so, since the following has been bothering me a lot since I joined this site yesterday and even made me think against titling this what I want, consider the written and spoken word. Humans literally decided as a species to sequence scribbles and mouth noises in an entirely arbitrary way, ascribe emotion to their arbitrary scribbles and mouth noises, and then claim, as a species, that very specific arbitrary scribbles and mouth noises are inherent evil and not to be expressed by any human. Isn't that fucking retarded?

I know what you may be thinking. You might be thinking, "wow, this hoofwall character just fucking wrote a fucking arbitrary scribble that my species has arbitrarily claimed to be inherent evil without first formally affirming, absolutely, that the arbitrary scribble he uttered could never be inherent evil and that writing it could never in itself do any harm. This dude obviously has no interest in successfully defending himself in argument". But fuck that. This is not the same as murdering a human and trying to conceive an excuse defending the act later. This is not the same as effecting the world in any way that has been established to be detrimental and then trying to defend the act later. This is literally sequencing the very letters of the very language the human has decided they are okay with and will use to express themselves in such a way that it reminds the indoctrinated and conditioned human of emotion they irrationally ascribe to the sequence of letters I wrote. This is possibly the purest argument conceivable for demonstrating superfluity in the human world, and the human psyche. There could never be an inherent correlation to one's emotionality and an arbitrary sequence of mouth noises or scribbles or whatever have you that exist entirely independent of the human. If one were to erase an arbitrary scribble that the human irrationally ascribes emotion to, the human will still have the capacity to feel the emotion the arbitrary scribble roused within them. The scribble is not literally the embodiment of emotionality. This is why censorship is retarded.

Mind you, I do not discriminate against literal retards, or blacks, or gays, or anything. I do, however, incorporate the words "retard", "nigger", and "faggot" into my vocabulary literally exclusively because it triggers humans and demonstrates the fact that the validity of one's argument and one's ability to defend themselves in argument does not matter to the human. I have at times proposed my entire argument, actually going so far to quantify the breadth of this universe as I perceive it, the human existence, emotionality, and right and wrong before even uttering a fuckdamn swear, but it didn't matter. Humans think plugging their ears and chanting a mantra of "lalala" somehow gives themselves a valid argument for their bullshit, but whatever. Affirming how irrational the human is is a waste of time. There are other forms of censorship I shout address, as well, but I suppose not before proposing what I perceive the breadth of everything less fundamental than the human to be.

It's probably very easy to deduce the following, but nothing can be proven to exist. Also, please do bear with my what are probably argument by assertion fallacies at the moment... I plan on defending myself before this post ends.

Any opinion any human conceives is just a consequence of their own perception, the likes of which appears to be a consequence of their physical form, the likes of which is a consequence of properties in this universe as we perceive it. We cannot prove our universe's existence beyond what we have access to in our universe as we perceive it, therefore we cannot prove that we exist. We can't prove that our understanding of existence is true existence; we can only prove, within our universe, that certain things appear to be in concurrence with the laws of this universe as we perceive it. We can propose for example that an apple we can see occupies space in this universe, but we can't prove that our universe actually exists beyond our understanding of what existence is. We can't go more fundamental than what composes our universe... We can't go up if we are mutually exclusive with the very idea of "up", or are an inferior consequence of "up" which is superior to us.

I really don't remember what else I would say after this but, I guess, without divulging how much I obsess about breaking emotionality into a science, I believe nudity can't be inherent evil either because it is literally the cause of us, the human, and we are necessary to be able to perceive good and evil in the first place. If humans were not extant to dominate the world and force it to tend to the end they wanted it to anything living would just live, breed, and die, and nothing would be inherently "good" or "evil". It would just be. Until something evolved if it would to gain the capacity to force distinctions between "good" and "evil" there would be no such constructs. We have no reason to believe there would be. I don't know how I can affirm that further. If nudity- and exclusively human nudity, mind you- were to be considered inherent evil that would mean that the human is inherent evil, that everything the human perceives is is inherent evil and that the human's understanding of "rationality" is just a poor, grossly-misled attempt at coping with the evil properties that they retain and is inherently worthless. Which I actually believe, but an opinion that contrary is literally satanism and fuck me if I think I'm going to be expounding all of that here. But fundamentally, human nudity cannot be inherent evil if the human's opinions are to be considered worth anything at all, and if you want to go less fundamental than that and approach it from a "but nudity makes me feel bad" standpoint, you can simply warp your perception of the world to force seeing or otherwise being reminded of things to be correlated to certain emotion within you. I'm autistic it seems so I obsess about breaking emotionality down to a science every day but this isn't the post to be talking about shit like that. In any case, you can't prove that the act of you seeing another human naked is literal evil, so fuck you and your worthless opinions.

Yeah... I don't know what else I could say here, or if censorship exists in forms other than preventing humans from being exposed to human nudity, or human-conceived words. I should probably assert as well that I believe the human's thinking that the inherent evil of human nudity somehow becomes okay to see when a human reaches the age of 18, or 21, or 16, or 12 depending on which subset of human you ask is retarded. Also, by "retarded" I do not literally mean "retarded". I use the word as a trigger word that's meant to embody and convey bad emotion the human decides they want to feel when they're exposed to it. This entire post is dripping with the grossest misanthropy but I'm interested in seeing what the responses to this are... By the way, if you just downvote me without expressing to me what you think I'm doing wrong, as far as I can tell you are just satisfied with vaguely masturbating your dissenting opinion you care not for even defining in my direction, so, whatever makes you sleep at night, if you do that... but you're wrong though, and I would argue that to the death.

After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.

I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.

Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.

So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?

The TV series 'Utopia' just started.

"The series follows a cast of 15 men and women who are placed in isolation and filmed twenty-four hours a day for one year. The cast must create their own society and figure out how to survive. The series will be shown twice a week, but there will be online streaming 24/7 with 129 hidden and unhidden cameras all over the Utopia compound. The live streams will begin on August 29, the day when the 15 pioneers will enter Utopia. Over 5,000 people auditioned for the series. Every month three pioneers will be nominated and could be sent back to their everyday lives. The live streamers will decide which new pioneers get their chance to become Utopian." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(U.S._reality_TV_series))

Since every month new 'pioneers' will be introduced, you can still audition for the series; here's how: http://www.utopiatvcasting.com/how-to-audition. I would love to see a well-trained rationalist teaching "the world" some applied rationality principles, and I think this TV show would be an excellent medium to reach the "average person". It would also be nice to see someone explaining what Utopia means to a transhumanist. Let us know if you apply.

The first greatest good for the greatest number for the greatest number will start "first" (by whatever measurement is applied) but ends before the second greatest good ends and doesn't last as long (in total) as the third greatest good.

The second greatest good for the greatest number will start end "last" (by whatever measurement is applied), but does not last as long as the third greatest good (in total)and doesn't start as soon as the first greatest good.

The third greatest good for the greatest number lasts the longest (in total), but ends before the second greatest good ends and starts after the first greatest good starts.

What within utilitarianism allows for selecting between these three greatest good for the greatest number?

Related to: Trusting Expert Consensus

In the sequences, Eliezer tells the story of how in childhood he fell into an affective death spiral around intelligence. In his story, his mistakes were failing to understand until he was much older that intelligence does not guarantee morality, and that very intelligent people can still end up believing crazy things because of human irrationality.

I have my own story about learning the limits of intelligence, but I ended up learning a very different lesson than the one Eliezer learned. It also started somewhat differently. It involved no dramatic death spiral, just being extremely smart and knowing it from the time I was in kindergaarden. To the point that I grew up with the expectation that, when it came to doing anything mental, sheer smarts would be enough to make me crushingly superior to all the other students around me and many of the adults.

In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry complains of having once had a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm is. I wonder if this is autobiographical on Eliezer's part. I have an even better story, though: in second grade, I had a teacher who insisted there was no such thing as negative numbers. The experience of knowing I was right about this, when the adult authority figure was so very wrong, was probably not good for my humility.

But such brushes with stupid teachers probably weren't the main thing that drove my early self-image. It was enough to be smarter than the other kids around me, and know it. Looking back, there's little that seems worth bragging about. I learned calculus at age 15, not age 8. But that was still younger than any of the other kids I knew took calculus (if they took it at all). And knowing I didn't know any other kids as smart as me did funny things to my view of the world.

I'm honestly not sure I realized there were any kids in the whole world smarter than me until sophomore year, when I qualified to go to a national-level math competition. That was something that no one else at my high school managed to do, not even the seniors... but at the competition itself, I didn't do particularly well. It was one of the things that made me realize that I wasn't, in fact, going to be the next Einstein. But all I took from the math competition was that there were people smarter than me in the world. It didn't, say, occur to me that maybe some of the other competitors had spent more time practicing really hard math problems.

Eliezer once said, "I think I should be able to handle damn near anything on the fly." That's a pretty good description of how I felt at this point in my life. At least as long as we were talking about mental challenges and not sports, and assuming I wasn't going up against someone smarter than myself.

I think my first memory of getting some inkling that maybe sufficient intelligence wouldn't lead to automatically being the best at everything comes from... *drum roll* ...playing Starcraft. I think it was probably junior or senior that I got into the game, and at first I just did the standard campaign playing against the computer, but then I got into online play, and promptly got crushed. And not just by one genius player I encountered on a fluke, but in virtually every match.

This was a shock. I mean, I had friends who could beat me at Super Smash Bros, but Starcraft was a strategy game, which meant it should be like chess, and I'd never had any trouble beating my friends at chess. Sure, when I'd gone to local chess tournaments back in grade school, I'd gotten soundly beat by many of the older players then, but it's not like I'd ever expected all older people to be as stupid as my second grade teacher. But by the time I'd gotten into Starcraft, I was almost an adult, so what was going on?

The answer of course was that most of the other people playing online had played a hell of a lot more Starcraft than me. Also, I'd thought I'd figured the game designer's game-design philosophy (I hadn't), which had let me to make all kinds of incorrect assumptions about the game, assumptions which I could have found out were false if I'd tested them, or (probably) if I'd just looked for an online guide that reported the results of other people's tests.

It all sounds very silly in retrospect, and it didn't change my worldview overnight. But it was (among?) the first of a series of events that made me realize that trying to master something just by thinking about it tends to go badly wrong. That when untrained brilliance goes up against domain expertise, domain expertise will generally win.

A whole bunch of caveats here. I'm not denying that being smart is pretty awesome. As a smart person, I highly recommend it. And acquiring domain expertise requires a certain minimum level of intelligence, which varies from field to field. It's only once you get beyond that minimum that more intelligence doesn't help as much as expertise. Finally, I'm talking about human scale intelligence here, the gap between the village idiot and Einstein is tiny compared to the gap between Einstein and possible superintelligences, so maybe a superintelligence could school any human expert in anything without acquiring any particular domain expertise.

Still, when I hear Eliezer say he thinks he should be able to handle anything on the fly, it strikes me as incredibly foolish. And I worry when I see fellow smart people who seem to think that being very smart and rational gives them grounds to dismiss other people's domain expertise. As Robin Hanson has said:

I was a physics student and then a physics grad student. In that process, I think I assimilated what was the standard worldview of physicists, at least as projected on the students. That worldview was that physicists were great, of course, and physicists could, if they chose to, go out to all those other fields, that all those other people keep mucking up and not making progress on, and they could make a lot faster progress, if progress was possible, but they don’t really want to, because that stuff isn’t nearly as interesting as physics is, so they are staying in physics and making progress there...

Surely you can look at some little patterns but because you can’t experiment on people, or because it’ll be complicated, or whatever it is, it’s just not possible. Partly, that’s because they probably tried for an hour, to see what they could do, and couldn’t get very far. It’s just way too easy to have learned a set of methods, see some hard problem, try it for an hour, or even a day or a week, not get very far, and decide it’s impossible, especially if you can make it clear that your methods definitely won’t work there. You don’t, often, know that there are any other methods to do anything with because you’ve learned only certain methods...

As one of the rare people who have spent a lot of time learning a lot of different methods, I can tell you there are a lot out there. Furthermore, I’ll stick my neck out and say most fields know a lot. Almost all academic fields where there’s lots of articles and stuff published, they know a lot.

(For those who don't know: Robin spent time doing physics, philosophy, and AI before landing in his current field of economics. When he says he's spent a lot of time learning a lot of different methods, it isn't an idle boast.)

Finally, what about the original story that Eliezer says set off his original childhood death spiral around intelligence?:

My parents always used to downplay the value of intelligence. And play up the value of—effort, as recommended by the latest research? No, not effort. Experience. A nicely unattainable hammer with which to smack down a bright young child, to be sure. That was what my parents told me when I questioned the Jewish religion, for example. I tried laying out an argument, and I was told something along the lines of: "Logic has limits, you'll understand when you're older that experience is the important thing, and then you'll see the truth of Judaism." I didn't try again. I made one attempt to question Judaism in school, got slapped down, didn't try again. I've never been a slow learner.

I think concluding experience isn't all that great is the wrong response here. Experience is important. The right response is to ask whether all older, more experienced people see the truth of Judaism. The answer of course is that they don't; a depressing number stick with whatever religion they grew up with (which usually isn't Judaism), a significant number end up non-believers, and a few convert to a new religion. But when almost everyone with a high level relevant experience agrees on something, beware thinking you know better than them based on your superior intelligence and supposed rationality.

Edit: One thing I meant to include when I posted this but forgot: one effect of my experiences is that I tend to see domain expertise where other people see intelligence. See e.g. this old comment by Robin Hanson: are hedge fundies really that smart, or have they simply spent a lot of time learning to seem smart in conversation?

As I inventoried my personal library and classified it using the Universal Decimal System, I found out about lots of fields of knowledge I was only dimly aware of or didn't even know existed¹, and one of those that piqued my curiosity was home economics, domestic science and housekeeping (field 64). I was kinda bluffed, actually; I always thought of home economics as that thing that shows up in American high school sitcoms, that elective "for girls" where people get to cook stuff on campus. Now I find that it fully occupies one of The Tens of the UDC! I finally realized it; this is Serious Business!

I thought of the permanently shoddy state of my bank account, of all the money I had spent in books (no less than 215 physical books, and then there's Kindle!), fancy gadgets (were those Marshall headphones really necessary? What about that sandwich-maker?), fancy food (even though I always seem to end up "cooking" the same boring, unbalanced crap), unnecessary or excessive heating and air conditioning, and so on and so forth.

I've come to realize how much I had underestimated this field, the duty towards oneself of taking care of one's house, and the advantages of so doing. I want to catch up in terms of planning my budget and my cleaning and my cooking and my buying furniture and appliances and so on and so for. I suppose I could figure it out by myself, but why reinvent the wheel?

So I thought to myself: asking your mates at LW has had awesome results when it came to getting your library in order, why don't you ask them about Home Economics? They probably actually went to those courses in High School, or have otherwise taken an interest just to optimize their homes! I mean, their literal livelihoods and well-beings are at stake, so why wouldn't they²?

So, yeah, if you guys know which reference books to start with, or have any practical recommendations in terms of resources or bibliography, and the handling thereof, I'd love to hear it. Who knows, maybe a good top level post may come of it?

¹This triggered my imagination on a completely unrelated topic: a gamified education system in the style of an RPG skill tree.

²My Inner Critic obligingly suggested "Arkasia and, given the demographic, a compounded disdain for manual labor, pedestrian and materialistic concerns, and girly stuff. Why else didn't you?" I told it to step aside and go have a swim in the North Atlantic.

Suppose it is absolutely true that atheism has a negative impact on your happiness and lifespan.  Suppose furthermore that you are the first person in your society of relatively happy theists who happened upon the idea of atheism, and moreover found absolute proof of its correctness, and quietly studied its effects on a small group of people kept isolated from the general population, and you discover that it has negative effects on happiness and lifespan.  Suppose that it -does- free people from a considerable amount of time wasted - from your perspective as a newfound atheist - in theistic theater.

Would you spread the idea?

This is, in our theoretical society, the emotional equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the group you tested it on is now comparatively crippled with existentialism and doubt, and many are beginning to doubt that the continued existence of human beings is even a good thing.  This is, for all intents and purposes, a basilisk, the mere knowledge of which causes its knower severe harm.  Is it, in fact, a good idea to go around talking about this revolutionary new idea, which makes everybody who learns it slightly less happy?  Would it be a -better- idea to form a secret society to go around talking to bright people likely to discover it themselves to try to keep this new idea quiet?

(Please don't fight the hypothetical here.  I know the evidence isn't nearly so perfect that atheism does in fact cause harm, as all the studies I've personally seen which suggest as much have some methodical flaws.  This is merely a question of whether "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is, in fact, a useful position to take, in view of ideas which may actually be harmful.)

[NOTE: This post has undergone substantial revisions following feedback in the comments section.  The basic complaint was that it was too airy and light on concrete examples and recommendations.  So I've said oops, applied the virtue of narrowness, gotten specific, and hopefully made this what it should've been the first time.]  

Take a moment and picture a master surgeon about to begin an operation.  Visualize the room (white, bright overhead lights), his clothes (green scrubs, white mask and gloves), the patient, under anesthesia and awaiting the first incision. There are several other people, maybe three or four, strategically placed and preparing for the task ahead.  Visualize his tools - it's okay if you don't actually know what tools a surgeon uses, but imagine how they might be arranged.  Do you picture them in a giant heap which the surgeon must dig through every time he wants something, or would they be arranged neatly (possibly in the order they'll be used) and where they can be identified instantly by sight?  Visualize their working area.  Would it be conducive to have random machines and equipment all over the place, or would every single item within arms reach be put there on purpose because it is relevant, with nothing left over to distract the team from their job for even a moment?    

Space is important.  You are a spatially extended being interacting with spatially extended objects which can and must be arranged spatially.  In the same way it may not have occurred to you that there is a correct way to have things, it may not have occurred to you that space is something you can use poorly or well.  The stakes aren't always as high as they are for a surgeon, and I'm sure there are plenty of productive people who don't do a single one of the things I'm going to talk about.  But there are also skinny people who eat lots of cheesecake, and that doesn't mean cheesecake is good for you.  Improving how you use the scarce resource of space can reduce task completion time, help in getting organized, make you less error-prone and forgetful, and free up some internal computational resources, among other things.  

What Does Using Space Well Mean?

It means consciously manipulating the arrangement, visibility, prominence, etc. of objects in your environment to change how they affect cognition (yours or other people's).  The Intelligent Use of Space (Kirsh, "The Intelligent Use of Space", 1995) is a great place to start if you're skeptical that there is anything here worth considering.  It's my primary source for this post because it is thorough but not overly technical, contains lots of clear examples, and many of the related papers I read were about deeper theoretical issues.  

The abstract of the paper reads:

How we manage the spatial arrangement of items around us is not an afterthought: it is an integral part of the way we think, plan, and behave. The proposed classification has three main categories: spatial arrangements that simplify choice; spatial arrangements that simplify perception; and spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation. The data for such a classification is drawn from videos of cooking, assembly and packing, everyday observations in supermarkets, workshops and playrooms, and experimental studies of subjects playing Tetris, the computer game. This study, therefore, focuses on interactive processes in the medium and short term: on how agents set up their workplace for particular tasks, and how they continuously manage that workplace.

The 'three main categories' of simplifying choice, perception, and internal computation can be further subdivided:

  simplifying choice

      reducing or emphasizing options.

      creating the potential for useful new choices.

  simplifying perception

      clustering like objects.

      marking an object.

      enhancing perceptual ability.

  simplfying internal computation

     doing more outside of your head.

These sub-categories are easier to picture and thus more useful when trying to apply the concept of using space correctly, and I've provided more illustrations below. It's worth pointing out that (Kirsh, "The Intelligent Use of Space", 1995) only considered the behavior of experts.  Perhaps effective space management partially explains expert's ability to do more of their processing offline and without much conscious planning.  An obvious follow up would be in examining how novices utilize space and looking for discrepancies.  

What Does Using Space Well Look Like?

The paper walks the reader through a variety of examples of good utilization of space.  Consider an expert cook going through the process of making a salad with many different ingredients, and ask how you would accomplish the same task differently:

...one subject we videotaped, cut each vegetable into thin slices and laid them out in tidy rows. There was a row of tomatoes, of mushrooms, and of red peppers, each of different length...To understand why lining up the ingredients in well ordered, neatly separated rows is clever, requires understanding a fact about human psychophysics: estimation of length is easier and more reliable than estimation of area or volume. By using length to encode number she created a cue or signal in the world which she could accurately track. Laying out slices in lines allows more precise judgment of the property relative number remaining than clustering the slices into groups, or piling them up into heaps. Hence because of the way the human perceptual system works, lining up the slices creates an observable property that facilitates execution.

Here, the cook used clustering and clever arrangement to make better use of her eyes and to reduce the load on her working memory, techniques I use myself in my day job.  As of this writing (2013) I'm teaching English in Korea.  I have a desk, a bunch of books, pencils, erasers, the works.  All the folders are together, the books are separated by level, and all ungraded homework is kept in its own place.  At the start of the work day I take out all the books and folders I'll need for that day and arrange them in the same order as my classes. When I get done with a class the book goes back on the day's pile but rotated 90 degrees so that I can tell it's been used. When I'm totally done with a book and I've entered homework scores and such, it goes back in the main book stack where all my books are.  I can tell at a glance which classes I've had, which ones I'll have, what order I'm in, which classes are finished but unprocessed, and which ones are finished and processed.  Cthulu only knows how much time I save and how many errors I prevent all by utilizing space well.  

These examples show how space can help you keep track of temporal order and make quick, accurate estimates, but it may not be clear how space can simplify choice.  Recall that simplifying choice usually breaks down into either taking some choices away or making good choices more obvious.  Taking choices away may sound like a bad thing, but each choice requires you to spend time evaluating options, and if you are juggling many different tasks the chance of making the wrong choice goes up.  Similarly, looking for good options soaks up time, unless you can find a way to make yourself trip over them.  

An example of removing bad decisions is in factory workers placing a rag on hot pipes so they know not to touch them (Kirsh, "The Intelligent Use of Space", 1995).  And here is how some carpenters structure their work space so that they can make good uses for odds and ends easier to see:

In the course of making a piece of furniture one periodically tidies up. But not completely. Small pieces of wood are pushed into a corner or left about; tools, screw drivers and mallets are kept nearby. The reason most often reported is that 'they come in handy'. Scraps of wood can serve to protect surfaces from marring when clamped, hammered or put under pressure. They can elevate a piece when being lacquered to prevent sticking. The list goes on.

By symbolically marking a dangerous object the engineers are shutting down the class of actions which involves touching the pipe. It is all too easy in the course of juggling multiple aspects of a task to forget something like this and injure yourself.  The strategically placed and obvious visual marker means that the environment keeps track of the danger for you.  Likewise poisonous substances have clear warning labels and are kept away from anything you might eat; both precautions count as good use of space.

My copy of Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From is on another continent, but the carpenter example reminded me of his recommendation to keep messy notebooks.  Doing so makes it more likely you'll see unusual and interesting connections between things you're thinking about.  He goes so far as to use a tool called DevonThink which speeds this process up for him.

And while I'm at it, this also points to one advantage of having physical books over PDFs.  My books take up space and are easier to see than their equivalent 1's and 0's on a hard drive, so I'm always reminded of what I have left to read. More than once I've gone on a useful tangent because the book title or cover image caught my attention, and more than one interesting conversation got started when a visitor was looking over my book collection.  Scanning the shelves at a good university library is even better, kind of like 17th-century StumbleUpon, and English-language libraries are something I've sorely missed while I've been in Asia.  

All this usefulness derives from the spatial properties and arrangement of books, and I have no idea how it can be replicated with the Kindle.  

Specific Recommendations

You can see from the list of examples I've provided that there are a billion ways of incorporating these insights into work, life, and recreation.  By discussing the concept I hope to have drawn your attention to the ways in which space is a resource, and I suspect just doing this is enough to get a lot of people to see how they can improve their use of space.  Here are some more ideas, in no particular order:

-I put my alarm clock far enough away from my bed so that I have to actually get up to turn it off.  This is so amazingly    effective at ensuring I get up in the morning that I often hate my previous-night's self.  Most of the time I can't go back to  sleep even when I try.   

-There's reason to suspect that a few extra monitors or a bigger display will make your life easier  [Thanks Qiaochu_Yuan].

-When doing research for an article like this one, open up all the tabs you'll need for the project in a separate window and close  each tab as you're done with it.  You'll be less distracted by something irrelevant and you won't have to remember what you did  or didn't read.  

-Having a separate space to do something seems to greatly increase the chances I'll get it done.  I tried not going to the gym  for a while and just doing push ups in my house, managing to keep that up for all of a week or so. Recently, I switched gyms,  and despite now having to take a bus all the way across town I make it to the gym 3-5 times a week, pretty much without fail.  If your studying/hacking/meditation isn't going well, try going somewhere which exists only to give people a  place to do that  thing.

-Put whatever you can't afford to forget when you leave the house right by the door.

-If something is really distracting you, completely remove it from the environment temporarily.  During one particularly strenuous  finals in college I not only turned off the xbox, I completely unplugged it and put it in a drawer.  Problem. Solved.  

-Alternatively, anything you're wanting to do more of should be out in the open.  Put your guitar stand or chess board or  whatever where you're going to see it frequently, and you'll engage with it more often.  This doubles as a signal to other  people, giving you an opportunity to manage their impression of you, learn more about them, and identify those with similar  interests to yours.  

-Make use of complementary strategies (Kirsh, "Complementary Strategies", 1995).  If you're having trouble comprehending    something, make a diagram, or write a list.  The linked paper describes a simple pilot study which involved two groups tasked  with counting coins, one which could use their hands and one which could not.  The 'no hands' group was more likely to make  errors and to take longer to complete the task.  Granted, this was a pilot study with sample size = 5, and the difference  wasn't that stark.  But it's worth thinking about next time you're stuck on a problem.    

-Complementary strategies can also include things you do with your body, which after all is just space you wear with you  everywhere.  Talk out loud to yourself if you're alone, give a mock presentation in which you summarize a position you're trying  to understand, keep track of arguments and counterarguments with your fingers.  I've always found the combination of  explaining something out loud to an imaginary person while walking or pacing to be especially potent.  Some of my best ideas  come to me while I'm hiking.    

-Try some of these embodied cognition hacks.

Summary and Conclusion

Space is a resource which, like all others, can be used effectively or not.  When used effectively, it acts to simplify choices, simplify perception, and simplify internal computation.  I've provided many examples of good space usage from all sorts of real-life domains in the hopes that you can apply some of these insights to live and work more effectively.  

Further Reading

[In the original post these references contained no links.  Sincere thanks to user Pablo_Stafforini for tracking them down]

Kirsh, D. (1995) The Intelligent Use of Space

Kirsh, D. (1999) Distributed Cognition, Coordination and Environment Design

Kirsh, D. (1998) Adaptive Rooms, Virtual Collaboration, and Cognitive Workflow

Kirsh, D. (1996) Adapting the Environment Instead of Oneself

Kirsh, D. (1995) Complementary Strategies: Why we use our hands when we think

Money is one measure of social status. People compare themselves favorably or unfavorably to others in their social circles based on their wealth and their earning power, and signals thereof, and compare their social circles favorably or unfavorably with other social circles based on the average wealth of people in the social circles. Humans crave social status, and this is one of people’s motivations for making money. 

Effective altruists attempt to quantify “amount of good done” and maximize it. Once this framing is adopted, “amount of good done” becomes a measure of social status in the same way that money is. Most people who aspire to be effective altruists will be partially motivated by a desire to matter more than other people, in the sense of doing more good. People who join the effective altruism movement may do so partially out of a desire to matter more than people who are not in the movement. 

Harnessing status motivations for the sake of doing the most good can have profound positive impacts. But under this paradigm, effective altruists will generally be motivated to believe that they’re doing more good than other people are. This motivation is not necessarily dominant in any given case, but it’s sufficiently strong to be worth highlighting.

With this in mind, note that effective altruists will be motivated to believe that the activities that they themselves are capable of engaging in have higher value than they actually do, and that activities that others are engaged in have lower value than they actually do. Without effort to counterbalance this motivation, effective altruists’ views of the philanthropic landscape will be distorted, and they’ll be apt to bias others in favor of the areas that use their own core competencies.

I worry that the effective altruist community hasn’t taken sufficient measures to guard against this issue. In particular, I’m not aware of any overt public discussion of it. Independently of whether or not there are examples of public discussion that I’m unaware of, the fact that I’m not aware of any suggests that any discussion that has occurred hasn’t percolated enough.

I’ll refrain from giving specific examples that I see as causes for concern, on account of political sensitivity. The effective altruist community is divided into factions, and Politics is the Mind-Killer. I believe that there are examples of each faction irrationally overestimating the value of their activities, and/or irrationally undervaluing the value of other faction's activities, and I believe that in each case, motivated reasoning of the above type may play a role.

I request that commenters not discuss particular instances in which they believe that this has occurred, or is occurring, as I think that such discussion would reduce collaboration between different factions of the effective altruist community. 

The effective altruist movement is in early stages, and it’s important to arrive at accurate conclusions about effective philanthropy as fast as possible. At this stage in time, it may be that the biggest contribution that members of the community can make is to engender and engage in an honest and unbiased discussion of how best to make the world a better place.

I don't have a very definite proposal for how this can be accomplished. I welcome any suggestions. For now, I would encourage effective altruist types to take pride in being self-skeptical when it comes to favorable assessments of their potential impact relative to other effective altruist types, or relative to people outside of the effective altruist community.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Vipul Naik and Nick Beckstead for feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

Note: I formerly worked as a research analyst at GiveWell. All views here are my own.

I cross-posted this article to http://www.effective-altruism.com/