Example: "you need to speak your mind more often". Is advice. If I decide that this advice is targeted at introverted people who like to be confident before they share what they have to say, but who often say nothing at all because of this lack of confidence. I then assume that if I am not an introverted person then this advice is not applicable to me and should be ignored.

I don't think the problem with "you need to speak your mind more often" is at it's core about targeting the advice and deciding whether it's the right advice for you.

The problem is rather that it doesn't tell you how to make the decision when to speak your mind. It also doesn't tell you what you could to speak your mind more often. From it's structure it's also not clear what's meant with "need". Does the advice giver mean that I should speak my mind more often? If so that comes with the general problems of "shoulding people".

In some sense you could say that "Radical Honesty" is about providing a solution to problem that the person who get's told "you need to speak your mind more often" has.

I spent a lot of time reading personal development material on the internet and I had read articles about "Radical Honesty". When I was reading about it I thought it was basically about insulting people. I didn't get what it was about.

Later I took a "Radical Honesty" workshop. I went because the title was "Radical Honesty and Conscious Intimicy" and the "Conscious Intimicy" part lured me. When I was there I got "Radical Honesty" and what it's about. "Radical Honesty" tells me about the trigger I can use to decide that it's a good moment to speak my mind. It has exercises that make it more likely that I'm actually speaking my mind that also have a strong physical effect. Lastly I'm not told that I need or should speak my mind in that enviroment.

Seeking advice like "you need to speak your mind more often" is like eating fast food. It's easy to digest and understand the advice but it's shallow and superficial.

I don't really think this is spending idiosyncrasy credits... but maybe we hang out in different social circles.

I periodically do things to get out of my comfort zone. I started years ago before a friend introduced me to LW where I pleasantly discovered that CoZE was recommended.

This write-up is about my most recent exercise: Do a Non Gender-Conforming Thing

I chose to have my nails painted. Having painted nails requires low enough effort that I have no excuse not to and, wearing them out in public is just out-of-the-ordinary enough to make me worry about how people will react. After getting them painted, I realized why girls say "My nails!" a lot after a manicure and worry about screwing them up. It took work to paint them and chipping them makes them look like shit. Can’t let that happen to me!

Then I challenged some friends to do it and gave these suggestions:

I think breaking arbitrary societal conventions and expanding comfort zones are positive things so I'm challenging a few people to try it and post a picture or video. Bonus points for a write-up of how you felt while doing it and any reactions from observers.

(Those who live in Berkeley are playing on easy mode.)

(People challenged may totally already do these! The list was limited to my imagination and ideas I could find. The idea is to get out of your comfort zone so feel free to get creative...)

Exercises I came up with:

Ideas for men:

• Get a manicure/pedicure (it's basically a massage)

• Wear (traditionally feminine) jewelry

• Carry a purse

• Play a “girly” pop song loud enough for others to hear

• Order a fruity alcoholic beverage

• Get your nails painted

• Wear a feminine outfit (or at least a pink shirt or something)

• Read/ask about fashion or some other traditionally feminine topic

Ideas for women:

• Wear a masculine outfit. (I feel like women have to try a bit harder than guys here)

• Don’t shave your legs for a week

• Don't shave your armpits for a week

• Wear a tie

• Give a guy a compliment

• Ask a guy on a date

• Don't wear makeup for a week

• Don't wear a bra for a week

• Read/ask about sports or some other traditionally masculine topic

My thoughts so far: It’s still weird for me to see my own hands. It takes me a second to recognize them as my own. “And how pretty they are!”

I'm already hypervigilant in public but we were in public in a new area and I was more hypervigilant than normal. I had to fight the urge to keep hiding my fingernails in the grocery store. I was worried that our hosts at the Airbnb we're staying at would be weird about it...

Now I'm caught between not wanting people to see my nails at all and not wanting to see them all chipped (it's hard taking proper care of them!). I'm conscious of my dad seeing this. I do weird enough things that my model of people in my tribe reacting is "John doing another thing..."

I need to get rid of them before we visit our friend’s parents so that way I don’t make a weird first impression. A lot of the discomfort has more to do with being misperceived or miscategorized. For instance, one time after getting my haircut, my shirts was covered with hair, so my friend lent me her Pink Floyd T-shirt to wear. I wasn’t defying social norms by wearing a Pink Floyd shirt, but that was not the kind of thing I would usually wear so I felt extra-aware of the potential for being perceived a certain way based on how I was dressed. Likewise, if I smoke a clove cigarette or cigar, which I do once every six months with a certain friend, I would be horrified to be falsely labeled a regular smoker.

I'll have to try this again when I'm in public more frequently to give it a fair shake.

Meta-Communication: I'm also getting out of my comfort zone because I'm not sure this is the right place for this type of post or if these kinds of posts are welcome.

Cross-Posted and editing from my Facebook. Feel free to follow me there!

This is really hard to answer in the context of:

Is there more useful signal than noise here? It depends on who you are, where you are, and how good you are at working that out for yourself.

I'd be willing to give it a shot. What problems are you working on at the moment?

Thoughts on the King, Warrior, Magician, Lover archetypes?

Having been at the self-dev, PUA, systems, psychology, lesswrong, kegan, philosophy, and other things - game for a very long time. My discerning eye suggests that some of the model is good, and some is bad. My advice to anyone looking at that model is that there are equal parts shit and diamonds. If you haven't been reading in this area for 9 years you can't see what's what. Don't hold anything too closely but be a sponge and absorb it all. Throw out the shit when you come across it and keep the diamonds.

At the end of the 4 (KWML) pages suggest some various intelligent and reasonable ways to develop one's self:

• Take up a martial art.
• Do something that scares you.
• Work on becoming more decisive.
• Meditate. Especially on death.
• Quit should- ing on yourself.
• Find your core values.
• Have a plan and purpose for your life.
• Boost your adaptability by strengthening your resilience.
• Study and practice the skills necessary for completing your goals, become a master of your trade.
• Find the principles that you’re loyal to.
• Establish some non-negotiable, unalterable terms (or N.U.Ts) and live by them.
• Compete in a race like the Warrior Dash.
• Strengthen your discipline by establishing habits and daily routines.
• Adopt a minimalist philosophy. Declutter your life. Simplify your diet. Get out of debt.

• Commit to lifelong learning
• Meditate
• Create more, consume less.
• Work with your hands.
• Take part in a rite of passage
• Find a mentor
• Become a mentor
• Join a Fraternal organization like the Freemasons
• Carve out a sacred space in your life

• Create more, consume less
• Leave a legacy
• Develop practical wisdom
• Become a mentor
• Find a mentor
• Establish your core values
• Develop the virtue of order
• Break away from your mother
• Develop a life plan
• Develop the traits of true leadership
• Protect the sanctity of your ideas
• Become decisive
• Avoid the corruption of money, power,and sex
• Live with integrity

These suggestions are not bad. save possibly the suggestion to take up a martial art which I disagree with and doing something that scares you. Anything that gets people to establish their purpose, have a plan and be more the people they want to be is a good thing.

Things like, "Work on becoming more decisive" are likely only to help the people who already think they are not decisive enough. Those who are decisive enough will probably skip it. HOWEVER if you already were* Study and practice the skills necessary for completing your goals, become a master of your trade. decisive and you thought you weren't you might end up down a rabbit hole trying to work out how to do the thing that you don't need to do.

• Quit should- ing on yourself.

Nate soares has a post on "should's" as well. http://mindingourway.com/not-because-you-should/ it's different but also covers the suggestion of not doing what you "should" but doing what you want to do instead.

• Study and practice the skills necessary for completing your goals, become a master of your trade.

So yea; do what you are doing with massive focus. Be so good they can't ignore you TM. etc. etc. This is not the first place to suggest such things. And I strongly believe that for some people this method of delivering advice is exactly what they need. For other's it's exactly not what they need. Good luck figuring out if it's you or not.

Is there more useful signal than noise here? It depends on who you are, where you are, and how good you are at working that out for yourself.

All I can say is - "maybe".

End note: I hope to soon write up a post on making advice applicable and thinking about basically "It depends on who you are, where you are, and how good you are at working that out for yourself." in more detail.

I wish I had read the ending first; Hall is relying heavily on Deutsch to make his case. Deutsch has come up on LW before, most relevantly here. An earlier comment of mine still seems true: I think Deutsch is pointing in the right direction and diagnosing the correct problems, but I think Deutsch underestimates the degree to which other people have diagnosed the same problems and are working on solutions to address those problems.

Hall's critique is multiple parts, so I'm writing my response part by part. Horizontal lines distinguish breaks, like so:

It starts off with reasoning by analogy, which is generally somewhat suspect. In this particular analogy, you have two camps:

1. Builders, who build ever-higher towers, hoping that they will one day achieve flight (though they don't know how that will work theoretically).

2. Theorists, who think that they're missing something, maybe to do with air, and that the worries the builders have about spontaneous liftoff don't make sense, because height doesn't have anything to do with flight.

But note that when it comes to AI, the dividing lines are different. Bostrom gets flak for not knowing the details of modern optimization and machine learning techniques (and I think that flak is well-targeted), but Bostrom is fundamentally concerned about theoretical issues. It's the builders--the Ngs of the world who focus on adding another layer to their tower--who think that things will just work out okay instead of putting effort into ensuring that things will work out okay.

That is, the x-risk argument is the combination of a few pieces of theory: the Orthogonality Thesis, that intelligence can be implemented in silicon (the universality of intelligence), and that there aren't hard constraints to intelligence anywhere near the level of human intelligence.

One paragraphs, two paragraphs, three paragraphs... when are we going to get to the substance?

Okay, 5 paragraphs in, we get the idea that "Bayesian reasoning" is an error. Why? Supposedly he'll tell us later.

The last paragraph is good, as a statement of the universality of computation.

And the first paragraph is one of the core disagreements. Hall correctly diagnoses that we don't understand human thought at the level that we can program it. (Once we do, then we have AGI, and we don't have AGI yet.) But Hall then seems to claim that, basically, unless we're already there we won't know when we'll get there. Which is true but immaterial; right now we can estimate when we'll get there, and what our estimate is determines how we should approach.

And then the latter half of this section is just bad. There's some breakdown in communication between Bostrom and Hall; Bostrom's argument, as I understand it, is not that you get enough hardware and then the intelligence problem solves itself. (This is the "the network has become self-aware!" sci-fi model of AGI creation.) The argument is that there's some algorithmic breakthrough necessary to get to AGI, but that the more hardware you have, the smaller that breakthrough is.

(That is, suppose the root of intelligence was calculating matrix determinants. There are slow ways and fast ways to do that--if you have huge amounts of hardware, coming across Laplace Expansion is enough, but if you have small amounts of hardware, you can squeak by only if you have fast matrix multiplication.)

One major point of contention between AI experts is, basically, how many software breakthroughs we have left until AGI. It could be the case that it's two; it could be the case that it's twenty. If it's two, then we expect it to happen fairly quickly; if it's twenty, then we expect it to happen fairly slowly. This uncertainty means we cannot rule out it happening quickly.

The claim that programs do not engage in creativity and criticism is simply wrong. This is the heart and soul of numerical optimization, metaheuristic programs in particular. Programs are creative and critical beyond the abilities of humans in the narrow domains that we've been able to communicate to those programs, but the fundamental math of creativity and criticism exist (in the terms of sampling from a solution space, especially in ways that make use of solutions that we've already considered, and objective functions that evaluate those solutions). The question is how easily we will be able to scale from well-defined problems (like routing trucks or playing Go) to poorly-defined problems (like planning marketing campaigns or international diplomacy).

Part 4 is little beyond "I disagree with the Orthogonality Thesis." That is, it sees value disagreements as irrationality. Bonus points for declaring Bayesian reasoning false for little reason that I can see besides "Deutsch disagrees with it" (which, I think, is due to Deutsch's low familiarity with the math of causal models, which I think are the solution he correctly thinks is missing with EDT-ish Bayesian reasoning).

Not seeing anything worth commenting on in part 5.

Part 6 includes a misunderstanding of Arrow's Theorem. (Arrow's Theorem is a no-go theorem, but it doesn't rule out the thing Hall thinks it rules out. If the AI is allowed to, say, flip a coin when it's indifferent, Arrow's Theorem no longer applies.)

Has there been any response to Brett Hall's critique of Bostrom's Superintelligence? What do y'all think? http://www.bretthall.org/superintelligence.html

predict with high confidence a Republican win

Odd since most prediction markets have a 60/40 split in favor of a Democrat winning the US presidency.

E.g., https://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/quotes/Pres16_Quotes.html

Sanders vs. Trump.

The polls have Sanders ahead in this particular matchup ...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.html

TV and Movies (Live Action) Thread

The link you provided isn't working. Here is the article: http://www.lifehack.org/330221/6-science-based-hacks-for-growing-mentally-stronger