Peter Thiel addresses this topic again in a debate with George Gilder:

"The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth"

An excellent debate between SIAI donor Peter Thiel and George Gilder on:

"The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth"

I suggest skipping the first 8 minutes since they are mostly intro fluff. Thiel makes a convincing case that we are living in a time of technological slowdown. His argument has been discussed on LessWrong before.

I would be interested in setting up an online study group, preferably via google hangout or skype for several key sequences that I want to grok and question more fully. Anyone else interested in this?

Ovulation Leads Women to Perceive Sexy Cads as Good Dads (HT: Heartiste)

Why do some women pursue relationships with men who are attractive, dominant, and charming but who do not want to be in relationships—the prototypical sexy cad? Previous research shows that women have an increased desire for such men when they are ovulating, but it is unclear why ovulating women would think it is wise to pursue men who may be unfaithful and could desert them. Using both college-age and community-based samples, in 3 studies we show that ovulating women perceive charismatic and physically attractive men, but not reliable and nice men, as more committed partners and more devoted future fathers. Ovulating women perceive that sexy cads would be good fathers to their own children but not to the children of other women. This ovulatory-induced perceptual shift is driven by women who experienced early onset of puberty. Taken together, the current research identifies a novel proximate reason why ovulating women pursue relationships with sexy cads, complementing existing research that identifies the ultimate, evolutionary reasons for this behaviour.

I think it is isn't much disputed that ovulating women seem to find dark tirade and some other personality traits more sexy when ovulating, so to me the above sounded like a clear example of the halo effect. Sexy men will seems smarter and kinder than they are, because any positive trait seems to beef up our perceptions of people in other areas as well. But even as my mind slowly noted that this should effect how they see the odds of a man caring for other women's children and that I don't have any info to suggest that women are more prone to halo effect for male sexiness in general during ovulation, I saw the authors had considered this:

Finally, there were no main effects of fertility or fertility by target male interactions for any of the other positive attributes: attractiveness, financial status, and social status (all ps  .33). Ovulation also had no effect on the perception of men’s attractiveness (Mlow fertility dad
5.06, Mhigh fertility dad
4.73; Mlow fertility cad
5.79, Mhigh fertility cad
5.65), financial status (M low fertility dad
4.76, Mhigh fertility dad
4.77; Mlow fertility cad
5.64, Mhigh fertility cad
5.64), or social status (Mlow fertility dad
4.82, M high fertility dad
4.74;Mlow fertility cad
6.21,Mhigh fertility cad
6.07). The ovulatory-induced perception of paternal investment, therefore, is not produced by a halo effect when women evaluate sexy cads at high fertility.

Study 2 also tested whether the ovulatory-induced overperception of paternal investment was a product of a broader ovulatory-induced halo effect that occurs when women evaluate attractive and charismatic men. The results showed that there was no ovulatory effect on women’s perceptions of the sexy cad’s attractiveness, financial status, or social status. Thus, ovulation appears to shift women’s perceptions of a man’s willingness to invest in her offspring specifically, but not his other positive traits.

I guess heterosexual women should be conscious of this bias, especially those desiring family formation or perhaps when judging in other contexts about which adult men they want their children to interact with. While obviously they probably aren't wrong about how sexy they find someone, they are biased when it comes to the other traits they, judging from their stated preferences, seek to maximize in such men.

Why aren't you posting any new videos on Bloggingheads.tv any more? From the outside they seemed like low investment at least with regards to the amount of time spent and easily accessible. Some may have even been personally entertaining conversations with interesting people.

I think you should consider making an appearance once your rationality book is out for promotion purposes at least.

The Essence Of Science Explained In 63 Seconds

A one minute piece of Feynman lecture candy wrapped in reasonable commentary. Excellent and most importantly brief intro level thinking about science and our physical world. Apologies if it has been linked to before, especially since I can't say I would be surprised if it was.

Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964. YouTube

Think about what he's saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.

The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."

This view is based on an almost sacred belief that the ways of the world are unshakeable, ordered by laws that have no moods, no variance, that what's "Out There" has no mind. And that we, creatures of imagination, colored by our ability to tell stories, to predict, to empathize, to remember — that we are a separate domain, creatures different from the order around us. We live, full of mind, in a mindless place. The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.

Considering what a horrible can of worms the definition of that word is and that "racist" represents a strong political and debating weapon against any enemy, I think society would be much helped to adopt a rationalist taboo on it. Even LessWrong discussions would be improved by this I think.

Stuff by Yvain

On the applications of bad translation.

Genes are overrated, genetics is underrated

by Razib Khan

... I agree one one thing in particular: an emphasis on concrete and specific genes for traits is a motif in science journalism that can be very frustrating, and often misleading. Nevertheless, that’s not the only story. I believe our current culture greatly underestimates the power of genetics in shaping broader social patterns.

How can these be reconciled? Do not genes and genetics go together? The resolution is a simple one: when you speak of 1,000 genes, you speak of no genes. You can’t list 1,000 genes in prose, even if you know them. But using standard quantitative and behavior genetic means one can apportion variation in the population of a trait to variation in genes. 1,000 genes added together can be of great effect. The newest findings in genomics are reinforcing assertions of non-trivial heritability of many complex traits, though rendering problematic attributing that heritability to a specific set of genes.

An interesting read I stumbled upon in gwern's Google+ feed.

Shelling Out -- The history of money