[LINK] Erotic fiction about clippy, fresh off the press
Paper clip maximizer soon to gain a whole new meaning...
Money threshold Trigger Action Patterns
In American society, talking about money is a taboo. It is ok to talk about how much money someone else made when they sold their company, or how much money you would like to earn yearly if you got a raise, but in many different ways, talking about money is likely to trigger some embarrassment in the brain, and generate social discomfort. As one random example: no one dares suggest that bills should be paid according to wealth, for instance, instead people quietly assume that fair is each paying ~1/n, which of course completely fails utilitarian standards.
One more interesting thing people don't talk about, but would probably be useful to know, are money trigger action patterns. That would be a trigger action pattern that should trigger whenever you have more money than X, for varying Xs.
A trivial example is when should you stop caring about pennies, or quarters? When should you start taking cabs or Ubers everywhere? These are minor examples, but there are more interesting questions that would benefit from a money trigger action pattern.
An argument can be made for instance that one should invest in health insurance prior to cryonics, cryonics prior to painting a house and recommended charities before expensive soundsystems. But people never put numbers on those things.
When should you buy cryonics and life insurance for it? When you own $1,000? $10,000? $1,000,000? Yes of course those vary from person to person, currency to currency, environment, age group and family size. This is no reason to remain silent about them. Money is the unit of caring, but some people can care about many more things than others in virtue of having more money. Some things are worth caring about if and only if you have that many caring units to spare.
I'd like to see people talking about what one should care about after surpassing specific numeric thresholds of money, and that seems to be an extremely taboo topic. Seems that would be particularly revealing when someone who does not have a certain amount suggests a trigger action pattern and someone who does have that amount realizes that, indeed, they should purchase that thing. Some people would also calibrate better over whether they need more or less money, if they had thought about these thresholds beforehand.
Some suggested items for those who want to try numeric triggers: health insurance, cryonics, 10% donation to favorite cause, virtual assistant, personal assistant, car, house cleaner, masseuse, quitting your job, driver, boat, airplane, house, personal clinician, lawyer, body guard, etc...
...notice also that some of these are resource satisfiable, but some may not. It may always be more worth financing your anti-aging helper than your costume designer, so you'd hire the 10 millionth scientist to find out how to keep you young before considering hiring someone to design clothes specifically for you, perhaps because you don't like unique clothes. This is my feeling about boats, it feels like there are always other things that can be done with money that precede having a boat, though outside view is that a lot of people who own a lot of money buy boats.
Strategic Bestseller: Taking the Blog Path (4HS002)
"The scariest moment is just before you start""I think timid writers like the passive voice for the same reason timid lovers like passiveFollow-up to: How can I strategically write a complex bestseller?
partners. The passive voice is safe." - Stephen King
2:27 PM, Mexico City, 08 July 2013
The Blog Path and the Time Dimension
Robin Hanson recently said that writing a book feels lonelier than writing blog posts. Blog posts have many features that books will never have. Not only the obvious ones such as instantaneous gratification, being able to complete a chunk of work in one sitting, and being able to show you are actually doing something, not just claiming you are. Blogs also partition time in a way that makes a primate brain comfortable, both from the reader's and the writer's perspective. But in my case the most important feature of blogs is that generate and test and trial and error are easy to do. So after my first post here, and weeks solving many of the surrounding problems that could impede me from moving forward, I decided to go through the beaten track and blog my way into a bestseller.
The Challenges Theme
The theme of the blog is self challenges, and it envisions the public that enjoys Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, with a side of A J Jacobs. It begins by the #50: Stop Learning, Start Doing.
This is the first post, so let’s cut to the chase: In this blog we’ll be going through a series of 50 challenges. Whatever you want to do, let’s do this together. You like A. J. Jacobs and Tim Ferriss? That’s a good start. You want to deal with your big picture question too? On top of that you like Science and Philosophy? You’ve come to the right place, but don’t take a seat yet, this is not a place to rest your gaze and get your warm fuzzy feeling inside by making a comment. This is a place to do.
All you’ll need prior to reading this blog is linked below:
You want to be one of the few Self-Actualizers out there? This won’t be any easy, and though we’ll make the journey together, no one besides you can do it for you.
But before we start, there are Six things you need to know, and they’re gonna hurt like few things you (... and it continues from here)
Previous LW Post Comments (ordered by upvotes):
Omid said that if writing is like music, being a bestseller is mostly about luck. Partially (0.5) I concur, but it seems to me that randomness in music interest is mostly dominated by prestige considerations from separate domains.
Trevor Blake told his story and made clear that only writing is writing, talking about it, or even what I'm doing here, writing about it, isn't it. That seemed like an important downward spiral to keep track of. It explains why these LW posts will be less frequent than I thought before.
Gwern and Pjeby had a long discussion about book stats and likelihoods of making bestselling lists. It is clear that it is very hard. But it made me feel it is less hard than I thought before.
ChristianKI asked the words per day question. I'll respond by saying that I read+write more than six hours a day, which is Stephen King's suggested time in his "On Writing"
Michaelos and Qiaochu_Yuan suggested a mixed nagging strategy, getting someone close to me to nag me about writing while also beeminding it. This seems very important. Beeminder is set, and feel free to nag me in private messages if you are reading this far from the date it was written. I'll get a friend whom I see a lot, and a sexy lady, and an authority figure, to nag me every once in a while. So whether I'm feeling gregarious, romantically infatuated or seeking validation, there will always be a chance that writing is the emotionally correct thing to do.
Finally, and of course there will never be time to respond to every comment here, though there might in the blog itself: Viliam_Bur devised "on the fly" a strategy, which nicely coincides with what I'm doing, except in that outlining the book is something I'll do after a few blog posts, now that this new "blog post" element entered the book agenda. Viliam also mentioned humans love reading stories, and the blogs next post will be one of my stories.
Getting informed about what does and doesn't work
Last post I said this post would contain a few things, among them "(d) Gather that information" in Salamon's list of strategic things to do in a project pursuit. From the information I got uptill now, including comments, posts in LW and asking authors by email, things that influence selling odds in non-fiction in a good way are, in no particular order:
1) Being famous
2) Writing a lot
3) Luck
4) Being a professor in a prestigious university
5) Passion
6) A wide circle of influence
7) Having a 1000 true fans, who'll buy your stuff because it is yours
8) Knowing your Grammar, and when to ignore it
9) Ignoring 80% of the criticism you receive
(those would be the "If I can't have it, so can't you" kind of critics, or just naturally spiteful individuals)
10) Paying five times more attention to the remaining 20%
11) If your reader says your writing is confusing, it is, by definition, confusing
12) Dealing with topics in a way that interests many, but focusing on your idealized one reader
13) Understand that lacking the level of obsession and resources used to promote The Four Hour Workweek, the journey could be as long as writing three or four books before making it big, or five hundred blog posts. It helps that I'm riding the four hour brand.
15) Using your strengths however you can
In my case I intend to use my "sure, naked dancing in public citing horoscopes sounds ok to me" strength, and also however many stories of unbelievable days this lack of embarrassment has given me.
Next LW Post
Before the next LW post I intend to copy Svi's idea of using TDT for a personal hacking experience, and also do the same thing with other unusual ideas that pop up in LW frequently. Instead of taking advice from something in LW that is specifically about strategic thinking, which I'm already doing with Great Courses lectures+Salamon's post, I'll just try to see how to administer things like TDT, Everett, Timeless Physics, AIXI, Newcomb, Iterated Prisoner Dilemma and PrudentBot into effective writing - ¿or should I call it effective bestselling now that I know writing itself is but the tip of the iceberg?. I have no idea how to do that transposition, but when last here I exposed my goals, and now it doesn't seem that embarrassing to do it anymore.
Last, I ask a favor with a story:
There is a one domain I never felt like learning more about. Seeking for truth is a noble goal, but some truths are information hazards, and I always had the impression that music, for me, was a dark terrain. It feels like the more I know - from almost nothing - about music, about structure, math, chords, composition, harmony, style, it all boils down to "unweaving the rainbow" in Dawkins' parlance. It detracts from the experience. Going to a music show for me is a torture, for the last thing I want to associate music with is a bunch of humans making coordinated physical motions in complex devices that cause the air to oscillate. I want music to be what makes my eyes teary when a Myiazaki's character finally saves the forgotten forest from the mountain spirit. Music should be a memoir of my grandma bringing me as a child to bed while Vivaldi's Spring surrounded the bed. By the same token, there are many details of people's lives we are better off unaware of, and in the case of a blogger, or a writer, you frequently just don't want to know the details, how easy or hard it was for her to write, or how long does she usually take in the shower. Most people are not hardcore epistemic rationalists, and I'd prefer that those didn't find any link, mention or pointer from the blog comments to the LW posts about it. Perhaps not so much in this community, but mystery is, and will forever remain, an important component in excitement and interest.
I'll finish off as I did before, by mentioning what this is all about: I don't know which LW posts contain the most compact, memorable or effective techniques for winning at being strategic, but I'm hoping by the end of this process the territory is better mapped for those who'd like to follow suit. Or point and laugh.
How can I strategically write a complex bestseller? (4HS001)
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
- Neil Gaiman
3:00 AM, Mexico City, 12 June 2013
Seven years ago I made a promise I didn't keep. I was 17 at the time, and mildly unaware of how complex and large the World is. The conversation went something like this:
Me: I could write a bestseller, come on, it is not that complicated. Just read a random bestseller, they are not even that smart anyway!
Mentor: Yeah, right, I dare you to go back home right now and write a bestseller, go!
Me: I'm busy with all this school stuff right now, so I have to do my homework and....
Mentor: Ok, ok, I'll concede we are very busy right now, how about in five years?
Me: Five years seems more than enough. Take a note, in five years time I'll have written a bestseller. I promise.
Somehow later on I got busy with cooking pasta I needn't eat and listening to gossip about people I didn't care. Not a good start.
It's never too late to start over though, and now is as good a time as any.
But wait! Humans are not automatically strategic right?
True. Also humans are not as good at detecting their own strategic failures and dead-ends as other humans. If we can't even face more than three minutes of work, how could we ever intuitively look at our work and see where it is bad?
Which is why it seems that the rational way to do it is to find a place where people trained at being strategic can pinpoint your failures and accomplishments as you go along, rewarding you for winning and twisting your mental knobs when you fail, so that over time, either you learn how to do it right, or you learn the right thing to do was something else altogether. This is the project. I'm hoping as an exercise in self-experimentation with Lesswrong rationality techniques that it both helps others who may be undertaking writing or related projects, and inspires others into remaining as strategic as they learned to be over time, or even more.
I won't write the book here, but I'll keep track of the writing process and everything involved around it here (killing plausible deniability of my goals), and encourage anyone who perchance might be doing something similar to keep track in the same way through commentaries or taking private notes. Starting by the checklist in Humans are not automatically strategic:
We do not automatically:
- (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
Descriptive definition: The goal is to have written a book that, despite having interesting complex content, and being within my interest scope, sells enough to get me a free and clear profit of 1700 Big Mac Indexes per month. 54 Big Macs a day. Current US $7140,00 per month, for three consecutive months.
Ostensive Definition: Being the author of something that enters my cognitive intensional cluster containing Drop Dead Healthy, The Four Hour Workweek, Outliers, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stumbling on Happiness, The Game, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Mistery Method, Freakonomics, Flourish, The Guinea Pig Diaries,
- (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
Achieve: The income part is easy to detect. If it has interesting content will have to depend on a fallible 'at the time judgment' and a quick consultation with a friend who knew me before the process. (Miss T, she is great)
Track: Writing here about the process. Checking for the twelfth virtue frequently. Track a long to do list with specific and impossible deadlines as soon as it makes sense to fully write one.
- (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
Possible danger: It is easy to be curious about the info for the book, and much harder to be curious about how to write much better, even harder how to write aiming at selling - or whichever reflective shield needs to be looked at to stare into the eyes of the selling Medusa.
- (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
This will be next post's topic. Here only what didn't work: (1)Writing purely for fun made me write a book but not create a product. (2)Waiting for creativity made no difference in writing quality, actually writing did. (3) Writing a book in Spanish was a terrible idea. (4)Choosing writer peers according to mild proximity helped with writing fiction movie scripts, but not non-fiction books.
- (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
Conjectures: (1)Trying to sell before writing may shorten the process manyfold. (2)Riding someone else's fame and marketing eases the process. (3)Writing with the purpose of causing the reader to show a friend what he has - who am I kidding, it's a guy, look at the ostensive examples - just read is the best meta-goal to keep in mind. (4) It is not that hard to get my goal, it isn't that far from a sarcastic quote: "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year." (4)There is always a third alternative, and many times I'm not the one who will see it first. Keep an attentive ear.
- (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
I don't have a clear idea of what Salamon meant by "isn't going into systematic exploration" and I can't constrain my experience based on this line alone, if anyone feels qualified to clarify, please do. I'll deal with this on later posts.
- (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;
Fears: Having learned in Lesswrong to do things I had never considered myself able to, I don't feel any fear of trying it wrong. I do however feel anxiety and fear that peeking into my reasoning process and strategic attempt at this goal won't be motivating enough for others to want to translate by analogy my experience into theirs, which wouldn't give me the critical minimal threshold of upvotes and comments necessary to keep me motivated to write about writing. That could stymie my exposition of the shortcuts that help me, and the biases that hinder me, in hope of improving my winning ability. Because I'm opening up the goal and process before it takes place, it could also forestall a case study of an attempt at strategic goal-pursuit free of survivorship bias.
Energy Vortexes: No Vortex is like the web for me. More on that later.
- (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;
My workspace is pretty optimized at this point. Nowhere under these freakishly bright lights I can look around and see anything but things that make me want to write more, make me happy, or avoid distractions, like anti-mosquitoes or earplugs.
I've just found out that writing about you goals feels like getting naked in public. The idea is for the next posts to be very similar to this one: find a set of strategic advices in Lesswrong, find out how to use them, and write about how am I implementing, or intending to implement them as much as possible in a way people can relate their own goal agenda, providing a case study of what happens as we go along. My favorite writer, AJ Jacobs, once set out to follow all 613 rules written anywhere in the Bible, literally. The idea here is to do something similar, but connotative. I will try to openly implement all of Lesswrong strategic offerings, and see how that goes. I don't know which posts contain the most compact, memorable or effective techniques for winning at being strategic, but I'm hoping by the end of this process the territory is better mapped for those who'd like to follow suit. Or point and laugh.
A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach
Robin Hanson wrote, five years ago:
Very distant future times are ridiculously easy to help via investment. A 2% annual return adds up to a googol (10^100) return over 12,000 years, even if there is only a 1/1000 chance they will exist or receive it.
So if you are not incredibly eager to invest this way to help them, how can you claim to care the tiniest bit about them? How can you think anyone on Earth so cares? And if no one cares the tiniest bit, how can you say it is "moral" to care about them, not just somewhat, but almost equally to people now? Surely if you are representing a group, instead of spending your own wealth, you shouldn’t assume they care much.
So why do many people seem to care about policy that effects far future folk? I suspect our paternalistic itch pushes us to control the future, rather than to enrich it. We care that the future celebrates our foresight, not that they are happy.
In the comments some people gave counterarguments. For those in a rush, the best ones are Toby Ord's. But I didn't bite any of the counterarguments to the extent that it would be necessary to counter the 10^100. I have some trouble conceiving of what would beat a consistent argument a googol fold.
Things that changed my behavior significantly over the last few years have not been many, but I think I'm facing one of them. Understanding biological immortality was one, it meant 150 000 non-deaths per day. Understanding the posthuman potential was another. Then came the 10^52 potential lives lost in case of X-risk, or if you are conservative and think only biological stuff can have moral lives on it, 10^31. You can argue about which movie you'll watch, which teacher would be best to have, who should you marry. But (if consequentialist) you can't argue your way out of 10^31 or 10^52. You won't find a counteracting force that exactly matches, or really reduces the value of future stuff by
3 000 000 634 803 867 000 000 000 000 000 000 777 000 000 000 999 fold
Which is way less than 10^52
You may find a fundamental and qualitative counterargument "actually I'd rather future people didn't exist", but you won't find a quantitative one. Thus I spend a lot of time on X-risk related things.
Back to Robin's argument: so unless someone gives me a good argument against investing some money in the far future (and discovering some vague techniques of how to do it that will make it at least one in a millionth possibility) I'll set aside a block of money X, a block of time Y, and will invest in future people 12 thousand years from now. If you don't think you can beat 10^100, join me.
And if you are not in a rush, read this also, for a bright reflection on similar issues.
Caring about possible people in far Worlds
This relates to my recent post on existence in many-worlds.
I care about possible people. My child, if I ever have one, is one of them, and it seems monstrous not to care about one's children. There are many distinct ways of being a possible person. 1)You can be causally connected to some actual people in the actual world in some histories of that world. 2)You can be a counterpart of an actual person on a distinct world without causal connections 3)You can be distinct from all actual individuals, and in a causally separate possible world. 4)You can be acausally connectable to actual people, but in distinct possible worlds.
Those 4 ways are not separate partitions without overlap, sometimes they overlap, and I don't believe they exhaust the scope of possible people. The most natural question to ask is "should we care equally about about all kinds of possible people". Some people are seriously studying this, and let us hope they give us accurate ways to navigate our complex universe. While we wait, some worries seem relevant:
1) The Multiverse is Sadistic Argument:
P1.1: If all possible people do their morally relevant thing (call it exist, if you will) and
P1.2: We cannot affect (causally or acausally) what is or not possible
C1.0: Then we cannot affect the morally relevant thing.
2) The Multiverse is Paralyzing (related)
P2.1: We have reason to care about X-Risk
P2.2: Worlds where X-Risk obtains are possible
P2.3: We have nearly as much reason to worry about possible non-actual1 worlds where X-risk obtains, as we have to actual worlds where it obtains.
P2.4: There are infinitely more worlds where X-risk obtains that are possible than there are actual1
C2.0: Infinitarian Paralysis
1Actual here means belonging to the same quantum branching history as you. If you think you have many quantum successors, all of them are actual, same for predecessors, and people who inhabit your Hubble volume.
3) Reality-Fluid Can't Be All That Is Left Argument
P3.1) If all possible people do their morally relevant thing
P3.2) The way in which we can affect what is possible is by giving some subsets of it more units of reality-fluid, or quantum measure
P3.3) In fact reality-fluid is a ratio, such as a percentage of successor worlds of kind A or kind B for a particular world W
P3.4) A possible World3 with 5% reality-fluid in relation to World1 is causally indistinguishable from itself with 5 times more reality-fluid 25% in relation to World2.
P3.5) The morally relevant thing, though by constitution qualitative, seems to be quantifiable, and what matters is it's absolute quantity, not any kind of ratio.
C3.1: From 3.2 and 3.3 -> We can actually affect only a quantity that is relative to our world, not an absolute quantity.
C3.2: From C3.1 and P 3.5 -> We can't affect the relevant thing.
C3.3: We ended up having to talk about reality fluid because decisions matter, and reality fluid is the thing that decision changes (from P3.4 we know it isn't causal structure). But if all that decision changes is some ratio between worlds, and what matters by P3.5 is not a ratio between worlds, we have absolutely no clue of what we are talking about when we talk about "the thing that matters" "what we should care about" and "reality fluid".
These arguments are here not as a perfectly logical and acceptable argument structure, but to at least induce nausea about talking about Reality-Fluid, Measure, Morally relevant things in many-worlds, Morally relevant people causally disconnected to us. Those are not things you can Taboo the word away and keep the substance around. The problem does not lie in the word 'Existence', or in the sentence 'X is morally relevant'. It seems to me that the service that that existence or reality used to play doesn't make sense anymore (if all possible worlds exist or if Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct). We attempted to keep it around as a criterial determinant for What Matters. Yet now all that is left is this weird ratio that just can't be what matters. Without a criterial determinant for mattering, we are left in a position that makes me think we should head back towards a causal approach to morality. But this is an opinion, not a conclusion.
Edit: This post is an argument against the conjunctive truth of two things, Many Worlds, and the way in which we think of What Matters. It seems that the most natural interpretation of it is that Many Worlds is true, and thus my argument is against our notion of What Matters. In fact my position lies more in the opposite side - our notion of What Matters is (strongly related to) What Matters, so Many Worlds are less likely.
Pluralistic Existence in Many Many-Worlds
There are at least ten different conceptions of how the World can be made of many worlds.
But are those just definitional disputes? Or are they separate claims that can be evaluated. If they are distinct, in virtue of what are they distinct. Finally, do we have good grounds to care (morally) about those fine distinctions?
Max Tegmark's taxonomy is well known here.
Brian Greene's is less, and has 9, instead of four, kinds of multiverse, I'll risk conflating the Tegmark ones that are superclasses of these, feel free to correct me:
In his book, Greene discussed nine types of parallel universes:
- (Tegmark 1) The quilted multiverse only works in an infinite universe. With an infinite amount of space, every possible event will occur an infinite amount of times. However, the speed of light prevents us from being aware of these other identical areas.
- (Tegmarks 1 and 2) The inflationary multiverse is composed of various pockets where inflaton fields collapse and form new universes.
- The brane multiverse follows from M-theory and states that each universe is a 3-dimensional brane that exists with many others. Particles are bound to their respective branes except for gravity.
- The cyclic multiverse has multiple branes (each a universe) that collided, causing Big Bangs. The universes bounce back and pass through time, until they are pulled back together and collided again, destroying the old contents and creating them anew.
- (Tegmarks 2) The landscape multiverse relies on string theory's Calabi-Yau shapes. Quantum fluctuations drop the shapes to a lower energy level, creating a pocket with a different set of laws from the surrounding space.
- (Tegmarks 3) The quantum multiverse creates a new universe when a diversion in events occurs, as in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
- The holographic multiverse is derived from the theory that the surface area of a space can simulate the volume of the region.
- (Related to Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis) The simulated multiverse exists on complex computer systems that simulate entire universes. (for the sake of brevity I'll consider dust theory to be a subset of this)
- (Tegmark's 4) The ultimate multiverse contains every mathematically possible universe under different laws of physics.
I don't understand branes well enough (or at all) to classify the others. The holographic one seems compatible with a multitude, if not all, previous ones.
Besides all those there is David Lewis's Possible Worlds in which all possible worlds exist (in whichever sense the word exist can be significantly applied, if any). For Lewis, when we call our World the Actual World, we think we mean the only one that is there, but what we mean is "the one to which we happen to belong". Notice it is distinct from the Mathematical/Ultimate in that there may be properties of non-mathematical kind.
So Actuallewis= Our world and Actualmost everyone else=Those that obtain, exist, or are real.
The trouble with existence, or reality, is that it is hard to pin down what it is pointing at. Eliezer writes:
The collection of hypothetical mathematical thingies that can be described logically (in terms of relational rules with consistent solutions) looks vastly larger than the collection of causal universes with locally determined, acyclically ordered events. Most mathematical objects aren't like that. When you say, "We live in a causal universe", a universe that can be computed in-order using local and directional rules of determination, you're vastly narrowing down the possibilities relative to all of Math-space.
So it's rather suggestive that we find ourselves in a causal universe rather than a logical universe - it suggests that not all mathematical objects can be real, and the sort of thingies that can be real and have people in them are constrained to somewhere in the vicinity of 'causal universes'. That you can't have consciousness without computing an agent made of causes and effects, or maybe something can't be real at all unless it's a fabric of cause and effect. It suggests that if there is a Tegmark Level IV multiverse, it isn't "all logical universes" but "all causal universes".
and elsewhere
More generally, for me to expect your beliefs to correlate with reality, I have to either think that reality is the cause of your beliefs, expect your beliefs to alter reality, or believe that some third factor is influencing both of them.
Now another interesting way of looking at existence or reality is
Reality=I should care about what takes place there
It is interesting because it is what is residually left after you abandon the all too stringent standard of "causally connected to me", which would leave few or none of the above, and cut the party short.
So Existenceyud and Existencemoral-concern are very different. Reality-fluid, or Measure, in quantum universes is also different, and sometimes described by some as the quantity of existence. Notice though that the Measure is always a ratio - say these universes here are 30% of the successors of that universe, the other 70% are those other ones - not an absolute quantity.
Which of the 10 kinds of multiverses, besides our own, have Existenceyud Existencemoral-concern and which can be split up in reality-fluid ratios?
That is left as an exercise, since I am very confused by the whole thing...
Cognitive Load and Effective Donation
We'd better start pushing emotional buttons and twisting the mental knobs of people if we want to get something done. Starting with our own.
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= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
(previous title: Very low cognitive load)
Sean Thomason
We can't trust brains when taken as a whole. Why should we trust their subareas?
Cognitive load is the load related to the executive control of working memory. Depending on what you are doing, the more parallel/extraneous cognitive load you have, the worse you'll do it. (The process may be the same as what the literature calls "Ego Depletion" or "system 2 depletion", the jury is still up on that)
If you go here and enter 0 as lower limit and 1.000.000 as upper limit, and try to keep the number in mind until you are done reading post and comments, you'll get a bit of load while you read this post.
Now you may process numbers verbally, visually, or both. More generally, for anything you keep in mind, you are likely allocating it in a part of the brain that is primarily concerned with a sensory modality, so it will have some "flavour","shape", "location", "sound", or "proprioceptual location". It is harder to consciously memorize things using odours, since those have shortcuts within the brain.
Let us in turn examine two domains in which understanding cognitive load can help you win: Moral Dilemmas and Personal Policy
Moral Games/Dilemmas
In Dictator game (you're given $20 and you can give any amount to a stranger and keep the rest) the effect of load is negligible.
In the tested versions of the Trolley problems (kill/indirectly kill/let die one to save five) people are likely to become less utilitarian when under non-visual load. It is assumed that higher functions of the brain (in VMPF cortex) - which integrate higher moral judgement with emotional taste buttons - fails to integrate, making the "fast thinking", emotional mode be the only one reacting.
Visual information about the problem brings into salience the gory aspect of killing someone, and other lower level features that incline non-utilitarian decisions. So when visual load requires you to memorize something else, like a bird drawing, you become more utilitarian since you fail to visualize the one person being killed (which we do more than the five) in as much gory detail. (Greene et al,2011)
(Bednar et al.2012) show that when playing two games simultaneously, the strategy of one spills over to the other one. Critically, heuristics that are useful for both games were used, increasing the likelihood that those heuristics will be suboptimal in each case.
In altruistic donation scenarios, with donations to suffering people at stake, (Small et al. 2007) more load increased scope insensitivity, so less load made the donation more proportional to how many people are suffering. Contrary to load, priming increases the capacity of an area/module, by using it and not keeping the information stored, leaving free usable space. (Dickert et al.2010) shows that priming for empathy increases donation amount (but not decision to donate), whereas priming calculation decreases it.
Taken together, these studies indicate that to make people donate more it is most effective to, after being primed for thinking about how they will feel about themselves, and for empathic feelings, make them feel empathically and non-visually someone from their own race. After all that you make them keep a number and a drawing in mind, and this is the optimal time to donate.
Personal Policy
If given a choice between a high carb food, and a low carb one, people undergoing diets are substantially more likely to choose the high carb one if they are keeping some information in mind.
Forgetful people, and those with ADHD know that, for them, out of sight means out of mind. Through luck, intelligence, blind error or psychological help, they learn to put things, literally, in front of them, to avoid 'losing them' in their minds corner somewhere. They have a lower storage size for executive memory tasks.
Positive psychologists advise us to make our daily tasks, specially the ones we are always reluctant to start, in very visible places. Alternatively, we can make the commitment to start them smaller, but this only works if we actually remember to do them.
Marketing appropriates cognitive load in a terrible way. They know if we are overwhelmed with information, we are more likely to agree. They'll inform us more than what we need, and we aren't left with enough brain to decide well. One more reason to keep advertisement out of sight and out of mind.
Effective use of Cognitive Load
Once you understand how it works, it is simple to use cognitive load as a tool: