Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill. This should tell us something-- if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.

While agreeing with the general idea in the post- that SA is important, I think you are slightly overstating the case by calling it the zeroth skill. Where SA helps is in helping you collect more information for your decision making process, but we the world has a lot of data that could be collected. Not all information has the same value for decision making.

In any case, as a person with low SA, I'm interested in seeing the rest of this sequence. What would be helpful, if you've also thought of it is: is this a skill that you can "switch off" when it's not required? If I were in a setting where it's safe to do so, it could be of value to turn off SA and focus more on - a book perhaps, or my own thoughts.

Let me expand on my comment from the Hacker News thread.

I went to the July workshop. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive and effective. Since then, I've mainly been trying to incorporate the low-hanging fruit---the obviously good simple ideas---into my life. Some examples:

• At work, I realized I wasn't doing anywhere near enough planning. My employees were spending time on the wrong things because I hadn't planned things out in enough detail to make it clear what was the most important thing to do next. I fixed this immediately after the camp.
• Again at work, I now document most discussions as they happen. It slows down the discussion a bit, but it's a net win because next time you can just have the delta of the discussion and avoid rehashing things.
• Val explained to me how he changed his diet in order to decouple the relationship between his energy levels and when he last ate. I hadn't actually realized such a thing was possible. It also works for me.
• I realized that it's a waste of time to learn things/watch video lectures and not put what I want to remember into anki. I make the cards while I watch the lectures, and have trained myself to review them on my phone when waiting in lines, walking down the street etc.
• I'm training myself to no longer think things like "I should go to the gym tomorrow." Instead I decide to go at X o'clock and set an alarm on my phone to remind me. (I apparently haven't got this one completely down yet, because yesterday I thought "I should go to the gym tomorrow" and didn't catch myself: it's now 11pm and I never went.)

I feel like I'm still a beginner at instrumental rationality and have an enormous amount to work on (I haven't even started trying to adopt most of the actual curriculum!). Since attending, I've been getting considerably more work done: my brother, who is also my business partner, has noticed too.

When I got back I was super busy and have been really bad at staying in touch with the instructors and other attendees, but there are a few people I met at the camp who I would really like to have more contact with.

Thanks for the advice. Do you have an idea of the probabilities for a 30-yo? I'm highly unlikely to wait any longer due to said fertility concerns.

Great points. I have personal connections in some poor rural areas of Kenya already (and already in that place, people are always asking, "How can I join?", both of me and of the current workers). My colleagues also have connections in a number of other developing countries where we could plant "seeds". How to grow the "crowd" from those seeds is an interesting problem, but not insurmountable, what with ever-increasing mobile phone/3G penetration and a mobile interface to our platform (lots of people in Kenya, for example, have a low end mobile phone or internet-capable "feature phone" while still living in mud huts), a franchise model using netbooks and small solar stations, etc.

As for quality control, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of ways to approach that (none of which Mturk implements). There's some well-established precedent for methods that work, so we feel confident we can generate high quality outputs.

Hi folks - long-time reader, first-time poster here. I'd like to share my new startup, formed over the past few months. In short, we use human computation to create employment opportunities in the developing world while enabling new types of data analysis for solving complex problems.

Some background and justification: extreme poverty is bad. I won't say too much to justify this point, other than that human suffering and the lost potential for individuals to do great things are two of the big things that make it bad. And just to be clear, by "extreme poverty" I am referring to the "living on $1 per day" kind (though that's a not a very good definition, it's at least in the ballpark). One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.

Human computation is when people do things that are easy for people but hard for computers. A good example is image processing/recognition (this is why reCAPTCHA works). By combining the things people do well with the things computers (i.e. software we currently able to write) do well, we can enable new kinds of data analysis. For example, we can mine figures from the medical literature for depictions of biochemical pathways, recreate many of them together (molecules = nodes, interactions = edges), and create a more complete picture of our biology.

So that's our approach: find an interesting, complex problem (so far they have been in the academic research world), collaborate with the domain experts to design human computation processes to enable the necessary data analysis and synthesis, and using our web platform, pay people in developing countries to do the work. Interesting problems get solved, we get paid, and people in Kenya get paid. Win, win, win.

Interested? We are looking for:

• People with problems to solve using human computation. We are especially looking for domain experts here. Not sure if your problem is amenable to human computation? Let's talk.

• Programmers. We've got a platform now but are continually improving it. Python/django. There's also a fair amount of cobbling together datasets for input and output that presents ever-changing challenges in many different languages.

• Marketing/sales. Our concept is a hard thing to explain to people. People don't seem to be used to thinking about solving problems in this manner, so it's difficult to get people to think, "Oh yes! I have problem X and this will help me solve it!". We need to figure out some way to communicate this better in order to expand the problems to work on and increase revenue.

• Funding. We need to pay programmers, marketing people, and us.

• Other! Think this is a cool idea but don't fit into one of the above areas? Let's talk!

these norms destabilising society in other ways?

Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind?

Pregnancy, particularly pregnancy out of wedlock, and venereal disease are the traditional sex-related problems. Both of them are massively higher after sexual liberation. (Out of wedlock births are also exacerbated by welfare, which is part of a larger political discussion.)

Births out of wedlock are somewhat difficult to hide from government record-keepers in developed countries like the US, though they may be possible to hide socially (which is what most people care about anyway). Out of wedlock births among African Americans are currently at ~70%; in 1940, a full generation before the civil rights era, it was 19%.

Venereal disease is a bit harder to compare to last century (whereas we have out-of-wedlock rates going back quite a bit), and there are issues with diseases (like syphilis) becoming treatable and overall medical care (including reporting) increasing. But the impact of the Sixties on American gonorrhea rates is still clear. (It also seems likely that gay liberation contributed to the AIDS epidemic- but the primary comparison there is to Cuba, where those with AIDS were quarantined. Unsurprisingly, quarantine reduces transmission rates.)

The thing is, what determines when autonomy is absolute and inviolable, and when it should be weighed against other concerns?

When it comes to interventions in human affairs by the state and other institutions, modern liberals pride themselves on their supposed adherence to (what they see as) rational and scientific cost-benefit analysis and common-sense notions of equality and fairness. They typically assert that their opponents are being irrational, or acting out of selfish interest, when they insist that some other principle takes precedence, like for example when conservatives insist on respecting tradition and custom, or when libertarians insist on inviolable property rights. In particular, liberals certainly see it as irrational when libertarians oppose their favored measures on the grounds of individual liberty and autonomy.

However, there are issues on which liberals themselves draw absolutist lines and lose all interest for cost-benefit analysis, as well as for concerns about equality and fairness that are perfectly analogous to those they care about greatly in other cases. Sex is the principal example. Liberals argue in favor of comprehensive intervention and regulation in nearly all areas of human life, but in contrast, people's sexual behavior is supposed to be a subject of complete laissez-faire. This despite the fact that many arguments that liberals normally use against the evils of laissez-faire and in favor of economic intervention, wealth redistribution, and paternalistic regulation, would apply with equal (or even greater) force to sex as well. Yet an attempt to argue in favor of more restrictive sexual norms on any of these grounds will be met with immediate hostility by liberals -- often so fierce that you'll be immediately dismissed as obviously crazy or malicious.

I don't think it's possible for liberals to salvage the situation by claiming that sexual laissez-faire is somehow entailed by the same considerations that, according to them, mandate complex and comprehensive regulation of almost everything else. This would be vanishingly improbable even a priori, and a casual look at the arguments in question definitely shows a glaring inconsistency here. The only plausible explanation I see here is that, just like everyone else in the human history, liberals base their sexual norms on a sacredness foundation -- except that for them, this foundation has the peculiar form of sacralizing individual autonomy, thus making a violation of this autonomy a sacrilege that no other considerations can justify.

Ironically, the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters. (And also a complete impossibility of discussing these topics in an open and honest manner, as witnessed by the fact that they reliably destroy the discourse even in a forum like LW.)

Apparently in some parts of India, public toilets charge women (who can ill afford it) but not men.

Heh, was just about to post that I as an Indian woman who has done a fair bit of travelling around the country have NEVER ever seen this, but decided to google just in case. And found a New York Times article agreeing with the claim. Upper class privilege indeed. :)

In any case this doesn't look like an institutional policy, just petty corruption against those who are the least powerless to stop it. Which is sort of your point.

Or to take an even more poignant example, what will happen if you refuse to be humble and obedient when you get pulled over by a cop? Historically, in many places and times, this example would have had similarly great emotional power as those employed by the author of the original post.

(In fact, I find it fascinating that present-day Americans would see it as a creepy totalitarian idea if you proposed that cops should be authorized to stop and detain pedestrians for random paper checks, even though the same thing is considered a normal and unremarkable fact of life for drivers. This example demonstrates especially clearly how random and incoherent human intuitions are when it comes to feelings of outrage at a perceived lack of freedom or equality.)

This helped me to prevent clutter from creeping back into my house after a dedicated decluttering effort: Never put an item on your list of things to buy the first time you feel a need for it. Wait until you feel its absence it 2 or 3 times, because chances are, something you've already got can substitute well enough for the functionality you are missing.

If you ever declutter, you'll find a surprising amount of products that end up in the corners of shelves which were used only once ever and then forgotten. Chances are you'll find 2 or 3 copies of the same thing, because a lot of times you don't even remember you had bought one of them months ago.

Ciphergoth's maxim for purchases of expensive items is excellent. I'm going to be using it, thanks!