Basically this: "Eliezer Yudkowsky  writes and pretends he's an AI researcher but probably hasn't written so much as an Eliza bot."

While the Eliezer S. Yudkowsky site has lots of divulgation articles and his work on rationality is of indisputable value, I find myself at a loss when I want to respond to this. Which frustrates me very much.

So, to avoid this sort of situation in the future, I have to ask: What did the man, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, actually accomplish in his own field?

Please don't downvote the hell out of me, I'm just trying to create a future reference for this sort of annoyance.

So I was there being my rationalist-with-akrasia-issues, nerdy, awkward self who studies acting, singing, rhetorics, PUA, TV Tropes, Machiavelli, The Art of War, the 48 Laws of Power, the Art of Seduction, the Seven Habits... in the hopes of escaping his chronic fear of his neighbor (with some success, shall I add, but it comes slowly). And then I sumble upon this nice little harmless meme:

Socially Awkward Penguin

I was absolutely stunned. This behavior. I thought it was strange and unique. It's incredibly common. This gave me great hope. If it is common, it means it isn't due to noise: there's a pattern there, there's something to unravel. The misjudgements of power, of what it's right to do, of when to fear and when to be bold, when to speak and when to be silent... What *is* the right thing to do when you're with a coworker on an elevator? What do you say when someone remembers you, but you don't remember them, and they have noticed that? What do you do when you're hit by a paper ball in class? What do you do when the only people you seem to be able to make friends with are older, younger, or of the opposite gender, and you're utterly intimidated by people of your same age and gender, the friendship of whom you know would profit you most? Why do you automatically recalculate trajectories to avoid acquaintances in the hall, at the super, on the bus? Why is it that when a person of the opposite gender so much as pays attention to you, you think you have a crush on them?

There are clues to some of these questions in the books and works I linked back there. But, more often than not, we expect those problems to solve themselves, with one magical word, "confidence".

I am confused at that notion. I find it unsatisfactory. I want to understand social awkwardness. The rules thereof. And how to vanquish it. And I want the keys in a way that can be taught. So that, when I have kids, they don't have to go through the same stupid struggles and can actually feel good about themselves and focus on getting stuff done.

So, I hereby summon the powers of the Lesswrong community: let us pick apart this problem as we know so well, and let us unbury the roots of this evil that is social awkwardness, so that we nerds and geeks may defeat it at last, and live free of its funk.

This is not a thesis post, it's an open-question, discussion-provoking post. That's why I'm posting it as Discussion, since this is what appears to serve the function of forum on this site. I am not looking for ratings, but for answers. With everyone's collaboration, they should present themselves, at least in outline. Please don't hesitate to point it out if you think i have completely misunderstood the purpose of the Discussion section and if I should refrain from this sort of posting in the future.

So, here is a summary of the rules the book proposes. Here is a little more expanded text.

To be honest, my first reaction to reading this was visceral rejection ("Preposterous! Try to act by those rules and you'll be labeled a psychopath, people will know not to trust you or deal with you."). The second was consternated acceptance ("But people do seem to behave in the way this book suggests... wouldn't it be better to adapt to a reality we have no power to change?"). This is the result of the third approximation: confused questioning.

The question I'd like to ask is this: are they rational? As in, would everyone's lives improve or worsen from following this? Unlike riches and actual achievements, competition for power does seem to be a Zero Sum Game, at least in a society that isn't expanding (demographically or by conquest or otherwise). Not only that, it appears to be a resource-intensive game, one that even gets in the way of doing actual work.

What is remarkable is that, when I think of my experiences in hindsight, Real Life does appear to work this way, and these would explain many behaviors people demonstrate that are out of synch with what they profess. This is especially egregious if you compare it with fiction, in which such behavior isn't used except by the most magnificent bastards, and even then it is portrayed as extremely questionable, and common moral philosophy, that seems to preach the opposite.

However, everything seems to indicate that this is definitely not the optimum way for things to work, in a utilitarian sense. If everyone followed the rules of this book, would we ever get anything done?

So should these social, anti-productive tendencies, be fought with education, or should they be embraced? Is there a way to harness them into a motivation for productive work, the way Capitalism advocates harnessing human greed?¹

1.Remarkably enough, lust for power can and does get in the way of greed for riches and even welfare. As does pride in scrupulous, principled, but materialistically impoverishing behavior.

This article explores the following topic: "When we are presented with too many choices, we can get paralized, and do nothing at all, or follow harmful heuristics, such as the path of least difficulty, or the path of least risk. Should we surrender that choice to external agents, so that among the choices that remain it is easier to determine a "best" choice? But which agents should we choose, and how much of our freedom should we surrender to them? Would a general AI be able to play this role for all of humanity? Given the inevitablity of the Singularity, can this even be avoided? What possibilities does this open? Is it a desirable outcome? We might end up becoming eternal minors. Literally, if immortality is reached."

Sometimes life can feel like a wide open quicksand box: you have so many choices before you, calculating the optimal choice is nigh-impossible. The more options you have, the harder it is to make a decision. To employ a visual metaphor, there is no greater freedom of movement than floating in an empty void  Yet there's nowhere to go from there, and all choices are meaningless. Drawing a floor, a horizon, allows you to move along it... but you have sacrificed a degree of freedom.

Life choices present you with a bit of a traveling salesman's dilemma. You may use some heuristic or another, but since heuristics by definition don't guarantee the optimum result, you still have to choose between heuristics, and consistently use the same heuristic. However, the more restrictions you place on your journey, the easier it is to discriminate between routes, and come out of it with the impression of having made the right choice, rather than lingering doubt that plagues you ever time your path becomes dangerously steep, or crowded to a crawl, where you tell yourself "I really shouldn't have taken that right turn at Albuquerque. Or should I have? Either way, there's no way for me to have known. But there's no way I can climb this road. I have ruined my life. But right now there's nowhere to go but on.  There is no hope. There is no respite. There is only car."

Hence, to make your choice in the crossroads of life, which can look less like the intersection of two curves and more like a point connecting an infinity of hyperplanes, you might be tempted to let other people, or other... things, outside of yourself, make the choices for you, just the same way when you aren't sure of the fastest way from point A to point B you just ask your GPS (or Google). You could:

• Find a leader you'd like to follow.
• Obey a dogmatic religious or philosophical creed
• Get a romantic partner in a "property of love" type of relationship
• Get into a marriage/have (a) kid(s) and allow the ties and responsibilities to force your life into a specific direction, and allow all of your free time to be allocated to childrearing.
• Or even write yourself a WorldOfDarkness character sheet and roll the dice everytime you have to choose.
• You could even get some smartphone app that lets you state options which you weight with a preference coefficient and randomly gives you one.
• You could use this very site's rational horoscope. (Yesterday's advice was pretty damn useful, too!).
• Worst case scenario, get yourself a good old-fashione enemy, and you can center your lives into a feud against each other! (I wouldn't recommend it, but it's a fairly popular option).
• Or you could simply do whatever society expects you to do, like most people. Either as a follower or as a leader: don't forget being a leader often means showing a very generic personality and being a slave to PR.
• Once you're stuck in a career, you could devote yourself to advance through it given pre-established chains of command/promotion. One can live through a lifetime like this 
• Or you could just wander aimelssly, get bit jobs you quit as soon as they get boring, or easy jobs where you have to do little, or even live off benefits, fall in love with your couch, and sink into the depths of the internet or some MMORPG where the choices and plots have already been written for you.

So, the subordinates (for example: children, citizens, employees, intellectuals) support Freedom of Choice so that they can follow the strong desires they have every now and then, that go against the norm set by authority (sometimes this is an end in itself, especially in the arts). The superiors (for example: parents, politicians and civil servants, bosses, censors and editors) might want to give their wards more leeway in order to escape responsibility for making hard choices for the others, because they know they will be blamed if the choice leads to a failure, and because they don't want to have to deal with accusations of being oppressive, tyrannical, or heavy-handed in their use of authority.

But such a climate can lead to a paralysis and a listlessness that is as bad and destructive and unhealthy as the worst dictatorship. But where to strike a balance? Which methods are the most questionable, which are the least? Surrendering your freedom to a foreign agent is a dangerous gamble! And this is where the biggest difficulty arises: the general self-modifying tranhuman AI. 

The actual traveling salesman can be brute-forced by enough processing power. Can something similar be said of every human's life? How are we going to deal with that? Will we allow it to turn our lives into scripted events optimized to every player's personalities? Ones with actual, life-threatening danger in them, even? (As immortals, will we become reckless with our lives, or more cowardly? Or will it simply be a matter of age?) Do we give the machine an Omniscient Morality License to make us live lives of excitement, drama, love, deception, hard, productive, rewarding work, and fun^4, with just the right balance of exaltation and relaxation for every individual? Will we start bitching like whiny spoiled brats if the processes aren't exactly optimal? There's a limit to how good a scripted event you can get in Real Life, with Real People. Or will we free-

Ohmygosh. I have just found a Wild Mass Guessing for The Matrix: humans have freely abandoned Real Life, which they leave the literal Deux Ex Machina (should we call the general AI D.E.M., or are the doomsday-cult connotations just too massive?) to run for the continued existence of the material support of their minds. The Matrix itself, including it's blue-filtered "Real World" is the game the machine created for those individuals that showed that they would enjoy their lives best as cyberpunk anti-heroes. Everything that happened in the movie was staged for their sake, and nothing is real. There are other massive multiplayer games, each catering to a specific type of individual, if not an entire universe for each individual, some of them having recursive levels of reality ("We must go deeper"). Each of them tailor-made to entertain them the most. If DEM decides a certain individual born into the games is not fit to be told the truth (perhaps they might try something stupid like trying to "free" those who are aware and perfectly content), they can live their whole lives without knowing the machine put a dream in their dream so they could dream while they dream.

So, fiction aside, this seems like a fairly probable hypothetical, an attractor of futures. Should we try to avoid it? Can we? Giving up a paralizing freeedom in exchange for an exciting but pre-plotted existence? We'd be stuck as children forever, we could never grow into responsible, self reliant adults (in fact it would be strongly unadvisable: you'd utterly lose to those DEM-advised overgrown kids, and that's if the DEM isn't constantly protecting and covering your skin against your own wishes).

And all of the people of the world were told they could remain children for ever. As in, for eternity.

CONGRATULATIONS

This article aims to prove that Ace Attorney is possibly the first rationalist game in the lesswrongian sense, or at least a remarkable proto-example, and that it subliminally works to raise the sanity waterline in the general population, and might provide a template on which to base future works that aim to achieve a similar effect.

The Ace Attorney series of games for the Nintendo DS console puts you in the shoes of Phoenix Wright, an attorney who, in the vein of Perry Mason, takes on difficult cases to defend his clients from a judicial system that is heavily inspired by that of Japan, in which the odds are so stacked against the defense it's practically a Kangaroo Court where your clients are guilty until proven innocent.

For those unfamiliar with the game, and those who want to explore the "social criticism" aspect of the game, I wholeheartedly recommend this most excellent article from The Escapist. Now that that's out of the way, we can move on to what makes this relevant for Less Wrong. What makes this game uniquely interesting from a Rationalist POV is that the entire game mechanics are based on

• gathering material evidence

• finding the factual contradictions in the witnesses' testimonies

• using the evidence to bust the lies open and force the truth out

Followup to Recovering Insufferable Genius

So, we've been talking a mighty amount on avoiding and understanding the common pitfalls and mistakes that plague most human minds for various biological, evolutionary and social reasons. This knowledge is supposed to be used for the sake of learning how to think proprely and clearly about the world, and for the sake of making the right choices, and making them quickly. Both blades of the weapon can have a dramatic effect on how we interact with people. Behaviors that would appear absurd and annoying to us would suddenly gain a history, reasons for their existence until now and even for their continued existence. The incomprehensible people around us suddenly become fairly simple and predictable, to the point that you might, every now and then, understand them better than they do themselves. They also become all that much more interesting. You find yourself observing them, gently pushing their buttons as you eagerly wait for what they are going to do next. Of course, this applies just as much to you yourself. You see your own past in a very different light, and Akrasia remains difficult to escape. But at least now you know what you're doing wrong.

Anyway, you've discovered the pleasures of socializing, and you've even acquired an "edge" over those who relied on intuition ever since they were young. What I want us to discuss here is how to reach not just some "proficiency" in social navigation, but actual social excellence. We've collected research on how to be happy, on how to confront organizational problems, etc. I think it would be nice if we also collected data on how to be polite. How to make one's company agreeable and interesting. How to make oneself elegant and glamorous. How to get people to do what you want, and then thank you for it.

Some slight bits of this are approached by PUA methods, but those are very specific in goal and scope, and require a set of skills that can be far from adequate in other contexts (that, and flirting with any and everybody all the time is just creepy and makes you look like a supervillain).

Of course, at its core, social grace is nothing but "intelligent application of the Golden Rule". So, with insight and purpose, everything should be possible... But that's a pretty huge ideaspace, and in day-to-day interaction you often don't have that much time to figure our what to do. Of course, there's rote behavior, protocol, that allows you to free brainspace for what's actually important, but too much of that and it can become blatant.

So... anyone know any actual research on the subject? We can also use some armchair philosophy, it's not like we eschew creative individual thinking here, but some backed-by-evidence stuff is very nice to have.

So, I was on TV Tropes creating an article, and I thought maybe you guys could help me add fictional as well as notable Real Life examples to the trope. Here's a copy of the description:

Some kids who are more intelligent than other kids the same age might grow up acting their intellectual age, forsaking interaction with other children their age which they deem to be boring and unfulfilling, if not outright painful or worse. This can be especially bad if they make a habit of pointing out to other kids what they think they are doing wrong, asking uncomfortable questions, or acting smug and superior. Instead, they prefer the company of books which can either efficiently and consistenty entertain them either by allowing them to escape the dreary world they think they live in or by actually answering their questions, or that of adults who can actually teach them stuff and provide an interesting feedback.

When those kids grow up they might end up being very disappointed by those adult figures they used to respect enough to discuss stuff with. If they have outgrown the Insufferable Genius phase they might go through a backlash face where they undertake Man Child activities as they rediscover (oftentimes with the aid of scientific material) how to interact with the vast majority of mankind as well as their peers[[hottip:*:these characters tend to be as different from each other as they are from the mainstream, connecting through each other through common interests, often of a geeky nature, or through work]]. Having no practice, no natural social skills, they can still become fascinated with societal behavior, and actively strive to learn a lot about them, in a quest to feel "together" with everyone else and to be loved and appreciated for who they are. Cognitive Sciences are a very favoured way for them to understand how people behave in ways that don't seem to make any sense, and learn some humility on the way. Evolutionary Psychology helps them understand that there is a perfectly good reason these systematic errors were hardwired into the human brain. Pick Up Arts are they way they try to apply that knowledge to succeed in their romantic lives, or at least to understand exactly why they don't and others do. There's also other fields of psychology and sociology, political sciences, economics, graphology, neurolinguistic programming, body language.., However, it's all book knowledge, and these characters are usually poor at application, at least until the get more practice done. And there are rather big holes in their knowledge.They might genuinely not realize how rude they can be. However, given that they tend to have few friends and that it often took them much effort to acquire said friends, you can expect them to be fiercely loyal and supportive to them, Characters who achieve success in their journey might become A Gentleman/Lady And A Scholar. Examples:

• Amy Farrah Fowler from The Big Bang Theory is this trope incarnate, and is an interesting foil to Insufferable Genius Ambiguously Autistic Jerk Ass Sheldon Cooper who despises all of the rest of humanity and wants no part of it, yet always wants to assume roles of leadership and be obeyed and followed by all those unworthy people. Many other characters in the series struggle with this.
• Promethean The Created's Pilgrinage shares some themes with this trope, to the point one might wonder if it isn't a metaphor.
• Genius The Transgression's main, overarching theme can be said to be that this trope is doomed to a Foregone Conclusion of complete and utter failure sooner or later, and the bitterness that resutls from this.
• The Less Wrong blog seems to have this as part of its interests. It even provides an answer to "How To Be Happy", based on a number of scientific studies.

I mentioned this place by name because I got the impression many guys here do fit this trope to an extent. As such, I'm sure you'd have paid more attention than others to fictional embodiments of the trope. I also think it'd be interesting fodder for discussion. I apologize in advance if the article is inadvertently offensive: I tend to be Innocently Insensitive myself, and would gladly welcome help to improve on this article's accuracy and range.

Por favor contesten en la sección de comentarios si son Españoles o residentes en España. La idea es entrar en comunicación, y poder discutir problemas de racionalidad propios de España. Que ésta página es muy EEUU-céntrica y aquí tenemos problemas endémicos.

Nota: Los hispanoamericanos también son los bienvenidos, anque solo sea por el idioma.

Nota 2: Los demás hispanohablantes y residentes en España también están bienvenidos: disculpad mi falta de imaginación al asumir que no habría. De hecho, que venga cualquier Lesswronger que quiera, ya nos las arreglaremos para compaginar idiomas.

Translation: Pease answer in the Comments section if you happen to be Spaniards or resident in Spain. The point of this thread is to establish contact, and be able to discuss rationality problems that are endemic to Spain. This site can sometimes feel far too US-Centric.

Note: Latin Americans are welcome to join us, if only because we share a language.

Note 2: Other residents of Spain, heck, any other lesswrongers are welcome. Sorry for assuming you wouldn't be there: I wansn't being exclusive, it's just that I wasn't expecting you. I forget Barcelona is a very cosmopolitan city.

Perhaps the Spaniard and/or Catalan tropers, and those others who simply feel like visiting this wonderful city that is Barcelona, could meet here during Semana Santa, the Spanish Spring Break, which lasts from April 15 to April 24. We could decide on a date within that interval. I'm not trying to compete with Paris or anything, but it's really one of the most convenient times in the year for such an event to take place.

Don't expect any Ku Klux Klan lookalikes though, Catalonia just doesn't do that.

I have noticed during my dialectic adventures on the Grid that religious people, no matter how "reasonable" (i.e. moderate, unaggressive, unassuming, gentle, etc.), would get very annoyed by an assertive, dry Atheist perspective, which they tend to nickname Hollywood Atheist (interestingly, religious people tend to use this term to atheists that openly make fun of religion and are very assertive and even preachy about their disbelief, while atheists tend to use it to mean people who are atheists for shallow, weak reasons and who do a poor job of defending their stance in an argument). There is also the tendency to compare the certainty of an Atheist with that of a Fundamentalists, when they are fundamentally different in nature (pun unintended), something they do not seem to be able or willing to grasp. Not that atheism hasn't had its fair share of fundamentalists, but that's supposedly the difference between an atheist who is so out of rationalism and one that is so because they hate the Church or because Stalin (glorified be his name) told them to.

On of the things that irritate them the most is the phrase "God is Dead". A phrase that is obviously meaningless in a literal sense (although, of course, God was never a living being in the first place, by the current definition). Figuratively, it means something akin to "Our Father is dead": we are now orphans, adults, we don't need a God to tell us what to do, or what to want, or how to see the world: we decide for ourselves, we see for ourselves, we are now free... but it does feel a bit lonely, and, for those who relied on their God or Parent Figure as a crutch, it can be hard to adapt to a world without a reference, without an authority figure. A world where you are the reference, you are responsible for your own moral choices.

There are other things, specific arguments, methods of approach, that anger them and are counterproductive to the submitting of the message. Of course, the atheist message is a Brown Note of sorts to the religious mind, since it challenges their entire worldview (though in the end it all adds up to normality... except much more seamlessly). However, it would be nice to develop an approach towards theists that avoids the frontal part of their mental shields and gets into the seams, using the minimal force in the points of maximum efficiency, bypassing their knee-jerk defences...

So, here is my question to you all: how do you get your points across to a theist without pushing any of their Berserk Buttons, without coming off as a condescending and dismissive jerk, and without having to shorten all of the freaking Inferential Distance?

Developing a general algorithm would help us spread our ideals further, which, as far as I know, we think will be to the benefit of all humanity and might in fact help us avoid extinction. So, suggestions...