... And Everyone Loses Their Minds

10 Ritalin 16 January 2015 11:38PM

Chris Nolan's Joker is a very clever guy, almost Monroesque in his ability to identify hypocrisy and inconsistency. One of his most interesting scenes in the film has him point out how people estimate horrible things differently depending on whether they're part of what's "normal", what's "expected", rather than on how inherently horrifying they are, or how many people are involved.

Soon people extrapolated this observation to other such apparent inconsistencies in human judgment, where a behaviour that once was acceptable, with a simple tweak or change in context, becomes the subject of a much more serious reaction.

I think there's rationalist merit in giving these inconsistencies a serious look. I intuit that there's some sort of underlying pattern to them, something that makes psychological sense, in the roundabout way that most irrational things do. I think that much good could come out of figuring out what that root cause is, and how to predict this effect and manage it.

Phenomena that come to mind, are, for instance, from an Effective Altruism point of view, the expenses incurred in counter-terrorism (including some wars that were very expensive in treasure and lives), and the number of lives said expenses save, compared with the number of lives that could be saved by spending that same amount into improving road safety, increasing public helathcare expense where it would do the most good, building better lightning rods (in the USA you're four times more likely to be struck by thunder than by terrorists), or legalizing drugs.

What do y'all think? Why do people have their priorities all jumbled-up? How can we predict these effects? How can we work around them?

A website standard that is affordable to the poorest demographics in developing countries?

10 Ritalin 01 November 2014 01:43PM

Fact: the Internet is excruciatingly slow in many developing countries, especially outside of the big cities.

Fact: today's websites are designed in such a way that they become practically impossible to navigate with connections in the order of, say, 512kps. Ram below 4GB and a 7-year old CPU are also a guarantee of a terrible experience.

Fact: operating systems are usually designed in such an obsolescence-inducing way as well.

Fact: the Internet is a massive source of free-flowing information and a medium of fast, cheap communication and networking.

Conclusion: lots of humans in the developing world are missing out on the benefits of a technology that could be amazingly empowering and enlightening.

I just came across this: what would the internet 2.0 have looked like in the 1980s. This threw me back to my first forays in Linux's command shell and how enamoured I became with its responsiveness and customizability. Back then my laptop had very little autonomy, and very few classrooms had plugs, but by switching to pure command mode I could spend the entire day at school taking notes (in LaTeX) without running out. But I switched back to the GUI environment as soon as I got the chance, because navigating the internet on the likes of Lynx is a pain in the neck.

As it turns out, I'm currently going through a course on energy distribution in isolated rural areas in developing countries. It's quite a fascinating topic, because of the very tight resource margins, the dramatic impact of societal considerations, and the need to tailor the technology to the existing natural renewable resources. And yet, there's actually a profit to be made investing in these projects; if managed properly, it's win-win.

And I was thinking that, after bringing them electricity and drinkable water, it might make sense to apply a similar cost-optimizing, shoestring-budget mentality to the Internet. We already have mobile apps and mobile web standards which are built with the mindset of "let's make this smartphone's battery last as long as possible".

Even then, (well-to-do, smartphone-buying) thrid-worlders are somewhat neglected: Samsung and the like have special chains of cheap Android smartphones for Africa and the Middle East. I used to own one; "this cool app that you want to try out is not available for use on this system" were a misery I had to get used to. 

It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to do the same thing for outdated desktops. I've been in cybercafés in North Africa that still employ IBM Aptiva machines, mechanical keyboard and all—with a Linux operating system, though. Heck, I've seen town "pubs", way up in the hills, where the NES was still a big deal among the kids, not to mention old arcades—Guile's theme goes everywhere.

The logical thing to do would be to adapt a system that's less CPU intensive, mostly by toning down the graphics. A bare-bones, low-bandwith internet that would let kids worldwide read wikipedia, or classic literature, and even write fiction (by them, for them), that would let nationwide groups tweet to each other in real time, that would let people discuss projects and thoughts, converse and play, and do all of those amazing things you can do on the Internet, on a very, very tight budget, with very, very limited means. Internet is supposed to make knowledge and information free and universal. But there's an entry-level cost that most humans can't afford. I think we need to bridge that. What do you guys think?

 

 

Does religion help cure insanity?

0 Ritalin 27 March 2014 05:57PM

I get papers cited at me, (the first is about "religion and spirituality", the rest about specific meditation disciplines) about but I can't tell whether they're well-done or not. I believe LessWrong is the ideal place to ask about this because there's a healthy combination of interest for self-improvement techniques and solid skepticism against quackery. I thought it would be a solid enough topic to merit its own thread rather than a discussion in Open Thread.

 

Rationalist fiction: a Slice of Life IN HELL

7 Ritalin 25 March 2014 05:02PM

"If you're sent to Hell for that, you wouldn't have liked it in Heaven anyway." 

This phrase inspired in me the idea of a Slice of Life IN HELL story. Basically, the strictest interpretation of the Abrahamic God turns out to be true, and, after Judgment Day, all the sinners (again, by the strictest standards), the pagans, the atheists, the gays, the heretics and so on end up in Hell, which is to say, most of humanity. Rather than a Fire and Brimstone torture chamber, this Hell is very much like earthly life, except it runs on Murphy's Law turned Up To Eleven ("everything that can go wrong, will go wrong"), and you can't die permanently, and it goes on forever. It's basically Life as a videogame, set to Maximum Difficulty, and real pain and suffering.

Our stories would focus actually decent, sympathetic people, who are there for things like following the wrong religion, or having sex outside missionary-man-on-woman, lack of observance of the daily little rituals, or even just being lazy. They manage to live more-or-less decently because they're extremely cautious, rational, and methodical. Given that reality is out to get them, this is a constant uphill battle, and even the slightest negligence can have a terrible cost. Thankfully, they have all the time in eternity to learn from their mistakes.

This could be an interesting way to showcase rationalist principles, especially those regarding safety and planning, in a perpetual Worst Case Scenario environment. There's ample potential for constant conflict, and sympathetic characters whom the audience can feel they really didn't deserve their fate. The central concept also seems classically strong to me: defying Status Quo and cruel authorities by striving to be as excellent as one can be, even in the face of certain doom.

What do you guys think? There's lots of little details to specify, and there are many things that I believe should be marked as "must NOT be specified". Any help, ideas, thoughts are very welcome.

The Craft And The Community: The Basics: Apologizing

0 Ritalin 23 November 2013 04:55PM

Now, it is said we all here pride ourselves on our intelligence, rationality, and moral sense. It is also said, however, that we are a fiercely independent bunch, and that we can let this pride of ours get the better of us. There have also been comments that the live communities that appear at meetups provide much more positive interactions than what goes on on this site's discussions; this might merit further investigation.

My point is; we've done a lot of research on how to do proper ethical and metaethical calculations, and on how to achieve self-empowerment and deal with our own akrasia, which is awesome. We've also done some work on matters of gender equality, which is very positive as well. But I haven't seen us do anything about the basic details of human interaction, what one would call "politeness" and "basic human decency". And I think it might be useful if we started tackling these, for our own sakes, that of those who surround us, and that of easing our mission along, which is, as I understand it so far, to save the world (from existential risk (at the hands of (unfriendly and self-modifying) artificial intelligence))).

What inspired me to propose this post was a video I just saw from Hank Green of the famed and fabled vlogbrothers. I hold these two individuals in very high esteem, and I would expect many here to share my feelings about them, on account of their values and sensibilities largely overlapping with ours; namely the sense that intelligence, knowledge and curiosity are awesome, and that intellectuals ought to use their power to help improve themselves and the world around them.

Here it is; I hope you enjoy it

 

 

The State of the Art of Scientific Research on Polyamoury

-6 Ritalin 09 September 2013 09:26PM

The idea of polyamoury is one that interests me. However, while such books as The Ethical Slut have done a good job of providing me with tools to understand and possibly handle the challenges and rewards involved, I found them unsatisfying in that they were largely based on anecdotal evidence, with a very strong selection bias. Before making the jump of attempting to live that way, one would need to know precisely the state of the art of scientific, rigourous, credible research on the topic; it is a tedious job to seek out and compile everything, but I believe it is a job worth doing. 

I'll be initiating an ongoing process of data compilation, and will publish my findings on this thread as I discover and summarize them. Any help is greatly appreciated, as this promises to be long and tedious. I might especially need help extracting meaningful information from the masses of data; I am not a good statistician yet, far from it.

To Be Expanded...

 

Home Economics

11 Ritalin 07 July 2013 09:30PM

As I inventoried my personal library and classified it using the Universal Decimal System, I found out about lots of fields of knowledge I was only dimly aware of or didn't even know existed1, and one of those that piqued my curiosity was home economics, domestic science and housekeeping (field 64). I was kinda bluffed, actually; I always thought of home economics as that thing that shows up in American high school sitcoms, that elective "for girls" where people get to cook stuff on campus. Now I find that it fully occupies one of The Tens of the UDC! I finally realized it; this is Serious Business!

I thought of the permanently shoddy state of my bank account, of all the money I had spent in books (no less than 215 physical books, and then there's Kindle!), fancy gadgets (were those Marshall headphones really necessary? What about that sandwich-maker?), fancy food (even though I always seem to end up "cooking" the same boring, unbalanced crap), unnecessary or excessive heating and air conditioning, and so on and so forth.

I've come to realize how much I had underestimated this field, the duty towards oneself of taking care of one's house, and the advantages of so doing. I want to catch up in terms of planning my budget and my cleaning and my cooking and my buying furniture and appliances and so on and so for. I suppose I could figure it out by myself, but why reinvent the wheel?

So I thought to myself: asking your mates at LW has had awesome results when it came to getting your library in order, why don't you ask them about Home Economics? They probably actually went to those courses in High School, or have otherwise taken an interest just to optimize their homes! I mean, their literal livelihoods and well-beings are at stake, so why wouldn't they2?

So, yeah, if you guys know which reference books to start with, or have any practical recommendations in terms of resources or bibliography, and the handling thereof, I'd love to hear it. Who knows, maybe a good top level post may come of it?

 

 

 

 


1This triggered my imagination on a completely unrelated topic: a gamified education system in the style of an RPG skill tree.

 

2My Inner Critic obligingly suggested "Arkasia and, given the demographic, a compounded disdain for manual labor, pedestrian and materialistic concerns, and girly stuff. Why else didn't you?" I told it to step aside and go have a swim in the North Atlantic.

A Gamification Of Education: a modest proposal based on the Universal Decimal Classification and RPG skill trees

13 Ritalin 07 July 2013 06:27PM

While making the inventory of my personal library and applying the Universal Decimal System to its classification, I found myself discovering a systematized classification of fields of knowledge, nested and organized and intricate, many of which I didn't even know existed. I couldn't help but compare how information was therein classified, and how it was imparted to me in engineering school. I also thought about how, often, software engineers and computer scientists were mostly self-thought, with even college mostly consisting of "here's a problem: go forth and figure out a way to solve it". This made me wonder whether another way of certified and certifiable education couldn't be achieved, and a couple of ideas sort of came to me.

It's pretty nebulous in my mind so far, but the crux of the concept would be a modular structure of education, where the academic institution essentially established what information precisely you need from each module, and lets you get on with the activity of learning, with periodic exams that you can sign up for, which will certify your level and area of proficiency in each module.

A recommended tree of learning can be established, but it should be possible to not take every intermediate test, if passing the final test proves that you've passed all the others behind it (this would allow people coming from different academic systems to certify their knowledge quickly and easily, thus avoiding the classic "Doctor in Physics from Former Soviet Union, current Taxi Driver in New York" scenario).

Thus, a universal standard of how much you have proven to know about what topics can be established.

Employers would then be free to request profiles in the format of such a tree. It need not be a binary "you need to have done all these courses and only these courses to work for us", they could be free to write their utility function for this or that job however they would see fit, with whichever weights and restrictions they would need.

Students and other learners would be free to advance in whichever tree they required, depending on what kind of profile they want to end up with at what age or point in time. One would determine what to learn based on statistical studies of what elements are, by and large, most desired by employers of/predictors of professional success in a certain field you want to work in.

One would find, for example, that mastering the peculiar field of railway engineering is great to be a proficient railway engineer, but also that having studied, say, things involved with people skills (from rhetoric to psychology to management), correlates positively with success in that field.

Conversely, a painter may find that learning about statistics, market predictions, web design, or cognitive biases correlates with a more successful career (whether it be on terms of income, or in terms of copies sold, or of public exposure... each one may optimize their own learning according to their own criteria).

One might even be able to calculate whether such complimentary education is actually worth their time, and which of them are the most cost-efficient.

I would predict that such a system would help society overall optimize how many people know what skills, and facilitate the learning of new skills and the updating of old ones for everyone, thus reducing structural unemployment, and preventing pigeonholing and other forms of professional arthritis.

I would even dare to predict that, given the vague, statistical, cluster-ish nature of this system, people would be encouraged to learn quite a lot more, and on a quite wider range of fields, than they do now, when one must jump through a great many hoops and endure a great many constraints in space and time and coin to get access to some types of educations (and to the acknowledgement of their acquisition thereof).

Acquiring access to the actual sources of knowledge, a library (virtual or otherwise), lectures (virtual or otherwise), and so on, would be a private matter, up to the learner:

  • some of them already have the knowledge and just need to get it certified,
  • others can actually buy the books they want/need, especially if keeping them around as reference will be useful to them in the future,
  • others can subscribe to one or many libraries, of the on-site sort or by correspondence
  • others can buy access to pre-recorded lectures, peruse lectures that are available for free, or enroll in academic institutions whose ostensible purpose is to give lectures and/or otherwise guide students through learning, more or less closely
  • the same applies to finding study groups with whom you can work on a topic together: I can easily imagine dedicated social networks could be created for that purpose, helping people pair up with each other based on mutual distance, predicted personal affinity, mutual goals, backgrounds, and so on. Who knows what amazing research teams might be borne of the intellectual equivalent of OK!Cupid.

A thing that I would like very much about this system is that it would free up the strange conflicts of interest that hamper the function of traditional educational institutions.

When the ones who teach you are also the ones who grade you, the effort they invest in you can feel like a zero-sum game, especially if they are only allowed to let a percentage of you pass.

When the ones who teach you have priorities other than teach (usually research, but some teachers are also involved in administrative functions, or even private interests completely outside of the university's ivory tower1), this can and often does reduce the energy and dedication they can/will allocate to the actual function of teaching, as opposed to the others.

By separating these functions, and the contradictory incentives they provide, the organizations performing them are free to optimize for each: 

  • Testing is optimized for predicting current and future competence in a subject: the testers whose tests are the most reliable have more employers requiring their certificates, and thus more people requesting that they test them
  • Teaching is optimized for getting the knowledge through whatever the heck the students want, whether it be to succeed at the tests or to simply master the subject (I don't know much game theory, but I'd naively guess that the spontaneous equilibrium between the teaching and testing institutions would lead to both goals becoming identical).
  • Researching is optimized for research (researchers are not teachers. dang it, those are very different skill-sets!). However researchers and other experts get to have a pretty big say in what the tests test for and how, because their involvement makes the tests more trustworthy for employers, and because they, too, are employers.
  • And of course entire meta-institutions can spring from this, whose role is to statistically verify, over the long term,
    • how good a predictor of professional success in this or that field is passing the corresponding test, and
    • how good a predictor of passing the test is to be taught by this or that teaching institution.
    • how good a predictor of the test being reliable is the input of these or those researchers and experts
  • It occurs to me now that, if one wished to be really nitpicky about who watches the watchmen, I suspect that there would be institutions testing the reliability of those meta-institutions, and so on and so forth... When does it stop? How to avoid vested interests and little cheats and manipulations pulling an academic equivalent of the AAA certification of sub-prime junk debt in 2008?

Another discrepancy I'd like to see solved is the difference between the official time it is supposed to take to obtain this or that degree, to learn this or that subject, and the actual statistical distribution of that time. Nowadays, a degree that's supposed to take you five years ends up taking up eight or ten years of your life. You find yourself having to go through the most difficult subjects again and again, because they are explained in an extremely rushed way, the materials crammed into a pre-formatted time. Other subjects are so exceedingly easy and thinly-spread that you find that going to class is a waste of time, and that you're better off preparing for it one week before finals. Now, after having written all of the above, my mind is quite spent, and I don't feel capable of either anticipating the effect of my proposed idea on this particular, nor of offering any solutions. Nevertheless, I wish to draw attention to this, so I'm leaving this paragraph in until I can amend it to something more useful/promising.

I hereby submit this idea to the LW community for screening and sound-boarding. I apologize in advance for your time, just in case this idea appears to be flawed enough to be unsalvageable. If you deem the concept good but flawed, we could perhaps work on ironing those kinks together. If, afterwards, this seems to you like a good enough idea to implement, know that good proposals are a dime a dozen; if there is any interest in seeing something like this happen, we can need to move on to proprely understanding the current state of secondary/superior/higher education, and figuring out of what incentives/powers/leverages are needed to actually get it implemented.

 



 

1By ivory tower I simply mean the protected environment where professors teach, researchers research, and students study, with multiple buffers between it and the ebb and flow of political, economical, and social turmoil. No value judgement is intended.

 


 

EDIT: And now I look upon the title of this article and realize that, though I had comparisons to games in mind, I never got around to writing them down. My inspirations here were mostly Civilization's Research Trees, RPG Skill Scores and Perks, and, in particular, Skyrim's skills and perks tree.

Basically, your level at whatever skill improves by studying and by practising it rather than merely by levelling up, and, when you need to perform a task that's outside your profile, you can go and learn it without having to commit to a class. Knowing the right combination of skills at the right level lets you unlock perks or access previously-unavailable skills and applications. What I like the most about it is that there's a lot of freedom to learn what you want and be who you want to be according to your own tastes and wishes, but, overall, it sounds sensible and is relatively well-balanced. And of course there's the fact that it allows you to keep a careful tally of how good you are at what things, and the sense of accomplishment is so motivating and encouraging!

Speaking of which, several netwroks and consoles' Achievement systems also strike me as motivators for keeping track of what one has achieved so far, to look back and be able to say "I've come a long way" (in an effect similar to that of gratitude journals), and also to accomplish a task and have this immediate and universal acknowledgement that you did it dammit (and, for those who care about that kind of thing, the chance to rub it the face of those who haven't).

I would think our educational systems could benefit from this kind of modularity and from this ability to keep track of things in a systematic way. What do you guys think?

Optimizing Workouts for Intellectual Performance

9 Ritalin 06 July 2013 07:56PM

So this year I've stopped working out, and my grades have improved drastically, but at the cost of losing muscle mass and gaining fat, and becoming physically slower and lazier just as I became faster and more active intellectually. One effect I especially noticed was the disappearance of that perpetual state of happiness/satisfaction that comes from frequent physical exertion, which I think had a tendency to get in the way of a feeling of urgency regarding studies; why bother with tiresome and frustrating intellectual exercise when physical exercise yielded results and pleasure/satisfaction much more easily and reliably?

Anyway, this got me thinking: "I need to figure out a training that is optimized for intellectual performance. Aspects that might be interesting to work on would be:

  • getting as much blood (oxygen, nutrients) as possible to the brain, whenever needed.
  • minimizing the amount of other tissue (including muscle in excess of what is strictly needed for a comfortable daily life, and digestive organs in excess of what is needed to get the nutrients from the food).
  • optimizing the diet in order to feed the brain according to its needs while avoiding dietetical imbalances that would result in damage of some sort or another (too much sugar can damage the pancreas, too much protein and the kidneys can suffer, etc.)
  • something that is easy and quick to implement and follow, relatively inexpensive and straightforward; the idea is to save as much time, resources and energy as possible for the needs of studying/working.

These ideas I'm throwing around from a position of extreme ignorance. I've tried hiring nutritionists, but their diets were optimized for bodybuilding, not for intellectual efficacy, and were incredibly troublesome to follow. These involved about five to eight meals a day, large amounts of meat or meat substitutes, which is expensive to sustain, and me in a perpetual state of either hunger or digestive lethargy, plus permanent muscular soreness from the training regime that goes with it... and then there's the supplements.

So, yeah, I'm no gwern, but I'd love to figure out a diet that allows me to work at maximum efficacy. Other concerns, such as feeling strong or looking attractive or even dancing well, are quite far behind in priority. How should I go about this? How about you lads and ladies? What's your experience with dieting/working-out? More importantly, what does the research say?

P.S. I tried to read "Good Calories Bad Calories", but I never managed to finish it: it spent so much time attacking the current paradygm that I grew tired of waiting for it to actually list and summarize its recommendations. If anyone here finished reading that and drew out the conclusions, I'd love to hear them.

P.P.S. The main post will update as the discussion advances; once enough proper information is gathered, a top level post might emerge.

 

Personal Library Management

3 Ritalin 05 July 2013 10:14PM

I've just finished my finals, and, after six years of college, I am faced with this fact: I have accumulated one heck of a lot of books, most of which I haven't read yet.

An app, or at the very least an algorythm, on how to manage them, make a reading list, and go about reading them, is something I really wish for, but I have no idea how to approach this problem in a time-efficient, productive way, and I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel.

Do any of you have the same problem? What are your solutions?

The main post will be gradually updated and amended as the discussion progresses.

EDIT: For Mac Users, it appears that Delicious Library is a great solution. While looking for alternatives, I found this web app, libib, which seems very promising.

EDIT 2: I've spent most of the day cataloguing all of my stuff on libib, which is incredibly efficient... as long as the ISBN is readily-recognized. This doesn't work so well with rarer books and older books, but they're a small enough minority that I can delcare a smashing success.

  1. Step 1 was making a list of all available books.
  2. Step 2 is going to be applying the Universal Decimal System,
  3. Step 3 will be Establishing a
  • Reading List and a
  • List of What's Already Read and a
  • List of What Will Probably Never Be Read

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