You may have noticed the announcement last week of Less Wrong's partnership with Castify to create Less Wrong podcasts. We're happy to announce that we now offer three new sequences. For those who want to try us out, we are also offering Eliezer's seminal essay, The Simple Truth, as a standalone 99¢ purchase (it's also part of the Map and Territory sequence).

Our channels:

• The Simple Truth
• Map and Territory
• Ethical Injunctions
• and our pilot sequence, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

We have audio samples on our site if you're curious.

In other news, we're still working to make the promoted posts available as a monthly subscription. We'll keep you up to date with the progress on that. It's still a few weeks away.

Side note: Because of user feedback, we have removed the one year download restriction for sequences purchased. However, we have added a clause in our terms of service that gives you a minimum of two years to download the audio, if only because living forever is hard, even for digital goods.

See you in the comments.

We can always use more case studies of insanity that aren't religion, right?

Well, Miracle Mineral Supplement is my new go-to example for Bad Things happening to people with low epistemic standards. "MMS" is a supposed cure for everything ranging from the common cold to HIV to cancer. I just saw it recommended in another Facebook thread to someone who was worried about malaria symptoms.

It's industrial-strength bleach. Literally just bleach. Usually drunk, sometimes injected, and yes, it often kills you. It is every bit as bad as it sounds if not worse.

This is beyond Poe's Law. Medieval blood draining via leeches was far more of an excusable error than this, they had far less evidence it was a bad idea. I think if I was trying to guess what was the dumbest alternative medicine on the planet, I still would not have guessed this low. My brain is still not pessimistic enough about human stupidity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement

If your English is good enough to follow discussions on this site you can get a job teaching English in Shanghai. If you can participate meaningfully you are frankly overqualified. I am currently saving about 2,000 dollars a month working approximately 9-5 every day.

The minimum legal requirements to teach are that you be over 23 years of age, have a (relevant) degree and two years of relevant work experience as well as a TEFL qualification that took 120 hours to complete. In theory you should also be from a country where English is a native language to teach but this requirement is often honoured in the breach. In practice you must be over 23 and know someone who can fake up a degree certificate in Photoshop, and be willing to write yourself a fitting resume and sign a form stating that all the documents you are submitting are true. Some companies will do all of the faking and lying for you, some will at least want you to give them the appropriate fake documents so there’s some farcical plausible deniability.

If you are not on a work visa doing work of any kind for pay is illegal. This rule is ignored all the time, including by large Western multinational companies with legal departments because the rules change depending on who’s interpreting them and which website you’re looking at. But people get Business visas to come over here and do internships regularly and if you are from a First World country the worst that will happen to you for getting caught working on a tourist or student visa is a large fine (5500 yuan). If you overstay your visa by more than about three days you will be deported. This is one of the few things the government care about when it comes to foreigners. Drugs, gambling, prostitution, as long as there are no nationals involved it needs to get quite big for them to care. But you can get unlucky. It's rare but it happens.

Demand for English teachers in Shanghai is insatiable. If you are being paid by the hour the minimum acceptable rate for someone with no experience, who can’t spell, and can’t teach is 150 RMB per hour. Never accept less than this for any job. The local public primary schools are legally barred from hiring foreigners so they go through companies who hire them instead. You will not really be teaching at most of these companies, more providing a prop; you, the foreign teacher. There isn’t that much you can teach in 35 minutes a week when half of it should be games or the children will dislike you, meaning the parents will dislike you, meaning the school will complain about you to the company. But you can make English fun, and given sufficient planning and practice you can teach something even in such small classes. If you just want a job for a visa there are companies who will provide one for teaching one day a week. You can make 7,000 RMB a month easily doing this four days a week. I used to make 10,000 when I was doing a similar schedule. This is in a city where you can eat well for 50 RMB a day, very well, have a maid come to your apartment three times a week for less than 200 and you can get a nice apartment for 3,000 a month. Ten RMB is worth approximately 1 pound sterling, so at a guess 1.6 dollars. My single greatest living expense is going out. There are "dive bars" with relatively low prices but most places that cater to foreigners make you pay for it. One company that is of average incompetence (very) and unusual honesty (except during negotiations about hours, pay per hour and where they have available schools) is Corneil. They will often screw up the recording of your hours but rarely by a significant amount and will give it to you if it's pointed out to them. It's not malice, they're just incompetent. So is everyone else.

To illustrate how low the standards are here I have met someone who was teaching at a high school who was moved to another at the school’s request because he was swearing in class, smoking in school and sharing with the students. They also suspected he was sleeping with one of his students. After they moved him the school requested him back because he was very popular. He also can’t spell. He has been teaching for seven years.

Getting work at the weekend is very, very easy. Again, never accept less than 150 an hour. Some people think that's low.There are many, many companies serving this market and all of them are perfectly willing to pay people who do not and can not legally work for them. In theory most of them have standards and demand lesson planning, something resembling professionalism and turning up to work on time. In practice if you arrive on time all the time and ask the co-teacher what pages to teach for the next 45 minutes you will be fine. Then there’s a break and you play a game for the remainder of the class. If you are working legally for one of these companies they will usually try to get you to work three evenings a week as well. I wouldn’t but if you want to you can. If you’re willing to work in the evenings you can just post an ad on one of the local expat magazine websites and you will be able to do private lessons. It’s easier to go through an agency that charges introduction fees at first but after you’ve been here a while you can just do it all yourself.

Teaching business or other professional English can be much more lucrative but the standards are higher.

If you actually have a relevant degree and two years of teaching experience you can probably get a job at an international school. They pay better, have higher minimum standards and as far as I can tell from talking to friends who teach at them they are all quite political places. Being a good or very good teacher will not protect you from politics but being reasonably good at politics will save you from anything but being an abombinably bad teacher. Most of the international schools start hiring for the next school year about now but just before the beginning of the school year is also reasonably good because if they need somebody they need them now. It is possible to go transition from teaching English as a foreign language or teaching a subject you know through English in a Chinese school to working in an international school but it takes a while. You must actually become a reasonable teacher first. If you want to do it for the long term it’s a good idea to get a teaching degree at some point. Once you teach in one international school you can travel almost anywhere and teach in others. It has much to recommend it.

Many of the business people here have a very dismissive attitude to teachers, whether TEFLers or international school teachers. If it bugs you don’t hang out with people like that.

Most single foreigners who have been here a significant length of time end up in Jing’an or the Former French Concession. You pay a premium for the central location but the cultural and other amenities make it well worth it. People with families are more common near Hongqiao Road in the Minhang area but that’s not relevant to you unless you’re homeschooling because even the “international” schools like Shanghai United International School that accept Chinese children cost very large sums of money. Shanghai American School’s yearly tuition is comparable to Harvard’s.

The dating situation here is incredibly easy for men and  pretty terrible for women, at least for expats. If I was a single woman I wouldn’t move over here unless I was very attractive, very outgoing or both. Even TEFL teachers here can easily be in the 90th percentile of income working five days a week. International school teachers get paid better. This, together, with the fact there are lots of women with a thing for either English speaking guys or white or black guys makes it really, really easy to meet women here. If you want a love life here as a woman it will really help to initiate. Also, if you move over with a boyfriend or husband he will get hit on all the time, including by people who know that he’s not single. There are a lot of very, very mercenary girls here who will use you for your bank balance but they’re not really that hard to avoid if you have some sense. As a teacher the real gold diggers will not care about you at all.

You will not learn much Chinese here unless you make a serious effort to do so. I have met expats who have been here eight years who know five words of Chinese. Mine is better than average by virtue of having completed the Pimsleur Mandarin series. This does not mean my Mandarin is good, it means everyone else's is crap.If you want to learn Mandarin every single other city in China is better, Beijing included.

If you have questions ask. If you can think of suitable tags or links to be added feel free to PM me.

I wrote this for the Positive Vector website awhile back and lots of people have found it valuable, so I want to share it with the Less Wrong community as well.   I think this applies to most people - meta suffering thing is something I see everywhere, even though it is most prominent with people who have depression.   This is based on my experience with working with depressed people and with studying Buddhism, especially Big Mind.   Enjoy!

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The roots of suffering are often deep.  But not all of the suffering happens at the root.  A lot of the suffering that people experience is “meta” suffering.  Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering.  You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end.  That you will feel this way forever.  This fear of the suffering persisting can cause you much more suffering than whatever started your suffering.  And it can last much longer.  At some point days later, you might think to yourself about how terrible that initial suffering was, and feel fear and suffering about the possibility of it coming back.

Many people suffer as much or more from meta-suffering than suffering that comes from physical or situational sources!  

The good news is that meta suffering is much easier to fix than deeper forms of suffering.

One thing you can do is to collect data* in order to develop an accurate model of how often you actually feel bad.    Try monitoring your moods for awhile and get a baseline for what your moods actually are.  At least half of the people who have suffered from major depression who have done this and spoken with me about it have been surprised to find that they often feel better than their self-perception when they assess their mood at random points throughout the day.

Regardless of what your default mood state or range is, once you know what it is, you are likely to feel less fear.  You can look at what your mood historically does over time, and feel more confidence that this is what it will do in the future.  When you are in the state of despair and wondering if it will last forever, odds are that it won’t.

Another extremely powerful technique for dealing with meta-suffering is accepting that you are suffering.  The meta suffering is suffering because you really want to change your state and are not successful.  If you can just be with the state and not making yourself bad or wrong for being in that state, then all you have to deal with is the base state of suffering, which will be less intense and last less long than if you tack on that extra meta layer.

The ironic thing is that just by thinking that thought, if you are prone to depression, you will probably notice yourself meta suffering and then feel guilt or shame about it.  If this happens, my advice is to take it to the next level – feel compassion and acceptance for your meta-meta-suffering.

As you make this a practice, and feel acceptance and compassion for your suffering, you will feel more freedom from the meta level, and have more resources to work with the underlying suffering or depression.

Another common way in which meta suffering sabotages people with depression is for them to feel depression as soon as they start feeling good.  The story that some people have is that it is futile to think that they might feel so good in the future, and it is better not to get their hopes up and have them crushed.  I encourage the person with this meta suffering story to assure the meta suffering part that they do not have obligation to feel good in the future.  Feeling good in the present is of value, for however long it lasts, and that is worth appreciating and a good thing.

Desiring more pleasant states is great.  Working to create those states is fabulous.

Feeling guilt, shame, depression, or other suffering because of not liking your current state or projected future state does not contribute to your feeling better, and is something that is pretty purely good to release.  

* Example of a site to track depression levels over time.   

New paper from Keith Stanovich (one of my favorite cognitive scientists): 

Several formal analyses in decision theory have shown that if people’s preferences follow certain logical patterns (the so-called axioms of rational choice) then they are behaving as if they are maximising utility. However, numerous studies in the decision-making literature have indicated that humans often violate the axioms of rational choice. Additionally, studies of nonhuman animals indicate that they are largely rational in an axiomatic sense. It is important to understand why the finding that humans are less rational than other animals is not paradoxical. This paper discusses three reasons why the principles of rational choice are actually easier to follow when the cognitive architecture of the organism is simpler: contextual complexity, symbolic complexity, and the strong evaluator struggle.

Enjoy.

A few years ago, I wrote a little dialogue I imagined between 2 materialists, one of whom was for and one against abortion, centering on the personal identity question. I recently cleaned it up and added a number of references for the biological claims.

You can read it at An Abortion Dialogue.

Early feedback from #lesswrong is that it's a 'nicely enjoyable read' and 'quite good'. I hope everyone likes it, even if it doesn't exactly break new philosophical ground.

This is based on a discussion in #lesswrong a few months back, and I am not sure how to resolve it.

Setup: suppose the world is populated by two groups of people, one just wants to be left alone (labeled Jews), the other group hates the first one with passion and want them dead (labeled Nazis). The second group is otherwise just as "good" as the first one (loves their relatives, their country and is known to be in general quite rational). They just can't help but hate the other guys (this condition is to forestall the objections like "Nazis ought to change their terminal values"). Maybe the shape of Jewish noses just creeps the hell out of them, or something. Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no changing that hatred.

Is it rational to exterminate the Jews to improve the Nazi's quality of life? Well, this seems like a silly question. Of course not! Now, what if there are many more Nazis than Jews? Is there a number large enough where exterminating Jews would be a net positive utility for the world? Umm... Not sure... I'd like to think that probably not, human life is sacred! What if some day their society invents immortality, then every death is like an extremely large (infinite?) negative utility!

Fine then, not exterminating. Just send them all to concentration camps, where they will suffer in misery and probably have a shorter lifespan than they would otherwise. This is not an ideal solutions from the Nazi point of view, but it makes them feel a little bit better. And now the utilities are unquestionably comparable, so if there are billions of Nazis and only a handful of Jews, the overall suffering decreases when the Jews are sent to the camps.

This logic is completely analogous to that in the dust specks vs torture discussions, only my "little XML labels", to quote Eliezer, make it more emotionally charged. Thus, if you are a utilitarian anti-specker, you ought to decide that, barring changing Nazi's terminal value of hating Jews, the rational behavior is to herd the Jews into concentration camps, or possibly even exterminate them, provided there are enough Nazi's in the world who benefit from it.

This is quite a repugnant conclusion, and I don't see a way of fixing it the way the original one is fixed (to paraphrase Eliezer, "only lives worth celebrating are worth creating").

EDIT: Thanks to CronoDAS for pointing out that this is known as the 1000 Sadists problem. Once I had this term, I found that lukeprog has mentioned it on his old blog. 

Oldie but goodie. A piece of fiction describing how a computer system can do the job of human managers at fast food restaurants (scarily plausible), how this leads to a dystopia (slowly getting implausible), and how to avoid this scenario and reach utopia (give me a break).