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I don't want a stranger to see me try something new and fail, but ideally that's something I should be doing quite often at work. Otherwise how will I learn? Seems like this would inhibit productive as well as antisocial behavior.
In response to
Under the eyes of your betters
You might be right.. you can have all kinds of inspiring people in your life though, ones that you might not feel the same kinds of pressures from. Like putting up Claudia Donovan from the show Warehouse 13 - the character she plays is really bright, but is definitely a get-into-trouble-first-and-ask-questions-later personality. Or for a real life example, Grace Hopper, who developed the first compiler for a computer language, who said "It is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission". You might try risking more to impress them, as long as you had a clear picture of what their personalities were like - they might be the kinds of people you'd get in trouble with...
In response to
Under the eyes of your betters
I'm thinking about A/B testing this by placing an Albertus Magnus portrait on my study desk and flipping a coin in the morning to determine if it will be visible for that day. If there is any effect, it should eventually show up in my Beeminder data (for studying logic, maths, and computer programming).
I would love to hear the results!
In response to
Under the eyes of your betters
I feel that may be a bit creepy, though perhaps that is the point. Still, a slightly-off-center gaze would be preferable. Seems relatively easy to conduct this experiment, unless there's a flaw in my reasoning of what the control would be.
What kind of design would you suggest? Keep in mind my resources are pretty limited. I was thinking maybe of doing flyers with different throwaway email addresses, and seeing how many people responded to flyers with different pictures (people looking away or towards, famous people who are said to possess a specific virtue and random people, or no picture altogether) on them, and then putting them in different well-trafficked areas of some public place.
Under the eyes of your betters
There is some research that claims the feeling of being watched motivates you to engage in more prosocial behavior. Our gaze recognition ability is apparently hard for us to suppress even when we try to intentionally. When I think about times when I've been around friends, however, I usually feel the pressure to act in a way I feel will impress that specific friend, which is not necessarily pro-social. I imagine the disembodied eyes are not registered as "friends" and heighten our anxiety about who might be looking at us. I wonder whether having pictures of your role models in your workspace and people in your life who encourage you to do well when you talk to them might encourage you to engage in behavior more in line with those virtues you'd like to cultivate. Especially if you intentionally go for pictures where the people in them are looking at the camera directly.
Or allowing someone to go long enough without air that they cannot be resuscitated.
This is less of a single qualitative distinction than you would think, given the various degrees of neurological damage that can make a person more or less the same person that they were before.
Good point... you are right about that. It would be more of a matter of degrees of personhood, especially if you had advanced medical technologies available such as neural implants.
In response to
Circular Altruism
I agree that as you defined the problems, both have problems. But I don't agree that the problems are equal, for the reason stated earlier. Suppose someone says that the boundary is that 1,526,216,123,000,252 dust specks is exactly equal to 50 years of torture (in fact, it's likely to be some relatively low number like this rather than anything like a googleplex.) It is true that proving this would be a problem. But it is no particular problem that 1,526,216,123,000,251 dust specks would be preferable to the torture, while the torture would be preferable to 1,526,123,000,253 dust specks would be worse than the torture: the point is that the torture would differ from each of these values by an extremely tiny amount.
But suppose someone defines a qualitative boundary: 1,525,123 degrees of pain (given some sort of measure) has an intrinsically worse quality from 1,525,122 degrees, such that no amount of the latter can ever add up to the former. It seems to me that there is a problem which doesn't exist in the other case, namely that for a trillion people to suffer pain of 1,525,122 degrees for a trillion years is said to be preferable to one person suffering pain of 1,525,123 degrees for one year.
In other words: both positions have difficult to find boundaries, but one directly contradicts intuition in a way the other does not.
I'm not totally convinced - there may be other factors that make such qualitative distinctions important. Such as exceeding the threshold to boiling. Or putting enough bricks in a sack to burst the bottom. Or allowing someone to go long enough without air that they cannot be resuscitated. It probably doesn't do any good to pose /arbitrary/ boundaries, for sure, but not all such qualitative distinctions are arbitrary...
In response to
Circular Altruism
It would be a very different kind of evaluation, but the importance would matter differently if it were the /last/ 500 humans we were talking about - and there was a 90% chance that all would live and a 10% chance that all would die on one pathway versus a guaranteed 100 dying on the other pathway. But since they are just /some group/ of 500 humans with presumedly other groups other places, it is worth the investment - gambling in this way pays out in less lives lost, on average.
In response to
Effective Rationality Training Online
I might suggest as possible models khanacademy.org and lumosity.com. Lumosity is a collection of games which claim to provide brain training which can improve mental capacities. Khanacademy is a site for people to learn mathematics and other subjects. The useful features each contains are in lumosity's case games arranged around topic areas that can help people develop skills, and in khanacademy's case short, ten-minute videos with small easily digested pieces of information and a skill tree with links to materials where you can master skills topic by topic before moving on to more complicated skills.
So you are assuming that in the future you will be forced to act on the belief that the probability can't be something other than 0 or 1/2 even though in the future you will know that the probability will almost certainly be something other than 0 or 1/2.
But isn't this the same as assuming that in the future you will forget that your choices had been limited to zero and 1/2?
Hrm, I think you might be ignoring the cost of actually doing the calculations, unless I'm missing something. The value of simplifying assumptions comes from how much easier it makes a situation to model. I guess the question would be, is the effort saved in modeling this thing with an approximation rather than exact figures worth the risks of modeling this thing with an approximation rather than exact figures? Especially if you have to do many models like this, or model a lot of other factors as well. Such as trying to sort out what are the best ways to spend your time overall, including possibly meteorite preparations.
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I think it sounds pretty interesting, I would read the finished product at least.
The premise where technological power is limited reminds me of the telluric field in this story (which I recommend reading).
I think the only way to become a good writer is to write stuff, and since it seems like something you want to do, I say give it a shot!
Thanks!