Containment thread

Requests for information

• Why is there is no space where can I dance with strangers in public for free without prior preperation or an exceptional value proposition to prospective partners (e.g. I'll pay you to dance with me, or you get to look at my handsome self - hint: I'm not super handsome). Or is there, and I'm not aware of it? In a foreign country, perhaps?

• Which life insurer do you use? Anyone know if Commonwealth bank or uni super will payout for cryonics?

• Recently I've been toying with the notion of political determinism. I'd be interested in a text analysis program that could analyse new legislation (this exists already) brought before parliament and predict (this doesn't exist yet) the political feasability based on content and contextual factors. Any suggestions? Given I have access to the text mining software that can classify legislation, can I propose a kaggle competition to predict responses to it? Right now political feasability analysis is pretty crude and requires human specialists not instead, policies could one day be generated based on plausibility then simply selected by human supervisors in parliament.

• What is the relationship between housing characteristics and the elements of flourishing?

• Science PhD's are frequently derided for being in vast oversupply to demand, resulting in poor employment outcomes for those who go for them. How do management and marketing PhD's compare as a career capital aquisition strategy? Hearsay suggets busines PhD's are far more valuable and there is high demand for business academics. However, my research suggests this may be explained by higher barriers to entry to business PhD's than science PhD's. Regarding management professional doctorates:

As a rule, students had 15 years of professional experience and were 40 years old. Two out of three were male and the students were from all sorts of industries – such as financial services, consulting firms, or IT and telecommunication – or ran their own businesses. Most of the students worked full-time, mainly in senior and middle management.

However, professional doctorates are a step higher than traditional PhDs. www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140507145246893. The fact that Oxford publishes a list of its unemployed PhD students from its last graduates is slightly telling of the markets disequilibrium. Take into account their already small intake and the high barriers to entry (Oxford Said GMAT simulator). The case for the marketing PhD is simpler. There is disequilbrium between supply and demand, but also mismatch between marketing PhD graduate characteristics and marketing job requirements so marketing PhD's are neccersarily even that geared towards academia. My tentative conclusion is that marketing and management PhD's are fraught endeavours justlike science PhD's (both being more job worthy than arts PhD's) in general.

• It seems like all studies between charitable giving and happiness are correlational and don't draw causal inferences, but journalists and charities frequently do. Is there any reason to believe that people who give more on aggregate have higher incomes, facilitating happier lives more generally?

Based on political affiliation, some studies argue conservatives, on average, are happier than liberals. A potential explanation is greater acceptance of income inequalities in society leads to a less worried nature.

-wiki

In fact, if I was to design a study from which to draw a cauasal inference, my hypothesise would test to see if becoming interested in donating harmed the donor.

• Effective altruism without justice considerations should suffer from the same problems as non-reciprocal altruism in nature.

Moralistic aggression. A protection mechanism from cheaters acts to regulate the advantage of cheaters in selection against altruists. The moralistic altruist may want to educate or even punish a cheater.

-wiki. How can they protect against that if at all?

Partnerships. Altruism to create friendships.

EA's don't try to improve the wellbeing of their own group directly generally so they're reducing their own fitness. In nature, altruistic cabals form and split away from the less altruistic groups, and if altruism is an effective strategy for their adaptiveness then that altruistic community thrives.

• What is the relationship between porn consumption and health outcomes? Are there any systematic reviews of the relationship between porn and health outcomes (including mental health outcomes)?

interesting research

Public interest alert. MIRI take note. I met a girl the other day who's researching reasoning about Goal Revelation in Human Negotiation. Specifically, she's working on training AI's to out-negotiate humans in psychological games. The implications for the AI box experiment are clear and terrifying. She seems unaware of the implications, and the field doesn't have a strong web-presence at my institute - but Harvard seems to be the powerhouse for papers in the subfield right now.

• The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter

• autobiographical episodic memory cueing the remedial equivelant to reference class forecasting

• In Meditation and attention: A comparison of the effects of concentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention the case is made that long term meditators can sustain their concentration longer than short term meditators, and that mindfulness meditators deal between with unexpected tasks of attention than concentrative meditators, but no differences otherwise.

• Can't concentrate for long? In Volitional modulation of autonomic arousal improves sustained attention the case is made that their autonomic arousal biofeedback protocol can increase sustained attention in neuropsychiatrically impaired populations. It probably applies to nonclinical populations too if you're looking for a cognitive superpower.

• This research examines the influence of power on consumer decision strategies. It proposes that high power directs consumers' attention to options' positive features, making choosing a more preferred strategy than rejecting, whereas low power shifts consumers' focus to negative features, making rejecting a more preferred strategy than choosing. Two studies using different manipulations of power provide consistent support for this effect. The results also indicate that consumers in a state of high power are more satisfied with their choices when they adopt a choosing strategy than when they adopt a rejecting strategy, whereas the opposite is true for consumers in a state of low power. In addition, study 2 shows that the previous effects are reduced when consumers' sense of responsibility is made salient.

• A main assumption behind privatisations, public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives in major programme delivery is that the involvement of private risk capital in programme delivery, for instance in infrastructure provision, will bring much-needed discipline to the planning and delivery of programmes.

The research in this project is designed to test this assumption. So far the assumption has been tested only with small samples of programmes and the evidence is mixed. Statistically valid conclusions do not exist. This study will attempt to change this state of affairs.

• Private versus public finance in major programme management

-The powerful select, the powerless reject: Power's influence in decision strategies - empirical support for the 'abundance mentality' theory of personal development

• Ariely argues that aversion to loss rather than a desire for flexibility explains the paradox of choice. That is, DON'T KEEP YOUR OPTIONS OPEN, RISK AND ITERATE INSTEAD as a maxim might be prudent in a broad class of circumstances while people get use to this paradigm, it's astrategic.

asking individuals to think about “how much time they would like to donate” (vs. “how much money they would like to donate”) to a charity increases the amount that they ultimately donate to the charity.

-Liu and Aaker

opinion

• A/PROF ANISH NAGPAL, former mechanical engineer, former economist and present day marketing professor. Wow.

• end the objectification of children and infants for the cuteness, they are not objects and deserve respect and self determination and rights not trivialisation and paternalism

media

• Author Robert Greene on the Utility of Weirdness, Fear, and Pain - Inside Quest - a very good video just like many on Inside quest

I have an idea for a billion dollar company in the space of health care. It's a bit similar to metamed but has much better business model. I'm at the moment not sure whether to persue it commercially. From an EA perspective I would also be happy if someone else builds the company.

At the moment I'm thinking about writing a longer document laying out the idea but don't know about the best venue for it. Are you aware of any competitons for ideas where money can be won by writing a document about health care innovation without having an startup working on the idea?

I can't up vote because I'm new, but I wanted to say that in addition to being a good insight, I really liked your use of examples. The diagrams, and the agents' human-like traits (like being in only one place at one time) made the article more accessible.

Also, do not forget how the body influences the brain. Just look back on what happened to you during puberty, when sex desire overwhelmed you, making you impossible to remain calm. This happened thanks to chemicals, but it's still very interesting to see how a single chemical can have a huge influence on your consciousness.

This sometimes falls by the wayside in discussions of whole brain emulation, but I think it's really interesting. I talked to a transgender person once, who said that she felt like a different person while taking hormones vs. not taking them, to the point that her memories of times she was off her medication felt like someone else's memories, or a past life. Brain emulation can probably simulate this somehow, and it's probably also more configurable than stuff within the brain.

Which opens up some interesting possibilities. People with emulated brains would have better control over this sort of thing than today's bio humans do. They could adjust the chemical inputs to be the best (in their opinion) version of themselves - energetic, focused, patient, and never craving caffine. And then maybe they'd want to experiment with more unusual chemical settings, and end up with a very different personality than before. Are they still the same person, after going from gloomy to peppy, or from iritable to serene? Does having this much control make them less human-like?

This is further complicated by the possibility of improvements in hormone and psychiatry medications for bio humans. If everyone could and occasionally did change their daily supplements in ways that made them feel like a different person, would we be less "human" while still biological?

I've been thinking about alternative reasons why people living in rich neighborhoods of poor counties are happier.

Maybe the happiness-promoting physical qualities of neighborhoods (green space, lack of noise, feeling safe) correlate with income when they vary between counties, but not when they vary within counties.

I'd expect the poorest part of Pittsburgh to be about equal to the poorest part of northern New Jersey, and the same for the richest parts. (Perhaps less fancy, but I suspect granite doesn't affect happiness that much.) The New Jersey county is more expensive because it's near high paying NYC jobs, not because it's that much nicer.

People move to neighborhoods based on niceness, but counties based on job proximity (mostly). The market reflects this, by putting a premium on job availability but not other county-wide traits, like weather. (If this wasn't true, I'd expect southern US real estate to be more expensive in relation to average income than northern real estate.)

Does anyone know why Jesus commanded his followers to give in secret?

Would an AI that simulates a physical human brain be less prone to FOOM than a human-level AI that doesn't bother simulating neurons?

It sounds like it might be harder for such an AI to foom, since it would have to understand the physical brain well enough before it could improve on its' simulated version. If such an AI exists at all, that knowedge would probably be available somewhere, so it could still happen if you simulated someone smart enough to learn it (or simulated one of the people who helped build it). The AI should at least be boxable if it doesn't know much about neurology or programming, though.

Maybe the catch is that a boxed human simulation that can't self-modify isn't very useful. It'd be good as assistive technology or immortality, but you probably can't learn much about any other kind of AI by studying a simulated human. (The things you could learn from it, are mostly ones you could learn about as easily from studying a physical human.)

What kind of information it gives to you when you observe that a bunch of filthy rich people were convinced by EY's arguments but MIRI is still badly in need of more funding?

It worked for me - like I described here.

But the more obvious difference between LWers and non-LWers, according to me, is that LWers do not appear "stuck", while a solid majority of non-LWers do.

The one improvement that I'm fairly certain I can contribute to lesswrong/HPMOR/etc is getting better at morality. First, being introduced to and convinced up utilitarianism helped me get a grip on how to reason about ethics. Realizing that morality and "what I want the world to be like, when I'm at my best" are really similar, possibly the same thing, was also helpful. (And from there, HPMOR's slytherins and the parts of objectivism that EAs tend to like were the last couple ideas I needed to learn how to have actual self esteem.)

But as to the kinds of improvements you're interested in. I'm better at thinking strategically, often just from using some estimation in decision making. (If I built this product, how many people would I have to sell it to at what price to make it worth my time? Often results in not building the thing.) But the time since I discovered lesswrong included my last two years of college and listening to startup podcasts to cope with a boring internship, so it's hard to attribute credit.

My memory isn't better, but I haven't gone out of my way to improve it. I'm pretty sure that programming and reading about programming are much better ways of improving at programming, than reading about rationality is. The sanity waterline is already pretty high in programming, so practicing and following best practices is more efficient than trying to work them out yourself from first principles.

It didn't surprise me at all to see that someone had made a post asking this question. The sequences are a bit over-hyped, in that they suggest that rationality might make the reader a super-human and then it usually doesn't happen. I think I still got a lot of useful brain-tools from them, though. It's like a videogame that was advertiesd as the game to end all games, and then it turns out to just be a very good game with a decent chance of becoming a classic. (For the record, my expectations didn't go quite that high, that I can remember, but it's not surprising that some peoples' do. It's possible mine did and I just take disappointment really well.)