I am a time traveler.

I hold this belief not because it is true, but because it is useful. That it also happens to be true -- we are all time travelers, swept along by the looping chrono-currents of reality that only seem to flow in one direction -- is largely beside the point.

In the literature of instrumental rationality, I am struck by a pattern in which tips I find useful often involve reframing an issue from a different temporal perspective. For instance, when questioning whether it is worth continuing an ongoing commitment, we are advised to ask ourselves "Knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time, would I make the same choice?"¹ Also, when embarking on a new venture, we are advised to perform a "pre-mortem", imagining ourselves in a future where it didn't pan out and identifying what went wrong.² This type of thinking has a long tradition. Whenever we use visualization as a tool for achieving goals, or for steeling ourselves against the worst case scenarios,³ we are, in a sense, stepping outside the present.

To the degree that intelligence is the ability to model the universe and "search out paths through probability to any desired future" we should not be surprised that mental time travel comes naturally to us. And to the degree that playing to this strength has already produced so many useful tips, I think it is worth experimenting with it in search of other tools and exploits.

Below are a few techniques I've been developing over the last two years that capitalize on how easy it is to mentally travel through time. I fully admit that they simply "re-skin" existing advice and techniques. But it's possible that you, my fellow traveller, may find, as I do, that these skins easier to slip into.

Back in December 2013, Jonah Sinick and I launched Cognito Mentoring, an advising service for intellectually curious students. Our goal was to improve the quality of learning, productivity, and life choices of the student population at large, and we chose to focus on intellectually curious students because of their greater potential as well as our greater ability to relate with that population. We began by offering free personalized advising. Jonah announced the launch in a LessWrong post, hoping to attract the attention of LessWrong's intellectually curious readership.

Since then, we feel we've done a fair amount, with a lot of help from LessWrong. We've published a few dozen blog posts and have an information wiki. Slightly under a hundred people contacted us asking us for advice (many from LessWrong), and we had substantive interactions with over 50 of them. As our reviews from students and parents suggest, we've made a good impression and have had a positive impact on many of the people we've advised. We're proud of what we've accomplished and grateful for the support and constructive criticism we've received on LessWrong.

However, what we've learned in the last few months has led us to the conclusion that Cognito Mentoring is not ripe for being a full-time work opportunity for the two of us.

For the last few months, we've eschewed regular jobs and instead done contract work that provides us the flexibility to work on Cognito Mentoring, eating into our savings somewhat to cover the cost of living differences. This is a temporary arrangement and is not sustainable. We therefore intend to scale back our work on Cognito Mentoring to "maintenance mode" so that people can continue to benefit from the resources we've already collected, with minimal additional effort on our part, freeing us up to take regular jobs with more demanding time requirements.

We might revive Cognito Mentoring as a part-time or full-time endeavor in the future if there are significant changes to our beliefs about the traction, impact, and long-run financial viability of Cognito Mentoring. Part of the purpose of "maintenance mode" will be to leave open the possibility of such a revival if the idea does indeed have potential.

In this post, I discuss some of the factors that led us to change our view, the conditions under which we might revive Cognito Mentoring, and more details about how "maintenance mode" for Cognito Mentoring will look.

Reason #1: Downward update on social value

We do think that the work we've done on Cognito Mentoring so far has generated social value, and the continued presence of the website will add more value over time. However, our view has shifted in the direction of lower marginal social value from working on Cognito Mentoring full-time, relative to simply keeping the website live and doing occasional work to improve it. Specifically:

• It's quite possible that the lowest-hanging fruit with respect to the advisees who would be most receptive to our advice has already been plucked. We received the bulk of our advisees through LessWrong within the month after our initial posting. Other places where we've posted about our service have led to fewer advisees (more here).
• Of our website content, only a small fraction of the content gets significant traction (see our list of popular pages), so honing and promoting our best content might be a better strategy for improving social value than trying to create a comprehensive resource. This can be done while in maintenance mode, and does not require full-time effort on our part.

What might lead us to change our minds: If we continue to be contacted by large numbers of potentially high-impact people, or we get evidence that the advising we've already done has had significantly greater impact than we think it did, we'll update our social value upward.

Reason #2: Downward update on long-run financial viability

We have enough cash to go on for a few more months. But for Cognito Mentoring to be something that we work full time on, we need an eventual steady source of income from it. Around mid-March 2014, we came to the realization that charging advisees is not a viable revenue source, as Jonah described at the end of his post about how Cognito Mentoring can do the most good (see also this comment by Luke Muehlhauser and Jonah's response to it below the comment). At that point, we decided to focus more on our informational content and on looking for philanthropic funding.

Our effort at looking into philanthropic funding did give us a few leads, and some of them could plausibly result in us getting small grants. However, none of the leads we got pointed to potential steady long-term income sources. In other words, we don't think philanthropic funding is a viable long-term revenue model for Cognito Mentoring.

Our (anticipated) difficulty in getting philanthropic funding arises from two somewhat different reasons.

1. What we're doing is somewhat new and does not fit the standard mold of educational grants. Educational foundations tend to give grants for fairly specific activities, and what we're doing does not seem to fit those.
2. We haven't demonstrated significant traction or impact yet (even though we've had a reasonable amount of per capita impact, the total number of people we've influenced so far is relatively small). This circles back to Reason #1: funders' reluctance to fund us may in part stem from their belief that we won't have much social value, given our lack of traction so far. Insofar as funders' judgment carries some information value, this should also strengthen Reason #1.

What might lead us to change our minds: If we are contacted by a funder who is willing to bankroll us for over a year and also offer a convincing reason for why he/she thinks bankrolling us is a good idea (so that we're convinced that our funding can be sustained beyond a year) we'll change our minds.

Reason #3: Acquisition of knowledge and skills

One of the reasons we've been able to have an impact through Cognito Mentoring so far is that both Jonah and I have knowledge of many diverse topics related to the questions that our advisees have posed to us. But our knowledge is still woefully inadequate in a number of areas. In particular, many advisees have asked us questions in the realms of technology, entrepreneurship, and the job environment, and while we have pointed them to resources on these, firsthand experience, or close secondhand experience, would help us more effectively guide advisees. We intend to take jobs related to computer technology (in fields such as programming or data science), and these jobs might be at startups or put us in close contact with startups. This will better position us to return to mentoring later if we choose to resume it part-time or full-time.

Knowledge and skills we acquire working in the technology sector could also help us design better interfaces or websites that can more directly address the needs of our audience. So far, we've thought of ourselves as content-oriented people, so we've used standard off-the-shelf software such as WordPress (for our main website and blog) and MediaWiki (for our information wiki). Part of the reason is that we wanted to focus on content creation rather than interface design, but part of the reason we've stuck to these is that we didn't think we could design interfaces. Once we've acquired more programming and design experience, we might be more open to the idea of designing interfaces and software that can meet particular needs of our target audience.We might design an interface that helps people study more effectively, make better life decisions, or share reviews of courses and colleges, in a manner similar to softwares or websites such as Anki or Beeminder or Goodreads. There might also be potential for a more effective online resource that teaches programming than those in existence (e.g. Codecademy). It's not clear right now whether there exists a useful opportunity of this sort that we are particularly well-suited to, but with more coding experience, we'll at least be able to implement an idea of this sort if we decide it has promise.

Reason #4: Letting it brew in the background can give us a better idea of the potential

If we continue to gradually add content to the wiki, and continue to get links and traffic to it from other sources, it's likely that the traffic will grow slowly and steadily. The extent of organic growth will help us figure out how much promise Cognito Mentoring has. If our wiki gets to the point of steadily receiving thousands of pageviews a day, we will reconsider reviving Cognito Mentoring as a part-time or full-time endeavor. If, on the other hand, traffic remains at approximately the current level (about a hundred pageviews a day, once we exclude spikes arising from links from LessWrong and Marginal Revolution) then the idea is probably not worth revisiting, and we'll leave it in maintenance mode.

In addition, by maintaining contact with the people we've advised, we can get more insight into the sort of impact we've had, whether it is significant over the long term, and how it can be improved. This again can tell us whether our impact is sufficiently large as to make Cognito Mentoring worth reviving.

What "maintenance mode" entails

1. We'll continue to have contact information available, but will scale back on personalized advising: People are welcome to contact us with questions and suggestions about content, but we will not generally offer detailed personalized responses or do research specific to individuals who contact us. We'll attempt to point people to relevant content we've already written, or to other resources we're already aware of that can address their concerns.
2. The information wiki will remain live, and we will continue to make occasional improvements, but we won't have a time schedule of when particular improvements have to be implemented by.
3. Existing blog posts will remain, but we probably won't be making many new blog posts. New blog posts will happen only if one of us has an idea that really seems worth sharing and for which the Cognito Mentoring blog is an ideal forum.
4. We'll continue our administrative roles in the communities of existing Cognito Mentoring advisees
5. We'll continue periodically reviewing the progress of people we've advised so far: This will help us get a better sense of how valuable our work has been, and can be useful should we choose to revive Cognito Mentoring.
6. We'll continue to correspond with advisees we have so far (time permitting), though we'll give more priority to advisees who continue to maintain contact of their own accord and those whose activities seem to have higher impact potential.
7. We'll try to get our best content linked from other sources, such as about.com: Sources like about.com are targeted at the general population. We can try to get linked to from there as an additional resource for the more intellectually curious population that's outside the core focus of about.com.
8. We'll link more extensively to other sources that people can use: For instance, we can more emphatically point to 80,000 Hours for people who are interested in career advising in relation to effective altruist pursuits. We can point to about.com and College Confidential for more general information about mainstream institutions. We already make a number of recommendations on our website, but as we stop working actively, it becomes all the more important that people who come to us are appropriately redirected to other sources that can help them.

Conclusion and summary (TL;DR)

We (qua Cognito Mentoring) are grateful to LessWrong for being welcoming of our posts, offering constructive criticism, and providing us with some advisees we've enjoyed working with. We think that the work we've done has value, but don't think that there's enough marginal value from full-time work on Cognito Mentoring. We think we can do more good for ourselves and the world by switching Cognito Mentoring to maintenance mode and freeing our time currently spent on Cognito Mentoring for other pursuits. The material that we have already produced will continue to remain in the public domain and we hope that people will benefit from it. We may revisit our "maintenance mode" decision if new evidence changes our view regarding traction, impact, and long-run financial viability.

The word 'signalling' is often used in Less Wrong, and often used wrongly. This post is intended to call out our community on its wrongful use, as well as serve as an introduction to the correct concept of signalling as contrast.

I was chasing links a few days ago and ran into Disputing Definitions from the sequences (again), and was thinking about the idea of having definition-argument participants expand their definition of a word to dissolve the dispute. And I thought, I've tried it a couple of times, and I don't think it has ever actually worked. 

I think something else is going on here: People arguing about the "true" definition of a word are trying to lay social claim to its connotations by dictating its denotation.

Consider an atheist gay-rights supporter and a Christian gay-rights opponent. The former says "homosexuality is not immoral" the latter says "homosexuality is immoral."

Expand on "immoral." Perhaps the atheist considers an act immoral if it harms someone else without their consent, while the Christian considers an act immoral if it goes against the teachings of the Bible.

The expanded forms look like:

A: "Homosexuality does not harm anyone without their consent.
B: "Homosexuality goes against the teachings of the Bible.

The atheist is unlikely to disagree with B; Leviticus 18:22 is pretty straightforward. He won't *care* that homosexuality is against biblical teachings, but he won't disagree that it does. The Christian may disagree with A, but assume for the sake of argument that he doesn't.

It would seem the factual disagreement has been dissolved; they aren't actually contradicting each other, they are making *entirely orthogonal statements.*

Present the above analysis to both sides, though, and I suspect that instead of acknowledging the dissolution, they would fall to arguing over the *correct* definition of the *label* "immoral." Even after the expansion is presented. This has happened to me a couple of times.

Question: If they're not arguing about the biblical status or harm status of homosexuality, and they acknowledge that they mean entirely different things by the label "immoral," what are they actually contesting when they argue the proper denotation of that label?

This seems to me to be the reversed version of sneaking in connotations. For that someone applies a word to a case for which it is denotationally true but connotation-ally questionable, as when referring to Martin Luther King, Jr as a criminal.

Arging over definitions, though, strikes me as trying to *lay claim* to connotations rather than sneak them in. If you can dictate the denotation of a commonly-used but disputed word, then you succeed in applying its connotations to all cases that match that denotation. "Homosexuality is a larommi act" does not have the same impact as "Homosexuality is an immoral act," even if the two words are given the same literal definition.

Science does not need more scientists.  It doesn't even need you, brilliant as you are.  We already have many times more brilliant scientists than we can fund.  Science could use a better understanding of the scientific method, but improving how individuals do science would not address most of the problems I've seen.

The big problems facing science are organizational problems.  We don't know how to identify important areas of study, or people who can do good science, or good and important results.  We don't know how to run a project in a way that makes correct results likely.  Improving the quality of each person on the project is not the answer.  The problem is the system.  We have organizations and systems that take groups of brilliant scientists, and motivate them to produce garbage.

Edit 11/28: Edited note at bottom to note that the random variables should have finite variance, and that this is essentially just L². Also some formatting changes.

This is something that has been bugging me for a while.

The correlation coefficient between two random variables can be interpreted as the cosine of the angle between them[0]. The higher the correlation, the more "in the same direction" they are. A correlation coefficient of one means they point in exactly the same direction, while -1 means they point in exactly opposite directions.  More generally, a positive correlation coefficient means the two random variables make an acute angle, while a negative correlation means they make an obtuse angle.  A correlation coefficient of zero means that they are quite literally orthogonal.

Everything I have said above is completely standard.  So why aren't correlation coefficients commonly expressed as angles instead of as their cosines?  It seems to me that this would make them more intuitive to process.

Certainly it would make various statements about them more intuitive.  For instance "Even if A is positive correlated with B and B is positively correlated with C, A might be negatively correlated with C."  This sounds counterintuitive, until you rephrase it as "Even if A makes an acute angle with B and B makes an acute angle with C, A might make an obtuse angle with C."  Similarly, the geometric viewpoint makes it easier to make observations like "If A and B have correlation exceeding 1/√2 and so do B and C, then A and C are positively correlated" -- because this is just the statement that if A and B make an angle of less than 45° and so do B and C, then A and C make an angle of less than 90°.

Now when further processing is to be done with the correlation coefficients, one wants to leave them as correlation coefficients, rather than take their inverse cosines just to have to take their cosines again later.  (I don't know that the angles you get this way are actually useful mathematically, and I suspect they mostly aren't.)  My question rather is about when correlation coefficients are expressed to the reader, i.e. when they are considered as an end product.  It seems to me that expressing them as angles would give people a better intuitive feel for them.

Or am I just entirely off-base here?  Statistics, let alone the communication thereof, is not exactly my specialty, so I'd be interested to hear if there's a good reason people don't do this.  (Is it assumed that anyone who knows about correlation has the geometric point of view completely down?  But most people can't calculate an inverse cosine in their head...)

[0]Formal mathematical version: If we consider real-valued random variables with finite variance on some fixed probability space Ω -- that is to say, L²(Ω) -- the covariance is a positive-semidefinite symmetric bilinear form, with kernel equal to the set of essentially constant random variables.  If we mod out by these we can consider the result as an inner product space and define angles between vectors as usual, which gives us the inverse cosine of the correlation coefficient.  Alternatively we could just take L²(Ω) and restrict to those elements with zero mean; this is isomorphic (since it is the image of the "subtract off the mean" map, whose kernel is precisely the essentially constant random variables).

Way back in October 2009 Reddit introduced their "Best" comment sorting system. We've just pulled those changes into Less Wrong. The changes affect only comments, not stories.

It's good. It should significantly improve the visibility of good comments posted later in the life of an article. You (yes you) should adopt it. It's the default for new users.

See http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html for the details.

Prerequisite reading which you will probably want open in another tab for reference: 31 Laws of Fun

Unprefaced, this post might sound a lot like I'm just picking on Eliezer, or Eliezer's particular set of "laws".  I'm sort of doing that, but only as a template for ways to pick on Laws of Fun in general.  The correct response to this post is not "Here is my new, different list of N things that will satisfy everyone".

(Well, it would be if you could do that.  I'm skeptical.)

If I purported to come up with general laws of fun, I might or might not do a better job.  Probably I'd do a better job coming up with a framework for myself; I might also be more cautious about assuming human homogeneity, but I doubt I'd do an unassailable job.  And an unassailable job is probably necessary, if everyone will abide by Laws of Fun forever.  An unassailable job of Legislating Fun is needed make sure that some people aren't caught between unwanted mental tampering and, probably not Hell, but a world that is subtly (or glaringly) wrong, wrong, wrong.

Please do not assume that I outright endorse unmentioned laws; these are just the ones I can pick at most obviously.

I fully expect to be told that I have misunderstood at least half of these items.

6 sits uncomfortably.  The savannah is where we were designed to survive, but evolution is miserly; it is not where we were designed to thrive gloriously.  (Any species designed to thrive gloriously there which was actually put there would find its descendants getting away with more and more corner-cutting until they found a more efficient frontier.  Creatures that can fly don't keep flight just because flying is awesome; they must also need it.)  I want a home designed for me to thrive gloriously in, not one that takes its cues from the environment my ancestors eked out a living in.  I suspect this is more like a temperate-clime park than a baking savannah, and it might be more like an architecturally excellent house than either.  "Windowless office" is not the fair comparison.  That is not how we design places to put people we like.

Guys I'd like your opinion on something.

Do you think LessWrong is too intellectually insular? What I mean by this is that we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong. For example all I can think of is some of Robin Hanson's and Paul Graham's stuff. But I don't think Robin Hanson really counts as Overcoming Bias used to be LessWrong.

The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here. The only major examples fellow LWers brought up in conversation where works that Eliezer cited as great or influential. :/

Another thing, I could be wrong about this naturally, but it seems to clear that LessWrong has not grown. I'm not talking numerically. I can't put my finger to major progress done in the past 2 years. I have heard several other users express similar sentiments. To quote one user:

I notice that, in topics that Eliezer did not explicitly cover in the sequences (and some that he did), LW has made zero progress in general.

I've recently come to think this is probably true to the first approximation. I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy blog since the author doesn't make new updates any more. Originally the man had high hopes for the site. He wanted to build something that could keep going on its own, growing without him. It turned out to be a community mostly dedicated to studying the scrolls he left behind. We don't even seem to do a good job of getting others to read the scrolls. 

Overall there seems to be little enthusiasm for actually systematically reading the old material. I'm going to share my take on what is I think a symptom of this. I was debating which title to pick for my first ever original content Main article (it was originally titled "On Conspiracy Theories") and made what at first felt like a joke but then took on a horrible ring of:

Over time the meaning of an article will tend to converge with the literal meaning of its title.

We like linking articles, and while people may read a link the first time, they don't tend to read it the second or third time they run across it. The phrase is eventually picked up and used out the appropriate of context. Something that was supposed to be shorthand for a nuanced argument starts to mean exactly what "it says". Well not exactly, people still recall it is a vague applause light. Which is actually worse.

I cited precisely "Politics is the Mindkiller" as an example of this. In the original article Eliezer basically argues that gratuitous politics, political thinking that isn't outweighed by its value to the art of rationality, is to be avoided. This soon came to meant it is forbidden to discuss politics in Main and Discussion articles, though it does live in the comment sections.

Now the question if LessWrong remains productive intellectually, is separate from the question of it being insular. But I feel both need to be discussed. If our community wasn't growing and it wasn't insular either, it could at least remain relevant.

This site has a wonderful ethos for discussion and thought. Why do we seem to be wasting it?

A thought occurred to me today as I skimmed an article in a rationality forum where the subject of gay marriage cropped up; seeing as the issue has been hotly contested in various public fora and especially the courts, what about poly? After all, many if not all the arguments for gay marriage apply to poly marriage as well.

Questions for LWers who are currently in a such a relationship, or have an opinion to share:

Do polies want to marry each other or do such relationships not lend themselves to permanence above a threshold of partners? Should polies campaign for the right for a civil union anyway? what are the up and down sides of this? etc