Robin Hanson, on the meta-topic of different approaches to answering the question, "what is the most likely route to greater-than-human intelligence, and how likely is it, and when?".

Not a very serious suggestion, but PZ Myers might be fun:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/singularly_silly_singularity.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/futurists_make_me_cranky.php

Yes, this is indeed the sort of argument that I'm not at all interested in, and naming this site "Less Wrong" instead of "More Wrong" reflects this. I'm going to find where the truth takes me; let me know how that lies thing works out - though I reserve the right not to believe you, of course.

Just a personal observation that for me there seem to be two classes of akrasia.

1) Inertial akrasia: I should be doing task X, I could do task X well if I just got going, I just can't seem to make myself do task X.

2) Exhaustive akrasia: I want to do task X but I've exhausted my willpower reserve. It's hard to start task X and even when I start I generally drift off-task as I've expunged my willpower reserves.

Type 1) akrasia consists of things like getting out of bed and procrastinating, type 2) is more zoning out midday or being unproductive after getting home from work.

They have similar symptoms and a fair amount of overlap but different treatments. Type 1 seems to generally be tricks to get you started, ie counting to 10, setting deadlines, etc. For type 2 treatments are more removing distractions (don't challenge your depleted willpower reserves) and taking a real break to replenish (ie watch a movie or work every other day).

Personally I think a lot of my troubles come when I try treating type 2 as type 1 or vice versa.

For instance often in the morning I'll often take a while to get working despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full. Instead of taking a break I should have a trick to start working. Conversely at the end of the day I'll sometimes spend the last half hour reading websites and intermittently poking at a project, unwilling to admit that I've run out of willpower and thinking I just need a trick to get going.

I suspect that my failure to correctly identify which kind of akrasia I'm experiencing so I can treat it accordingly is partially a form of akrasia itself.

Does anyone else have similar experiences?

I'm surprised to see how close I was to the mean in so many cases. I expected on several questions that I would be, if not an outlier, then outside the middle quartiles. I was wrong in most cases. Clearly the OB/LW brainwashing process has been more successful than I realised... :P

Seriously, very interesting results. I'm a bit dismayed by the 3% female figure -- I knew I was in a minority, but I didn't realise it was that tiny. I wish I could articulate some suggestions for getting hold of more female readers/commenters. I can sort of see intuitively how this place could seem like not the most attractive one to some women, but I don't have any ideas for sorting that out. Largely I guess it may just be a self-perpetuating thing. Perhaps the first step ought to be just getting some of the current female readers/commenters to make (more/some) top-level posts too. I wish I felt brave and knowledgeable and intelligent enough to attempt one touching on some aspect or other of feminism.

It's a cliche that kookdom is filled with brilliant scientists outside of their expertise, but its definitely not what I observe when I look at scientific history.

Lots of kook inventors, Faraday, and lots of chemical and life and social scientists who start out correct but ignored or rejected and gradually embrace more extreme, attention-getting, but exaggerated and false versions of their initial thesis as a result of years avoiding their peers and interacting primarily with those members of the public who will act as an echo chamber.

Then there are the free energy and anti-gravity crowds. They seem to be born that way.

Awesome work.

One thing that disappointed, but didn't really surprise me, was the lack of diversity in the community

"160 (96.4%) were male, 5 (3%) were female, and one chose not to reveal their gender.

The mean age was 27.16, the median was 25, and the SD was 7.68. The youngest person was 16, and the oldest was 60. Quartiles were <22, 22-25, 25-30, and >30.

Of the 158 of us who disclosed our race, 148 were white (93.6%), 6 were Asian, 1 was Black, 2 were Hispanic, and one cast a write-in vote for Middle Eastern. Judging by the number who put "Hinduism" as their family religion, most of those Asians seem to be Indians."

The thing that particularly worries me is our low age. Now it's to be expected as internet communities are a young person's game but I'd be more comfortable with an average age closer to 30.

Combine that with the fact that most of us seem to be in Computers or Engineering (I'd really like to know what those "Other Hard Sciences" were) I do worry about our rationality as a group. One thing I've noticed with junk science is that Engineers and to a lesser extent Computer Scientists seem to be overrepresented. I'm not sure of all the reasons for this, I suspect that part of the problem is that we regularly work with designed systems that have a master plan that can be derived from a small amount of evidence. The problem being if you take that tendency to problem spaces that aren't designed you have a tendency to go flying off in the wrong direction.

I'm worried that we could start turning into an echo-chamber where a localized consensus masks a growing dissonance with the outside world. The Shangri-la diet sounds interesting (I'm even giving it a try) but it also sounds a bit like pseudo-science. There could be a completely different mechanism at work, it could even be the good old fashioned placebo effect. I worry that we'll develop a tendency to believe our rationality is strong enough to wade outside of our fields of expertise, the halls of kookdom are filled with brilliant scientists who wandered into a neighbouring discipline and I worry we could risk the same fate.

I'm not saying Less Wrong is a doomed cause or anything, the topics we explore (oh that crazy old Omega!) we seem to do fairly well on and I've picked up many useful lessons and insights. I just worry since we all want to apply our rationality and find answers, but regardless of how rational you are you can't unravel the secrets of the universe just from analysing a piece of cake.

ps Oh yeah, how many of us 83.4% Libertarians/Liberals were very torn because while we really liked the free-market and social liberty ideals of libertarians there were just too many crackpots over there so we considered giving up some economic freedom for the mainstream democrats.

I took the survey. I will now take this opportunity to criticize it.

Severely missing items:

• "Moral Views" should have had links to definitions; especially of "Eliezer's interpretation".
• "Charity" should have had a "No opinion/I have no information on the matter" choice.
• "Cryonics" should have had a "I have not yet considered the matter / No opinion" choice.

Minor missing items:

• "Political Views" should have been split into questions on the particular attributes listed, for those of us who don't bother to figure out which label applies to us.
• "Time in Community" should have listed how many months ago LW and OB were created, for convenience.

Clarify your taxonomy:

• If our universe is a simulation, does the containing universe have any significance to the Supernatural and God questions?
• If our universe is a simulation, not of some other universe, but constructed from scratch, is the designer of it God in the sense of "Probability: God"? Does it matter whether this entity has edited the state of the simulation since the beginning of its time?
• If our universe is a simulation which was designed to include ontologically basic mental entities, even though the universe in which it is simulated does not, does that count towards "Probability: Supernatural"?

Anyone who takes this survey and doesn't post is probably trying to signal that they don't care about karma. Anyone who does post is probably a karmawhore. So if you don't take the survey, you are probably trying to signal that you don't care about karma and you don't care about signaling that you don't care about karma. It appears that no matter what you do on this survey, you are probably trying to signal to the community that you are valuable to the community.

And, yes, I took the survey.

With probability 50% or greater, the long-term benefits of the invasion of Iraq will outweigh the costs suffered in the short term.