http://blastr.com/2011/06/terry-pratchett-begins-fo.php

Another great mind that will be needlessly lost forever. :(

It seems we have agreed that open threads will continue but that they will go in the Discussion section, so here's this month's thread.

In a recent article, the unusually well-researched comedy site Cracked.com discussed “5 scientific reasons the dark side will always win,” including:

• Clenching your fists and thinking evil thoughts can increase strength and willpower. (Hung & Labroo 2011, Schubert 2004, Gray 2010)
• Particular “power poses” raise testosterone and lower cortisol levels (in both men and women) and increase feelings of power and tolerance for risk. (Carney et al. 2010)
• Boosts in pride can allow you to work longer and harder on “effortful and hedonically negative” tasks. (Williams & DeSteno 2008)
• Negative moods can decrease gullibility, increase persuasiveness and social influence, and improve the accuracy of eyewitness recollections. (Forgas 2007, Forgas 2008, Forgas et al. 2005)

Perhaps, then, it could be useful to intentionally cultivate a Mysterious Dark Side, or just ask yourself “What would Voldemort do?” once in a while (please do not murder anyone). I’m definitely going to be giving some of these a try; fist-clenching and power-posing are easy, and as a source of evil thoughts and pride, I already have a dark lord alter-ego I could channel when necessary (I’ll probably need to flesh out his character a bit more than I have so far).

The Cracked.com article mostly links to news stories, so, for your convenience, here are the original papers they refer to:

• Frank, Mark G. and Gilovich, Thomas (1988). “The Dark Side of Self- and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Aggression in Professional Sports.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(1), 74-85.

• Hung, Iris W. and Labroo, Aparna A. (2011). “From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower: Understanding the Role of Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation.” Journal of Consumer Research, 37(6), 1046-1064.

• Gray, Kurt (2010). “Moral Transformation: Good and Evil Turn the Weak Into the Mighty.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1(3), 253-258.

• Carney, Dana R., Cuddy, Amy J.C., and Yap, Andy J. (2010). “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance.” Psychological Science, 21(10), 1363–1368.

• Schubert, Thomas W. (2004). “The Power In Your Hand: Gender Differences In Bodily Feedback From Making a Fist.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(6), 757-769.

• Tracy, Jessica L. and Robins, Richard W. (2008). “The Nonverbal Expression of Pride: Evidence for Cross-Cultural Recognition.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(3), 516-530.

• Williams, Lisa A. and DeSteno, David (2008). “Pride and Perseverance: The Motivational Role of Pride.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(6), 1007–1017.

• Williams, Lisa A. and DeSteno, David (2009). “Pride: Adaptive Social Emotion or Seventh Sin?” Psychological Science, 20(3), 284-288.

• Forgas, Joseph P. (2007). “When sad is better than happy: Negative affect can improve the quality and effectiveness of persuasive messages and social influence strategies.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(4), 513-528.

• Forgas, Joseph P. and East, Rebekah. (2008). “On being happy and gullible: Mood effects on skepticism and the detection of deception.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(5), 1362-1367.

• Forgas, Joseph P., Laham, Simon M., and Vargas, Patrick T. (2005). “Mood effects on eyewitness memory: Affective influences on susceptibility to misinformation.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41(6), 574-588.

• Wolff, Sarah E. and Puts, David A. (2010). “Vocal masculinity is a robust dominance signal in men.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 64(10), 1673-1683.

I recently discovered that "Look Around You", a BBC TWO educational science-themed series from the 1980s¹, had on its "Computers" episode a live-action AI Box Experiment, in which Bournemouth, what was at the time Britain's most advanced computer, was assigned to physically escape from a steel cage. For your convenience, I've excerpted the relevant clips from the episode. Watch and see how it turns out!

¹ Note: The above description is a lie.

Placebo Effect Benefits Patients Even When They Knowingly Take a Fake Pill

This is a little bit disturbing. (A kind of belief in belief, perhaps? Like, "I know a placebo is where you take a fake pill but it makes you feel better anyway if you believe it's real medicine, so I'd better believe this is real medicine!")

Though it's too bad they (apparently) didn't have a third group who received a placebo that they didn't know was a placebo, to compare the effect size.

Edit: Here's the actual study. RolfAndreassen points out that its results may not actually be strong evidence for what is being claimed.

From Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight: A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange.

Videos of some of the talks and panel discussions (currently eight twelve of them) from this year's Singularity Summit are now online.

Michael Vassar:
The Darwinian Method

Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism

Demis Hassabis:
Combining systems neuroscience and machine learning: a new approach to AGI

Shane Legg:
Universal measures of intelligence

Debate: Terry Sejnowski and Dennis Bray
Will we soon realistically emulate biological systems?

Jose Cordeiro:
The Future of Energy and the Energy of the Future

Panel: John Tooby, Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Shane Legg
Narrow and General Intelligence

Ray Kurzweil:
The Mind and How to Build One

Gregory Stock:
Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence

Ramez Naam:
The Digital Biome

Ben Goertzel:
AI Against Aging

Dennis Bray:
What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't

Akrasia is a topic that shows up on LW very frequently. Is there evidence that this is related to any of the traits that correlate with LW participation (high intelligence, non-neurotypical to some greater or lesser degree, inclination toward far thinking, anything else we know from the (old) survey or any other polls I'm forgetting)? Or is it just a problem in instrumental rationality that most or all people deal with from time to time, for which there is limited scientific understanding and therefore very little science underlying the mainstream advice, thus making it (seemingly) low-hanging fruit for rationalists?

There have been many previous discussions here on cryonics and why it is perceived as threatening or otherwise disagreeable. Even among LWers who are not signed up and don’t plan to, I’d say there’s a good degree of consensus that cryonics is reviled and ridiculed to a very unjustified degree. I had a thought about one possible factor contributing to its unsavory public image that I haven’t seen brought up in previous discussions:

COLD is EVIL.

Well, no, cold isn’t evil, but “COLD is EVIL/THREATENING/DANGEROUS/HARSH/LONELY/UNLOVING/SAD/DEAD” seems to be a pretty common set of conceptual metaphors. You see it in figures of speech like “cold-hearted,” “in cold blood,” “cold expression,” “icy stare,” “chilling,” “went cold,” “cold calculation,” “the cold shoulder,” “cold feet,” “stone cold,” “out cold.” (Naturally, it’s also the case that WARM is GOOD/COMFORTING/SAFE/SOCIAL/LOVING/HAPPY/ALIVE, though COOL and HOT sort of go in their own directions.) Associating something with coldness just makes it seem more threatening and less benevolent. And besides, being that “COLD is DEAD,” it’s pretty hard to imagine someone as not really dead if they’re in a container of liquid nitrogen at -135ºC. (Even harder if it’s just their head in there… but that’s a separate issue.) There is already a little bit of research on the effects of some of the conceptual metaphors of coldness and the way its emotional content leaks onto metaphorically associated concepts (“Cold and lonely: does social exclusion literally feel cold?”; “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth.”; any others?).