"A Disneyland with no children" apocalypse where optimization competition eliminates any pleasure we get from life.

A hell apocalypse where a large numbers of sentient lifeforms are condemned to very long term suffering possibly in a computer simulation.

Exercise

In previous attempts at exercising, I've never lost weight; never gained in strength or dexterity; never even gotten a second wind. I've never met any significant exercise goals. But in the long-term, exercise is still worthwhile. So I'm trying something new: Changing my self-conception to Someone Who Exercises Daily. No expectations of any gains, rewards, or second winds. Just someone who slogs through the painful routine each day, every day.

I've picked a routine that can be done anywhere, with no equipment: Burpees, in descending sets (ie, for 15, do 5, 4, 3, 2, 1; for non-triangular numbers, add at the start, ie for 17, do 7, 6, 3, 2, 1), adding 1 per day. (Supposedly, burpees work all the major parts of the body, etc, etc.) If-and-when I make it to 30-descending, I'll consider changing it up.

Today: Did 5 burpees.

Also today: Set up https://twitter.com/DPR_exercise to semi-publicly keep track. (Or, as an RSS feed, http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=dpr_exercise .)

If anyone would like a collaborator for something they're writing for LessWrong or diaspora, please PM me. Anyone interested in being a collaborator can reply to this comment, thereby creating a collaborator repository.

train groups of young people to socialise romantically and sexually with the opposite sex to replace substance-assisted romantic and sexual initiatory behaviour.

Alcohol works as a 'social lubricant' to make people less inhibited, in moderation it's very effective at what it does. It also works quickly and is cheap. There is also a culture and set of traditions around alcohol, as well as a powerful industry lobby.

I pity the fool who tries to compete with something that is so good at what it does, especially with a 'training program'.

The only way I can see alcohol being dislodged is with another drug which is specifically engineered to be better than alcohol at what it does (reduce anxiety, provide an excuse for people to get away with things, etc) but also has none of the problems that alcohol has.

Once you open up the floodgates to a whole world of choice, settling for those around you makes you feel like a sucker, and it ruins you.

So, anyone wants to disconnect and settle for those in the immediate vicinity? Anyone? ...anyone?

I suspect that Dunbar's number includes fictional characters and people you don't know in person but have many information about them (celebrities, politicians). In the past people also had a few examples in this category, for example Jesus, or the local king, but that is at least an order of magnitude less than all current movie characters, celebrities, and politicians people are familiar with. Also, watching someone on TV is a stronger stimulus than merely hearing or reading about them.

So it seems to me quite likely that modern media consume our "empathy points". (And the clickbait media make it even worse, because they burn all kinds of "giving-a-shit points" like a wildfire.)

A solution is spending time offline with other people (doing something else than watching media). Because people are not automatically strategic, someone has to organize an event and invite others. LW meetups, former classmates meeting at a cafe every Thursday, etc.

Consider how old and universal story-telling is. Humans felt empathy for fictional characters since forever.

Here's a little example of prisoner's dilemma that I just thought up, which shows how mass media might contribute to modern loneliness:

Let's assume that everyone has a fixed budget of attention and empathy. Empathizing with imaginary Harry Potter gives you 1 point of utility. Empathizing with your neighbor gives them 10 points of utility, but doesn't give you anything, because your neighbor isn't as interesting as Harry Potter. So everyone empathizes with Harry Potter instead of their neighbor, and everyone is lonely.

Does that sound right? What can society do to get out of that trap?

Here's a simple explanation why quantum entanglement is weird. Imagine that Alice tells you: "I have three numbered fair coins. I can flip one of them, but then the other two will disappear." Bob, who is far away from Alice and can't communicate with her, says: "I have another set of three coins that is mysteriously connected to Alice's and always gives the same outcomes."

1) If you ask Alice and Bob to flip the same numbered coin, their answers always agree.

2) If you ask Alice to flip coin 1 and Bob to flip coin 2, they are different about 5% of the time.

3) If you ask Alice to flip coin 2 and Bob to flip coin 3, they are different about 5% of the time.

4) If you ask Alice to flip coin 1 and Bob to flip coin 3, they are different about 20% of the time!

Why is that strange? Well, if coin 1 is different from coin 3, then at least one of them must be different from coin 2, which you didn't ask about, but could have. So the probability of the last situation can't be greater than the sum of the previous two. Even if Alice and Bob are lying to you and have agreed on some strategy beforehand, the above scenario is still impossible. But with quantum mechanics it's possible (see Wikipedia or Eliezer's post for details).

It's also easy to understand why such tricks don't allow you to send signals faster than light. For example, if you want to influence one of Bob's coins toward heads, asking Alice to flip one of her coins won't help you, because it's equally likely to come up either way. As a tool for playing games like this one, quantum entanglement is stronger than hidden variables, but weaker than communication.

Do you also think that "HBD is false" makes no predictions and has no policy implications?