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Do you feel lonely because you spent your time alone or because you will you don't connect with the people with whom you spend your time?
Two separate problems.
Not feeling connected with people, or, increasingly feeling less connection with people.
I actively socialize myself, and this helps, but the other thing maybe suggests to me I'm doing something wrong.
(Edit: to clarify, my empathy thingy works as well (maybe better) than it ever has, I just feel like the things I crave from social interactions are getting harder to acquire. Like, people "getting" you, or having enough things in common that you can effectively talk about the stuff that interests you. So, like, obviously, one of the solutions there is to hang out with more bright-and-happy CFAR-ish/LW-ish/EA-ish people.)
In response to
Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014
Hey, does anyone else struggle with feelings of loneliness?
What strategies have you found for either dealing with the negative feelings, or addressing the cause of loneliness, and have they worked?
Of course it's not clear what "ontologically basic" means.
By far the best definition I've ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier's: A "supernatural" explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities." (http://lesswrong.com/lw/tv/excluding_the_supernatural/)
I have made a prosecutor pale in the face by suggesting that courthouses should be places where people with plea bargains shop their offers around with each other so that they know what's a good deal and a bad deal.
In response to
2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Done.
I think it is somewhat unrealistic to expect individual digit ratios to be accurate to three significant figures (although I understand that two significant figures might be too crude a measure to show effects of smaller size). One can hope that the errors are symmetric and it doesn't matter.
I don't think it's going to matter very much. 3 digits after the dot, with the understanding that the third digit is probably not very good, but the second probably is pretty good.
My public key is the same as my user name. Should it have been anonymous?
Assuming Yvain does the same thing as last year, both the public and private key will be released as part of the survey dataset if you checked the 'release my survey data' box.
Faith in Humanity moment: LW will not submit garbage poll responses using other LW-users as public keys.
The gender default thing took me by surprise. I'm guessing that a lot of people answer yes to having a strong gender identity?
This has seen a lot of discussion over at Slate Star Codex. Judging from the anecdotes I've seen in the comments there, there doesn't seem to be an obviously dominant answer, although of course there are self-selection issues in that context; I'll be interested to see what the survey turns up.
I definitely don't have a strong identity in this sense; like, I suspect I'd be pretty okay if an alien teenager swooped by and pushed the "swap sex!" button on me, and the result was substantially functional and not horrible to the eye. Like, obviously I'd be upset about having been abused by an outside force, but I don't think the result itself is inherently distasteful or anything like that.
I'm really curious to see how this and related stuff (male/female traits, fingers) relate.
In response to
2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Is Anti-Agathics a strict superset of Cryonics? That is to say, would someone becoming cryonically frozen and then restored, and then living for 1000 years from that date, count as a success for the anti-agathics question?
Definitely had a thought on this order; I went with "don't die at any point and still reach age 1000", though I also don't really consider solutions that involve abandoning bodies counting.
In response to
2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I am curious what kind of analysis you plan to run on the calibration questions. Obvious things to do:
For each user, compute the correlation between their probabilities and the 0-1 vector of right and wrong answers. Then display the correlations in some way (a histogram?).
For each question, compute the mean (or median) of the probability for the correct answers and for the wrong answers, and see how separated they are.
But neither of those feels like a really satisfactory measure of calibration.
At the very least, I suspect one of the analyses will be 'bucketize corresponding to certainty, then plot "what % of responses in bucket were right?"' - something that was done last year (see 2013 LessWrong Survey Results)
Last year it was broken down into "elite" and "typical" LW-er groups, which presumably would tell you if hanging out here made you better at overconfidence, or something similar in that general vicinity.
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I've recently started a tumblr dedicated to teaching people what amounts to Rationality 101. This post isn't about advertising that blog, since the sort of people that actually read Less Wrong are unlikely to be the target audience. Rather, I'd like to ask the community for input on what are the most important concepts I could put on that blog.
(For those that would like to follow this endeavor, but don't like tumblr, I've got a parallel blog on wordpress)
Noticing confusion is the first skill I tried to train up last year, and is definitely a big one, because knowing what your models predict and noticing when they fail is a very valuable feedback loop that prevents you from learning if you can't even notice it.
Picturing what sort of evidence would unconvince you of something you actively believe is a good exercise to pair with the exercise of picturing what sort of evidence would convince you of something that seems super unlikely. Noticing unfairness there is a big one.
Realizing when you are trying to "win" at truthfinding, which is... ugh.