Related to: Politics is the mind-killer, Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies, The Importance of Saying "Oops", Leave a Line of Retreat, You Can Face Reality

This is something I wrote, sort of in brain-dump mode, in the process of trying to organize my thoughts for a song I'm working on. I don't think it covers any new ground for this community, but I was somewhat taken with the way it turned out and figured I'd go ahead and post it for LW's enjoyment.

So you've changed your mind. Given up your sacred belief, the one that defined so much of who you are for so long.

You are probably feeling pretty scared right now.

Your life revolved around this. There is not a single aspect of your life that will not feel the effects of this momentous tumult. Right now though, you're still in shock. You know that later, little by little, as you lie awake in bed or stare at your desk at work, the idea will creep its way through the web of your mind. It will touch each and every idea, and change it, and move on. And that changed idea will change other ideas, and those ideas will change as well. Who are you as a person if not the person who holds that idea? For as this new notion gradually but violently makes its way through your skull, will it not upset everything that you know, everything that you do, everything that you are? Will you not then be another person?

The thought is terrifying. What person will you be?

Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

One day a coworker said to me, "Luke! You're, like, the happiest person I know! How come you're so happy all the time?"

It was probably a rhetorical question, but I had a very long answer to give. See, I was unhappy for most of my life,¹ and even considered suicide a few times. Then I spent two years studying the science of happiness. Now, happiness is my natural state. I can't remember the last time I felt unhappy for longer than 20 minutes.

That kind of change won't happen for everyone, or even most people (beware of other-optimizing), but it's worth a shot! 

We all want to be happy, and happiness is useful for other things, too.² For example, happiness improves physical health,³ improves creativity,⁴ and even enables you to make better decisions.⁵ (It's harder to be rational when you're unhappy.⁶) So, as part of a series on how to win at life with science and rationality, let's review the science of happiness.

The correlates of happiness

Earlier, I noted that there is an abundance of research on factors that correlate with subjective well-being (individuals' own assessments of their happiness and life satisfaction).

Factors that don't correlate much with happiness include: age,⁷ gender,⁸ parenthood,⁹ intelligence,¹⁰ physical attractiveness,¹¹ and money¹² (as long as you're above the poverty line). Factors that correlate moderately with happiness include: health,¹³ social activity,¹⁴ and religiosity.¹⁵ Factors that correlate strongly with happiness include: genetics,¹⁶ love and relationship satisfaction,¹⁷ and work satisfaction.¹⁸

But correlation is not enough. We want to know what causes happiness. And that is a trickier thing to measure. But we do know a few things.

Happiness, personality, and skills

Genes account for about 50% of the variance in happiness.¹⁹ Even lottery winners and newly-made quadriplegics do not see as much of a change in happiness as you would expect.²⁰ Presumably, genes shape your happiness by shaping your personality, which is known to be quite heritable.²¹

So which personality traits tend to correlate most with happiness? Extroversion is among the best predictors of happiness,²² as are conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-esteem, and optimism.²³

What if you don't have those traits? The first thing to say is that you might be capable of them without knowing it. Introversion, for example, can be exacerbated by a lack of social skills. If you decide to learn and practice social skills, you might find that you are more extroverted than you thought! (That's what happened to me.) The same goes for conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-esteem, and optimism - these are only partly linked to personality. They are to some extent learnable skills, and learning these skills (or even "acting as if") can increase happiness.²⁴

The second thing to say is that lacking some of these traits does not, of course, doom you to unhappiness.

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Anthropic Trilemma

Imagine you live in a future society where the law allows up to a hundred instances of a person to exist at any one time, but insists that your property belongs to the original you, not to the copies. (Does this sound illogical? I may ask my readers to believe in the potential existence of uploading technology, but I would not insult your intelligence by asking you to believe in the existence of a society where all the laws were logical.)

So you decide to create your full allowance of 99 copies, and a customer service representative explains how the procedure works: the first copy is made, and informed he is copy number one; then the second copy is made, and informed he is copy number two, etc. That sounds fine until you start thinking about it, whereupon the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. The problem lies in your anticipated subjective experience.

After step one, you have a 50% chance of finding yourself the original; there is nothing controversial about this much. If you are the original, you have a 50% chance of finding yourself still so after step two, and so on. That means after step 99, your subjective probability of still being the original is 0.5^99, in other words as close to zero as makes no difference.

Assume you prefer existing as a dependent copy to not existing at all, but preferable still would be existing as the original (in the eyes of the law) and therefore still owning your estate. You might reasonably have hoped for a 1% chance of the subjectively best outcome. 0.5^99 sounds entirely unreasonable!

Related to: Calibration fail, Test Your Calibration!

Around here, calibration is mostly approached on a discrete basis: for example, the Technical Explanation of Technical Explanations talks only about discrete distributions, and the commonly linked tests and surveys are either explicitly discrete or offer only coarsely binned probability assessments. For continuous distributions (or "smooth" distributions over discrete quantities like dates of historical events, dollar amounts on the order of hundreds of thousands, populations of countries, or any actual measurement of a continuous quantity), we can apply a finer-grained assessment of calibration.

The problem of assessing calibration for continuous quantities is that our distributions can have very dissimilar shapes, so there doesn't seem to be a common basis for comparing one to another. As an example, I'll give some subjective (i.e., withdrawn from my nether regions) distributions for the populations of two countries, Canada and Botswana. I live in Canada, so I have years of dimly remembered geography classes in elementary school and high school to inform my guess. In the case of Botswana, I have only my impressions of the nation from Alexander McCall Smith's excellent No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and my general knowledge of Africa.

For Canada's population, I'll set my distribution to be a normal distribution centered at 32 million with a standard deviation of 2 million. For Botswana's population, my initial gut feeling is that it is a nation of about 2 million people. I'll put 50% of my probability mass between 1 and 2 million, and the other 50% of my probability mass between 2 million and 10 million. Because I think that values closer to 2 million are more plausible than values at the extremes, I'll make each chunk of 50% mass a right-angle triangular distribution. Here are plots of the probability densities:

When I read Alicorn's post on problems vs tasks, I immediately realized that the proposed terminology helped express one of my pet peeves: the resistance in society to applying rationality to socializing and dating.

In a thread long, long ago, SilasBarta described his experience with dating advice:

I notice all advice on finding a girlfriend glosses over the actual nuts-and-bolts of it.

In Alicorn's terms, he would be saying that the advice he has encountered treats problems as if they were tasks. Alicorn defines these terms a particular way:

It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems.  A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer.  A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future.  So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be.

Yet as she observes in her post, treating genuine problems as if they were defined tasks is a mistake:

Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them.  You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread.

Similarly, many straight guys or queer women can't just find a girlfriend, and many straight women or queer men can't just find a boyfriend,  any more than they can "just become immortal."

This is part 1 of a sequence on problem solving.  Here is part 2.

It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems.  A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer.  A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future.  So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be.  For example:

• If you want a peanut butter sandwich, and you have the tools, ingredients, and knowhow that are required to make a peanut butter sandwich, you have a task on your hands.  If you want a peanut butter sandwich, but you lack one or more of those items, you have a problem.
• If you are sad, and you know that this is because you have not seen your favorite cousin in a while, and you have the wherewithal to arrange to have your cousin over, then arranging to have your cousin over is a task.  If you are sad, and you don't know why, then the sadness is a problem.
• If eight of your friends are involved in massive unpleasant social drama, but you have a forty-three-step surefire plan to calm down the angry and smooth over the ruffled and chew out the misbehaved and bring back the normalcy, you have forty-three subtasks of one big task.  If you have no clue what the heck is up with the drama but it's on your last nerve, problem ahoy!
• If you are a mortal creature, you may already be a problem-haver.

Problems are solved by turning them into tasks and carrying out those tasks.  Turning problems into tasks can sometimes be problematic in itself, although small taskifications can be tasky.  For instance, in the peanut butter sandwich case, if your only missing component for sandwich-making is bread, it doesn't take much mental acrobatics to determine that you now have two tasks to be conducted in order: 1. obtain bread, 2. make sandwich.  Figuring out why you're sad, in case two, could be a task (if you're really good at introspecting accurately, or are very familiar with the cousin-missing type of sadness in particular) or could be a problem (if you're not good at that, or if you've never missed your favorite cousin before and have no prior experience with the precise feeling).  And so on.

Why draw this distinction with such care?  Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them.  You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread.  And agonizing about "why I can't just do this" will produce the solution to very few problems.  First, you have to figure out how to taskify the problem.  And the first step is to understand that you have a problem.

..fragments of a book that would never be written...

*      *      *

Captain Selena, late of the pirate ship Nemesis, quietly extended the very tip of her blade around the corner, staring at the tiny reflection on the metal.  At once, but still silently, she pulled back the sword; and with her other hand made a complex gesture.

The translation spell told Hirou that the handsigns meant:  "Orcs.  Seven."

Dolf looked at Hirou.  "My Prince," the wizard signed, "do not waste yourself against mundane opponents.  Do not draw the Sword of Good as yet.  Leave these to Selena."

Hirou's mouth was very dry.  He didn't know if the translation spell could understand the difference between wanting to talk and wanting to make gestures; and so Hirou simply nodded.

Not for the first time, the thought occurred to Hirou that if he'd actually known he was going to be transported into a magical universe, informed he was the long-lost heir to the Throne of Bronze, handed the legendary Sword of Good, and told to fight evil, he would have spent less time reading fantasy novels.  Joined the army, maybe.  Taken fencing lessons, at least.  If there was one thing that didn't prepare you for fantasy real life, it was sitting at home reading fantasy fiction.

Dolf and Selena were looking at Hirou, as if waiting for something more.

Oh.  That's right.  I'm the prince.

Hirou raised a finger and pointed it around the corner, trying to indicate that they should go ahead -

With a sudden burst of motion Selena plunged around the corner, Dolf following hard on her heels, and Hirou, startled and hardly thinking, moving after.

(This story ended up too long for a single LW post, so I put it on yudkowsky.net.
Do read the rest of the story there, before continuing to the Acknowledgments below.)

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable we have to alter it every six months."

-- Oscar Wilde

For the past few decades, I and many other men my age have been locked in a battle with the clothing industry. I want simple, good-looking apparel that covers my nakedness and maybe even makes me look attractive. The clothing industry believes someone my age wants either clothing laced with profanity, clothing that objectifies women, clothing that glorifies alcohol or drug use, or clothing that makes them look like a gangster. And judging by the clothing I see people wearing, on the whole they are right.

I've been working my way through Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works, and reached the part where he quotes approvingly Quentin Bell's theory of fashion. The theory provides a good explanation for why so much clothing seems so deliberately outrageous.

Here is a 2-hour slide presentation I made for college students and teens:

You Are A Brain

It's an introduction to realist thinking, a tour of all the good stuff people don't realize until they include a node for their brain's map in their brain's map. All the concepts come from Eliezer's posts on Overcoming Bias.

I presented this to my old youth group while staffing one of their events. In addition to the slide show, I had a browser with various optical illusions open in tabs, and I brought in a bunch of lemons and miracle fruit tablets. They had a good time and stayed engaged.

I hope the slides will be of use to others trying to promote the public understanding of rationality.

Note: When you view the presentation, make sure you can see the speaker notes. They capture the gist of what I was saying while I was showing each slide.

Added 6 years later: I finally made a video of myself presenting this, except this time it was an adult audience. See this discussion post.