There's not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though.

In most people Eugenics (even the good ones) is evil Nazi stuff and this can count even helpful GM as evil.

The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?

But we fail the test thus our sanity waterline could be raised :(

Hello!

I'm getting into the Bay area this afternoon for the CFAR workshop starting tomorrow. I'm looking for advice on how to spend the time and also where might be a good place to look for affordable lodging for one evening.

I'd initially thought about crashing at the Piedmont house hostel as it's cheap and close enough that I could visit CFAR before heading over tomorrow, but it appears to be sold out. I figured there are probably folks here who know the area or have visited, so I didn't see any harm in asking for info, or checking to see if anyone was getting up to anything.

:) Kim

I was actually looking for an errata page for the minor mistake on page 119, where it says "three billion" for "three million". The notes are clear, but it still stuck a thumb in my eye.

For what it's worth, I rate the book as good, though a bit drier than The Willpower Instinct. Also, this book seemed less focused on specific things to do.

As a possible point of clarification:

The underwear itself really just happened to be the first time I recognized an example of aspects of my thinking that I'd been having trouble with. Specifically, that I tend to go about tackling problems in an exceedingly round-about way.

I posted it to this group because I found myself able to express the actual orientations and order of operations that my thoughts went through. It was a relatively isolated example, in that it didn't reference interactions with other people or processes. As such, it seemed ideal for exploring with the specific intent of generating alternative approaches that might generalize to other processes.

It appears that I might have missed a couple of factors in my choice of example. I hadn't considered the likelihood that such a common activity might encourage responses/solutions outside of the (I see now less-than-clearly) specified areas of focus. I also somewhat habitually underestimate the pull to judge examples deemed silly or unimportant.

FWIW, I have found quite a few pieces of useful information in the responses I've gotten, and you all have my appreciation and gratitude for coming with me on this little journey. :)

Haha, thanks, but I already specced out and outsourced Stage 1 of the MVP :)))

Anyway, here's what I find lacking in other personal Todo apps:

1. Recurring Task Fragility

I rely on recurring / repeating tasks a lot, I use them to automate my life. The problem is, in most todo apps recurring tasks are too brittle.

For example, I have a task on 15th of each month. One month I decide to do it earlier, on 12th of the month. The natural way would be to just reassign the due date from 15th to 12th, but doing that would change the recurrence condition of the task: it will now recur on 12th of each month! And God forbid I delete the task because I don’t need it this month -- this would delete all future recurrences!

Because of all this, I’m forced to walk on eggshells around recurring tasks. I’m afraid to treat them as normal tasks. I can’t rename them, can’t delete them, can’t move them to another list, can’t change the due date.

This happens because most todo apps conflate the recurring task instance with the definition of recurring task. I want to de-conflate these concepts. In my app, the recurrence logic is defined by a Schedule Item, which ‘spawns’ recurring task instances that can be deleted, modified, renamed etc. You won’t accidentally change the recurrence settings of a task by editing it in the task list. If you want to modify the recurrence settings, go to Schedule and do that explicitly.

(As a bonus, in the above system all recurring tasks will be visible in one place, the Schedule. This is essentially my life program, my human crontab. I like the ability to edit my life in one place.)

(And there’s another bonus to this system: forward visibility of recurring tasks. Most todo apps don’t display recurring tasks in forecast views. My app will. When you define a Schedule Item in Schedule, the recurring tasks ‘spawned’ by it will be visible across the entire future timeline. That is, you can literally look at the day Sep 1st 3215 and see that you have to walk the dog, buy the groceries and arrange a check up with the doctor.)

2. Due Date Pollution

My personal productivity system is closer to Autofocus than to GTD, so when I have a task in my list, and don’t want or cannot do it at the moment, I want it to temporarily disappear from my list until I’m ready to do it.

The only way to “disappear” a task in most todo apps is to set its Due Date to Tomorrow or such, but if I do this to a dateless task, it would become dateful! Why the hell must I make my dateless tasks dateful just to dismiss them for a while?

A Due Date should only be used on tasks that must be done on that specific date, so it doesn’t make any sense on dateless tasks. Which brings us to the next topic, Dismiss:

3. Proper Dismiss.

So, to combat Due Date Pollution, I need a proper Dismiss Until command that hides the task until some condition is met without making the task dateful. For example, Dismiss Until Tomorrow Morning, or Dismiss Until September 1st, 2015. I would like this function to be easily accessible, for example via the swipe-away gesture on list items.

Now, Dismiss Until Tomorrow is nice, and Dismiss Until Evening is great, but I also want Dismiss until I’m at Work, Dismiss until I’m in Boston, Dismiss until I’m near Bob Smith, or even Dismiss Until (NASDAQ:AAPL < 100) AND (Weather in Moscow is Good). Which brings us to our next topic, Contexts and Triggers:

4. Contexts and Triggers

For example, I have a task which I want to do only on workdays, in the evening and outside of work. When these conditions are met, I want the task to be visible in my list, and otherwise it should stay hidden.

To implement this, my app will have an Active When field, which can specify activation conditions for the task. For the above task, that would be something along the lines of @workday AND @evening AND (NOT @work).

@work, @evening and @workday are Triggers. The terminology is not final, and I don’t yet know how to call them, but essentially Triggers are boolean functions that can be incorporated into tasks in order to activate them when certain events happen.

Triggers can also be used in Dismiss Until command, and I plan a version of Schedule based on Triggers. That is, you can specify conditions, and when these conditions are met, a specified task will appear in your task list.

5. Multi-line Todo Items.

I need multi-line todo items in order to word my tasks properly. A task titled “Widgets!” is much less meaningful than a task “Decide which Widget to buy. Ask Bob, he’s the expert on Widgets.” This may sound trivial, but many popular todo apps display todo items as single-line -- and Wunderlist is among them!

I’m not worried about the screen real estate occupied by multiline items. The primary way to consume a todo app these days is mobile, and scrolling on mobile is effortless.

So, to sum up, this is a hybrid of a todo app and IFTTT / Tasker for humans. I don’t think that there’s currently anything on the market that offers that. Anyway, the work is already underway, and the MVP should be ready by the end of the year. I’ll announce it here on Lesswrong.

I know of a project to start building a list of related groups; but even that will be limited to "explore and find out to confirm". Without us explicitly knowing what "lesswrongers" are; other than people who hang around lesswrong.com; its quite hard to find others quite like our little in-group.

Do you still need volunteers to help with the SF event?

I joined a while ago but don't think I ever posted here. I'd lurked for quite some time here and at various blogs a degree or so separation away since before that. I've mostly link-hopped my way around the sequences and various pieces of fiction and followed folks on facebook and recently realized we had a local LW meetup. I'm happy to answer any questions about me, but never really know what kind of information would be relevant to put in an introductory post, so instead I thought I'd make a proposal instead:

I've seen (for a while) a lot of activity regarding AI / Singularities / Existential Risk within these groups of people. For my own part, I have pretty much no background knowledge when it comes to that. So I was looking to really dig into the book Superintelligence as a way to get a rudimentary understanding of it all.

That said, I find that I definitely get a lot more out of learning when I have people to discuss it with. So, with a bit of encouragement, since this is the "get-to-know-you" thread, I figured I'd to put a call out on here to see if there was anyone who might be interested in reading (or re-reading) the book along with me being skype buddies for this process.

My current plan is to go through it a chapter at a time and discuss / do further research / etc before moving on. Message me if that sounds like something you might be interested in doing!

~Kim

Naturally it depends on the other alternatives on the table, and how far one wants to go. But I do know several people who report that learning the subject changed how they think in general, not only in the context of math.