"Earth is one of the first habitable planets to form - and we're probably too early to the party to get a chance to meet future alien civilisations."

http://www.sciencealert.com/earth-was-one-of-the-first-habitable-planets-in-the-universe-and-most-are-yet-to-be-born-study-finds

I have non-zero probability to die next year. In my age of 42 it is not less than 1 per cent, and probably more. I could do many investment which will slightly lower my chance of dying – from healthy life style to cryo contract.  And I did many of them.

From economical point of view the death is at least loosing all you capital.

If my net worth is something like one million (mostly real estate and art), and I have 1 per cent chance to die, it is equal to loosing 10 k a year. But in fact more, because death it self is so unpleasant that it has large negative monetary value. And also I should include the cost of lost opportunities.

Once I had a discussion with Vladimir Nesov about what is better: to fight to immortality, or to create Friendly AI which will explain what is really good. My position was that immortality is better because it is measurable, knowable, and has instrumental value for most other goals, and also includes prevention of worst thing on earth which is the Death. Nesov said (as I remember) that personal immortality does not matter as much total value of humanity existence, and more over, his personal existence has no much value at all. All what we need to do is to create Friendly AI. I find his words contradictory because if his existence does not matter, than any human existence also doesn’t matter, because there is nothing special about him.

But later I concluded that the best is to make bets that will raise the probability of my personal immortality, existential risks prevention and creation of friendly AI simultaneously. Because it is easy to imagine situation where research in personal immortality like creation technology for longevity genes delivery will contradict our goal of existential risks reduction because the same technology could be used for creating dangerous viruses.

The best way here is invest in creating regulating authority which will be able to balance these needs, and it can’t be friendly AI because such regulation needed before it will be created.

That is why I think that US needs Transhumanist president. A real person whose value system I can understand and support. And that is why I support Zoltan Istvan for 2016 campaign.

Me and Exponential Technologies Institute donated 10 000 USD for Immortality bus project. This bus will be the start of Presidential campaign for the writer of “Transhumanist wager”. 7 film crews agreed to cover the event. It will create high publicity and cover all topics of immortality, aging research, Friendly AI and x-risks prevention. It will help to raise more funds for such type of research. 

Epistemic status: 90% confident.

Inspiration: Arjun Narayan, Tyler Cowen.

The noblest charity is to prevent a man from accepting charity, and the best alms are to show and enable a man to dispense with alms.

Moses Maimonides.

Background

Effective Altruism (EA) is "a philosophy and social movement that applies evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world." Along with the related organisation GiveWell, it often focuses on getting the most "bang for your buck" in charitable donations. Unfortunately, despite their stated aims, their actual charitable recommendations are generally wasteful, such as cash transfers to poor Africans. This leads to the obvious question - how can we do better?

Doing better

One of the positive aspects of EA theory is its attempt to widen the scope of altruism beyond the traditional. For instance, to take into account catastrophic risks, and the far future. However, altruism often produces a far-mode bias where intentions matter above results. This can be a particular problem for EA - for example, it is very hard to get evidence about how we are affecting the far future. An effective method needs to rely on a tight feedback loop between action and results, so that continual updates are possible. At the extreme, Far Mode operates in a manner where no updating on results takes place at all. However, it is also important that those results are of significant magnitude as to justify the effort. EA has mostly fallen into the latter trap - achieving measurable results, but which are of no greater consequence.

The population of sub-Saharan Africa is around 950 million people, and growing. They have been a prime target of aid for generations, but it remains the poorest region of the world. Providing cash transfers to them mostly merely raises consumption, rather than substantially raising productivity. A truly altruistic program would enable the people in these countries to generate their own wealth so that they no longer needed poverty - unconditional transfers, by contrast, is an idea so lazy even Bob Geldof could stumble on it. The only novel thing about the GiveWell program is that the transfers are in cash.

Unfortunately, no-one knows how to turn poor African countries into productive Western ones, short of colonization. The problem is emphatically not a shortage of capital, but rather low productivity, and the absence of effective institutions in which that capital can be deployed. Sadly, these conditions and institutions cannot simply be transplanted into those countries.

A greater charity

However, there do exist countries with high productivity, and effective institutions in which that capital can be deployed. That capital then raises world productivity. As F.A. Harper wrote:

Savings invested in privately owned economic tools of production amount to... the greatest economic charity of all.

That is because those tools increase the productivity of labour, and so raise output. The pie has grown. Moreover, the person who invests their portion of the pie into new capital is particularly altruistic, both because they are not taking a share themselves, and because they are making a particularly large contribution to future pies.

In the same way that using steel to build tanks means (on the margin) fewer cars and vice-versa, using craftsmen to build a new home means (on the margin) fewer factories and vice-versa. Investment in capital is foregone consumption. Moreover, you do not need to personally build those economic tools; rather, you can part-finance a range of those tools by investing in the stock market, or other financial mechanisms.

Now, it's true that little of that capital will be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa at present, due to the institutional problems already mentioned. Investing in these countries will likely lead to your capital being stolen or becoming unproductive - the same trap that prevents locals from advancing equally prevents foreign investors from doing so. However, if sub-Saharan Africa ever does fix its culture and institutions, then the availability of that capital will then serve to rapidly raise productivity and then living standards, much as is taking place in China. Moreover, by making the rest of the world richer, this increases the level of aid other countries could provide to sub-Saharan Africa in future, should this ever be judged desirable. It also serves to improve the emigration prospects of individuals within these countries.

Feedback

Another great benefit of capital investment is the sharp feedback mechanism. The market economy in general, and financial markets in particular, serve to redistribute capital from ineffective to effective ventures, and from ineffective to effective investors. As a result, it is no longer necessary to make direct (and expensive) measurements of standards of living in sub-Saharan Africa; as long as your investment fund is gaining in value, you can rest safe in the knowledge that its growth is contributing, in a small way, to future prosperity.

Commitment mechanisms

However, if investment in capital is foregone consumption, then consumption is foregone investment. If I invest in the stock market today (altruistic), then in ten years' time spend my profits on a bigger house (selfish), then some of the good is undone. So the true altruist will not merely create capital, he will make sure that capital will never get spent down. One good way of doing that would be to donate to an institution likely to hold onto its capital in perpetuity, and likely to grow that capital over time. Perhaps the best example of such an institution would be a richly-endowed private university, such as Harvard, which has existed for almost 400 years and is said to have an endowment of $32 billion.

John Paulson recently gave Harvard $400 million. Unfortunately, this meant he came in for a torrent of criticism from people claiming he should have given the money to poor Africans, etc. I hope to see Effective Altruists defending him, as he has clearly followed through on their concepts in the finest way.

Further thoughts and alternatives

• Some people say that we are currently going through a "savings glut" in which capital is less productive than previously thought. In this case, it may be that Effective Altruists should focus on funding (and becoming!) successful entrepreneurs in different spaces.
• I am sympathetic to the Thielian critique that innovation is being steadily stifled by hostile forces. I view the past 50 years, and the foreseeable future, as a race between technology and regulation, which technology is by no means certain to win. It may be that Effective Altruists should focus on political activity, to defend and expand economic liberty where it exists - this is currently the focus of my altruism.
• However, government is not the enemy; rather, the enemy is the cultural beliefs and conditions that create a demand for the destruction of economic liberty. To the extent this critique, it may be that Effective Altruists should focus on promoting a pro-innovation and pro-liberty mindset; for example, through movies and novels.

Conclusion

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/05/immortal-but-damned-to-hell-on-earth/394160/

With such long periods of time in play (if we succeed), the improbable hellish scenarios which might befall us become increasingly probable.

With the probability of death never quite reaching 0, despite advanced science, death might yet be inevitable.

But the same applies also to a hellish life in the meanwhile. And the longer the life, the more likely the survivors will envy the dead. Is there any safety in this universe? What's the best we can do?

I think we need a discussion thread for the californian drought going on. I would like to compile information in the main post and would like help compiling it. If we really are proud to be effective altruists then this is an area we should really figure out.

• http://ca.gov/drought/
• http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
• http://www.californiadrought.org/

•  http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-Use.pdf
• http://www.californiadrought.org/the-state-of-the-california-drought-still-very-bad/
• Read this: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_drought_impacts_full_report3.pdf

Any one have any good ideas on how we can help?

The reasoning of most of the people on this site and at MIRI is that to prevent an AI taking over the world and killing us all; we must first create an AI that will take over the world but act according to the wishes of humanity; a benevolent god, for want of a better term. I think this line of thinking is both unlikely to work and ultimately cruel to the FAI in question, for the reasons this article explains:

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/01/16/my-hostility-towards-the-concept-of-friendly-ai/

Paper clip maximizer soon to gain a whole new meaning...

http://gizmodo.com/someone-wrote-erotic-fiction-about-clippy-1691377689?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

So. Inevitably after a plane crash a discussion comes up where someone may say that they're worried about flying now, and someone else pulls out the statistic that driving to the airport is more dangerous than flying.  I think this reasoning is basically correct on the long-term, but not appropriate in the short-term.

Suppose it's the day after flight MH370 mysteriously disappeared.  Information is extremely sketchy.  You're about to get on a similar plane, operated by the same airliner, taking off from the same airport flying the same route.  Should you get on the plane?  That is, are you wrong to worry more than usual when we have no idea what happened to MH370?  I would say no.  The complete disappearance of flight MH370 without warning and without a trace the day before says **update your priors** at least for the short-term.

Summary: I will here focus on nerds who suffer, from the lack of self-respect and sexual, romantic, social success.  My thesis this stems from self-hatred, and the self-hatred stems from childhood bullying, and the solution will involve fixing things that made one a "tempting" bullying target, and some other ways to improve self-respect.

Motivated reasoning and offense

SSC wrote we don't yet have a science of nerds. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/25/why-no-science-of-nerds/ My proposal is to use motivated reasoning and focus on the subset of nerds who suffer and need helping. I am mostly familiar with the white straight male demographic and in this, suffering nerds are often called "neckbeards", or "omega males".

One danger of such motivated reasoning is giving out offense, because problems that cause suffering and in need of helping have a huge overlap with traits that can be used as insults, many disabilities are good parallels here, it is possible to use disabilities as insults mainly for people who don't actually have them, especially when using emotionally loaded language like "cripple" or "retard". Any helpful doctor needs to be careful if he wants to diagnose a child with low IQ, parents will often be like, "my kid is not stupid!" and we have a similar issue here.

The solution to the offense issue is: if you are a nerd, and you find what I write here does not apply to you, good: you are not in the subset of nerds who need helping! You are a happy, well-adjusted person with some "nerdy" interests and preferences, which is entirely OK but also relatively uninteresting, I simply don't want to discuss that because that is mostly like discussing why some people don't like mushroom on their pizza: maybe borderline curious, but not important. I focus on nerds who suffer. Human suffering is what matters, and if I can help a hundred people who suffer while offending ten who do not understand that I am not talking about them, it is a good trade.

I am largely talking about the guys who are mocked and bullied by being called "forever a virgin", those whose traits cluster around interest in D&D, Magic: The Gathering, fantasy, anime, have poor body hygiene, dress and groom in ways considered unattractive, have poor social skills, very low chances of ever finding a girlfriend, and not have any social life besides teaming up with fellow social outcasts.

Self-hatred


I propose the core issue of suffering nerds, "neckbeards", "omega males" is self-hatred. I see three reasons for this:

A) Engaging in fantasy, D&D, discussing superheroes, Star Wars etc. can be seen as escaping from a self and life one hates.

Against1: every novel and movie is a way to that. Not just fantasy or superhero comics.

Pro1: have you noticed non-nerdy people like movies and novels that are more or less cast in the here and now, with heroes that are believable contemporary characters? While nerds are often bored by "mainstream" crime novels, Ludlum type spy novels, by stuff "normal people" read?

Against2: this can simply mean disliking the current, real world, but not necessary their own self.

Pro2: admittedly, unreal, magical adventures can have an allure to all. Our modern world really is disenchanted, as Max Weber had put it. Things were more interesting when people believed stone arrow heads found are from elves, not cavemen. Still, people who are happy with their own self are happy enough with seeing an improved version of their own self overcoming realistic obstacles in a "mainstream" crime or war novel or movie. Dreaming about being a fireball caster wizard or a superhero with superpowers means you do not trust yourself you could ever be like a guy in a "mainstream" movie, throwing punches, shooting guns and kissing models, it does not inspire you to become like that, it rather frustrates you  that you could be something like that and you are not, and thus you want your heroes and idols to be safely non-imitable. Nobody will give you shit why you cannot cast a lightning bolt spell. It does not remind you of your inadeqacies and the shit you were given for them. Instead of a real-world fantasy that gives you a painful reminder of your inadequacy, a magical fantasy allows you to fantasize about a completely different life, being a completely different person, someone you could never expected to be. Instead of these dreams painfully reminding you to improve yourself, in your fantasy you basically die as your current self and be reborn as someone entirely different in an entirely different life with entirely different rules.

Against3: so everybody who enjoys LOTR movies and the GoT series is hating himself?  Have you not noticed fantasy went mainstream in the recent years?

Pro3: indeed it did. But a version of it that lacks the unreal appeal. Game of Thrones is almost historical, it is just normal medieval people fighting and scheming for power, with very little supernatural thrown in. LOTR got hollywoodized in the movies, much more focus on flashy sword fighting against stupid looking brutes, less about supernatural stuff. They are to fantasy what Buck Rogers was to sci-fi.  And non-nerds just watch them, maybe read them, but do not obsess about them.

B) Their poor clothing and grooming habits suggest they do not think their own self deserves to be decorated.

Against1: maybe they are just not interested  in their looks.

Pro1: life is a trade-off. Time you invest into looks is time you take away from something else. How could people who spend their time fantasizing about Star Wars think their time is that important? Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks his time is invested into literally saving humankind from extinction and still takes time away from it to invest into grooming and dressing in an okay way and finding eyeglasses that match his face, because he knows otherwise his message will not be taken seriously enough. It is a worthy investment. People don't want to listen to someone with a "crazy scientist" or similar look. He knows he needs to look like he is selling software, kind of. I don't think anyone could seriously think the social gains from a basic okay wardrobe and regular barber visits do not worth taking some time away from D&D. Obesity is often a neckbeard problem too, and it is also unhealthy.

Against2: Okay, but maybe they either do not realize it, due to some kind of social blindness, or lack the ability to figure out how to look in a way that society approves. Chalk it up to poor social skills, not self-hatred?

Pro2: The heroes suffering nerds fantasize about actually look good in their own fantasy world. Often even in the real one. In the sense that Superman was a good looking journalist when he was not Superman and even Peter Parker being borderline okay, and most fantasy heroes look like someone who is appropriate in that social circumstance (simplified/heroized/sanitized/mythologized European middle ages). First of all they are not fat and rather muscular, they are well groomed, and so on. Suffering nerds don't even imitate their own heroes. Although someone trying to look like Aragorn would be weird today, basically being a tall and muscular guy with a long hair and short cropped, well groomed beard and maybe leather clothes would look like a biker rocker, which is leaps and bounds cooler in society's eyes than an obese neckbeard with greasy hair and Tux t-shirt with dirty baggy jeans and dirtier sneakers. If nerds would really try to look like fantasy heroes, the would be more popular. But they look more like, they feel don't deserve to improve their looks. But there is also something more:

C) When they sometimes improve their looks, this does not come accross as improving their real selves or finding something that matches who they are, rather as a symbolic imitation of an entirely different person. A good example is the fedora, which symbolizes an old fashioned gentleman in 1950 which does not match the rest of their clothes or the fact it is not 1950. This suggests self-hatred.

Against1: Doesn't it contradict the previous point?

Pro1: I think it strenghtens it. Any guy with a fedora or something like that cannot be said to be uninterested in looks, and misjudging what society considers to be attractive cannot possible mean you wear Dick Tracy's hat but not his suit, muscles, lack of paunch, and lack of neckbeard. I think it is more of a symbol that I don't want to be me, I want to be someone totally different.

A-C)

Against1: fine, neckbeards hate themselves and dream about being someone else. How do we know it is the source of their problems, and not an effect? How about lack of socio-sexual success making them both suffering and self-hating and they react to this like that?

Pro1: we don't, and it is a good point, something like autism may play a role. Socio-sexual success, being borderline "cool" or at least accepted is something not exactly bright high school dropouts can figure out, how comes often highly intelligent men cannot? Indeed, autism or Asperger may play a role. However there are charming, sexy people on the spectrum, this cannot possible be the cause. Besides certain symptoms overlap with self-hatred: if someone avoids eye contact, how to know if it comes from their Asperger syndrome or from self-hatred making them afraid to meet a gaze directly and rather wanting to hide from other people's eyes? Cannot obsessive tendencies be a way to avoid thinking about one's own self? It is entirely possible that many men on the spectrum developed a self-hatred due to the bullying the received for being on the spectrum and much of their problems come from that. One thing is clear - whatever other reasons there are for lacking socio-sexual success, the above characteristics make the situation much worse.

Against2: Satoshi Kanazawa argued high IQ suppresses instincts and makes you basically lack "common sense". Maybe it is just that?

Pro2: Yes. But the instinct in question is not simply basic social skills. I will get back to this.

Against3: Paul Graham wrote nerds are unpopular because they simply don't want to invest into being popular, having other interests.

Pro3: This seems to be true for non-suffering nerds. Primarily the nerds who are into this-worldly, productive, STEM stuff. Why care about fashionable clothes when you are learning fascinating things like physics? Slightly irritated about the superficiality of other people, the non-suffering nerd gets a zero-maintenance buzz cut and 7 polo shirts of the same basic color of a brand a random cute looking girl has recommended, so that he does not have to think about what to put on, and has a presentable look with minimal effort. Of course we know "neckbeards", "omegas" don't look like that. Much worse. Suffering nerds seem to have deeper problems than not wanting to invest a minimal amount of time into their looks. Besides, look at their interests. STEM nerds are into things that are useful in this today's real world. D&D nerds want to escape it.

Against4: Testosterone?

Pro4: Plays a role both ways, see below.


The cause of self-hatred

Other people despising you. Sooner or later you internalize it. There could be many causes for that... sometimes parents of the kind who always tell their kids they suck. Some people hit walls like racism or homophobia... some people get picked on as kids because they are disabled or disfigured.

Actually this latest is a good clue and a good proof of we are on a good track with this here. I certainly have seen an above-average % of disabled or disfigured youths playing D&D. It seems if you are a textbook target for bullying, if other kids tell you you are a worthless piece of feces in various ways for years, you will want to escape into a fantasy where you are a wizard casting fireballs burning the meanines to death. So we are getting a clue about what may cause this self-hatred.

However in my experience simply being a weak or cowardly boy causes the same shitstorm of bullying, humiliations, and beatings. Kids are cruel. It is basically a brutal form of setting up a dominance hierarchy by trying to torture everybody, those who don't even dare to resist get assigned the lowest rank, those who try and fail only slightly higher, and the bravest, bolderst, cruelest, most aggressive fighters being on top. And intelligence may be an obstacle here by suppressing your fighting instinct.

Being bullied into the lowest level of social rank basically destroys your serum teststerone levels. It also makes you depressed. Both depend on your rank in the pecking order. Low-T combined with depression is probably something really close to what I call "self-hatred", since high-T is often understood as pride and confidence, so the opposite of it is probably shame and submissiveness, and SSC wrote depressed people who are suicidial often say "I feel I am a burden" i.e. you are not worthy to others, a liability, not an asset. Shame, submissiveness and feeling worthless is precisely what I called self-hatred.

Thus these two well-documented aspects of getting a low social rank already cause something akin to self-hatred, but I think it is also important how it happens in childhood. If it would be simply kids e.g. respecting those with higher grades, or richer parents more but still behaving borderline polite with everybody, the way how adults do it, I think it would be less of an issue. Kids, boys, however, establish social rank with brutal beatings, humiliation, bullying, and making sure the other boy got the "you suck" message driven in with a sledgehammer. A textbook example of the "wedgie" which Wiki calls a prank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedgie and perhaps it is possible to do it in harmless pranky that way, too, but when four muscular boys boys capture a weak, scared, squealing one in the toilet, immobilize him, and give him an atomic one then force him to walk out like that so that everybody can laugh at his humiliation, this is no prank. This is the message hammered in: you suck, you are worthless, you are helpless, you are no man, you got no balls, we do whatever we want to you and you have no "figther rank" whatsoever, you did not even try to defend yourself.  And I have seen many such events when I was a child.

Against1: Ouch. But is this really about fighting ability? Don't you think other ways how kids rank each other, rank their popularity matters, especially in modern schools where fighting is strictly forbidden and surveillance is strong?

Pro1: not 100% sure. After all they do it teaming up. It is perfectly possible that if a brown skinned boy and a bunch of racist classmates interacted it would be the same for him even if he is strong and does MMA. Still... in my experience, it was usually about that. I mean, not about what karate belt you have, it was more like testing your masculinity, like courage, aggression, strength. If you are "man enough" they would respect you and leave you alone, basically assigning a higher rank. The whole thing felt like testing whatever I later learned about testosterone levels, both prenatal and serum. It seems bullies were trying to sniff out weakness, both emotional and physical, and T is the best predictor to a combination of both.  For example, the worst thing was to cry, you got called a girly boy and bullied even more, get the lowest possible rank. Surely boys being raised in patriarchical and homophobic cultures had something to do with it, but the whole thing still reminded me of something biological like reindeer "locking horns".  I think if there is ever such a thing as males establishing a dominance hierarchy largely through  testing each others prenatal or serum testosterone i.e. manly courage and strength and fierceness, it was that.

But I also find it likely being "different" in any way, race, sexuality, disability, must have made you much more of a target.

Obviously this reflects the values of society, too. In Russia even grown up soldiers and prison inmates do this, which probably reflects the highly toxic-masculinity values they have or the oppression they themselves receive from officers, or even formerly from fathers. Two fascinating links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law#Ponyatiya so you can imagine what goes on in schools. And yes, on the other hand growing up in a textbook NY liberal community must be a lot easier in this regard. Most of Europe will be somewhere in between.

Against1: So, your argument is that bullying destroys your self-respect much more than any other way of achieving a low social rank, and this leads to self-hatred, which leads to fantasy escapism and typical nerd-neckbeard behaviors, which then adds up and results in the lack of socio-sexual success? Isn't it a job for Occam's razor?

Pro1: well, the argument is more like, whatever happens with you in your childhood is very important, boys tend to establish rank by bullying and fighting or even in the best case, by testing each others courage and masculinity by other means, daring each other to climb trees etc. My point is, not simply that bullying or even childhood bullying matters so much, my point is rather that bullying or courage tests in childhood make you realize the fact that indeed you are lacking in important masculine abilities like courage, fierceness or strength, so probably low prenatal T, and low social rank established via this cuts much deeper in a man's soul than simply low social rank because you are poor or get bad grades. It affirms you don't worth much as a man and this makes you hate yourself much more than simply internalizing that you are poor or something like that. This alone - such as the depressed T levels and general depression due to low social rank - could explain the suffering and lack of later socio-sexual success of nerds, but the fantasy-escapism as a coping method makes it worse. Without that, nerds, neckbeards would not be a noticable and much ridiculed type - without that, all you would see is that some guys are kind of sad and timid, but otherwise look and behave like all the other guys!

Against1: do you think anti-bullying policies could solve "neckbeards" for the next generation ?

Pro1: Trying to make people behave less cruel is ought to reduce the suffering of the victims and a good thing. Having said that, while this demographic I am talking about would suffer less victimization as a child, I am not entirely convinced they would end up with much less self-hatred and better socio-sexual success, thus less adult suffering.  Why? Because my thesis is not that victimization hurts, obviously it does, my thesis is that being truly, indeed, actually less masculine than other boys and having your nose rubbed into it so that you realize you are indeed not much of a man is what generates self-hatred, perhaps partially due to biology and partially to patriarchy, I don't know why. I mean, the bullies are ethically wrong, but truthfully right - they bully you because you are indeed weak, in emotion or body, and you hate yourself for being indeed, truly weak.  So for example something as light as not daring to climb a rope during gym class and the other boys giving you a contemptuous look could destroy your self-respect here, especially if afterwards you are interacted with as a low-rank social pariah. And this is not something the anti-bullying teachers can solve. Perhaps you can try to pressure boys to not judge each others for courage, not express it so, never treat anyone like a social outcast etc. but it would be a lot like trying to destroy their masculinity too, trying to destroy that competititve, dominant, judgemental spirit that is so strongly linked to testosterone. I don't think it can succeed and I don't think it would be ethical to try do so. This is what they are. You can teach them to express their views in less agressive ways, but human freedom means if you want to frown because you think another guys suck, you can. Nevertheless, still it is good to not tolerate bullies, it is better to force high-To boys to express their contempt in more civilized ways, to reduce the suffering of their victims, just don't expect it prevents later "nerd problems".

Against1: I am still not convinced other forms of discrimination or low social rank do not generate more self-hatred.

Pro1: Well, just look at those American blacks who are both poor and black, both giving them a lower social rank at school, and end up being gangsta-rappers or even criminal inmates, but still strong, tattooed, masculine as hell, really the opposite of neckbeards-nerds who typically have characteristics that are considered unmasculine. It seems you could be bullyed for many a thing, but apparently nerdiness, neckbeardery tends to be formed when it is specifically your lack of a masculine fighter spirit that made you a target.

Against1: Any ways to easily test all this?

Pro1: Yes. Ask your neckbeard friend to consent to a test that will not be physically harmful but may cause emotional triggering. Then pretend to slap or munch him in the face. Do you get a panicky, nervous reaction, like turtling up and blinking, or you get a "manly" one like leaning back and catching your hand? This predicts if he is used to fighting back, or used to getting beaten and not daring to fight.


The cure

How to fix all this? Well, I have found that some neckbeards have managed to fix themselves to a certain extent without really even planning to, via the following means:

- Career success giving you a certain sense of social rank and self-confidence. Being higher on the social ladder increases testosterone, which also gets you the feedback from others and yourself that you are less unmasculine now, which makes you hate yourself for being unmasculine less.

- During career, many neckbeards did the same thing as Eliezer and opted for a simple, easy smart-casual wardrobe and better groomed in a low-maintenance way. This improved feedback from others and thus their confidence.

- It seems sports, martial arts, to some extent even basic body building helped many a man.

- All this led to better self-acceptance.

But let's try to go deeper here.

Neckbeards need to find self-respect WHILE accepting they are intellectuals. The goal is neither to accept yourself the way you are - they way you currently are sucks - nor to hate yourself so much that you do not feel you deserve to be improved and thus projecting a false public image. The goal is to self-improve WHILE accepting you are an intellectual.

Step 1 is to realize that it is not intellectualism that makes people marginalized, ridiculed, and unable to find girlfriends. It is the lack of other skills than intellectual ones, largely, the lack of masculine virtues. Here the idea of a writer is a useful mental crutch: you as a neckbeard are probably a voracious reader, thinking you are made from the same material writers are made from is not entirely wrong, it is realistic, it is close enough to your real self or essence. As a voracious reader, you are as to writers what power users are to programmers. Close enough. It is not a fake persona for you if you make some writers your role models: you both are intellectuals in essence. And yes, sexy, masculine, socially and sexually succesful male writers exist: Richard Dawkins, Robert Heinlein, Albert Camus. Shaping yourself after them is both true to your real self and a way to improve yourself.

The basics are not hard.

- Sports (more about it later)

- Smart casual wardrobe, nice low maintenance haircut, facial hair probably to be completely avoided until you learn more about style. That is an advanced level milestone, postpone it.

- Dropping a nuke on your social shyness by joining Toastmasters - a writer should be able to give a speech on a podium? Toastmasters International (and the later is not just a name, they are in Europe etc. too) says on the can that they are about public speaking skills, which is true, but public speaking is simply the hardest kind of speaking for introverted, shy, or self-hating people, go through the Comm manual giving the 10 speeches, participate in table topics, and compared to that 1:1 socializing or chatting will be easy.

- One more thing you need to learn there, namely to develop a genuine interest in other people and not just obsessively talk about your interests to them, but also be interested in their stuff, or even in small talk. This is annoying,  but once you get a bit used to it, you realize that you are gaining validation from respectable looking people choosing to discuss the weather or similar stupid topics with you. If they "wasted" a minute or two on a worthless topic with you, then perhaps it is your own person that is not worthless for them. This helps with the self-hatred issue. Toastmasters tends to be very good at this. Old time members are happy to chat with newbies just about anything, because these meetings are marked as communicate, communicate, communicate in their calendar.

- Therapy, focusing on your childhood bullying for being perceived weak and cowardly, or general feedbacks about being less masculine. Well, this is one of the advices that is almost useless, because if you are the type of guy who goes to shrinks you have did it long ago and if you are the type who would not go near a shrink unless borderline suicidial you won't take this advice, but it simply had to be given, for the sake of my conscience more than for your benefit.

- So, back to sports. Yes, you need to get in shape. But also you need to convince your inner boy that you could not be bullied, beaten, your masculinity brutally challenged and your self humiliated and oppressed anymore. You need to compensate, and do it hard.  There are three schools of thought here. Many people recommend gym type body-building, weight-lifting. On one hand it is good, on the other hand it can make you feel fake: you feel you look like a fighter, but you feel you are still a timid, cowardly boy inside and it makes you feel faking it. It works better at 17, when you are more superficial, it does not work at 40.  A second school says martial arts, and indeed there are many a neckbeard in the local karate dojo, the issue is, that doing katas and kumite of the kind that stops at the first succesful hit is still not fighting. It is not going through figther moves that you need. It is to awaken a raw sense of masculinity in you, to face your fears and overcome them, and feel courage and fierceness. You need to get in touch with your inner animal a bit, and that is not karate. I recommend boxing. A light boxing sparring - done after about 6 months - is the closest thing to simulating someone really trying to beat you. Not at full force, but your opponent is really lauching a hundrend punches right in your face. This is why boxing has this rules. This is why it was a primary way to teach British intellectual boys to man up. It is not supposed to teach you street fighting techniques. It is supposed to help you conquer your fears and find your courage, your inner fierce animal with bared fangs, by focusing on the kinds of attacks that are most fearsome: punches right into your face. A grappling lock or MMA thigh kick may immobilize or hurt you, and they are effective at fighting, but they are not as effective at scaring people. This is the whole point. You need to get scared many times, until you learn courage. Boxing is courage training. And courage, not strength or skill, is what makes a man - and what makes an ex-unmanly-boy not hate himself.

Socially speaking, anti-bullying and reducing the worst aspects of toxic masculinity or highly patriarchical values should help but be careful! Natural born high-T bullies fly under the radar much more than bullied nerds who are trying to man up and thus doing spectacularly manly things. Do it the wrong way around, and you end up handicapping precisely those you are trying to help! Anyone who obsesses about guns, MMA or choppers, while wearing fatigues and Tapout tees are not the masculine bullies: they are the nerds trying to cope with not actually being or not having been masculine. While this is a questionable way to cope, it is not them you want to handicap, so if you want to fight toxic masculinity or patriarchy, do NOT focus on its lowest hanging fruits! The true bullies don't do these, they don't need to.

(extended rewrite of http://lesswrong.com/lw/lpf/the_truth_about_mathematical_ability/)

There's widespread confusion about the nature of ability, for a variety of reasons:

    Most people don't know what it is.
    Most people don't know enough statistics to analyze the question properly.
    Most people are not very metacognitive.
    Very few people have more than a casual interest in the subject.

If ability's nature were exclusively an object of intellectual interest, this would be relatively inconsequential. For example, many people are confused about Einstein’s theory of relativity, but this doesn’t have much of an impact on their lives. But in practice, people’s misconceptions about ability seriously interfere with their own ability to learn, something that hurts them both professionally and emotionally.

I have a long standing interest in the subject. Unfortunately I do not have any expertise, being too young to have acquired such credentials.

I’ve thought about writing about ability for a long time, but there was a missing element: I myself had never done genuinely original and high quality work. Indeed, I still have not; using R would be cheating, since to qualify for my notion of genuinely original, I would have to have started from the bare earth, smelted the ore, refined them into a computer, and written an entire operating system. This continued failure of originality has sharpened my understanding of the issues.

This is a post where I try to clarify the situation. I don't think it has a point, other than sarcasm and making fun of certain people.

What is up with Jobs?

I was saddened to learn of the death of Steve Jobs several years ago. He's the person who I identify with the most on a personal level, and I had hoped to have the chance to meet him. I hesitated as I kept the last sentence, because I'm not certain it will cause every reader to roll their eyes. The material below should make my state of mind clear:

    “Steve Jobs's deep experience in hardware mass production (early Apple, NeXT) has been brought to bear in creating an unrivaled exclusive supply chain of advanced technology literally years ahead of anyone else on the planet,” Anonymous wrote. “Apple products are superior, since Jobs was such a visionary and perfectionist. What consumer wouldn’t feel great about purchasing a device developed by such a person." — Michael Pennington, Samsung’s vice president of sales operations and head of national sales for Samsung Telecommunications America,

    "When I was at Stanford as a student, I went to Jobs's commencement speech... I enjoyed the atmosphere around him very much ... If we look at the decisions and patterns displayed by those who we believe to have an obsessive pursuit, we can see a theme of sacrifice and suffering as a result of prioritizing that passion over everything else." — Stanford students

    "[Tom] knew how it felt to have no privacy whatsoever when he was working right here, in a little Californian town called Cupertino, in a legendary place located in One Infinite Loop. [...] The Worldwide Loyalty Team reported directly to Steve Jobs." -- Gawker. "Steve Jobs was a great person. he was ….. a god." — Sandy

    "Suffice to say, I was one heck of a Mac bigot in those days. I idolized Steve Jobs, traveled faithfully and constantly to the Cupertino Mecca Apple called home, had ongoing dialogues with the now-infamous Apple CEO John Sculley and was invited to Steve Wozniak's palatial home for a holiday party." — Robert C. DeMarzo

Based on these remarks alone, it should be very hard to imagine how anyone could want to be more like Jobs. But when I read http://time.com/3698686/gifted-and-talented/, it's hauntingly familiar. Although more than three decades of research from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and others have support the belief in developing one's potential, and in particular shown that individual struggle is critical to higher learning, there is a persistent belief that this is not "what counts". There are people who cheat, who look for the easy way out.

Jobs writes:

    “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use... Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary”

When I checked http://www.lewisandlewis.com.au/assessments-tests/giftedness/was-steve-jobs-gifted-2/, they scoffed and said that of course Jobs was gifted and smarter than those around him – he was engaging in a sort of bragging, along the lines of "I'm so awesome that even though I'm not smart I am still one of the greatest people ever."  It is hard to reconcile Jobs's self-description with his above-average performance. But I was stunned by the article's willingness to ignore the remarks of somebody so great out of hand. In fairness, Steve Jobs was probably following the work of Carol Dweck with great interest, and simply stated what would help the students, rather than the truth.

What is up with me?

I went to a different school every two years. The high school I went to did not even offer a course AP Calculus BC; I took their AB class, spent a few days studying the last two chapters of the textbook, and got a 5 on the AP exam. From this, people understandably inferred that I'm unusually brilliant. Having received a number of awards to that effect, I tend to agree. When I point out that things are not always this way, and that I have in fact received several B's and even one C throughout my academic career, along with numerous disciplinary incidents, their reactions tended to be along the lines of "so what?". It's not at all mysterious to me why I got those B's and C's. In fact, if you were to ask my teachers, it would be obvious; I simply wasn't paying enough attention to their course. The disciplinary incidents are harder to explain away; currently, a power coup by the vice-principal seems to be the most self-serving explanation.

Aside from taking AP Calculus BC during my freshman year, I also took the SAT in 6th grade. I only scored around 650, but there were still ~20 students who scored higher than me in the state of Colorado and were invited to the awards ceremony. The only problem was that they were all older than me. But just looking at my SAT score, people would think very unlikely that I could have gotten a 5 on the AP Calculus BC in my freshman year.

As far removed my ability is from Jobs's, we have at least one thing in common: our respective performances on some commonly used measures of ability are about what most people would expect based on our accomplishments.

Hopefully these examples suffice to make clear that whatever ability is, it's not precisely "what the SAT measures." What the SAT measures is highly relevant, but still not the most relevant thing.

What does the SAT measure?

Just for fun, let's first look at what the College Board has to say on the subject. According to The Official SAT Study Guide

    The SAT does not test logic abilities or IQ. It tests your skills in reading, writing and mathematics – the same subjects you're learning in school. [...] If you take rigorous challenging courses in high school, you'll be ready for the test.

Some of you may be shocked by the College Board's disingenuousness without any further comment. How would they respond to my own situation? Well, they would point out that I was still in middle school, and so was unlikely to score well. Indeed, I took it again as a high school junior and received an 800 on the mathematical section. But then I took it a third time as a senior, and received only a 780 on the math section; I instead got an 800 on the verbal. Why the variance? Their strongest response would be to say that there is always some random noise on the test. I prefer to say that it discriminates based on people's interests.

I don’t think that rigorous, academic challenging courses build skills that enable high school students to solve these questions. It is more the other way around; the students build up skills to solve the questions posed in rigorous, academic challenging courses, which transfer occasionally to other disciplines such as the SAT. As my own experience shows, many questions can be solved by a very smart 6th grader who hasn’t studied algebra or geometry. (I took those in 7th and 8th grades, respectively). However, to do exceptionally requires advance preparation and/or taking the test more than once.

The SAT Subject Tests are much more closely connected with what students (are supposed to) learn in school. As such, I did not bother studying for it at all, and received an 800 anyways.

At least for me, the SAT did give me, a smart student from a relatively underprivileged background, the chance to attend a "high quality"  private college (top 10 in mathematics, No.4 in the 2012 US news rankings), on a nice scholarship – it turns out that (sticker) price does not imply quality. Although the university did indeed have a rigorous curriculum, the occasional incidents such as exploding toilets, plastic in the dining hall's food, and binge drinking, led me to believe that the university has become a harmful force in society. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/take-away-harvards-nonprofit-status.html characterizes Harvard as a giant hedge fund masquerading as a non-profit college; I'm not certain where universities keep all their money, but it certainly isn't spent on student living conditions.

Singly exceptional gifted children

Let’s return to the question of reconciling my very strong AP Calculus BC performance with my relatively low SAT score in 6th grade. I could have taken up the notion that I had always had very high intelligence and that that’s why I was able to learn well by saying “No, you’re wrong, my SAT score shows that I don’t have very high intelligence, the reason that I was able to learn well is that I really love the subject.” But that would oversimplify things. In particular, it leaves the problem of time; the SAT was 6th grade, while the Calculus BC was freshman year. Perhaps the largest part of why I failed in 6th grade was that I was too young at the time, too inexperienced. But what made me different in freshman year? The simple answer is they were measuring different things; I was around the 90th percentile in the SAT, while at least 40% of people who take it get a 5 on the AP Calculus BC every year, at least since 1999. How unique am I, compared to Steve Jobs?

Partial answers to these questions come from the literature on so-called “Twice Exceptional” (2e) children. The label is used broadly, to refer to children who are intellectually gifted and also have some sort of disability. For example, the original author of this post had exceptionally high reasoning abilities, but only average short term memory and processing speed. I do not appear to have such problems; I was tested, and all systems functioned above average. I am a "singly exceptional gifted child". Unfortunately, even this is a disability; I have an exceptional ability to focus, often to the concern of others around me. For example, I was (re)writing this essay instead of grading papers at $11 an hour. Since it impairs my ability to work, this qualifies as a mental disability. The psychiatrists tell me I have type I bipolar disorder, and should take drugs to make me less easily distracted, but I thought I should check with LW first before making a decision, since I'm not exactly certain who's suffering from the cognitive biases.

Jobs wrote:

    Remember, the sixties happened in the early seventies, and that's when I came of age; and to me, the spark of that was that there was something beyond what you see every day. It's the same thing that causes people to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that's a wonderful thing. I think that same spirit can be put in to products, and those products can be manufactured, and given to people, and they can sense that spirit.
   
Readers are welcome to speculate on what Jobs had in mind in writing this; I will just mentioned that the sixties are occasionally advertised as an age of "sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll", and that I happen to be flying to the International Students for Liberty Conference in D.C. this weekend. (Please PM me if you're there!)