If the strip was also clever or funny,

It is funny. Not the best xkcd ever, but not worse than the norm for it.

I can't find it, but I once read an article from a guy a trust about how he just stopped following news, assuming that if anything sufficiently important happened, he'd find out about it anyway. His quality of life immediately rose. Having followed this approach for a few years now, I would suggest consuming zero news (is minimalist, completely devoid of noise, and exceptionally well-organized).

I was recently heartened to hear a very good discussion of effective altruism on BBC Radio 4's statistics programme, More or Less, in response to the "Ice Bucket Challenge". They speak to Neil Bowerman of the Centre for Effective Altruism and Elie Hassenfeld from GiveWell.

They even briefly raise the possibility that large drives of charitable donations to ineffective causes could be net negative as it's possible that people have a roughly fixed charity budget, which such drives would deplete. They admit there's not much hard evidence for such a claim, but to even hear such an unsentimental, rational view raised in the mainstream media is very bracing.

Available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless (click the link to "WS To Ice Or Not To Ice"), or directly here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/moreorless/moreorless_20140908-1200a.mp3

This is actually pretty easy to demonstrate though. You can laugh at your own expectations failing when you're alone, as per the phone example. So we KNOW this can happen.

Now, let's change the expectation, and we can see clearly that the laughter will change or disappear. For example, when I look at Da Vinci's notebook, who I obviously think of as an amazing artist, I don't laugh the least bit at the quality of the drawings contained within, and no one that I know of looks at Da Vinci's notebooks and the amazing quality of his thought as a source of comedy. The different aspect that creates the humor in the case is your own expectations turning out to be wrong.

We know this can cause humor by itself, and we know it's here in this case, so the theory addresses it quite clearly and it seems very well defined as laughter at the self.

Here's one more piece of information that strongly indicates this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww2d_o0N62w

Here, Michael Jordan, in his mid-30's, dunks on a center, and it makes the commentator laugh. Notice what he says..."Excuse me! I'm sorry!" In other words, apologizing for his own statement or belief that Jordan was no longer capable of that. He's laughing at how wrong he himself just turned out to be.

(having said that, there is a separate emotional reaction that's triggered when someone's ability surpasses expectations, which I have as a solution to another classic "mystery" of human behavior, but that's for another topic)

As a heterosexual I'm not your target audience, but I voted this up for being a well-compiled and useful (to its audience) bit of research.

I think it's supposed to be a unit of sin.

Hi 9e,

The first example is first-person laughter, where you laugh at yourself for your own expectations turning out to be so wrong, similar to looking for your phone then realizing you're on the phone already. I would hope this doesn't seem like a forced explanation (apologies if it does). We have standards about what we ourselves are capable of, and oftentimes we find out that we were way off-base. I like the example of finding out that you already had your phone because there's no one else involved and it hopefully thus isolates the issue and demonstrates clearly that you can laugh purely as a result of realizing your own errors.

The second example is a good one, and that's something that I had to think about a lot. I eventually noticed that those incidents result from a misplacement, which almost always comes from something that has something in common with their surroundings but are noticeably out of place. I think that most often these are combined with some other source of humor, like the misplacement being combined with someone else's mess-up, or a reminder of a mess-up, or laughing at someone's bad pun.

I wrote a bit more on this in the papers, right now I'm trying to do several different things so sorry if my explanation of that is jumbled (especially because that's one of the most important and least straightforward aspects).

In regards to bullies laughing at the target, I think it involves them not feeling anxiety at the target's misfortune, and usually their laughter (I say usually because I'm not in their brains so I can't totally dissect or make concrete statements), seems to come from pushing the victim to new lows, like making them carry their bags or embarrassing them in new ways. This would put them below whatever quality-expectation the bully has of them. (apologies here, an expectation of very little quality is still a "quality expectation," sorry if the word "quality" sounds like it always means something above average. I know the word is sometimes used that way.)

What sophisticated ideas did you come up with independently before encountering them in a more formal context?

I'm pretty sure that in my youth I independently came up with rudimentary versions of the anthropic principle and the Problem of Evil. Looking over my Livejournal archive, I was clearly not a fearsome philosophical mind in my late teens, (or now, frankly), so it seems safe to say that these ideas aren't difficult to stumble across.

While discussing this at the most recent London Less Wrong meetup, another attendee claimed to have independently arrived at Pascal's Wager. I've seen a couple of different people speculate that cultural and ideological artefacts are subject to selection and evolutionary pressures without ever themselves having come across memetics as a concept.

I'm still thinking about ideas we come up with that stand to reason. Rather than prime you all with the hazy ideas I have about the sorts of ideas people converge on while armchair-theorising, I'd like to solicit some more examples. What ideas of this sort did you come up with independently, only to discover they were already "a thing"?

I independently conceived of determinism and a vague sort of compatibilism when I was twelveish.

What sophisticated ideas did you come up with independently before encountering them in a more formal context?

I'm pretty sure that in my youth I independently came up with rudimentary versions of the anthropic principle and the Problem of Evil. Looking over my Livejournal archive, I was clearly not a fearsome philosophical mind in my late teens, (or now, frankly), so it seems safe to say that these ideas aren't difficult to stumble across.

While discussing this at the most recent London Less Wrong meetup, another attendee claimed to have independently arrived at Pascal's Wager. I've seen a couple of different people speculate that cultural and ideological artefacts are subject to selection and evolutionary pressures without ever themselves having come across memetics as a concept.

I'm still thinking about ideas we come up with that stand to reason. Rather than prime you all with the hazy ideas I have about the sorts of ideas people converge on while armchair-theorising, I'd like to solicit some more examples. What ideas of this sort did you come up with independently, only to discover they were already "a thing"?