To sate the curiousity of anyone uninclined to look for information themselves, other senses include:

• Equilibrioception, via the inner ear, providing sensation of angular momentum and acceleration
• Proprioception, feedback on the movement and position of the body. This is why you can close your eyes and touch your fingertips together.
• Various internal signals, such as hunger
• Pain, a distinct sensation that can be caused by various conditions
• What is commonly regarded as the sense of "touch" can be separated into multiple distinct types, including heat, cold, and pressure.

For a demonstration of the difference between heat and cold sensation, place small amounts of the chemicals menthol (from peppermint extract) and capsaicin (from chili peppers) in your mouth--the former triggers cold receptors, while the latter triggers heat (and pain) receptors.

As an aside, there are also five distinct sensations of flavor, not the four that were commonly accepted until recently.

I think this post made some very good points and I've voted it up, but I want to pick a nit with the mention of "your five senses". Thats Aristotelean mythology. We have many more than five, and so could you please edit this to just read "your senses"?

(Actually, since I'm posting this, I should mention I don't believe in qualia either, but that is a debate of an entirely different order).

I think it will be very necessary to carefully frame what it would be that we might wish to accomplish as a group, and what not. I say this because I'm one of those who thinks that humanity has less than a 50% chance of surviving the next 100 years, but I have no interest in trying to avert this. I am very much in favour of humanity evolving into something a lot more rational than what it is now, and I don't really see how one can justify saying that such a race would still be 'humanity'. On the other hand, if the worry is the extinction of all rational thought, or the extinction of certain, carefully chosen, memes, I might very well wish to help out.

The main problem, as I see it, is in being clear on what we want to have happen (and what not) and what we can do to make the preferred outcomes more likely. The more I examine the entire issues, the harder it appears to define how to distinguish between the good and the bad outcomes.

No, not really. I kind of thought we needed more on that, but that this post was long enough already. And I didn't even think of the police-criminal thing. If you have more than what you said in this comment, please do post it, maybe with this post in the "related to" section.

I find it interesting that some folks have mental imagery and others don't, because this possibility had never occurred to me despite having varying ability with this at different times. My mental imagery is far more vivid and detailed when I'm asleep than when I'm awake, which I've often wondered about.

This post completely takes the wind out of the sails of a post I was planning to make on 'Self-Induced Biases' where one mistakes the environment one has chosen for themselves as being, in some sense, 'typical' and then derives lots of bad mental statistics from this. Thus, chess fanatics will tend to think that chess is much more popular than it is, since all their friends like chess, disregarding the fact that they chose those friends (at least partly) based on a commonality of interests.

A worse case is when the police start to think that everyone is a criminal because that's all they ever seem to meet.

I keep hoping someone else will post their interpretation of it from a sufficiently different viewpoint that I can at least understand it well enough to know if I agree with it or not.

There are two types of thinking: sensory experience, and abstractions about sensory experience. Each type of thinking has strengths and weaknesses.

Sensory thinking lets you leverage a high degree of unconscious knowledge and processing power, applied to detailed models. Abstract thinking can jump several steps at a time, but lacks precision.

A major distinction between the two systems is that our actions are actually driven almost exclusively by the sensory system, and only indirectly influenced by the abstract system. The abstract system, in contrast, exists primarily to fulfill social goals: it's the brain's "spin doctor", whose job is to come up with plausible-sounding explanations that make you seem like an attractive ally, mate, etc.

Thus, each system has different biases: the sensory system is optimized for caring about what happens to you, right now, whereas the abstract system is optimized for thinking about how things "ought" to be for the whole group in the future... in ways that just "coincidentally" turn out to be for your own good. ;-)

The two systems can work together or against each other. In a typical dysfunctional scenario, the sensory system alerts you to a prediction of danger associated with a thought (e.g. of a task you're about to complete), and the abstract system then invents a plausible reason for not following up on that thought, perhaps followed by a plausible reason to do something else.

Unfortunately, once people notice this, they have a tendency to respond by having their abstract system think, "I shouldn't do that" or "I should do X instead"... which then does nothing. Or they invent reasons for how they got that way, or why other people or circumstances are against them, or whatever.

What I teach people to do is observe what the sensory machinery is doing, and retrain it to do other things. As I like to put it, "action is not an abstraction". The only time that our abstract thoughts lead to behavior changes is when they cause us to make connections in the sensory machinery...

Which is why one little story like "Stuck In The Middle With Bruce" has so much more impact on people than just talking in an abstract way about self-defeating behavior.

Lurkers and Involvement.

I've been thinking that one might want to make a post, or post a survey, that attempts to determine how much folks engage with the contents on less wrong.

I'm going to assume that there are far more lurkers than commenters, and far more commenters than posters, but I'm curious as to how many minutes, per day, folks spend on this site.

For myself, I'd estimate no more than 10 or 15 minutes but it might be much less than that. I generally only read the posts from the RSS feed, and only bother to check the comments on one in 5. Even then, if there's a lot of comments, I don't bother reading most of them.

One of the reasons I don't post is that I often find it takes me 20-30 minutes to put my words into a shape that I feel is up to the rather high standard of posting quality here, and I'm generally not willing to commit that much of my time to this site.

I think the question of how much of their time an average person thinks a site is worth to them is an important metric, and one we may wish to try to measure with an eye to increasing the average for this site.

Heck, that might even get me posting more often.

I think there's a post somewhere in the following observation, but I'm at a loss as to what lesson to take away from it, or how to present it:

Wherever I work I rapidly gain a reputation for being both a joker and highly intelligent. It seems that I typically act in such a way that when I say something stupid, my co-workers classify it as a joke, and when I say something deep, they classify it as a sign of my intelligence. As best I can figure, its because at one company I was strongly encouraged to think 'outside the box' and one good technique I found for that was to just blurt out the first technological idea that occurred to me when presented with a technological problem, but to do so in a non-serious tone of voice. Often enough the idea is one that nobody else has thought of, or automatically dismissed for what, in retrospect, were insufficient reasons. Other times its so obviously stupid an idea that everyone thinks I'm making a joke. It doesn't hurt that often I do deliberately joke.

I don't know if this is a technique others should adopt or not, but I've found it has made me far less afraid of appearing stupid when presenting ideas.

I have to admit, I've never understood Hanson's Near-Far distinction either. As described it just doesn't seem to mesh at all with how I think about thinking. I keep hoping someone else will post their interpretation of it from a sufficiently different viewpoint that I can at least understand it well enough to know if I agree with it or not.