All of InquilineKea's Comments + Replies

My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it's vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8122027/

What are some of your favorite search terms to use on LessWrong (or any site with lots of "interesting" content) to find important/interesting things/or things whose patterns self-recur at the most fascinating intervals?

(the best terms are terms that often mix the technical in soulful contexts). Most technical work completely lacks soul/vitality and that's why many of the most enlightened people hate academic papers with vicious intensity

I'll start with some: 

higher specificity [you know it's good when it's usdd, common enough to try w/o frustration, ... (read more)

1Alex K. Chen (parrot)
multiscale entropy netlify/vercel/heroku/shinyapps/fleek (find cool associated apps!) + replit github  modal/EC2/docker photonic computing

Sometimes, people generically hate on the general principle of virtue-signalling as an indirect way of signalling which virtues they disagree with OR which virtues are policed - eg polarizing virtues (while being able to maintain plausible deniability on what specific virtue signals they disagree on). Sometimes, this generic hatred of "virtue signalling" is also a generic hatred/dislike of "lawful good" [or "those more successful than them"], or those they perceive as having "higher pain tolerance than them" (a generalized hatred of all associated with vir... (read more)

>I think there's still a substantial chance of something 10x large being revealed within 18 months (which I think is the upper bound on 'timeline measured in months')

So did that happen?

4Tomás B.
I suppose the new scaling laws render this sort of thinking obsolete. 

Upper bound so there's a high chance that it will come more quickly than that.

I know. I still feel psychologically wrecked/burned by it all and afraid to be proud of expressing myself (my strengths and weaknesses), and still overly judged by other people's notion of what it means to make proper progress. It defines and tracks *everyone*, it limits our social circles (and confines us to permanent bubbles), and it makes us feel guilty over doing anything that's different. I frequently feel like I'm on the defensive. I wish I could have a childhood I was fully proud of - that I want to show off to the rest of the world (... (read more)

1zulupineapple
"If not for school I wouldn't have anxiety", is an appealing theory, but I wouldn't put much faith in it. I propose that your anxieties are not due to school, but due to people in general.

Recording the set of one's past games would help a lot with relieving the availability heuristic.

Does anyone know if these tradeoffs occur in organic brain variation between people? It almost seems that the g-factor is so strong as to overwhelm these tradeoffs without tDCS...

Now with people posting more of their gaming online, many of their gaming experiences don't necessarily go away once they quit the game. In fact, how one plays video games says a lot about one's personality.

I still stay emotionally involved with some of my old AOE2 games many years later (because I record them all), and I still sometimes reel over certain really irrational decisions I made in them.

Does anyone know if one could convince the Archive Team to archive them? Or does the Archive Team often consist of more difficult personalities?

Could producerism also be a major issue in East Asia?

(before people's social behavior had seemed like a complicated blur because I saw so many variables without having started to correctly identify the latent ones).

Interesting - what are some examples of the latent ones?

It didn't occur to me how significant this was. The number of hours that I had is perhaps as small as the number of hours that most people have by age 10. In hindsight it's obvious: of course I didn't have good social skills relative to other adults, in the same way that a 10 year old doesn't have good social skills for an adult. I just hadn't put nearly enough time in!

Just out of curiosity - do you think that all other people who put massive amounts of time into socializing get benefits that are proportionate to the amount of time put in? From our poin... (read more)

2Autolykos
Intelligence is basically how quickly you learn from experience, so being smart should allow you to get to the same level with much less time put in (which seems to be what the OP is hinting at). I'd also expect diminishing returns, especially if you always socialize with the same (type of) people. At some point, each social group (or even every single person) becomes a skill of its own. Once your generic social skills are at an acceptable level, pick your specializations carefully. Life is too short to waste it on bad friends.
2Richard_Kennaway
I can think of a few people I know who do put a substantial effort into socialising, and yet it seems to me that they are not getting much return for their efforts. In different ways, their efforts are going wrong, and to see this in action is like seeing a plane going down an endless runway but never taking off. I sometimes wonder if the pilot even knows there is such a thing as flying. Grinding the hours does not on its own lead to mastery. It's how you use them.

What about something like this? http://nyscf.org/images/pdf/biopsy_flyer_versionweb.pdf?study_id=17&participant_id=51644acd8255dc3ede4fa494b7def28831554d6a . I'm not sure if they'd store the samples at a timescale long enough to be relevant though (aka, 4+ decades).

How important is it, though, that the cells be your own cells? In several decades, we may have even better tools to deal with the transplant rejection that stems from regenerated organs with different genomic material.

==

FWIW here is a relevant article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scienc... (read more)

0ChristianKl
He might also simply make stem cells out of aged cells of our own bodies. There are already cases where it's possible to reverse a cell.

Well, it's a growth factor. Even IGF1 and growth hormone can rejuvenate old tissue, but they don't make one age any more slowly (though they can make one more robust up to the end).

Do you think that growth factors like these can accelerate aging in the end though? Reductions in growth factor signalling are often associated with increases in longevity, especially since many growth factors increase mTOR signalling (which often results in lowered rates of protein autophagy). I'm not sure how GDF11 would impact mTOR signalling though.

==

Edit: Or is it really a... (read more)

Hm - thanks for the feedback. I've decided to edit my answers to think them out more (so that they're hopefully more convincing - though they might not be convincing yet). Of course - this is not the goal of rationality. I've just realized that some of my past rationalizations suck.

I am very well aware that people generally suck at evaluating themselves (especially given sunk costs and post hoc rationalizations). But I emphatically assign an extremely high probability to getting AoK as being one of the best decisions of my life ever (some of the other things I've bulleted though - I actually assign lower probabilities to).

Oh yes - definitely! I think the San Francisco Bay Area is best (public transport is amazing, the culture is amazing, there are lots of smart students from Stanford/Berkeley, and people are very tech-oriented).

The Boston area is probably second best, probably followed by NYC. Beyond that, it's harder to find people for social discovery.

2Metus
Which would need me to relocate from Germany to the United States. Also I hear rent is ridiculous and public transportation atrocious.

In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating). Show people who think academics or hard sciences are the obvious path that all sorts of "soft skills" are actually very valuable even in their presumptive careers, but can also open their eyes to other paths.

Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.

Oh yes! I think that expa... (read more)

Good replies.

Regarding UnCollege -they charge tuition of $14k-$15k/year (see http://www.uncollege.org/program/ ). It's certainly not the way I would fund such a service, but we'll see if it works in the long term..

Hmm.. Yeah.. reddit isn't going to be the easiest medium to advertise on.. You could also try http://www.reddit.com/r/highschool, maybe, though I'm not sure if it'll work. Maybe you could use another page on Cognito Mentoring to advertise on reddit?

It's also important to note that K-12 education tends to infantilize people in general (and restrain their imagination of what's possible and what isn't). Many (though not all) 16-18 year old homeschooled students can have incredible levels of maturity and self-awareness.

I'm curious: what sorts of communities are they most familiar with? What did they think of College Confidential? And what were the subreddits that they were most familiar with?

"I think you are likely making a strategic mistake by focusing on outreach instead of focusing on building a place where people want to go."

I agree - I think it would be nice to create a Facebook group (at least). Forums/subreddits could also work, although I'm not sure if they would gain much traction at this stage.

I'm curious - what do you think of UnCollege and how it manages to advertise/fund itself? Would you be interested in following a similar model?

Also - what about advertising on sites like College Confidential and reddit? It probably wouldn't run well with the mods there if you advertised too much, but doing it once might work.

I think getting in touch with the homeschooling community might also provide some ideas. People in those communities can be incredibly motivated and resourceful.

4JonahS
Thanks for the thoughts! I've visited UnCollege once. The participants there seemed very curious and open to experience. I don't know enough about the program itself to make an assessment, though my superficial impressions were favorable. I tend to think that going to college is a good idea for almost everyone who's capable of doing well there, and to that extent there's tension between my views and theirs, but in many cases the participants seemed to be delaying college by a single year rather than not attending altogether. I don't know what their funding model is – do you? I assumed that the participants pay. Yeah, I've been hesitant to post to College Confidential because of their strict no-advertising policy. I made a few of our posts to Reddit, but didn't get any upvotes. We've done some of this (e.g. Gifted Homeschoolers Forum links an article that I wrote about college admissions for home schoolers, but we can probably do more. Thanks.

Thanks for that excellent reply - that pretty much describes my social life too. :)

The one school that Chicago seems comparable to is Caltech, but Caltech students do seem to be more cliquish (due to the house system) and also probably less "intellectually promiscuous".

Thanks very much for that reply! And I think you're right about that. There are very few non-LAC schools where the undergrads actually expect to be grad students in the future. So that's probably enough to make Chicago unique. Whereas at a place like Stanford, they might disdain the grad students since there is so much social pressure to join startups rather than grad school.

Oh okay I see.

Just wondering - are people in the dormitories somewhat cliquish? Or are the cliques less extreme than at other schools? And do they open up more easily than most students at other schools? In public universities, people often largely stick with their peer groups from high school (so I can never really join). And I've heard that people often become cliquish in the other elite schools too. Stanford undergrads even mistreat Stanford grad students (see http://www.quora.com/Why-do-Stanford-undergrads-mistreat-grad-students ). But Chicago seems like it would be the least cliquish, based on the limited stuff I know about it so far.

1TimS
Another UChicago alum. FWIW, my experience as an undergrad was that there wasn't all that much social mixing between the undergrads and the graduate students. I'm sure it occurred some, but the difference in life stage between those two populations was sufficiently large that mixing did not occur naturally. My impression was the grad students were aloof from the undergrads, not that the undergrads were hostile to grad students (undergrad hostility would surprise me, since many undergrads at UChicago thought they would be graduate students some time in the future). Most student groups I participated in were overwhelmingly undergrad, such that a graduate student would stand out. But I mostly participated in academic competition groups (Mock Trial, Parliamentary Debate) that wouldn't have allowed graduate students to participate in the actual competitions.
2orthonormal
I almost never found it cliquish, which is different from what I've heard of other elite schools. People are either notably shy or willing to talk to anyone, anytime, about their favorite intellectual topics. (I guess what I'm saying is that the UChicago autism bell curve is a few standard deviations to the right of the usual one...)

Wow - very nice. :) And very good points. :)

Do you know if PhD students are allowed to join these dining hall conversations?

0orthonormal
That would be a bit unusual in the dormitory dining halls (and it should also be noted that their food is terrible), but pretty feasible at Bartlett Commons or the Reynolds Club. Or you could crash conversations at one of the campus coffee shops. I don't want to make it sound like all U of C students have conversations like this, but I could almost always find one happening. (It helped that I made friends with other people who liked abstract arguments.)

Oh wow - that's so interesting! I would love to join a LW group there if I end up coming.

"Over half of the student population at UChicago is atheist/agnostic"

Isn't that true for most elite universities?

4orthonormal
UChicago alum speaking. I loved the school, for reasons very similar to why I love Less Wrong. More students there are philosophically inclined, idiosyncratic, and generally willing to entertain strange arguments than at any other school I know of. LW meetups at their best remind me of the dining hall conversations at the U of C. The proportion of atheists may be also high at some of the Ivy League schools, but that atheism generally has a relativist flavor rather than a rationalist one, and people there are less willing to deal with ideas contrary to that worldview. The traditional UChicago student will actually give an absurd but well-argued idea a genuine hearing! Major caveat, though: graduate departments are always very different from the undergraduate college.

Ah - thanks for the feedback! And yeah - does anyone know if a moderator could change the title of this?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

To see a list of all the quizzes, see http://www.yourmorals.org/all_morality_values_quizzes.php

Haha - this is interesting: http://www.yourmorals.org/bigfive_process.php - for some reason - us LWers are less conscientiousness than others. I wonder why (or actually, I just noticed a sample size of 3 - I wonder if this will stand with more samples).

http://www.yourmorals.org/schwartz_process.php - love it how we all score 0 on traditionalism

http://www.yourmorals.org/5f_new2_process.php - we're lower than everyone on all counts

2gwern
Looks like it. Right now here's the current graph: Up to 63 LWers, but C is still 3.4 vs 2.8.
0thomblake
Now we're a bit higher on traditionalism, but we're still beating everyone on achievement. (what do we win?)
0gwern
I rated as more Conscientious (but less agreeable and extroverted!). That may just be because I'm impressed by its importance and have worked on it.

meshes well with findings that the more children parents have the less they subscribe to nurture, since they finally, possibly for the first time ever, get some hands on experience with the nurture (nurture as in stuff like upbringing not nurture as in lead paint) versus. nature issue

Interesting - where are these findings reported?

I agree - though since most people have gross misunderstandings of genetics, then they might also think - "Well - they have the same parents and yet they're still so different!"- so then they might ascribe less to heredity too (and more to birth order or certain other environmental influences)

Why not create a Steam group for LW?

Well, both statements could be true. Most popular Internet forums are over-represented by atheists [1], so the result is that many of the Christians (especially the conservative ones) get driven out and congregate on other forums (which may, in turn, not form particularly representative samples of the population)

Here's the other nail-biter: I'd actually suspect that Aspies might be over-represented among the highly-religious as well (though not as much among the non-religious). But they may also be especially likely to be driven out of wrongplanet

[1] relat... (read more)

Their neurotypical comparison group was golivewire.com...

People who go on forums in the first place are frequently much less religious than average.

This is definitely true for numerous non-autistic forum as well (I've conducted polls). Among online communities I know where an overwhelming majority of the population is non-religious...

  • HeavenGames
  • Interesting Nonetheless (INTL), an offshoot of HeavenGames
  • Reddit
  • Social Anxiety Forums
  • College Confidential (though the ratio there is only around 60%)
  • Digg (the old digg, anyways).
  • Quora
  • I'm pretty sure it's
... (read more)
0gwern
Que?

"Not professing opposition" is different from supporting it. Sorry for not making it more clear.

If someone has no public view on the issue - that's fine. It's a completely different thing if they actively take the irrational view (like supporting it)

My signal is usually someone's beliefs on certain controversial issues that arouse emotional gut responses in most people.

E.g., someone's view of the war on drugs is a pretty good signal of how rational they are - to a limited extent (although opposing it doesn't mean that they'll have Razib Khan or Robin Hanson levels of rationality). Mostly though, it just filters out irrational people (and it does a better job at filtering out irrational people than, say, views on abortion).

I do generally investigate more deeply though - beliefs on the public educatio... (read more)

0__Emil__
A rational reason for not professing opposition to the war on drugs is that you do not want to lose status. Surely your tests are for identifying contrarians?

Do you think that the original SC helps as much? You have to do a lot of "clickfesting" in SC1, which you're spared from doing in SC2. Which means much more thinking in SC2. Wow.

0Alexei
I don't know. I never cared to get good at SC. With SC2 I actually practiced and tried to get better. But your intuition makes sense to me, and I want to agree.

Holy crap - seriously?

The thing is - it's SO incredibly easy to play Starcraft 2 lazily. Which is why most people don't improve. But if you force yourself to improve, maybe there's a mechanism? I actually posted such a thread here: http://www.quora.com/In-Starcraft-2-how-do-you-deal-with-game-theoretic-anticipation-chains-the-enemy-anticipating-that-you-anticipate-that-the-enemy-anticipate-that-you-might-do-X

====

Here was my original question: In Starcraft 2, how do you deal with game-theoretic anticipation chains? (the enemy anticipating that you anticipat... (read more)

0Alexei
From all the SC2 games I've played and watched, there is very little anticipation and prepared counter. In other words, yes, your opponent might think you'll do X, but there is a small chance they'll actually prepare to counter X. (Unless it's something really really basic, like seeing a fast rash from your opponent and reacting by building more defenses.) Most of the time you can reliably predict that your opponents will do what they've always done.

Oh interesting. Maybe things are different between the East Coast and the West Coast? The West Coast seems to care less about rules/social norms/richness.

1NancyLebovitz
You should definitely count this as one data point, which might not even generalize to other cities or more expensive restaurants.

Surprisingly, overtipping can be pretty rational (well, at least according to Yishan Wong, who is quite a rational person, based on his posts on Quora)

http://www.quora.com/Life-Advice/What-life-lessons-are-counter-intuitive-or-go-against-common-sense-or-wisdom

Overtip everywhere you go. Usually, the only way to be treated like royalty at restaurants and service establishments is to be a celebrity (or royalty). The other way is to be the person known for tipping well. Especially at places you frequent often, make a point of tipping extremely well - at l

... (read more)
0Desrtopa
My experience is the same as Nancy's; where I live, I think you would have to consistently tip 30% or up before you would start to become memorable to the staff.
3NancyLebovitz
I thought 20% was standard these days. It certainly doesn't get me noticed in Philadelphia.

Hm interesting - how would the trustfund exactly work?

Yeah - I'd be scared of bankruptcy too.

Now that I think about it though, here's a possibly motivational factor: If the company fails to keep some bodies frozen, then confidence in it will drastically drop (especially for issues like this) and new patients will really stop paying for it. The influx of new patients is one factor that might help pay for it.

The economics might be scalable if only hundreds or thousands of bodies are frozen. Which will probably end up being the case. But significantly more t... (read more)

3fubarobfusco
If the maintenance of existing frozen patients depends on an increasing influx of new patients, then what you have there is a pyramid scheme. If, on the other hand, you can expect to benefit from economics of scale, then the number of new patients needed over time to keep the business alive may stabilize, in which case it's not a pyramid. Something else to consider: Once the revival technology works, you're not going to revive all the frozen people at once. You're only going to revive those whose underlying medical problem can be fixed. And the frozen heads pretty much have to wait for upload tech. Once you start reviving, you now have a small population of extremely grateful people. But, by the above assumption, you're going to have fewer people getting frozen because more underlying medical problems can just be fixed without freezing and waiting.

Hm, well, I'm not asking LW to criticize them - I'm just inquiring about what LW thinks about their ideas (since LW is the only community whose input I would really consider). Right now, I'm pretty much an uncritical fanboy of them, but I'd still like to update my beliefs with some discussion (of course I'll always respect them a lot)

Oh cool - thanks for the reply and examples!

Which of his ideas are you skeptical about?

Okay. The one thing is that these writers are so diverse that it's hard to summarize them all in one post.

But basically, they're all contrarians who question the very models that most people (including academics) follow. Basically, they're all about taking risks, short incremental bursts of productivity, and economics based on non-financial principles of values. Are they right on everything? Who knows. But it's refreshing to see what they say.

E.g. here's one of Venkat's good quotes (I can't take too much) - from http://www.quora.com/What-careers-or-industr... (read more)

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