All of KatieHartman's Comments + Replies

I'm much less (emotionally) motivated to try new things/deviate from my routine than I'd like to be, especially when an intervention's purpose is to improve something I'm currently not doing very well at. For example, I feel a lot more motivated to try something that might further improve a project that's already going very well than I am to try something that might turn around a project that's failing. I suspect that this is related to ugh fields. Any suggestions?

0whales
I have one project that came to mind immediately when I read your comment, so I feel like I know what you mean. A fix turned out to be "tell a friend I want to do X, and ask her to remind + encourage me when the appropriate chance comes up." But social-commitment-type things don't always apply. I have more experience with projects that started becoming aversive, and that pushed me harder (both emotionally and otherwise) to tweak my approach, which in the end led to renewed focus and progress. Having those examples available helps motivate me in situations where I don't otherwise want to attend to operations long enough to change them from their default. Could the same be true for you? That's the only general suggestion I have.

I'm up for committing to the first week and then continuing if it seems useful. :)

0pinyaka
Fair enough. Let us know what you think of the class at the Google group here.

It actually seems pretty difficult to see how having children would, on average, be anywhere near as strong an option if your outcome measures are (1) number of children who would otherwise would not exist/reach adulthood and (2) number of children produced using your (presumably much better than donor-average) genetic material.

There are a lot of factors that influence the cost to raise a child (e.g. family income, number of children in a single household), but the USDA's figures suggest that even a relatively low-income family ($0-60k combined household ... (read more)

Is there any good reason for having children you don't particularly want to have rather than (a) donating lots of high-quality gametes and (b) giving some or all of the money you would've spent on child-rearing to an organization that prevents the premature deaths of other children?

2Apprentice
I never meant to argue that there was no way you could not have children and come out ahead in the moral calculus. Your suggestion, for example, might well work, yes. The market for donated gametes is limited - but not necessarily saturated, as David Gerard keeps pointing out. So contributing there may well do a lot of good on the margin.

This could be changed by promoting efficient altruism, creating local meetups of efficient altruists, etc. It's not only to find new altruists, but to give some social bonus (= warm fuzzies) to both existing and the new ones.

There's a significant difference between selling effective altruism to non-EAs and selling a specific effective charity to non-EAs. I suspect that the former is both more valuable (in the long term) and more difficult. Upping the warm-fuzzies seems to me like it would work toward both (as well as EA retention, although I know of no ... (read more)

3Viliam_Bur
Effective altruists who want to maximize their total donations over lifetime -- as opposed to signal the highest virtue today, and then risk burning out tomorrow -- should accept the warm fuzzies at least when they come reasonably cheap, and not role-play a Straw Vulcan Mother Theresa. "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." Meeting with people who share the same values, assuming you don't have to literally travel far, gives in my opinion a lot of cheap warm fuzzies. And could be used to convert new people. Also networking can help to increase one's income so they can donate more. Maybe someone already thought about this, but if they didn't... if you have at least five effective altruists in your area, you should arrange a meetup once in a month, preferably in a place where other people can join you and talk with you (e.g. on a local campus). But I consider it possible that a marketing campaign designed by professionals, could have even greater impact. Still, if the campaign attracts a few new people, the regular meetups may help them stay. Also they would have a place they could bring their friends to talk with the more experienced effective altruists. (Disclosure: I am not an effective altruist. I just enjoy telling other people what they should do. That does not make me automatically wrong, although it makes it more likely that I missed some important aspect of the situation. Maybe someone already has done all my suggestions that make sense.)

Yes!

Tangentially related: I've wondered whether there might be high expected value for creating an organization (perhaps a temporary one, or one existing within a larger existing org) dedicated to figuring out how to sell EA charities effectively. There is already a growing body of research on charitable giving, but the opportunities are hardly tapped out. There seems to be an understanding that donating to EA charities tends to provide fewer warm-fuzzies than giving to their (most successful) non-EA counterparts, but few people talking about it seem to consider this very dire or changeable.

1Viliam_Bur
Almost certainly yes. I mean, it if helps to create more effective altruists than it has members, it already is a net benefit. Actually, its members don't even have to be effective altruists, only the ones who make decisions (to make sure that the organization remains promoting effective altruism and that it uses a correct definition). So the best structure would be to have a group of effective altruists as supervisors, a few employees selected by their expertise (they don't even have to be altruists of any kind), and a group of volunteers (e.g. students who want to be altruists, but don't have any significant income yet; again it's not necessary for them to be effective altruists). Meta-charities like GiveWell are a multiplier, in the sense that they help altruists to donate their money to higher-impact causes instead of lower-impact causes. But if we had dozen of GiveWell's, they would not multiply each other; they wouldn't even add to each other, because at the end they would help to redirect the same amounts of money. But an organization promoting effective altruism and creating new effective altruists would be another multiplier. This could be changed by promoting efficient altruism, creating local meetups of efficient altruists, etc. It's not only to find new altruists, but to give some social bonus (= warm fuzzies) to both existing and the new ones. So it seems to me this should be a high priority.

It's an interesting theory, but I'm hesitant to give much weight to weakly-supported hypotheses intended to explain very broad and inclusive phenomena, like "murders (or a lack thereof) occurring within these arbitrary geographical borders." This is especially true when there's no shortage of plausible theories and a lot of potentially-useful information is missing.

The changeling myths seem to serve the purpose of guilt-relief only insofar as they also aid shame-relief, so I''m not sure they're all that helpful. (Am I missing something?)

Basically, this reads to me like an interesting but not particularly credible just-so story.

This seems irresponsible and unwise when you have substantial fixed costs, all necessary for core activities, and not much in the way of back-up resources. I can see it feasibly leading to a bunch of problems, including (a) the incentive to save up financial resources rather than put them to use toward high-EV activities and (b) difficulty hiring staff smart enough to realize that the resources from which their salaries are paid out will be highly variable month-to-month.

-5brazil84

I just googled it. I suspect that the "refined" in "refined carbohydrates" is a stand-in for "bad, for reasons left unspecified."

2tut
Refined means that somebody has done something to it. Like for example purified it or changed it to something sweeter that get digested faster.

Having spent a fair amount of time around CFAR staff, in the office and out, I can testify to their almost unbelievable level of self-reflection and creativity. (I recall, several months ago, Julia joking about how much time in meetings was spent discussing the meetings themselves at various levels of meta.) For what it's worth, I can't think of an organization I'd trust to have a greater grasp on its own needs and resources. If they're pushing fundraising, I'd estimate with high confidence that it's because that's where the bottleneck is.

I think donating ... (read more)

6SarahNibs
Do you know why CFAR's probability experiment reports have stopped after exactly one? Did they stop performing experiments? Were the results uninteresting and they decided not to write them up despite their claim that they would? I'd also love to see their underlying data for even the first experiment but no one's sharing. Should I offer them money to release the data instead?

I'm not sure what you mean by "valid" here - could you clarify? I will say that I think a world where beings are deriving utility from the perception of causing suffering without actually causing suffering isn't inferior to a world where beings are deriving the same amount of utility from some other activity that doesn't affect other beings, all else held equal. However, it seems like it might be difficult to maintain enough control over the system to ensure that the pro-suffering beings don't do anything that actually causes suffering.

0Said Achmiz
Sure. By "valid" I mean something like "worth preserving", or "to be endorsed as a part of the complex set of values that make up human-values-in-general". In other words, in the scenario where we're effectively omnipotent (for this purpose, at least), and have decided that we're going to go ahead and satisfy the values of all morally relevant beings — are we going to exclude some values? Or exclude some beings on the basis of their values? For example: should we, in such a scenario, say: "we'll satisfy the values of all the humans, except the psychopaths/sharks/whoever; we don't find their values to be worth satisfying, so they're going to be excluded from this"? I would guess, for instance, that few people here would say: yeah, along with satisfying the values of all humans, let's also satisfy the values of all the paperclip maximizers. We don't find paperclip maximization to be a valid value, in that sense. So my question to you is where you stand on all of that. Are there invalid values? Would you, in fact, try to satisfy Clippy's values as well as those of humans? If not, how about sharks? Psychopaths? Etc.? Ok. Actually, I could take that as an answer to at least some of my above questions, but if you want to expand a bit on what I ask in this post, that would be cool. Well, sure. But let's keep this in the least convenient possible world, where such non-fundamental issues are somehow dealt with.

It strikes me as folly, too. But "Let's go kill the sharks, then!" does not necessarily follow from "Predation is not anywhere close to optimal." Nowhere have I (or anyone else here, unless I'm mistaken) argued that we should play with massive ecosystems now.

I'm very curious why you don't feel any need to exterminate or modify predators, assuming it's likely to be something we can do in the future with some degree of caution and precision.

0Said Achmiz
There's something about this sort of philosophy that I've wondered about for a while. Do you think that deriving utility from the suffering of others (or, less directly, from activities that necessarily involve the suffering of others) is a valid value? Or is it intrinsically invalid? That is, if we were in a position to reshape all of reality according to our whim, and decided to satisfy the values of all morally relevant beings, would we also want to satisfy the values of beings that derive pleasure/utility from the suffering of others, assuming we could do so without actually inflicting disutility/pain on any other beings? And more concretely: in a "we are now omnipotent gods" scenario where we could, if we wanted to, create for sharks an environment where they could eat fish to their hearts' content (and these would of course be artificial fish without any actual capacity for suffering, unbeknownst to the sharks) — would we do so? Or would we judge the sharks' pleasure from eating fish to be an invalid value, and simply modify them to not be predators? The shark question is perhaps a bit esoteric; but if we substitute "psychopaths" or "serial killers" for "sharks", it might well become relevant at some future date.
2Richard_Kennaway
That sort of intervention is too far in the future for me to consider it worth thinking about. People of the future can take care of it then. That applies even if I'm one of those people of the far future (not that I expect to be). Future-me can deal with it, present-me doesn't care or need to care what future-me decides. In contrast, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and the like are worth exterminating now, because (a) unlike the beautiful big fierce animals, they're no loss in themselves, (b) it doesn't appear that their loss will disrupt any ecosystems we want to keep, and (c) we actually can do it here and now.

Yes, I'm using "natural lifespan" here as a placeholder for "the typical lifespan assuming nothing is actively trying to kill you." It's not great language, but I don't think it's obviously tautological.

The shark's "natural" lifespan requires that it eats other creatures. Their "natural" lifespan requires that it does not.

Yes. My question is whether that's a system that works for us.

2Richard_Kennaway
We can say, "Evil sharks!" but I don't feel any need to either exterminate all predators from the world, nor to modify them to graze on kelp. Yes, there's a monumental amount of animal suffering in the ordinary course of things, even apart from humans. Maybe there wouldn't be in a system designed by far future humans from scratch. But radically changing the one we live in when we hardly know how it all works -- witness the quoted results of overfishing shark -- strikes me as quixotic folly.

If you eliminate some species because you think they're mean, you're going to damage a lot more.

I'd just like to point out that (a) "mean" is a very poor descriptor of predation (neither its severity nor its connotations re: motivation do justice to reality), and (b) this use of "damage" relies on the use of "healthy" to describe a population of beings routinely devoured alive well before the end of their natural lifespans. If we "damaged" a previously "healthy" system wherein the same sorts of things were happening to humans, we would almost certainly consider it a good thing.

1Richard_Kennaway
If "natural lifespans" means what they would have if they weren't eaten, it's a tautology. If not, what does it mean? The shark's "natural" lifespan requires that it eats other creatures. Their "natural" lifespan requires that it does not.

For the record, the chicken that survived had retained most of the brainstem. He was able to walk ("clumsily') and attempted some reflexive behaviors, but he was hardly "functional" to anyone who knows enough about chickens to assume that they do more than walk and occasionally lunge at the ground.

The chicken's ability to survive with only the brain stem isn't shocking. Anencephalic babies can sometimes breathe, eat, cry, and reflexively "respond" to external stimuli. One survived for two and a half years. This was a rare case, but... (read more)

I like Beyond Meat, but I think the praise for it has been overblown. For example, the Effective Animal Activism link you've provided says:

[Beyond Meat] mimics chicken to such a degree that renowned New York Times food journalist and author Mark Bittman claimed that it "fooled me badly in a blind tasting".

But reading Bittman's piece, the reader will quickly realize that the quote above is taken out of context:

It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both a

... (read more)
0A1987dM
I dunno -- look at all the brouhaha about genetically modified food.
9wedrifid
It seems overwhelmingly unlikely that the optimal method of meat production is to have it walking around eating plant matter and going 'Moo!'.
0Osiris
I predict a big drop in price soon after vat meat becomes sufficiently popular due to money saved on dealing with useless organs and suffering, as well as a great big leap in profit for any farm that sells "natural cow meat." One is inherently efficient due to it simplfying farming. The other is pretty, however ugly it is for the animals. I do worry about the numbers New Harvest gives, but in the long run, there is hope for this regardless of what the price is initially--the potential for success in feeding humanity cheaply and well is just too great, in my opinion. Seems like I will be pushing "meat in a bucket" whenever possible, and I am not even that into making animals happy.

If AMF can add about 30 years of healthy human life for $2000 by averting malaria and a human is worth 40x that of a chicken, then we'd need to pay less than $1.67 to avert a year of suffering for a chicken (assuming averting a year of suffering is the same as adding a year of healthy life, which is a messy assumption).

This might be a minor point, but I don't think it's necessarily a given that one year of healthy, average-quality life offsets one year of factory farm-style confinement. If we were only discussing humans, I don't think anyone would consider a year under those conditions to be offset by a healthy year.

Do you consider young children and very low-intelligence people to be morally-relevant?

(If - in the case of children - you consider potential for later development to be a key factor, we can instead discuss only children who have terminal illnesses.)

2Said Achmiz
Good question. Short answer: no. Long answer: When I read Peter Singer, what I took away was not, as many people here apparently did, that we should value animals; what I took away is that we should not value fetuses, newborns, and infants (to a certain age, somewhere between 0 and 2 years [1]). That is, I think the cutoff for moral relevant is somewhere above, say, cats, dogs, newborns... where exactly? I'm not sure. Humans who have a general intelligence so low that they are incapable of thinking about themselves as conscious individuals are also, in my view, not morally relevant. I don't know whether such humans exist (most people with Down syndrome don't quite seem to fit that criterion, for instance). There are many caveats and edge cases, for instance: what if the low-intelligence condition is temporary, and will repair itself with time? Then I think we should consider the wishes of the self that the person was before the impairment, and the rights of their future, non-impaired, selves. But what if the impairment can be repaired using medical technology? Same deal. What if it can't? Then I would consider this person morally irrelevant. What if the person was of extremely low intelligence, and had always been so, but we could apply some medical intervention to raise their intelligence to at least normal human level? I would consider that act morally equivalent to creating a new sapient being (whether that's good or bad is a separate question). So: it's complicated. But to answer practical questions: I don't consider infanticide the moral equivalent of murder (although it's reasonable to outlaw it anyway, as birth is good Schelling point, but the penalty should surely be nowhere near as harsh as for killing an adult or older child). The rights of low-intelligence people is a harder issue partly because there are no obvious cutoffs or metrics. I hope that answers your question; if not, I'll be happy to elaborate further.

We're treading close to terminal values here. I will express some aesthetic preference for nature qua nature.

That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value. In those terms, nature is bad. Really, really bad.

I also recognize a libertarian attitude that we should allow other individuals to live the lives they choose in the environments they find themselves to the extent reasonably possible.

It seems arbitrary to exclude the environment from the cluster of factors that go into living &... (read more)

2elharo
An example of the importance of predators I happened across recently: "Safer Waters", Alisa Opar, Audubon, July-August 2013, p. 52 This is just one example of the importance of top-level predators for everything in the ecosystem. Nature is complex and interconnected. If you eliminate some species because you think they're mean, you're going to damage a lot more.
A1987dM110

That strikes me as inconsistent, assuming that preventing suffering/minimizing disutility is also a terminal value.

Two values being in conflict isn't necessarily inconsistent, it just mean that you have to make trade-offs.

1elharo
There's a lot here, and I will try to address some specific points later. For now, I will say that personally I do not espouse utilitarianism for several reasons, so if you find me inconsistent with utilitarianism, no surprise there. Nor do I accept the complete elimination of all suffering and maximization of pleasure as a terminal value. I do not want to live, and don't think most other people want to live, in a matrix world where we're all drugged to our gills with maximal levels of L-dopamine and fed through tubes. Eliminating torture, starvation, deprivation, deadly disease, and extreme poverty is good; but that's not the same thing as saying we should never stub our toe, feel some hunger pangs before lunch, play a rough game of hockey, or take a risk climbing a mountain. The world of pure pleasure and no pain, struggle, or effort is a dystopia, not a utopia, at least in my view. I suspect that giving any one single principle exclusive value is likely a path to a boring world tiled in paperclips. It is precisely the interaction among conflicting values and competing entities that makes the world interesting, fun, and worth living in. There is no single principle, not even maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, that does not lead to dystopia when it is taken to its logical extreme and all other competing principles are thrown out. We are complicated and contradictory beings, and we need to embrace that complexity; not attempt to smooth it out.

We need to value the species as a whole, not just the individual members; and we need to value their inherent nature as predators and prey.

Why?

While zoos have their place, we should not seek to move all wild creatures into safe, sterile environments with no predators, pain, or danger any more than we would move all humans into isolated, AI-created virtual environments with no true interaction with reality.

Assuming that these environments are (or would be) on the whole substantially better on the measures that matter to the individual living in them, why shouldn't we?

1elharo
We're treading close to terminal values here. I will express some aesthetic preference for nature qua nature. However I also recognize a libertarian attitude that we should allow other individuals to live the lives they choose in the environments they find themselves to the extent reasonably possible, and I see no justification for anthropocentric limits on such a preference. Absent strong reasons otherwise, "do no harm" and "careful, limited action" should be the default position. The best we can do for animals that don't have several millennia of adaptation to human companionship (i.e. not dogs, cats, and horses) is to leave them alone and not destroy their natural habitat. Where we have destroyed it, attempt to restore it as best we can, or protect what remains. Focus on the species, not the individual. We have neither the knowledge nor the will to protect individual, non-pet animals. When you ask, "Assuming that these environments are (or would be) on the whole substantially better on the measures that matter to the individual living in them, why shouldn't we?" it's not clear to me whether you're referring to why we shouldn't move humans into virtual boxes or why we shouldn't move animals into virtual boxes, or both. If you're talking about humans, the answer is because we don't get to make that choice for other humans. I for one have no desire to live my life in Nozick box, and will oppose anyone who tries to put me in one while I'm still capable of living a normal life. If you're referring to animals, the argument is similar though more indirect. Ultimately humans should not take it upon themselves to decide how another species lives. The burden of proof rests on those who wish to tamper with nature, not those who wish to leave it alone.

That seems plausible, though PETA already has a million-dollar prize for anyone who can mass-market an in-vitro meat product. Given their annual revenues (~$30 million) and the cost associated with that kind of project, it seems like they're going about it the wrong way.

From a utilitarian perspective, wireheading livestock might be an even better option - though that probably would be perceived by most animal activists (and people in general) as vaguely dystopian.

2ialdabaoth
I find this interesting, because it seems to imply that people have an intuitive sense that eudaimonia applies to animals. I'll have to think about the consequences of this.
3[anonymous]
Does the technology to reliably and cheaply wirehead farmed animals now exist at all? Without claiming expertise, I find that unlikely.

I'm really curious why all of the major animal welfare/rights organizations seem to be putting more emphasis on vegan outreach than on in-vitro meat/genetic modification research. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where any arbitrary (but large) contribution toward vegan outreach leads to greater suffering reduction than the same amount put toward hastening a more efficient and cruelty-free system for producing meat.

0freeze
There are already meat alternatives (seitan, tempeh, tofu, soy, etc.) which provide a meat-like flavor and texture. It's not immediately obvious that in-vitro meat is necessarily more effective than just promoting or refining existing alternatives. I suppose for long-run impact this kind of research may be orders of magnitude more useful though.
1hylleddin
I've wondered about this as well. We can try to estimate New Harvest's effectiveness using the same methodology attempted for SENS research in the comment by David Barry here. I can't find New Harvest's 990 revenue reports, but it's donations are routed through the Network for Good, which has a total annual revenue of 150 million dollars, providing an upper bound. An annual revenue of less than 1000 dollars is very unlikely, so we can use the geometric mean of $400 000 per year as an estimated annual revenue. There are about 500 000 minutes in a year, so right now $1 brings development just over a minute closer.* There currently 24 billion chicken, 1 billion cattle, and 1 billion pigs. Assuming the current factory farm suffering rates as an estimate for suffering rates when artificial/substitute meat becomes available, and assuming (as the OP does) that animals suffer roughly equally, then bringing faux meat one minute closer prevents about (25 billion animals)/(500 000 minutes per year) = 50 animal years of suffering. If we assume that New Harvest has a 10% chance of success, $1 dollar there prevents an expected 5 animal years of suffering, or expressed as in the OP, preventing 1 expected animal year of suffering costs about 20 cents. So, these (very rough) estimates show about similar levels of effectiveness. *Assuming some set amount of money is necessary and the bottleneck and you aren't donating enough for diminishing marginal returns.
3Peter Wildeford
A lot of animal welfare/rights organizations provide funding for in-vitro meat / fake meat, though they don't do much to advertise it. The idea is that these meat substitutes won't take off unless they create some demand for them. Vegan Outreach is one of the biggest funders of Beyond Meat and New Harvest.
2Jabberslythe
Well if vegan/vegetarian outreach is particularly effective then it may do more to develope lab meat than just donating to lab meat causes themselves (because there would be more people interested in this and similar technologies). Additionally, making people vegan/vegetarian may have a stronger effect in promoting anti speciesism in general which seems like it will be of larger overall benefit than just ending factory farming. This seems like it would happen because thoughts follow actions.
CAE_Jones120

There seems to be, based just on my non-rigorous observations, significant overlap between the Vegan/Vegetarian communities and the "Genetically Modified Foods and big Pharma will turn your babies into money-forging cancer" theorists. Obviously not all Vegans are "chemicals=bad because nature" conspiracy theorists, and not all such conspiracy theorists are vegan, but the overlap seems significant. That vocal overlap group strikes me as likely to oppose lab-grown meat because it's unnatural, and then the conspiracy theories will begin. A... (read more)

By the way. One question I always wanted to ask a pro-animal-rights type: would you support a program for the extinction/reductions of the population of predatory animals on the grounds that they cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to their prey?

I've heard this posed as a "gotcha" question for vegetarians/vegans. The socially acceptable answer is the one that caters to two widespread and largely unexamined assumptions: that extinction is just bad, always, and that nature is just generally good. If the questioned responds in any other ... (read more)

0Jiro
It's a "gotcha" question for vegetarians because vegetarians in the real world are seldom vegetarians in a vacuum; their vegetarianism is typically associated and based on a cloud of other ideas that include respect for nature. In other words, it's not a "gotcha" because you would write off the vegetarian who believes it, it's because believing it would undermine his own core, but illogical and unstated, motives.

This was my first reaction, too. I recall my car-buying experience consisting mostly of me trying to keep up with my impressions about seat-feel, head space, visibility, dash design, etc. and trying to somehow aggregate that information with numbers that I really didn't know how to process in the first place (e.g. safety ratings, scores from reviews, prices vs. upkeep costs). It wasn't until I'd pretty much picked out my car that I made an effort to mentally simulate a typical drive.

I'd like to see gamification components - a point system, leaderboard, badges/achievements, etc.

As with the original experiment, the "cat" would be far enough onto the shoulder that it would only be hit if the driver intentionally swerved off of the road. For safety reasons (and to reduce confounds), I'd set it up on a straightaway with wide lanes.

Frankly, if someone is going to regret making the decision to deliberately harm an animal, I'd rather they have their change of heart after "killing" a dummy and not the real thing.

I really, really want to repeat this test with something furry. Anybody know of an affordable toy mammal that might withstand getting hit by an SUV repeatedly?

I once hit some sort of large bird on the highway when it flew directly into my lane from a cluster of bushes off the shoulder. It was so close to me when it entered my lane that all that registered was "white, flying." There was no way I could have avoided hitting it, but I had to pull off the road to bawl over it for a few minutes. I don't expect people to react the same way I did, but I ... (read more)

0DanArmak
Leaving people to believe they just killed a cat, maybe to regret it later, isn't being kind to the people.

I've become an insufferable list-maker. I've been meaning to start a blog, largely to improve my ability to organize and effectively communicate challenging concepts. Every time I sit down to "start work on the blog," I find myself ending up with a stack of lists - what needs to be done, topic ideas, features of the website design, people to partner/affiliate/guest blog with, hooks for a viral video blog, and so on. Rinse and repeat - a new stack of lists every time.

1Viliam_Bur
Something similar happens to me too, though with a shorter list. (I need a responsive design, Atom/RSS feed or even better a few of them, navigable directory structure, links between multilingual versions of the same article, better admin part, support for JQuery and other libraries, syntax highlighting in code examples; and then articles about Java programming, rationality, education; buttons for social networks, a twitter feed... that's what I remember at this moment, without looking at notes.) Technically, the solution is iterative programming: Add one feature and make it all work. Add another feature and make it work. When the basic framework is ready, ask yourself which feature would be most useful to add next. Psychologically, I realized that I am afraid of failure. Often when I start a project, it grows too big in my imagination, and I don't finish it. It helped me to remind myself that I have also completed many projects; and that if I had to the make a similar project in my work, I would do it without problems and actually would consider it an easy project. -- It does not mean my web is finished yet, but it helped me to do some progress yesterday, instead of just avoiding the work.

Thanks, daenerys! :)

2Davorak
From my layman perspective it looks professional and very clean, great job.
1shokwave
Hey everybody, let's upvote this!

I didn't dispute Eugine's argument - I just thought it worthwhile to point out that the evidence itself is obviously confounded. If we consider the confound itself - the gender-based training - evidence of the hypothesis, we're stuck in a tricky chicken-and-egg situation. It wasn't a refutation of Eugine's comment, but I hardly think it's irrelevant.

Do the test with cooks of both genders; their experience of using fridges is unlikely to differ significantly in length.

Unless female cooks are more likely to become professionals as the result of early an... (read more)

1prase
I am not sure if I understand what exactly is tricky in this situation. I assume that "the hypothesis" is something like "the innate psychological differences between the sexes are the main basis for the gender constructs". There is some trickiness associated with the exact meaning of the hypothesis, but no trickiness with the evidence. Remember that the evidence is not the sole existence of gender-based training, but the fact the training is culturally universal. If the division between the roles of men and women were purely arbitrary or based on physical differences, one would expect more variability between cultures; some cultures would have men in kitchens. If women don't stare at open fridges because they are using them every day and have thus have learned how to search there efficiently (that was your suggested hypothesis), then male cooks will also not stare at open fridges because they use them every day. Perhaps female cooks are even better, but if the test is done and it is found that male cooks who spend on average 5 hours a day cooking stare at the fridge significantly more than female non-cooks who spend on average 2 hours a day cooking, there goes your theory. Be it egalitarian. Therefore I haven't suggested doing the fridge test with self-identified feminists, but with women raised in feminist (or egalitarian, if you wish) households. Or, more directly, simply select women who never cook or prepare food. You will certainly find some. In general, I don't say the evidence in any of the discussed examples is strong. But I object to your implicit insistence that it is virtually impossible to test hypotheses about inherited psychological differences between the sexes.

Even if you assume that societies are more likely to structure their gender constructs around innate psychological traits than physical traits (or that the former would result from the latter), you've got a major confound when assessing the strength of the effect.

It's not difficult to show that biological sex predicts some features of perceptual/cognitive ability. It is difficult to show that people of a gender that is generally trained to work with refrigerators have, as an innate feature of their psychology, an effective strategy for searching fridges.

1prase
Eugine's argument was that the probability of societies structuring their gender constructs around innate psychological traits has to be updated upwards on seeing culturally universal gender stereotypes that have something to do with psychology. It doesn't need assumption of high prior on the hypothesis. That's true, but irrelevant with respect to the parent comment. Do the test with cooks of both genders; their experience of using fridges is unlikely to differ significantly in length. Do another test with women raised in feminist families and compare to general population.

One of the major challenges to evo-psych hypotheses about gender is never really tackled in the original comment thread: that women and men are conditioned differently in almost all current and historical societies, so it's almost impossible to differentiate effects of training from inborn psychological phenomena.

Basically: if you're the one who's always been expected to put the groceries away, do the cooking, and set the table, you've probably developed a pretty good strategy for getting the damn ketchup out of the fridge.

Of course, we could always argue ... (read more)

0Dr_Manhattan
relevant: http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
3sixes_and_sevens
Not that I disagree with you, but I've just this second noticed how dangerous "almost impossible" is as an expression.
9Eugine_Nier
This fact (or rather the fact you seem to mean, i.e., that the differences have a similar character across almost all societies) is itself evidence for the evo-psych hypotheses about gender.

It seems that you could use this to argue that nobody ever ought to be born unless we can ensure that they'll never die (assuming they stay dead, as people tend to do now).

3Normal_Anomaly
I bite this bullet to an extent, but I don't think the argument that strong. If someone has a better-than-average life before they die, they can still raise the average, especially if everyone else dies too. I'm not sure how to model that easily; I'm thinking of something like: the utility of a world is the integral of all the utilities of everyone in it (all the utility anyone ever experiences), divided by the number of people who ever existed. In this framework, I think it would be permissible to create a mortal person in some circumstances, but they might be too rare to be plausible.

Could not agree more! I'm suggesting Luke to the new team - they're not particularly interested in the LW crowd, but I think I can probably tempt them by providing some of Luke's atheism-related writings/works.

No, not at the moment. I've passed Skepticon off to next year's crew (just successfully moved out of the area and on to new things), but I'll suggest that they contact speakers about making the slides public.

Bear in mind that even with the information on how to make this virus human transmitable available, it is probably rather difficult without the appropriate facilties to reproduce, so that rules out random lunatics, and realistically its simply not sensible for anyone else to do so.

I don't find this terribly comforting, given that I don't assume that everyone with an interest in biological warfare lacks the funding to create the appropriate facilities. What I do find comforting is the strong suspicion that neither the researchers nor the advisory board w... (read more)

1betterthanwell
What about this guy?
6komponisto
Seconding the thanks for organizing; I also had a great time! Suggestion for next year: invite Luke to talk about why he takes the Singularity seriously.

Upvoted for the clarification. Thanks!

What about laws of physics, or evolution? While true (if technically vague) explanations for actions, they are not true cognitive reasons for actions.

"I don't want to die," for example, is obviously both an emotional preference and the result of the natural evolution of the brain. That the brain is an evolved organ isn't disputed here.

0Vladimir_Nesov
There are explanations of different kinds that hold simultaneously. An explanation of the wrong kind (for example, evolutionary explanation) that is only similar (because of shared reasons) to the relevant explanation (of the right kind, in this case "goals", a normative or at least cognitive explanation) can be used to gain correct answers, used as a heuristic (evolutionary psychology has a bit of predictive power about human behavior and even goals). This further simplifies confusing them, so that instead of a rule of thumb, a source of knowledge, an explanation of the wrong kind would try taking a role that doesn't belong to it, becoming a definition of the thing being sought. For example, "maximizing inclusive fitness" can be believed to be an actual human goal.
3daenerys
Upvoting everyone. This was a really useful conversation, and I'm pretty sure I was wrong, so I definitely learned something. The evolutionary drives example was much more useful to me than the AI example. Thanks! (Though I am still of the opinion that the speech itself was still great without the info; Due to being an introduction to the topic, I still don't expect it to be able to cover everything. )

Goals seem to be indeed significantly determined by emotions in humans. But this is not a defining property of something being a goal, and even in humans not a necessary way of implementing goals.

I don't think she implies that emotions are necessary for implementing a goal - that was the point of mentioning a rationality "filter," which can aid in accurately translating emotional desires into practical goals that best fulfill those desires, and then in translating practical goals into effective actions.

Can we trace the flow chart back to any e... (read more)

5Vladimir_Nesov
That phrase was primarily in reply to daenerys, not Julia. What about laws of physics, or evolution? While true (if technically vague) explanations for actions, they are not true cognitive or decision theoretic or normative reasons for actions. See this post.

Expect the next batch on Monday, including the panel on death (lovingly dubbed the atheist death panel by the moderator, Jesse Galef) featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky, Greta Christina, Julia Galef, and James Croft!

It's possible that they'll be up sooner, but as far as I understand it, our videographer (Rob Lehr) is taking a well-deserved break.

3Dr_Manhattan
Katie, is there any place where the slides are posted for these?
0[anonymous]
Can't wait to see this!
4lavalamp
Yay, the "death panel" was my favorite. I had a great time, thanks for organizing the event!

Kudos to Julia for not only introducing a solid take on the relationship between reasoning and emotion, but also for doing so in a way that had the audience eating out of her hand. Of all the Skepticon talks that dealt with rationality, I think this was received the most enthusiastically.

She handled the impromptu voice-over brilliantly, too! I nearly strangled the sound guy.

I met Jesse Galef last year, and we became fast friends - at which point he practically begged me to read Methods of Rationality and LW. Good on you, Jesse!

This year I was the organizer for Skepticon, a conference that has traditionally concerned itself with the atheist movement. Eliezer, Julia Galef, Richard Carrier, and Spencer Greenberg were kind enough to come speak on topics more pertinent to the rationalist community (Bayes' theorem saw lots of love, and LW was plugged in several of the presentations!). Attendance was just over 1,100, and many of the... (read more)

First, you've got to sound like you're chatting with your reader, like you're giving them an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness access to your ideas as you think them. Second, on no account should you actually do that.

Eliezer is one of the masters at this; his essays are littered with phrases like "y'know" and "pretty much", but they're way too tight to be hastily published first drafts (or maybe I'm wrong and Eliezer is one of the few people in the world who can do this; chances are you're not). You've got to put a lot of work into ma

... (read more)

I'd like to know of a science - any science, social or otherwise - that can be optimally useful without utilizing mathematical analysis.

0[anonymous]
Math can be a very powerful tool. I don't think anybody is arguing against that possibility here?
4Barry_Cotter
I suspect this is like demanding a married bachelor. If you understand something well enough to have a theory that explains a lot about something's characteristics or behaviour you can probably model this abstraction mathematically. And math is unreasonably effective at manipulating abstractions.

I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. ... People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?

It is precisely this kind of thinking, fostered by a pretty low-par early education in math and physics, that led me to believe that knowledge in these areas is virtually useless to just about everyone. And... (read more)

1[anonymous]
Oh wow, now that I look at it again... that is some horrible wording. I apologize. That "instead" should have been "before" or "in addition to." Also, I meant to be talking in relative - not absolute - terms. I repeat, I do not think they are "useless." I am not at all disparaging this fields. Rather, I was trying to say that learning other fields can sometimes be as useful.
-6wedrifid
1Barry_Cotter
Literature, most of the humanities, the social sciences except at high levels of abstraction, i.e. those things that we've evolved to deal with or that are products of those subsystems that we encountered all the time in the EEA.

Many of the examples in the table (especially "values," "bias," and "error") aren't the result of a knowledge gap, but of a simple definitional dispute.

It's not clear to me which is the case, actually. It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that the average layman is almost always primed to read "positive" as "good" rather than "present" or "upward," but that doesn't indicate whether or not he's actually aware of those alternate uses. Maybe he's never been exposed to scientific literature - that wouldn't exactly be shocking.

I wish I could access the original paper the table was published in. Alas!

I'm not sure how valid your point is in practice. Being enthusiastic about hunting does not necessarily indicate a willingness to face the consequences of one's actions, nor does it indicate any particular attitude toward factory farming. It may just indicate a lack of visceral discomfort when encountering animal suffering.

It is plausible that some/many/most hunters simply enjoy pursuing and eating prey, and that the comparative advantages to overall utility make little or no difference to them. In this case, I wouldn't say that the utility advantage says... (read more)