Open Thread, October 27 - 31, 2013

Recent work suggests that dendrites may be able to do substantial computation themselves. This implies that getting decent uploads or getting a decent preservation from cryonics may require a more fine-grained approached than is often expected. Unfortunately, the paper itself seems to be not yet online, but it is by the same group which previously suggested that dendrites could be partially responsible for memory storage.

6VincentYu11y

Smith et al. (2013). Dendritic spikes enhance stimulus selectivity in cortical neurons in vivo. Abstract (emphasis mine):

[-][anonymous]11y170

Sillicon Valley's Ultimate Exit, a speech at Startup School 2013 by Balaji Srinivasan. He opens with the statement that America is the Microsoft of nations, goes into a discussion on Voice, Exit and good governence and continues with the wonderful observation that:

"There’s four cities that used to run the United States in the postwar era: Boston with higher ed; New York City with Madison Avenue, books, Wall Street, and newspapers; Los Angeles with movies, music, Hollywood; and, of course, DC with laws and regulations, formally running it."

He names this the Paper Belt, and claims the Valley has beem unintentionally dumping horse heads in all of their beds for the past 20 years. I would call it The Cathedral and note the NYT does not approve of this kind of talk:

First the slave South, now this.

No seriously, that is the very first line.

7[anonymous]11y

Transcript

1NancyLebovitz11y

I love this speech, but I suspect it's overoptimistic. I believe that bitcoin will be illegal as soon as it's actually needed. Still, I appreciate his appreciation of immigration/emigration. I'm convinced that mmigration/emigration gets less respect than staying and fighting because it's less dramatic, less likely to get people killed, and more likely to work.

3Lumifer11y

That is likely, but note that torrenting Lady Gaga's mp3s is also illegal and yet I have absolutely zero difficulty in finding such torrents on the 'net.

0NancyLebovitz11y

Maintaining a currency takes a much more complicated information structure than letting people make unlimited copies of something.

0Lumifer11y

What do you mean, "maintaining"? Bitcoin was explicitly designed to function in a distributed manner without the need for any central authority.

2RolfAndreassen11y

And consequently it has a much more complicated information structure than torrents do. :) But this aside, while you can likely run the Bitcoin economy as such, if Bitcoins cannot be exchanged for dollars or directly for goods and services, they are worthless; and this is a bottleneck where a government has a lot of infrastructure to insert itself. I suggest that, if Bitcoins become illegal, buying hard drugs is the better analogy than downloading torrents: It won't be impossible, but it'll be much more difficult than setting up a free client and clicking "download".

1Lumifer11y

The differences between the physical and the virtual worlds are very relevant here. Silk Road was blatantly illegal and it took the authorities years to bust its operator, a US citizen. Once similar things are run by, say, Malaysian Chinese out of Dubai with hardware scattered across the world, the cost for the US authorities to combat them would be... unmanageable.

[-]drethelin11y170

What probability should I assign to being completely wrong and brainwashed by Lesswrong? What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic? For each new visitor who comes in and accuses us of messianic groupthink how far should I update in the direction of believing them? Am I going to burn in counter factual hell for even asking?

[-]ChristianKl11y290

If Lesswrong would be good at brainwashing I would expect much more people to have signed up for cryonics.

What steps would one take to get more actionable information on this topic?

Spend time outside of Lesswrong and discuss with smart people. Don't rely on a single community to give you your map of the world.

[-][anonymous]11y180

The first thing you should probably do is narrow down what specifically you feel like you may be brainwashed about. I posted some possible sample things below. Since you mention Messianic groupthink as a specific concern, some of these will relate to Yudkowsky, and some of them are Less Wrong versions of cult related control questions. (Things that are associated with cultishness in general, just rephrased to be Less Wrongish)

Do you/Have you:

1: Signed up for Cyonics.

2: Agressively donated to MIRI.

3: Check for updates on HPMOR more often then Yudkowsky said there would be on the off hand chance he updated early.

4: Gone to meet ups.

5: Went out of your way to see Eliezer Yudkowsky in person.

6: Spend time thinking, when not on Less Wrong: "That reminds me of Less Wrong/Eliezer Yudkowsky."

7: Played an AI Box experiment with money on the line.

8: Attempted to engage in a quantified self experiment.

9: Cut yourself off from friends because they seem irrational.

10: Stopped consulting other sources outside of Less Wrong.

11: Spent money on a product recommended by someone with high Karma (Example: Metamed)

12: Tried to recruit other people to Less Wrong and felt negatively if they de... (read more)

4drethelin11y

1. No 1. I'm a top 20 donor 1. Nope 1. yes. 1. Not really? That was probably some motivation for going to a mincamp but not most of it. 1. Nope. 1. Nope. 1. a tiny amount? I've tracked weight throughout diet changes. 1. Not that I can think of. Certainly no one closer than a random facebook friend. 1. Nope. 1. I've spent money on Modafinil after it's been recommended on here. I could count Melatonin but my dad told me about that years ago. 1. Yes. 1. Nope. 1. I was in an open relationship before I ever heard of Leswrong. 1. HAHAHAHAHAH no. 1. This one is hard to analyze, I've talked about EM hell and so on outside of the context of Lesswrong. Dunno. 1. Seriously considering moving to the bay area.

2ChrisHallquist11y

I'm in the process of doing 1, have maybe done 2 depending on your definition of aggressively (made only a couple donations, but largest was ~$1000), and done 4. Oh, and 11, I got Amazon Prime on Yvain's recommendation, and started taking melatonin on gwern's. Both excellent decisions, I think. And 14, sort of. I once got talked into a "polyamorous relationship" by a woman I was sleeping with, no connection whatsoever to LessWrong. But mostly I just have casual sex and avoid relationships entirely.

2fubarobfusco11y

... huh. I'm a former meetup organizer and I don't even score higher than two on that list. Cool. I think maybe we're not a cult today.

2A1987dM11y

Good. I score 5 out of 16 by interpreting each point the broadest reasonably possible way.

1jefftk11y

Beware: you've created a lesswrong purity test.

[-]Mitchell_Porter11y140

In "The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview", by the Russian computer scientist and Soviet-era dissident Valentin Turchin, in the chapter "The Ideological Hierarchy", Soviet ideology was analyzed as having four levels: philosophical level (e.g. dialectical materialism), socioeconomic level (e.g. social class analysis), history of Soviet Communism (the Party, the Revolution, the Soviet state), and "current policies" (i.e. whatever was in Pravda op-eds that week).

According to Turchin, most people in the USSR regarded the day-to-day propaganda as empty and false, but a majority would still have agreed with the historical framework, for lack of any alternative view; and the number who explicitly questioned the philosophical and socioeconomic doctrines would be exceedingly small. (He appears to not be counting religious people here, who numbered in the tens of millions, and who he describes as a separate ideological minority.)

BaconServ writes that "LessWrong is the focus of LessWrong", though perhaps the idea would be more clearly expressed as, LessWrong is the chief sacred value of LessWrong. You are allowed to doubt the content, you ... (read more)

7Viliam_Bur11y

Or not.

[-]hyporational11y100

Could people list philosophy oriented internet forums with high concentration of smart people and no significant memetic overlap so that one could test this? I don't know any and I think it's dangerous.

2JDelta11y

I would love to see this as well

4TheOtherDave11y

I'd suggest starting by reading up on "brainwashing" and developing a sense of what signs characterize it (and, indeed, if it's even a thing at all). Presumably this depends on how much new evidence they are providing relative to the last visitor accusing us of messianic groupthink, and whether you think you updated properly then. A dozen people repeating the same theory based on the same observations is not (necessarily) significantly more evidence in favor of that theory than five people repeating it; what you should be paying attention to is new evidence.

3Shmi11y

Note that your suggestions are all within the framework of the "accepted LW wisdom". The best you can hope for is to detect some internal inconsistencies in this framework. One's best chance of "deconversion" is usually to seriously consider the arguments from outside the framework of beliefs, possibly after realizing that the framework in question is not self-consistent or leads to personally unacceptable conclusions (like having to prefer torture to specks). Something like that "worked" for palladias, apparently. Also, I once described an alternative to the LW epistemology (my personal brand of instrumentalism), but it did not go over very well.

0TheOtherDave11y

Brainwashing (which is one thing drethlin asked about the probability of) is not an LW concept, particularly; I'm not sure how reading up on it is remaining inside the "accepted LW wisdom." If reading up on brainwashing teaches me that certain signs characterize it, and LW demonstrates those signs, I should increase my estimate that LW is brainwashing people, and consequently that I'm being brainwashed. And, yes, if I conclude that it's likely that I'm being brainwashed, there are various deconversion techniques I can use to negate that. Of course, seriously considering arguments from outside the framework of beliefs is a good idea regardless. Being completely wrong, admittedly, (the other thing drethlin asked about the probability of) doesn't lend itself to this approach so well... it's hard to know where to even start, there.

6ChristianKl11y

Reading up on brainwashing can mean reading gwern's essay which concludes that brainwashing doesn't really work. Of course that's exactly what someone who wants to brainwash yourself would tell you, wouldn't it?

0TheOtherDave11y

Sure. I'm not exactly sure why you'd choose to interpret "read up on brainwashing" in this context as meaning "read what a member of the group you're concerned about being brainwashed by has to say about brainwashing," but I certainly agree that it's a legitimate example, and it has exactly the failure mode you imply.

0Nornagest11y

For what it's worth, gwern's findings are consistent with mine (see this thread). I'd rather restrict "brainwashing" to coercive persuasion, i.e. indoctrinating prisoners of war or what have you, but Scientology, the Unification Church, and so forth also seem remarkably poor at long-term persuasion. It's difficult to find comparable numbers for large, socially accepted religions, or for that matter nontheism -- more of the conversion process plays out in the public sphere, making it harder to delineate, and ulterior motives (i.e. converting to a fiancee's religion) are much more common -- but if you read between the lines they seem to be higher. Deprogramming techniques aren't much better, incidentally -- from everything I've read they range from the ineffective to the abusive, and often have quite a bit in common with brainwashing in the coercive sense. You couldn't apply most of them to yourself, and wouldn't want to in any case.

0Shmi11y

No argument there. What I alluded to is the second part, incremental "Bayesian" updating based on (independent) new evidence. This is more of an LW "inside" thing.

0TheOtherDave11y

Ah! Yes, fair. Sorry, I wasn't trying to be nonresponsive, that reading just didn't occur to me. (Coincidence? Or a troubling sign of epistemic closure?) I will admit, the idea that I should update beliefs based on new evidence, but that repeatedly presenting me with the same evidence over and over should not significantly update my beliefs, seems to me nothing but common sense. Of course, that's just what I should expect it to feel like if I were trapped inside a self-reinforcing network of pernicious false beliefs. So, all right... in the spirit of seriously considering arguments from outside the framework, and given that as a champion of an alternative epistemology you arguably count as "outside the framework", what would you propose as an answer to drethlin's question about how far they should update based on each new critic?

2Shmi11y

Hmm. My suspicion is that formulating the question in this way already puts you "inside the box", since it uses Bayesian terms to begin with. Something like trying to detect problems in a religious moral framework after postulating objective morality. Maybe this is not a good example, but a better one eludes me at the moment. To honestly try to break out of the framework, one has to find a way to ask different questions. I suspect that am too much "inside" to figure out what they could be.

0TheOtherDave11y

(nods) That's fair. And I can certainly see how, if we did not insist on framing the problem in terms of how to consistently update confidence levels based on evidence in the first place, other ways of approaching the "how can I tell if I'm being brainwashed?" question would present themselves. Some traditional examples that come to mind include praying for guidance on the subject and various schools of divination, for example. Of course, a huge number of less traditional possibilities that seem equally unjustified from a "Bayesian" framework (but otherwise share nothing in common with those) are also possible. I'm not terribly concerned about it, though. Then again, I wouldn't be.

3Lumifer11y

Wrong about what? Different subjects call for different probability. The probability that the Bayes Theorem is wrong is vanishingly small. The probability that the UFAI risk is completely overblown is considerably higher. LW "ideology" is an agglomeration in the sense that accepting (or not) a part of it does not imply acceptance (or rejection) of other parts. One can be a good Bayesian, not care about UFAI, and be signed up for cryonics -- no logical inconsistencies here.

2ChrisHallquist11y

As long as the number is small, I wouldn't update at all, because I already expect slow trickle of those people on my current information, so seeing that expectation confirmed isn't new evidence. If LW achieved a Scientology-like place in popular opinion, though, I'd be worried. No.

2Nisan11y

Less Wrong has some material on this topic :) Seriously though, I'd love to see some applied-rationality techniques put to use successfully doubting parts of the applied rationality worldview. I've seen some examples already, but more is good.

0JDelta11y

The biggest weakness, in my opinion, with purely (or almost purely) probabilistic reasoning is the fact that it cannot ultimately do away with us relying on a number of (ultimately faith/belief based) choices as to how we understand our reality. The existence of the past and future (and within most people's reasoning systems, the understanding of these as linear) are both ultimately postulations that are generally accepted at face value, as well as the idea that consciousness/awareness arises from matter/quantum phenomena not vice versa.

7TheOtherDave11y

In your opinion, is there some other form of reasoning that avoids this weakness?

0JDelta11y

That's a very complicated question but I'll try to do my best to answer. In many ancient cultures, they used two words for the mind, or for thinking, and it is still used figuratively today. "In my heart I know..." In my opinion, in terms of expected impact on the course of life for a given subject, generally, more important than their understanding of Bayesian reasoning, is what they 'want' ... how they define themselves. Consciously, and unconsciously. For "reasoning", no I doubt there is a better system. But since we must (or almost universally do) follow our instincts on a wide range of issues (is everyone else p-zombies? am I real? Is my chair conscious? Am I dreaming?), it is highly important, and often overlooked, that one's "presumptive model" of reality and of themselves (both strictly intertwined psychologically) should be perfected with just as much effort (if not more) as we spend perfecting our probabilistic reasoning. Probabilities can't cover everything. Eventually you just have to make a choice as to which concept or view you believe more, and that choice changes your character, and your character changes your decisions, and your decisions are your life. When one is confident, and subconsciously/instinctively aware that they are doing what they should be doing, thinking how they should be thinking, that their 'foundation' is solid (moral compass, goals, motivation, emotional baggage, openness to new ideas, etc.) they then can be a much more effective rationalist, and be more sure (albeit only instinctively) that they are doing the right thing when they act. Those instinctive presumptions, and life-defining self image do have a strong quantifiable impact on the life of any human, and even a nominal understanding of rationality would allow one to realize that. Maximise your own effectiveness. Perfect how your mind works, how you think of yourselves and others (again, instinctive opinions, gut feelings, more than conscious thought, although consc

1TheOtherDave11y

All right. Thanks for clarifying.

0ChristianKl11y

I think the discussion about the value of Bayseanism is good (this post and following).

1DanielLC11y

You'd be crazy not to ask. The views of people on this site are suspiciously similar. We might agree because we're more rational than most, but you'd be a fool to reject the alternative hypothesis out of hand. Especially since they're not mutually exclusive.

1Risto_Saarelma11y

Use culture to contrast with culture. Avoid being a man of a single book and get familiar with some past or present intellectual traditions that are distant from the LW cultural cluster. Try to get a feel for the wider cultural map and how LW fits into it.

0passive_fist11y

I'd say you should assign a very high probability for your beliefs being aligned in the direction LessWrong's are, even in cases where such beliefs are wrong. It's just how the human brain and human society works; there's no getting around it. However, how much of that alignment is due to self-selection bias (choosing to be a part of LessWrong because you are that type of person) or brainwashing is a more difficult question.

[-]lukeprog11y110

From Venter's new book:

As [my team] analyzed the [smallpox] genome, we became concerned about several matters.
The first was whether the government... should allow us to publish our sequencing and analysis... Before the HIV epidemic, the smallpox variola virus had been responsible for the loss of more human life throughout history than all other infectious agents combined...
I eventually found myself in the National Institutes of Health... together with government officials from various agencies, including the department of defense. The group was very understandably worried about the open publication of the smallpox genome data. Some of the more extreme proposals included classifying my research and creating a security fence around my new institute building. It is unfortunate that the discussion did not progress to develop a well-thought-out long-term strategy. Instead the policy that was adopted was determined by the politics of the Cold War. As part of a treaty with the Soviet Union, which had been dissolved at the end of 1990, a minor strain of smallpox was being sequenced in Russia, while we were sequencing a major strain. Upon learning that the Russians were preparing to publi

... (read more)

[-]Shmi11y90

The Sequences probably contain more material than an undergraduate degree in philosophy, yet there is no easy way for a student to tell if they understood the material properly. Some posts contain an occasional question/koan/meditation which is sometimes answered in the same of a subsequent post, but these are pretty scarce. I wonder if anyone qualified would like to compile a problem set for each topic? Ideally with unambiguous answers.

0Vaniver11y

I also think this is a worthwhile endeavor, and speculate that the process and results may be useful for development of a general rationality test, which I know CFAR has some interest in.

[-]Paul Crowley11y90

Is Our Final Invention available as any kind of e-book anywhere? I can find it in hardback, but not for Kindle or any kind of ePub. I'm not going to start carrying around a pile of paper in order to read it!

1Tenoke11y

You can order it to http://1dollarscan.com/ and still read it on your kindle.

0Douglas_Knight11y

What do you mean by "anywhere"? As Vincent Yu mentions, it is available in the US. It hasn't been published in print or ebook in the UK. When you find it in hardback, it's imports, right? If it is published in the UK, it will probably be available as an ebook, but I don't know if that will happen before the US edition is pirated. If you are generally chomping at the bit to read American ebooks, it is worth investing the time to learn if any ebook sellers fails to check national boundaries. The publisher lists six for this book. Probably not useful, but the US edition is available in France. (Rights to publish English-language books in countries that don't speak English aren't very valuable, so the monopolies to the US and UK usually include those rights. So you if you're in France, you can get the ebook first, regardless of whether it's published in the US or UK. Unless they forget to make it available in France.)

0VincentYu11y

I see a Kindle edition on Amazon.

0Paul Crowley11y

That page only shows me a price for the hardcover version. I wonder if it's because I have a UK IP address? How much is the Kindle version?

0Kaj_Sotala11y

I can see it from Finland, lists the price as $16 for me.

0Douglas_Knight11y

I think it is more likely rejecting you based on being logged in than based on IP, since I can see UK and FR results. Google cache of that link, both at google.com and google.co.uk show me the kindle edition. ($11)

[-]Tenoke11y90

Am I the only person getting more and more annoyed of the cult thing? If the whole 'lesswrong is a cult' thing is not a meme that's spreading just because people are jumping on the bandwagon then I don't know what is. Can you seriously not tell? Additionally, From my POV it seems like people starting a 'are we a cult' threads/conversations do it mainly for signaling purposes.

Also, I bet new members wouldn't usually even think about whether we are a cult or not if older members were not talking about it like it is a real possibility all the bloody time. (and yes I know, the claim is not made only by people who are part of the community)

/rant

[-]Mestroyer11y100

It especially annoys me when people respond to evidence-based arguments that LessWrong is not a cult with, "Well where did you come to believe all that stuff about evidence, LessWrong?"

Before LessWrong, my epistemology was basically a more clumsy version of what is now. If you described my present self to my past self, and said "Is this guy a cult victim?" he would ask for evidence. He wouldn't be thinking in terms of Bayes's theorem, but he would be thinking with a bunch of verbally expressed heuristics and analogies that usually added up to the same thing. I used to say things like "Absence of evidence is actually evidence of absence, but only if you would expect to see the evidence if the thing was true and you've checked for the evidence," which I was later delighted to see validated and formalized by probability theory.

You could of course say, "Well, that's not actually your past self, that's your present self (the cult victim)'s memories, which are distorted by mad thinking," but then you're getting into brain-in-a-vat territory. I have to think using some process. If that process is wrong but unable to detect its own wrongness, I'm sc... (read more)

5passive_fist11y

I can identify with this. Reading through the sequences wasn't a magical journey of enlightenment, it was more "Hey, this is what I thought as well. I'm glad Elezier wrote all this down so that I don't have to."

4Mitchell_Porter11y

Something more than a salon and less than a movement, then... English has a big vocabulary, there must be a good word for it.

4Risto_Saarelma11y

What's wrong with 'forum'?

-2Lumifer11y

Ah, just like 4Chan then? X-D

3NancyLebovitz11y

I think people also say things just to get conversation going. We need to look at making it easier to find useful ways of getting attention.

0TheOtherDave11y

Can you expand on this?

2NancyLebovitz11y

I believe that one of the reasons people are boring and/or irritating is that they don't know good ways of getting attention. However, being clever or reassuring or whatever might adequately repay attention isn't necessarily easy. Could it be made easier?

[-]TheOtherDave11y110

(nods) Thank you.

I wonder how far a community interested in solving the "boring/irritating people" problem could get by creating a forum whose stated purpose was to respond in an engaged, attentive way to anything anyone posts there. It could be staffed by certified volunteers who were trained in techniques of nonviolent communication and committed to continuing to engage with anyone who posted there, for as long as they chose to keep doing so, and nobody but staff would be permitted to reply to posters.

Perhaps giving them easier-to-obtain attention will cause them to leave other forums where attention requires being clever or reassuring or similarly difficult valuable tings.

I'm inclined to doubt it, though.

I am somewhat tangentially reminded of a "suicide hotline" (more generally, a "call us if you're having trouble coping" hotline) where I went to college, which had come to the conclusion that they needed to make it more okay to call them, get people in the habit of doing so, so that people would use their service when they needed it. So they explicitly started the campaign of "you can call us for anything. Help on your problem sets. The Gross National Product of Kenya. The average mass of an egg. We might not know, but you can call us anyway." (This was years before the Web, let alone Google, of course.)

2Shmi11y

You say "cult" like it's a bad thing. Seriously though, using a term with negative connotations is not a rational approach t begin with. Like asking "is this woman a slut?". It presumes that a higher-than-average number of sexual partners is necessarily bad or immoral. Back to the cult thing: why does this term have a derogatory connotation? Says wikipedia: Some of the above clearly does not apply ("kidnapping"), and some clearly does ("systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle-class communities" -- CFAR workshops, Berkeley rationalists, meetups). Applicability of other descriptions is less clear. Do the Sequences count as brainwashing? Does the (banned) basilisk count as psychological abuse? Matching of LW activities and behaviors to those of a cult (a New Religious Movement is a more neutral term) does not answer the original implicit accusation: that becoming affiliated, even informally, with LW/CFAR/MIRI is a bad thing, for some definition of "bad". It is this definition of badness that is worth discussing first, when a cult accusation is hurled, and only then whether a certain LW pattern is harmful in this previously defined way.

7Tenoke11y

*I say "cult" like it carries negative connotations for most people.

4Shmi11y

I expanded on what I meant in my reply. Sorry about the ninja edit.

6drethelin11y

Lesswrong is the Rocky Horror of atheist/skeptic groups!

2ChristianKl11y

Being a cult is a failure mode for a group like this. Discussing failure modes has some importance. There also the issue that cult are powerful and speaking of Lesswrong as a cult implies that Lesswrong has a certain power.

8Tenoke11y

A really unlikely failure mode. The cons of discussing whether we are a cult outweigh the pros in my book - especially when it is discussed all the time.

0hyporational11y

When when will these rants go meta?

0drethelin11y

nope http://lesswrong.com/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsingularity/60ub

0Ritalin11y

I believe we are cult. The best cult in the world. The one whose beliefs works. Otherwise, we're the same; an unusual cause, a charismatic ideological leader, and, what distinguishes us from a school of philosophy or even a political party, is that we have an excathology to worry about; an end-of-the-world scenario. Unlike other cults, though, we wish to prevent or at least minimize the damage of that scenario, while most of them are enthusiastic in hastening it. For a cult, we're also extremely loose on rules to follow, we don't ask people to cast off material posessions (though we encourage donations) or to cut ties with old family and friends (it can end up happening because of de-religion-ing, but that's an unfortunate side-effect, and it's usually avoidable). I could list off a few more traits, but the gist of it is this; we share a lot of traits with a cult, most of which are good or double-edged at worst, and we don't share most of the common bad traits of cults. Regardless of whether one chooses to call us a cult or not, this does not change what we are.

7Tenoke11y

You are using a very loose definition of a cult. Surely you know that 'cult' carries some different (negative) connotations for other people? It might not change what we are but it has some negative consequences. People like you who call us a cult while using a different meaning of 'cult' turn new members away because they hear that LessWrong is a cult and they don't hear your different meaning of the word (which excludes most of the negative traits of bloody cults).

-1Ritalin11y

Why a "bloody" cult? What image does "cult" summon in your mind? Cthulhu followers? Osho's Cadillac collection? The Kool Aid? I'm beginning to see where you're going with this. Calling us a cult is like calling Marting Luther King a criminal. Technically correct, but misleading, because of the baggage the word carries. We would do well, then, to list all the common traits and connotations of a cult, good and bad, and all the ways we are demonstrably different or better than that. That way, we'd have a ready-made response we could release calmly in the face of accusations of culthood, without going through the embarassing and stammering "yeahbut" kind of argument that gives others the opportuinity to act as inquisitors. Nevertheless, I for one believe we shouldn't reject the word, but reappropriate it, if only to throw our critics off-balance. "Less Wrong is a cult!" "Fracking right it is!" "... Wait, you aren't denying it?" "Nope. But, please, elaborate, what's wrong with us being a cult, precisely?"

8TheOtherDave11y

Conversely, we could skip the listing of traits and the construction of ready-made responses that we could release uniformly and the misleading self-descriptions, and move directly to "What would be wrong with that, if we were?" Anyone who can answer that question has successfully tabooed "cult" and we can now move on to discussing their actual concerns, which might even be legitimate ones. Engaging on the topic further with anyone who can't answer that question seems unlikely to be productive.

3Lumifer11y

The problem with cults is that they tend to assign the probability of 1 to their priors. Of course it's a general problem with religions, but quoting Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary from memory... Religion, n. -- a large successful cult. Cult, n. -- a small unsuccessful religion.

3Jayson_Virissimo11y

Well, one of LW's dogmas seems to be that 0 and 1 are not probabilities, so...

-2TheOtherDave11y

Ah, but that's just the sort of thing we'd want you to think we believe, to throw you off the scent!

0TheOtherDave11y

Do we assign the probability of 1 to our priors?

0Lumifer11y

LW regulars are a diverse bunch. Though I have no evidence I am pretty sure some assign the probability of 1 to some priors.

0TheOtherDave11y

Yes, I agree. When you said that the problem with religions is that they tend to assign the probability of 1 to their priors, did you mean to include having some members who assign probability 1 to some priors in the category you were identifying as problematic?

0Lumifer11y

Insofar the religion encourages or at least accepts those "some" members and stands behind them, and insofar these priors are important, yes.

0TheOtherDave11y

OK, cool. Thanks for clarifying.

3Ritalin11y

You make a very good point.

4TheOtherDave11y

And has this nominally very good point changed your beliefs about anything related to this topic?

7Ritalin11y

It changed my preferred method of approach slightly; I skip the "Yeah we're a cult" and go straight to the "So what?" It's a simple method: answer with a question, dodge the idiocy.

0TheOtherDave11y

Cool.

5Tenoke11y

Substitute 'bloody' for 'fucking' to get the intended meaning. Might help but not calling ourselves a cult will probably lead to better PR.

9TheOtherDave11y

Somewhat amusingly, there's another tangent somewhere in this discussion (about polyamory, recruiting sex partners, etc.) on which 'fucking cult' could also be over-literally interpreted.

0Ritalin11y

I think there are too many superficial similarities for critics, opponents and trolls not to capitalize on them, leaving us in the awkward position of having to explain the difference to these self-styled inquisitors like we're somehow ashamed of ourselves. It's not enough to agree not to call ourselves a cult (and not just because people will, willfully or unwittingly, break this agreement, probably frequently enough to make the policy useless for PR effects). We need to have an actual plan to deal with it. I say proclaiming ourselves "the best cult in the world" functions as a refuge in audacity, causes people to stop their inquiry, listen up, think, because it breaks patterns. Saying "we're not a cult, really, stop calling us a cult, you meanies" comes off as a suspicious denial, prompting a "that's what they all say" response, simply by pattern-matching to how a guilty party would usually behave. To make ourselves above suspicion, we need to behave differently than a guilty party would. On a tangential note, I found it useful in raising the sanity waterline precisely among the sort of people who'd be suckers for cults, the sort that wouldn't go to a doctor and would prefer to resort to homeopathy or acupuncture. By presenting EY as my "guru" and using his more mystical-style works (the "Twelve Virtues of a Rationlist" for example), I managed to get them in contact with the values we preach rather than with the concrete, science-based notions (these guys are under the impression that Science Is Evil and humanity is Doomed to suffer Gaia's Revenge etc. etc.). With this, I hope to progressively introduce them to an ideology that values stuff that's actually proven to work, with an idealism and an optimism that is far apart from their Positivist-inspired view of Science as a cold and heartless exploitation machine. I'm not very confident on that last bit, though, so I suppose I could easily be argued into dropping it.

9Tenoke11y

That's not what I am saying at all. I am not saying that we should stop people from calling us a cult. I am saying that WE (or maybe YOU) should stop starting threads and conversations about how we are a cult, whether we are a cult and so on. As I said - if people on Lesswrong weren't questioning themselves whether they are in a cult (there is one such thread in this OT for example) which is ridiculous and weren't bring attention to it all the time the external cult-calling wouldn't be so strong either. And again - to make it clearer: People, please stop bringing up the damn cult stuff all the time. Sure - respond to outsiders when they ask you whether we are a cult but don't start such a conversation yourself. And don't mention the cult bollocks when you are telling people about Lesswrong for the first time.

0Ritalin11y

If the problem is the folks among us worrying about us being a cult, not talking about it will only make them worry more. Their concerns should be treated seriously ("Supposing we were a cult, what's wrong with that?" is indeed a good approach), no matter how stupid they may turn out to be, and they should be reassured with proper arguments, rather than dismissed out of hand. Intimidating outsiders into feeling stupid is, I think, a valid short-time tactic, but when it comes to our folks, we owe each other to examine things clearly. Since the problem seems to pop up spontaneously as well as propagate memetically, I would suggest making an FAQ with all the common concerns, addressing them in a fair and conclusive manner, that will leave their minds at peace. And not in a short-term, fuzzily-reassuring bullshit kind of peace, but a "problem solved, question dissolved, muthahubber" kind of peace.

1Tenoke11y

I assume you haven't read this and related posts and the countless other discussions on the topic? The topic has been over discussed already.. My problem is that people keep bringing it up all the time and people (and search engines) start associating 'lesswrong' with 'cult'.

-3Ritalin11y

Well then why don't you just link people to this every time you see the problem pop up? I certainly will. Sorry, I'm going to be a freaking pedant here, but this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. That is a physical impossibility. Please refrain from this kind of hyperbole and use the appropriate adjective; in this case, many. Thank you.

3Tenoke11y

I can't count them = they are subjectively countless for me. Happy now?

0Ritalin11y

Sure you could, you just have other stuff you'd rather do, which is totally okay :)

1Tenoke11y

Nope, I don't even even have access to information regarding most of the discussions that have taken place ;)

1TheOtherDave11y

Tangentially... while encouraging others to provide links to relevant past discussions when a subject comes up is a fine thing, it ought not substitute for encouraging in ourselves the habit of searching for relevant past discussions before bringing a subject up.

0Ritalin11y

Actually, a huge problem I have with LW is the sheer amount of discussions-inside-discussions we have. Especially in the Sequences, there's just too many comments to humanly read. If we could make summaries of the consensus on any specific topic, and keep them updated as discussions progress...

1TheOtherDave11y

I'm not suggesting reading all the comments everywhere. I agree that there's a lot of them, and while I think your estimate of human capability here is low, I can certainly sympathize with the lack of desire to bother reading them all. I am suggesting that Google is your friend. Googling "site:lesswrong.com cult," for example, is a place to start if you're actually interested in what people have said on this topic in the past. As far as publishing updated summaries of LW consensus by topic goes, sure, if someone wanted to do that work they'd be welcome to do so. You might also find the LW wiki useful, if you decide you're willing to do some looking around (the link is at the top of the site). For example, someone has taken the time to maintain a jargon file there, in the hopes of making local jargon more accessible to people. I realize it's not quite as useful to newcomers as someone explaining the jargon each time, or as everyone restricting themselves to mainstream language all the time, but it might be better than nothing.

0TheOtherDave11y

On a site like this, how do we tell the difference?

0Ritalin11y

Accumulated karma is usually a good metric. The jargon, and the ideological equipment and epistemological approach, are also important signs to look out for. So is the degree of mean-spiritedness. Subjective is not the same as meaningless.

1TheOtherDave11y

Gotcha. For my own part I endorse intimidating people who demonstrate mean-spirited behavior into silence (whether by making them feel stupid, if that works, or some other mechanism). Depending on what you mean by "ideological equipment and epistemological approach", I might endorse the same tactic there as well. Neither of those endorsements depends much on how long those people have been contributing, or how much karma they've accumulated, or what jargon they use.

0Lumifer11y

Have to be careful about that -- if you're being trolled there is noticeable potential for an epic fail :-)

1TheOtherDave11y

I endorse intimidating them into silence. I don't endorse doing something ineffectual or counterproductive with the intention of intimidating them into silence.

5TheOtherDave11y

Do we? Well, OK. One place to start planning is by identifying desired outcomes, and then suggesting actions that might lead to those outcomes. So... what do we expect to have achieved, once we've dealt with it? Another place to start, which is where you seem to be starting, is by arguing the merits of various proposed solutions. That's usually not an ideal place to start unless our actual goal is to champion a particular set of actions, and the problem is being identified primarily in order to justify those actions. But, OK, if we're going down that path... you've identified two possible solutions: 1. Proclaiming ourselves "the best cult in the world" 2. Saying "we're not a cult, really, stop calling us a cult, you meanies" And you've argued, compellingly, that #2 is a bad plan, with which I agree completely. I will toss another contender into the mix: 1. Asking "assuming we are, so what?" and going on about our business. There of course exist other options.

0Ritalin11y

Desired outcome: * Our folks stop worrying about whether they're in a cult. * New folks stop worrying about joining a cult. * Outsiders stop worrying about our potential agendas as a cult. And I don't mean "relax", I mean stop worrying, by virtue of knowing for a fact that their concerns are unfounded.

3Lumifer11y

You do understand that these are the desired outcomes of a bona fide cult as well, right? If you kidnap virgins to sacrifice in jungle hideouts while waiting for the UFOs to arrive, that's what you'd want, too.

5Ritalin11y

Yes, well, the desired outcome of both a criminal and an innocent when facing an investigation is to be found innocent. That they both share this trait is irrelevant to their guilt. An innocent certainly shouldn't start worrying about maybe being guilty just because he doesn't want to be found guilty, that's just stupid.

1TheOtherDave11y

OK. Given that desired outcome, I'd suggest your next steps would be: * figure out who worries about whether they're in/joining a cult, and what causes them to worry about that * figure out which outsiders worry about our agendas, and what causes them to worry about that * address the concerns that cause those worries. How to best go about step 3 will depend a lot on the results of step 1 and 2. Do you have any theories about 1 and 2?

5lmm11y

Things I worry about: Some members make large donations There is secret knowledge that you pay for (ai-box) Members do some kooky things (cryonics, polyamory) Members claim "rationality" has helped them lose weight or sleep better - subject things without controls - rather than something more measurable and where a mechanism is more obvious. At least one thing is not supposed to be discussed in public (banned memetic hazard). LW members seem significantly kookier when talking about this (and in the original deleted thread) than on more public subjects. Members have a lot of jargon. It can seem like they're speaking their own language. More, there's a bunch of literature embedded in the organization's worldview; publicly this is treated as simple fiction, but internally it's clearly taken more seriously. Although there's no explicit severing advice, LW encourages (in practice if not in theory) members to act in ways that reduce their out-of-group friendships The hierarchy is opaque; it feels like there is a clique of high-level users, but this is not public.

5Tenoke11y

Wouldn't you expect that if the cause actually made sense though? (and not only if this is a cult) Less than 0.01% of the users have played an ai-box game (to my knowledge) and even less have played it for money. Again fairly small subset for the first thing, slightly larger for the second but I guess I will give you that one. Probably a tiny subset of users claim that - I personally have never seen anyone claim that rationality helped them sleep better and if you mean that evidence-based reasoning helped them find an intervention designed to increase sleep quality you are grasping for straws. We are not supposed to write out the actual basilisk (there is only one) on lesswrong.com. There is no problems with talking about it in public and again this affects a tiny portion of users. Giving you this one as well. Bullshit. There are just respected users and no clear-cut hierarchy - that's what happens at most places. For a proxy of who is a high-level user look at the 'Top Contributors'.

0Brillyant11y

This sort of point-by-point refutation is the same sort of thing that would happen in a church that was trying to defend against allegations of cultyness. I don't think lmm's list of reasons was utterly compelling -- good, but not utterly compelling -- but I don't think it would matter if it were a perfect list, because there will always be a defense for accusations of cultyness that satisfies the church/forum. It is more interesting watching it happen here vs. the church IMO because LW is all about rationality, where the church can always push the "faith" button when they are backed into a logical corner. At the end of the day, it is just an online forum. But it does sound to me (based on what I can gather from perusing) like there are a group of people here who take this stuff seriously enough so as to make cultyness possible. I'm sure the "LW/cryonics/transhumanism/basilisk stuff is so similar to how religion works" bit got old a long time ago, but Dear Lord is it apparent and fascinating to me.

4satt11y

Ah, the perennial dilemma of how to respond to an accusation of cultiness. If one bothers to rebut it: that's exactly what a cult would do! If one doesn't rebut it: oh, the accusation must be unanswerable and hence true!

0Brillyant11y

I completely understand. And I know mine is pretty cheap reasoning. But it just reminds me of what happens in a similar situation in the church. Feel free to ignore it. As I said, I'm confident it has probably been played out by now. I'm satisfied just to watch in awe.

-1lmm11y

Given how much LWers seem to care about effective charity, I'd expect more scrutiny, and a stronger insistence on measurable outcomes. I guess you're right though; the money isn't inherently a problem. It seems like a defining characteristic; it's one place where the site clearly differs from more "mainstream" AI research (though this may be a distorted perception since it was how I first heard of LW) Shrug. It looks dodgy to me. It pattern-matches with e.g. the unverifiable stories people tell of their personal experience of Jesus. That's not at all clear. I've never seen any explicit rules. I've seen articles that carefully avoid saying the name. Even on internet forums there's usually an explicit distinction between mod and not, and often layers to it. (The one exception I know is HN, and even there people know who pg is, who's part of YC and who's not, and stories are presented differently if they're coming from YC members). And it's unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other. It raises questions over objectivity, oversight, conflict resolution.

5Tenoke11y

It's not. Your view is definitely distorted. .. Look around then? Eliezer has even made a Reddit thread for things like that where the basilisk is freely discussed. Yeah, and people here know who Eliezer Yudkowsky is and who is part of MIRI which is LW's parent organization..

1lmm11y

I'm not active on reddit. Most forums have a link to the rules right next to the comment box; this one does not. There clearly is a chilling effect going on, because I've seen posts that make carefully oblique references to memetic hazards rather than just saying "don't post the basilisk in the comments please". I have no idea who's part of MIRI and which posts are or aren't from MIRI, because we don't do the equivalent of (YC 09) on stories here. (And HN was explicitly the worst other example I know; they could certainly stand to improve their transparency a lot).

1Kaj_Sotala11y

By "first-name terms with each other", do you mean something more than the literal meaning of "familiar with someone, such that one can address that person by his or her first name"? Because in my experience, treating other users on a first name basis is the default for all users on many Internet forums, LW included.

0lmm11y

I meant "talk about each other as if they're close personal friends". (Myself I generally try to avoid using first names for people who aren't such, but I appreciate that that's probably a cultural difference).

0katydee11y

I think this is more due to the number of people who have their real name as their LessWrong username than any sinister cabal.

4Moss_Piglet11y

Don't forget that much of the inner circle actually draws a paycheck from the organizations members are encouraged to donate to, and supposedly a fairly large one at that, and that the discussion of how much to donate is framed in terms of averting the destruction of the human race. That and the polyamory commune are the two sketchiest things IMO, since it shows that the inner circle is materially and directly benefiting from the "altruism" / "rationality" of lower ranking members. This is a good website, mostly good people on it, but there's also an impression that there are questionable dealings going on behind the scenes.

4TheOtherDave11y

Would LW be improved if paid employees/consultants of those organizations were barred from membership? (I do realize there are other ways to address this concern, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise... for example, we could re-institute the moratorium on discussing those organizations, or a limited moratorium on fundraising activitiies here, or various other things. I'm just curious about your opinion about that specific solution.) I get a kick out of this, because my social circle is largely polyamorous but would mostly consider LW a charming bunch of complete nutjobs on other grounds. Polyamory really isn't all that uncommon in communities anchored around high-tech development/elite tech schools, IME.

6lmm11y

No, I suspect it would die. Actionable suggestion though: some kind of "badge" / note (along the lines of the "mod" or "author" tag you get in Disqus, for example). When I worked for a company with user forums it was policy that all staff had badges on their avatars and you should not post from a non-staff account while employed by the company. That is very surprising, very different from my experiences. My social circle comes mainly from the University of Cambridge and the London tech scene; I am friends with several furries, more transsexuals, and have had dinner with the maintainer of the BDSM FAQ. Polyamory still seems fucking weird (not offensive or evil, but naive and pretentious, and correlated with what I can probably best summarize as the stoner stereotype). I've met a couple of openly poly people and they were perfectly friendly and had the best of intentions but I wouldn't trust them to organize my closet, yet alone the survival of humanity. I originally took Moss_Piglet to imply that the leadership were recruiting groupies from LW to have sex with. That I would find very disturbing and offputting. Assuming that's not an issue, I think the weirdness of the polyamory would be amply countered by evidence of general competence / life success.

4Tenoke11y

Wth? You seem very prejudiced. What makes people who have multiple relationships this much less trustworthy than 'normal' people to you (that you wouldn't even trust them to organize your closet)?

4lmm11y

This whole subject is about prejudice; we judge organizations for their cultlike characteristics without investigating them in detail. I think I was unclear: the implication runs in the opposite direction. All the specific poly individuals I've met are people I wouldn't trust to organize my closet, in terms of general life competence (e.g. ability to hold down a job, finish projects they start, keep promises to friends). As a result, when I find out that someone is poly, I consider this evidence (in the Bayesian sense) that they're incompetent, the same way I would adjust my estimate of someone's competence if I discovered that they had particular academic qualifications or used a particular drug. (Obviously all these factors are screened off if I have direct evidence about their actual competence level).

4Lumifer11y

To throw in a possibly-relevant factor: age. It seems to me that polyamory in early twenties is quite different from polyamory in late forties.

4TheOtherDave11y

Well, I would certainly agree with this. The poly folk I know in their 40s are as a class more successful in their relationships than the poly folk I know in their 20s. Of course, this is true of the mono folk I know, also. Which is what I would expect if experience having relationships increased one's ability to do so successfully.

3Kaj_Sotala11y

It also agrees with the experience from my real-life social circles, which are dominated by university people from the Helsinki region. Poly seems to be treated as roughly the same as homosexuality: unusual but not particularly noteworthy one way or the other. Treatments in the popular press (articles about some particular poly triad who's agreed to be interviewed, etc.) are also generally positive.

2TheOtherDave11y

(nods) Fair enough. My experience is limited to the U.S. in this context. I agree that "recruiting groupies to have sex with," if I understand what you mean by the phrase, would be disturbing and offputting. Moss_Piglet appears to believe that polyamory is in and of itself a bad sign, independent of whether any groupies are being recruited. Beyond that, I decline to speculate.

-2Moss_Piglet11y

The ethics of conflicts of interest in the media are pretty well-trodden ground; you could adapt any journalistic ethics document into a comprehensive do's and don'ts list. Do state your financial interests clearly and publicly, don't mix advertising and information content, etc. It's not foolproof and bias is universal, but a conflict of interest on the scale of one's career and sex life is something a rationalist ought to be at least a little concerned about. That may well be true, but it makes little difference. The collapse of sexual mores is directly, IMO causally, linked with decreased stability and fertility; letting it take hold in the highest IQ sections of the population is a recipe for disaster. Engaging in that sort of behavior is strong evidence against a person's character as a leader.

5Lumifer11y

That's a silly assertion. First because it's obviously only true from the point of view of a specific morality. And second, because it ignores the empirical fact that, in full compliance with biology, powerful male leaders usually bed many women.

3TheOtherDave11y

Actually, that sounds like a great idea. I would absolutely endorse a policy along those lines. Ah, I see. Sure, if I believed that failing to conform to previously established sexual mores led to decreased stability, I would no doubt agree that the poly aspects of LW and its various parent organizations were troubling. Similar things are true of my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc. Come to that, I suppose similar things are true of my state government, which accepts my marriage to my husband as a family despite this being a clear violation of pre-existing sexual mores, and of large chunks of my country, which accepts marriages between people of different skin colors as families despite this being a clear violation of the sexual mores of a few decades ago.

-1Moss_Piglet11y

I'd prefer not to completely derail this into a political/moral argument, since the issue at hand is a bit more relevant. Since you are, as you admit, fairly invested in your position there is little purpose to debate on this point except to distract from the main issue.

[-]TheOtherDave11y100

Sure; I have no interest in debating with you whether polyamory, homosexuality, miscegenation and other violations of sexual mores really are harmful. As you say, it would be a distraction.

My point was that if they were, it would make sense to object to an organization on the grounds that its leadership approves of/engages in harmful sexual-more-violating activities. What would not make sense is to differentially object to that organization on those grounds.

That is, accepting/endorsing/engaging sexual-more-violating activities might make LW's parent organizations dangerous, but it doesn't make them any more dangerous than many far-more-mainstream organizations that do the same things (like my college living group, the theater group I perform with, etc).

If this one of the two sketchiest things about the organization, as you suggest, it sounds to me like the organization is pretty darned close to the mainstream, which seems rather opposed to the point lmm was trying to make, and which I originally inferred you were aligning with.

1Lumifer11y

Don't forget treating the writings of the charismatic founder as a sacred text and ritually quoting them :-)

2TheOtherDave11y

Cool... this sort of thing is far more actionable than "seeming like a cult." So, next question. Taking you as representative of the group (which is of course not necessarily true, but we start from where we are)... what is your sense of where each of these falls on the spectrum between "this is legitimately worrying; in order to be less at risk for actual bad consequences LW should actually change so as not to do this" on the one hand, and "this is merely superficially worrying; there are probably no real risks here and LW should merely take steps to reassure worriers not to worry about it"?

8lmm11y

I'm legitimately worried about the money and the incentives it creates. What would a self-interested agent (LW seems to use "agent" in exactly the opposite sense to what I'd expect it to mean, but I hope I'm clear) in the position of the LW leadership do? My cynical view is: write some papers about how the problems they need to solve are really hard; write enough papers each year to appear to be making progress, and live lives of luxury. So what's stopping them? People in charities that provide far more fuzzies than LW have become disenchanted. People far dumber than Yudkowsky have found rationalizations to live well for themselves on the dime of the charity they run. Corrupt priests of every generation have professed as much faith that performing their actual mission would result in very high future utility, while in fact neglecting those duties for earthly pleasures. Even if none of the leadership are blowing funds on crack and hookers, if they're all just living ascetically and writing papers, that's actually the same failure mode if they're not being effective at preventing UFAI. When founding the first police force, one of Peel's key principles was that the only way they could be evaluated was the prevalence of crime - not how much work the police were seen to be doing, not how good the public felt about their efforts. It's very hard to find a similar standard with which to hold LW to account. It occurs to me as I write that I have no idea what the LW funding structure is - whether the site is funded by the CFAR, MIRI, SIAI or something else. Even having all these distinct bodies with mostly the same members smells fishy, seems more likely to be politics than practicalities. The kookiness... if LW were really more rational than others, I'd expect them to do some weird-but-not-harmful-to-others things. So I suspect this is more a perception than reality thing (Though if there are good answers to "what's the empirical distinction between real and fake cryonics

3Kaj_Sotala11y

MIRI and SIAI are the same organization: SIAI is MIRI's old name, now no longer used because people kept confusing the Singularity Institute and Singularity University. (AFAIK, LW has traditionally been funded by MIRI, but I'm not sure how the MIRI/CFAR split has affected this.) One might as well ask "why do you expect monogamy to turn out better than it did for all the people who have gone through a series of dysfunctional relationships". Being in any kind of relationship is difficult, and some relationships will always be unsuccessful. Furthermore, just as there are many kinds of monogamous relationships - from the straight lovers who have been together since high school, to the remarried gay couple with a 20-year age difference, to the arranged marriage who've gradually grown to love each other and who practice BDSM - there are many kinds of polyamorous relationships, and the failure modes of one may or may not be relevant for another. If you specify "the kinds of relationships practiced in the hippie communes of the sixties", you're not just specifying a polyamorous relationship style, you're also specifying a large list of other cultural norms - just as saying "conventional marriages in the 1950's United States" singles out a much narrower set of relationship behaviors than just "monogamy", and "conventional marriages among middle class white people in the 1950's United States" even more so. And we haven't even said anything about the personalities of the people in question - the kinds of people who end up moving to hippie communes are likely to represent a very particular set of personality types, each of which may make them more susceptible to some kinds of problems and more resistant to others. Other poly people may or may not represent the same personality types, so their relationships may or may not involve the same kinds of problems. Answering your original question would require detailed knowledge about such communes, while most poly people are more

2lmm11y

You're right, I overextended myself in what I wrote. What I meant was: I'm aware of long-term successful communities practicing monogamy, and long-term somewhat successful communities practicing limited polygyny - i.e. cases where we can reasonably conclude that the overall utility is positive. I'm not aware of long-term successful communities practicing other forms such as full polyamory (which may well be my own ignorance). The fact that a small group of bay-area twentysomethings has been successfully practicing polyamory for a few years does not convince me that the overall utility of polyamory is positive. That's because with '60s hippie communes my understanding is that a small group of bay-area twentysomethings were successfully practicing polyamory for a few years, but eventually various "black swan"-type events (bwim events analogous to stock market crashes, but for utility rather than economic value) occurred, and it turns out the overall utility of those communes was negative despite the positive early years. If today's polyamorists want to convince me that "this time is different" they would have some work to do. (I'm not an expert on the history. It's entirely possible I'm simply wrong, in which case I'd appreciate pointers to well-written popular accounts that are more accurate than the ones I'm currently basing my judgement on).

7Kaj_Sotala11y

It still sounds like you're talking about poly as if it was a coherent whole, when it's really lots and lots of different things, some with a longer history than others. Take a look at this map, for instance - and note that many of the non-monogamous behaviors may overlap with ostensibly monogamous practices. E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, (EDIT: removed questionable prevalence figure) basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn't work for others. Similarly, for everything else in that map, you could find reports from different people (either contemporary people or historical figures) who've done something like it, with it having been a good idea for some, and a bad idea for others. I guess the main thing that puzzles me about your comments is that you seem to be asking for some general argument for why (some specific form of) polyamory could be expected to work for everyone. Whereas my inclination would be to say "well, if you describe to me the people in question and the specific form of relationship arrangement they're trying out, I guess I could try to hazard a guess of whether that arrangement might work for them", without any claim of whether that statement would generalize for anyone else in any other situation. For example, in Is Polyamory a Choice?, Michael Carey writes: I've also personally ran into cases of "naturally poly" people, who couldn't prevent themselves from falling into love with multiple people at once, and who were utterly miserable if they had to kill those emotions: if they wanted to stay monogamous, they would have been forced to practically stop having any close friendships with people of the sexes that they were attracted to. For those people, it seems obvious that some kind of non-monogamous arrangement is the only kind of relationship in which they can ever feel really happy. (I don't need to find an example of a visible community that has successfully practiced large-scale polyamory in order to

7gwern11y

I don't believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles - "experts say", "some experts think", etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open. Slightly better are 'estimates' (or was it 'a study'?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that's also quoted as '2-4m' (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being 'the BDSM and swing communities', which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can't even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.

3Kaj_Sotala11y

Fair point - the exact number wasn't very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the "couples" to include "non-married couples", and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn't sound too unreasonable.)

2lmm11y

I think the argument goes through the same way though. I understand your position to be: a culture in which a variety of different relationships are accepted and respected (among both leaders and ordinary citizens), and LW-style polyamory is one of those many varieties, can be stable, productive, and generally successful and high-utility. The question remains: why don't we see historical examples of such societies? While you're right that even nominally monogamous societies usually tolerate some greater or lesser degree of non-monogamous behavior, the kind of polyamory practiced by some prominent LW members is, I think, without such precedent, and would be condemned in all historically successful societies (including, I think, contemporary american society; while we don't imprison people for it, I don't think we'd elect a leader who openly engaged in such relationships, for example). Yes, there's a small self-selecting bay area community which operates in the way you describe. But I don't think that community has (yet) demonstrated itself to be successful; other communities have achieved the same level of success that they currently enjoy, and then undergone dramatic collapse shortly after.

4Kaj_Sotala11y

Well, one possibility would be that a polyamorous inclination is simply rare. In that case, we wouldn't expect any society to adopt large-scale polyamorous practices for the same reason why we wouldn't expect any society to adopt e.g. large-scale asexual or homosexual practices. But then there's also the issue that most societies have traditionally been patriarchal, with strict restrictions on women's sexuality in general (partially due to early contraception being unreliable and pregnancies dangerous). If you assumed that polyamory could work, but that most societies in history wouldn't want to give women the same kind of sexual freedom as men, then that would suggest that we could expect to see lots of polygamous societies... which does seem to be case. What counts as success, anyway? Does a relationship have to last for life in order to be successful? I wouldn't count e.g. a happy relationship of five years to be a failure, if it produces five years of happiness for everyone involved.

5TheOtherDave11y

In general agreed, but a quibble about: I don't think I would necessarily expect that. Of course, it depends a lot on what we mean by "large scale". A society with a 5% Buddhist minority can still have large-scale Buddhist practice (e.g., millions of people practicing Buddhism in a public and generally accepted way). I would say some U.S. states are visibly adopting homosexual practices (e.g. same-sex marriage) on a large scale, despite it being very much a minority option, for example. In the absence of any other social forces pushing people towards nominally exclusive monogamy/monoandry (and heterosexuality, come to that) I would expect something like that kind of heterogeneity for natural inclinations. Of course, in the real world those social forces exist and are powerful, so my expectations change accordingly.

2lmm11y

I think you're putting the cart before the horse there. If patriarchy is a near-human-universal, doesn't that suggest there's a good reason for it? My impression is that the downsides of breakup dominate the overall utility compared to the marginal increase from having a better relationship. Particularly in the presence of children.

4Lumifer11y

My impression is the reverse. Breakups tend to be sharply painful, but the wounds heal in a matter of months or at most a few years. But if you're unwilling to consider breakups, being in a miserable relationship is for the rest of your life.

3Kaj_Sotala11y

Sure - it was probably a natural adaptation to the level of contraception, healthcare, and overall wealth available at the time. Doesn't mean it would be a good idea anymore. And if you wish to reinstate patriarchy, then singling out polyamory as a suspicious modern practice seems rather arbitrary. There's a lot of bigger stuff that you'd want to consider changing, like whether women are allowed to vote... or, if we wish to stay on the personal level, you'd want to question any relationships in which both sexes were considered equal in the first place. That sounds unlikely in the general case (though there are definitely some spectacularly messy break-ups where that is true), but of course it depends on your utility function.

1lmm11y

I think that happens; it's hard to imagine e.g. a president with anything other than a traditional family (were/are the Clintons equals? More so than those before them, but in public at least Hilary conformed to the traditional "supportive wife" role (in a way that I think contrasts with Bill's position for the 2008 primaries)). To a certain extent LW is always going to seem cultish if our leaders' relationships are at odds with the traditional forms for such. And I don't think that's irrational: in cases where failures are rare but highly damaging, it makes sense to accord more weight to tradition than we normally do. (on the voting analogy: I'd be very cautious about adopting any change to our political system that had no historical precedent and seemed like it might increase our odds of going to war, even if it had been tried and shown to be better in a few years of day-to-day use. I don't think that's an argument against women having the vote (they're stereotypically less warlike - although it has been argued that the Falklands War happened because Thatcher felt the need to prove herself and wouldn't've occurred under a male PM), but it is certainly an argument for not extending the vote to non-landowners and under-21s. In as much as war has declined since the vote was extended to non-landowners and under-21s - which is actually, now that I think about it, really quite surprising - I guess that's evidence against this position)

3TheOtherDave11y

There are many relationships where the "marginal" increase from not being in that relationship anymore far outweigh the downsides of the breakup.

3Lumifer11y

Sure there are good reasons. Physical strength is one. Not being in a semi-permanent state of either pregnant or breast-feeding is another.

2TheOtherDave11y

Sure, I think these are legitimate. Actually, I think this periodic "cult" angst distracts attention from a far more interesting question: "do contributions to MIRI actually accomplish anything worthwhile?" (Of which "Is MIRI a scam?" is a narrow subset, and not the most interesting subset at that, though still far more interesting than "Is LW a cult?".) Admittedly, I have the same problem with most non-profit organizations, but I agree that financial and organizational transparency is important across the board. (That said, I have no idea how MIRI's transparency compares to, say, the National Stroke Foundation's, or the Democratic National Committee's.) Hm. So, just to clarify our terms a little... there's a difference between fictional evidence on the one hand (that is, treating depictions of fictional events as though they were actual observations of the depicted events), and creating fictional examples to clearly and compellingly articulate a theory or call attention to an idea on the other. The latter, in and of itself, I think is harmless. Do you disagree? The former is dangerous, in that it can lead to false beliefs, and I suppose I agree that any use of fiction (including reading it for fun) increases my chances of unintentionally using it as evidence. So I guess the question is, are we using fiction as evidence? Or are we using it as a shortcut to convey complicated ideas? And if it's a bit of both, as I expect, then it's (as you say) a question of where the balance is. So, OK. You clearly believe the balance here swings too far to "fiction as evidence," which might be true, and is an important problem if true. What observations convinced you of this? More tangentially: Well, ultimately my answer to this is that a lot of my friends are in poly relationships, and it seems to be working for them all right. This is also why I expect same-sex marriages to turn out OK, why I expect marriages between different races to turn out OK, why I expect people re

4lmm11y

All the other examples I can think of of what I might call political fiction - using fiction to convey serious ideas - are organizations/movements I have negative views of. One thinks of Ayn Rand, those people who take Gor seriously (assuming they're not just an internet joke), the Pilgrim's Progress. Trying to cast my net wider, I felt the part of The Republic where Plato tells a story about a city to be weak, I found Brave New World interesting as fiction but actively unhelpful as an point about the merits of utilitarianism. Monopoly is an entertaining board game (well, not a very entertaining one to be honest) but I don't think it teaches us anything about capitalism. I've been highly frustrated by the use of "parables" here like the dragon of death or the capricious king of poverty; it seems like the writers use them as a rhetorical trick, allowing them to pretend they've made a point that they haven't in fact made, simply because it's true in their story. I am genuinely struggling to think of any positive-for-the-political-side examples of this kind of fiction. I guess the main thing here is that if poly relationships worked (beyond limited polygyny in patriarchal societies, which evidently does "work" on some level) I'd expect to see an established tradition of polyamory somewhere in the world, and I don't (maybe I'm not looking hard enough). Being single clearly works for many people. Gay people have shown an ability to form long-term, stable relationships when they weren't allowed to marry, so it seems like marriage is likely to work. Widespread interracial marriage simply wasn't possible before the development of modern transport technology, so there's no mystery about the lack of historical successes. Is there some technological innovation that makes polyamory more practical now than it was in the past? I guess widespread contraception and cheap antibiotics might be such a thing... hmm, that's actually a good answer. I shall reconsider.

2TheOtherDave11y

So, when marriage traditionalists argue that the absence of an established tradition of same-sex marriages is evidence that same-sex marriage isn't likely to work (since if it did, they'd expect to see an established tradition of same-sex marriage), you don't find that convincing... your position there is that: a) marriage is just a special case of long-term, stable relationship, and b) we do observe an established (if unofficial, and often actively derided) tradition of long-term, stable same-sex relationships among the small fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships, so c) we should expect same-sex marriages to work among that fraction of the population. Yes? But by contrast, on your account we don't observe an established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships, so a similar argument does not suffice to justify expecting multi-adult marriages to work among the fraction of the population who enjoy such relationships. Yes? Have I understood you correctly?

1lmm11y

You've accurately summarized what I said. I think on reflection point a) is very dubious, so allow me to instead bite your bullet: I don't yet have a strong level of confidence that same-sex marriages are likely to work. (Which I don't see as a reason to make them illegal, but might be a reason to e.g. weight them less strongly when considering a couple's suitability to adopt). I think we may need to taboo "work" here; if we're talking about suitability as an organizational leader here then that's a higher standard than just enjoying one's own sex life. I would supplement b) with the observation that we observe historical instances of gay people making major contributions to wider society - Turing, Wilde, Britten (British/Irish examples because I'm British/Irish). But yeah, that's basically my position. Interested to see where you're going with this - is there such an "established (if unofficial) tradition of long-term, stable multi-adult relationships" that I'm just ignorant of?

0Vaniver11y

Um, polygamy? Concubinage? Both have long histories, and show up in cultures that are clearly functional. Both of them are less gender egalitarian than modern polyamory, and it's not clear to me that there's ample real-world evidence of, say, Heinlein's idea of line marriages working out.

3gwern11y

Clearly functional... but as functional? http://www.gwern.net/docs/2012-heinrich.pdf

3Lumifer11y

I think it would be useful here to distinguish between what is/was/should be/might be the average and what is the acceptable range of deviation from that average. A society where most men have one wife but some men have several is different from a society where most men have one wife and having several is illegal and socially unacceptable.

3Vaniver11y

Probably not- I buy the arguments that the incentives generated by monogamy are better than the ones generated by polygamy, across society as a whole. (I am not yet convinced that serial monogamy enabled by permissive divorce laws is better than polygyny, but haven't investigated the issue seriously.) I meant more to exclude the idea that polygamy is only seen in, say, undeveloped societies.

0TheOtherDave11y

Where I'm going with this is trying to understand your position, which I think I now do. My own position, as I stated a while back, is that I base my opinions about the viability of certain kinds of relationships on observing people in such relationships. The historical presence or absence of traditions of those sorts of relationships is also useful data, but not definitively so. EDIT: I suppose I should add to this that I would be very surprised if there weren't just as much of a tradition of married couples one or both of whom were nonmonogamous with the knowledge and consent of their spouse as there was a tradition of people having active gay sex lives, and very surprised if some of those people weren't making "major contributions to wider society" just as some gay people were. But I don't have examples to point out.

2asr11y

Notoriously, Lady Hamilton and Horatio Nelson had a public affair in the 1800s, without any objection from Lord Hamilton.

2A1987dM11y

Off the top of my head, Erwin Schrödinger.

3TheOtherDave11y

Given this fact, I am now surprised by not having previously observed a seemingly endless series of jokes about it playing on the supposed indeterminacy of poly relationships.

1Lumifer11y

I detect a horrible gap in the fabric of the universe! We need to create some ASAP!!

4Alejandro111y

SMBC is on to it.

1lmm11y

Right. As I've said, I think relationships tend to have big negative spikes analogous to stock market crashes, so am cautious about judging from samples of a few years.

0TheOtherDave11y

Sure, absolutely. Even watching twenty-year-old poly relationships, as I sometimes do, isn't definitive... maybe it takes a few generations to really see the problems. Ditto for same-sex marriages, or couples of different colors, or of different religious traditions... sure, these have longer pedigrees, but the problems may simply not have really manifested yet, but are building up momentum while people like me ignore the signs. I mention my own position not because I expect it to convince you, but because you were asking me where I was going in a way that suggested to me that you thought I was trying to covertly lead the conversation along to a point where I could demonstrate weaknesses in your position relative to my own, and in fact the questions I was asking you were largely orthogonal to my own position.

0TheOtherDave11y

Just to pick a somewhat arbitrary example I was thinking about recently... have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? Does it qualify as what you're calling "political fiction"? Do you associate it with any particular organizations/movements?

1lmm11y

By happy coincidence I also read it recently. I've not seen it used to make political/philosophical arguments, so I don't class it as such. To my mind the ending and indeed the whole story is more ambiguous than the examples I've been thinking of; if the intent was to push a particular view then it failed, at least in my case. (By contrast Brave New World probably did influence my view of utilitarianism, despite my best efforts to remain unmoved). If I saw someone using it to argue for a position I'd probably think less of it or them, and on a purely aesthetic level I found it disappointing. I guess maybe Permutation City is a positive example; it provides a useful explicit example of some things we want to make philosophical arguments about. Maybe because I felt it wasn't making a value judgement - it was more like, well, scientific fiction.

1TheOtherDave11y

Thinking about this some more, and rereading this thread, I'm realizing I'm more confused than I'd thought I was. Initially, when you introduced the term "political fiction," you glossed it as "using fiction to convey serious ideas." Which is similar enough to what I had in mind that I was happy to use that phrase. But then you say that you don't class Omelas in this category, because it doesn't successfully push a particular view. Which suggests that the category you have in mind isn't just about conveying ideas, but rather about pushing a particular philosophical/political perspective -- yes? But then you say that you do class Permutation City in this category (and I would agree), and you approve of it. This actually surprises me... I would have thought, given what you'd said earlier, that you would object to PC on the grounds that it simply asserts a fictional universe in which various things are true, and could be misused as evidence that those things are in fact true in the real world. I'm glad you aren't making that argument, as it suggests our views are actually closer than I'd originally thought (I would agree that it's possible to misuse PC that way, as it is possible to misuse other fictional ideas, but that's a separate issue). And you further explain that PC isn't making a value judgment... but that you still consider it an example of political fiction... which is consistent with your original definition of the term... but I don't know how to reconcile it with your description of Omelas. So... I'm genuinely confused.

0lmm11y

I'm trying to explore this as we go along; it's very possible I've been incoherent. I don't class Omelas in any of these categories category because I've never seen it used in this kind of discussion, at all. Permutation City was an example I only thought of in the last post. Fundamentally I feel like it belongs in a different cluster from these other examples (including the LW ones) - I'm trying to understand why, and I was suggesting that the value judgements might be the difference, but that's little more than a guess.

1TheOtherDave11y

Well... OK. Let's change that. OK... now that you've seen Omelas used to in a discussion about utilitarian moral philosophy, does your judgment about the story change?

0lmm11y

Hmm. I was not fond of the story in any case, so this use would need to be particularly bad to diminish my opinion of it. The fundamental lack of realism in the story now seems more important. Where before I was happy to suspend disbelief on the implausibility of a town that worked that way, if we're going to apply actual philosophy it I find myself wanting a more rigorous explanation of how things work - why do people believe that comforting the child would damage the city? Do I think using the story has made the discussion worse? Maybe; it's hard to compare to a control in the specific instance. But I think in the general, average case philosophical discussions that use fictional examples turn out less well than those that don't. If I thought the use of the story had damaged the discussion, would that make me think less of the story or author? I think my somewhat weaselly (and nonutilitarian) answer is that intent matters here. If I discovered that a story I liked was actually intended allegorically, I think I'd think less of it (and to a certain extent this happened with Animal Farm, which I read naively at an early age and less naively a few years later, and thought less of it the second time). But if someone just happens to use a story I like in a philosophical argument, without there being anything inherent to the story or author that invited this kind of use, I don't think that would change my opinion.

0TheOtherDave11y

OK, fair enough. Thanks for clarifying your position.

0TheOtherDave11y

Interesting. From my perspective, Omelas does a fine job of doing what I'm claiming fiction is useful for in these sorts of discussions... it makes it easy to refer to a scenario that illustrates a point that would otherwise be far more complicated to even define. For example, I can, in a conversation about total-utilitarianism, say "Well, so what if anything is wrong with Omelas?" to you, and you can tell me whether you think there's anything wrong with Omelas and if so what, and we've communicated a lot more efficiently than if we hadn't both read the story. Similarly, around LW I can refer to something as an Invisible Dragon in the Garage and that clarifies what might otherwise be a hopelessly muddled conversation. Now, you're certainly right that while having identified a position is a necessary first step to defending that position, those are two different thigns, and that soemtimes people use fiction to do the former and then act as though they'd done the latter when they haven't. This is a mistake. (Also, since you bring it up, I consider Brave New World far too complicated a story to serve very well in this role... there's too much going on. Which is a good thing for fiction, and I endorse it utterly, since the primary function of fiction for me is not to provide useful shortcuts in discussions. However, some fiction performs this function and I think that's a fine thing too.)

0Protagoras11y

I think there is a good deal to be said for the interpretation according to which many of the features of the "ideal" city Socrates describes in Republic are intended to work on the biases of Glaucon and Adeimantus (and those like them) and not intended to actually represent an ideal city. Admittedly, Laws does seem to be intended to describe how Plato thinks a city should be run, so it seems that Plato had some pretty terrible political ideas (at least at the end; Laws is his last work, and I prefer to think his mind was starting to go), but nonetheless it's not at all safe to assume that all the questionable ideas raised by Socrates in Republic are seriously endorsed by Plato. I completely agree that Brave New World seems unhelpful in evaluating utilitarianism.

1lmm11y

Which is I think the fundamental problem with this kind of political fiction. It allows people to present ideas and implications without committing to them or providing evidence (or alternately, making it clear that this is an opposing view that they are not endorsing). But then at a later stage they go on to treat the things that happened in their fiction as things they'd proven.

0gattsuru11y

Brave New World is intended as a critique of utilitarianism: the Fordian society's willingness to treat people as specialized components may not be as immediately terrifying as 1984, but it's still intentionally disutopian. My apologies if I'm misreading your statement, but many folk don't get that from reading the book in a classroom environment. Some subcultures have different expectations of exclusivity, which may be meaningful here even if not true polyamory. Communication availability and different economic situations, as well. The mainstream entrance of women into the work force as self-sustaining individuals is a fairly new thing, and the availability of instant always-on communication even more recent. EDIT: I agree that there are structural concerns if a sufficient portion of the leadership are both poly and in a connected relationship, but this has to do more with network effects than polyamory. The availability and expenditures of money are likely to trigger the same network effect issues regardless of poly stuff.

0lmm11y

Yes. I thought it would be clear that I knew that, since I don't think my statement makes any sense otherwise? I found Brave New World, in so far as it is taken as an illustration of a philosophical point, actively unhelpful; that is, its existence is detrimental to the quality of philosophical discussions about the merits of utilitarianism (basically for all the usual reasons that fictional evidence is bad; it leads people to assume that a utilitarian society would behave in a certain way, or that certain behaviors would have certain outcomes, simply because that was what happened in Brave New World). (Independently, I found it interesting and enjoyable as a work of fiction).

2asr11y

I think this fine if the papers are good. It's routine in academic research that somebody says "I'm working on curing cancer." And then it turns out that they're really studying one little gene that's related to some set of cancers. In general, it's utterly normal in the academy that somebody announces dramatic goal A, and then really works on subproblem D that might ultimately help achieve C, and then B, an important special case of A. The standard I would use is "are there a significant number of people who find the papers interesting and useful?" And that's a standard that I think MIRI is improving significantly on. A large fraction of academics with tenure in top-50 computer science departments aren't work that's better. Notice that I wouldn't use "avoid UFAI danger" as a metric. If the MIRI people are motivated to answer interesting questions about decision theory and coordination between agents-who-can-read-source-code, I think they're doing worthwhile work.

2lmm11y

Worthwhile? Maybe. But it seems dishonest to collect donations that are purportedly for avoiding UFAI danger if they don't actually result in avoiding UFAI danger.

0A1987dM11y

Which one was it?

2Risto_Saarelma11y

I think the word for a thing that started calling itself the best cult in the world is 'religion'.

0Ritalin11y

When people ask me what religion I hail from (as far as I'm concerened, religion or religation is nothing more or less than RED Team VS BLU Team style affiliation, with, in the absence of exterior threats, a tendency to splinter and call heresy on each other), I tell them "secular humanist". As far as I'm concerned, LW is just a particularly interesting denomination of that faith. "We're the only religion whose beliefs are wholly grounded in empirical experience, and which, instead of praying for things to get better, go out and make them so".

0TheOtherDave11y

Are there in fact no ("other") religions which endorse making things better?

0Desrtopa11y

I am aware of religious denominations which advocate doing good works as a route to personal salvation, but I honestly can't think of any religious branch I'm aware of which advocates good works on the basis of "For goodness' sake, look at this place, it's seriously in need of fixing up."

0TheOtherDave11y

So, just to make sure I understand the category you're describing here... if, for example, an organization like the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations asserts as one of its guiding principles "The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;" and does not make a statement one way or the other about the salvatory nature of those principles, is that an example of the category?

0Desrtopa11y

I guess I'd say that it counts if you're willing to treat Unitarian Universalism as an actual religious denomination. Whether it counts or not would probably depend on how you identify such things, since it's missing qualities which one might consider important, such as formal doctrines. In my experience Unitarian Universalism, at least in its modern form, is mainly a conglomeration of liberal progressive ideals used as an umbrella to unite people with religious beliefs ranging from moralistic therapeutic deism to outright atheism. All of the Unitarian Universalists I've known well enough to ask have also identified themselves as secular humanists, so I certainly wouldn't regard it as an alternative to secular humanism which carries that value.

2fubarobfusco11y

Atheists tend to identify religions as creeds: your religion is about what you believe. By this way of thinking, a Catholic is any person who believes thus-and-so; a Buddhist is any person who believes this-and-that; a Muslim is any person who believes the-other-thing; and so on. Having correct belief (orthodoxy) is indeed significant to many religious people, but that's not the same as it being what religion is about. Protestant Christianity asserts sola fide, the principle that believers are justified (their sins removed) by dint of their faith in Jesus Christ. The first pillar of Islam is the shahadah, a declaration of belief. One of the first questions people ask about any new-to-them religion is, "What do you believe in?", and discussions of religions often involve clarifying points of belief, such as "Buddhists don't believe the Buddha is a god." Examples such as these may lead many atheists to think that religion is about belief. Another way of looking at religion, though, is that religion is about practice: what you do when you think you're doing religion. The significant thing that makes your religion is not your religious beliefs, but your religious habits or practices. You can assert the Catechism all day long ... but if you don't go to Mass, pray, take communion, and confess your sins to a priest, you're not a central example of a Catholic. And the other four pillars of Islam aren't about belief, but about practice. And something else to consider is that religion is also about who you do it with — a community. Religion is usually done with some reference to a local community (a church, coven, what-have-you) and a larger community that includes other local groups as well as teachers, leaders, recognized figures. It is this community that teaches and propagates the beliefs. People are considered to be members of the religion by dint of their membership in this community (possibly formally recognized, as by baptism) even if they do not yet know the belie

0TheOtherDave11y

Well, that's why I'm asking the question. UU is one group I happen to know well enough to expect that its members do in fact advocate good works on the basis of good works being a good thing, so if it's a counterexample, that's easy. But if it isn't because it isn't actually a religion, OK. I think something similar is true of Congregationalists, from my limited experience of them... but then, all the Congregationalists I've known well enough to ask have identified themselves as agnostics and atheists, so perhaps they don't count either. But I have a clearer notion of what your category is now; thank you for the clarification. Does it seem to you that you and Ritalin (in the comment I replied to) mean the same thing by "religion"?

0Desrtopa11y

I can't speak for Ritalin, but I'd speculate that we'd both identify it as requiring certain patterns of belief as well as affiliation.

0Ritalin11y

As far as I know, they're all about giving up your ego in one way or another and happily wait for death or the endtimes. The most proactive they get is trying to spread this attitude around (but not too much; they still need other people to actually pay for their contemplative lifestyle). Making things better, improving the standing of humankind, cancelling the apocalypse? A futile, arrogant, doomed effort.

0TheOtherDave11y

OK.

3Lumifer11y

In British English "bloody" is a general-purpose intensifier, e.g. "That's just bloody lovely!" :-)

2Ritalin11y

I know, I just thought maybe he meant the more literal kind of bloody, given the context (we're talking about cults, this site is dominated by US Citizens), and wanted him to clarify.

-1JDelta11y

Yes, I get definite cultist vibes from some members. A cult is basically an organization of a small number of members who hold that their beliefs make them superior (in one or more ways) to others, with an added implication of social tightness, shared activities, internal slang, difficult for outsiders to understand. Many LW people often appear to behave like this.

4Tenoke11y

You too are using an even looser definition of a cult. Surely you know that 'cult' carries some different (negative) connotations for other people?

0JDelta11y

I never stated LW is a cult. It clearly isn't. It does however have at least several, possibly many, members who appear to think about LW in the way many cult members think of their cult.

6Richard_Kennaway11y

Observe the progression: ... ... At this point, are you saying anything at all?

-1JDelta11y

I assume an educated reader will infer the massive negative social connotations of any movement or organization that has a reputation, no matter how small at this point, as being 'cultish' -- such a reputation inevitably makes achieving goals, recruiting members, etc., more difficult. Thus being careful not to create that image is very important (or should be) to the membership of the site.

2Richard_Kennaway11y

From saying almost nothing you have switched to overblown hyperbole. (BTW, I believe you mean "be aware of", not "infer".) It appears that LW does have, in some circles (like RationalWiki, ha) a cultish reputation, but I do not see "massive" consequences arising from that.

0JDelta11y

In a highly chaotic system like our society, small differences (e.g. a reputation in some circles as cultish) can decrease the odds of something gaining influence or acceptance incredibly. People spend their whole lives researching sales, and any time someone is spreading an idea, sales comes into it. If you think any marketing department of a major company would accept the idea that some website likely visited by many, many, potential members discusses their organization in such a negative light, you are very mistaken. When even the regular members are discussing openly, are we getting a reputation as a cult, that is a terrible 'branding' failure. For LW to achieve the potential most of it's members (I would assume) hope it will... yes there are consequences. Any time a large group of potential members or future 'rationalists' (not to confuse LW with rationalism) is skeptical or inclined to disinterest in LW because they heard it had some sort of 'cultish' reputation, is a massive potential loss of people who could contribute and learn for the betterment of themselves and society as a whole. Don't underestimate the impact of small differences when you are dealing with something as complex, and unpredictable as society and the spread of ideas.

2TheOtherDave11y

Which members?

[-]Vaniver11y90

So, I link to Amazon fairly frequently here, and when I do I use the referral link "ref=nosim?tag=vglnk-c319-20" to kick some money back to MIRI / whoever's paying for LW.

First, is that the right link? Second, what would it take to add that to the "Show help" box so that I don't have to dig it up whenever I want to use it, and others are more likely to use it?

4Douglas_Knight11y

This is done automatically in a somewhat different way. So my advice is not to worry about it. But, yes, it shouldn't hurt and and it should help in the situation that viglink doesn't fire. In those comments, Wei Dai agrees that this is the referral code.

1Vaniver11y

Part of the reason why I'm asking is because that info might be old. Apparently "ref=nosim" was obsolete two years ago, and I don't know if that's still the right VigLink account, etc.

2gwern11y

I thought LW automatically added affiliate links using VigLink already.

0Vaniver11y

I was under that impression also. [Edit] I prefer doing it by hand because I almost always only open links in new tabs, which I predict others will do as well, and VigLink does not do that with new tab links. [Edit2]The original text before the edit was: When I asked why I did it by hand, I got back the answer "I do it by hand because I do it by hand," which seemed silly. But it turns out there was a good reason which I had forgotten; score one for blind tradition.

0ChristianKl11y

Maybe it might even sense to let the forum automatically format links to Amazon that way.

4Vaniver11y

I believe this is supposed to happen already, but have not tested it.

-6Lumifer11y

[-]Lumifer11y90

LW is mostly pure-text with no images except for occasional graphs. Why is that so? Are the reasons technical (due to reddit code), cultural (it's better without images), or historical (it's always been so)?

[-]Douglas_Knight11y220

I think most people are unaware that they can include images in comments.

[-][anonymous]11y150

A state of affairs which I hope continues.

[-]Lumifer11y100

A state of affairs which I hope continues.

Ah, a vote for "it's better this way". Why do you prefer pure text? Is it because of the danger of being overrun with cat pictures and blinking gif smileys?

5hyporational11y

Let's take that particular image. It covers a huge block that could have been filled by text otherwise and conveys relatively little information accurately. It distrupts my reading completely for a little while and getting back to the nice flow takes cognitive effort. This moment I'm reading on my phone and the image fills the whole screen.

0Gunnar_Zarncke11y

It is because text can be copy-pasted and composed easily since browsers mostly allow selecting any text (this is more difficult in win apps). Whereas images cannot be copy pasted as simple (mostly you have to find the URL and copy paste that) and images cannot be composed easily at all (you at least need some pic editor which often doesn't allow simple copy-paste). This is the old problem that there is no graphical language. A problem that has evadad GUI designers since the beginning.

0Lumifer11y

Um. In Firefox, right-click on the image, select Copy Image. Looks pretty simple to me. Pretty sure it works the same way in Chrome as well. I think you're missing the point of images. Their advantage is precisely that they are holistic, a gestalt -- you're supposed to take them in whole and not decompose them into elements. Sure, if you want to construct a sequential narrative out of symbols, images are the wrong medium.

0Gunnar_Zarncke11y

And how do you insert it into a comment? That may be true of some images but not all.

9gwern11y

I'd go with laziness and lack of overt demand. I know that people love graphs and images, but I don't especially feel the need when writing something, and it's additional work (one has to make the image somehow, name it, upload it somewhere, create special image syntax, make sure it's not too big that it'll spill out of the narrow column allotted articles etc). I can barely bring myself to include images for my own little statistical essays, though I've noticed that my more popular essays seem to include more images.

9luminosity11y

I haven't tried authoring an article myself, but a quick look now seems to indicate that you can't upload images, only link to them. This means images must be hosted on third parties, meaning you have to upload it there and if not directly under your control, it's vulnerable to link rot. It seems like this would be inconvenient.

0Richard_Kennaway11y

You can upload images to the LessWrong wiki, and then link them from comments or posts. It's a bit roundabout, but the feature is there. The question is then, should it be made easier?

1Douglas_Knight11y

I haven't tried it, but just knowing that it requires logging in to the wiki, I know that it's way too hard and I'll probably use imgur instead.

0Lumifer11y

That's very common in online forums (for the server load reasons) but doesn't seem to stop some forums from being fairly image-heavy. It's not like there is a shortage of free image-hosting sites. Yes, I understand the inconvenience argument, but the lack of images at LW is pretty stark.

2TheOtherDave11y

Do you think more people should include graphics in their posts? Do you think more people should include graphics in their comments? Do you think the image-heavy forums you mention get some benefit from being image-heavy that we would do well to pursue?

8Lumifer11y

I am hesitant to put forward a recommendation. I don't know yet and approach this as the Chesterton's Fence.

3TheOtherDave11y

That's fair. I'll observe that I read your comments on this thread as implicitly recommending more images. This is of course just my reading, but I figured I'd mention it anyway if you are hesitant to make a recommendation for fear of tearing that fence down in ignorance, on the off chance that I'm not entirely unique here.

0Lumifer11y

I understand where you are coming from (asking why this house is not blue is often perceived as implying that this house should be blue) -- but do you think there's any way to at least tone down this implication without putting in an explicit disclaimer?

1TheOtherDave11y

Well, if that were my goal, one thing I would try to avoid is getting into a dynamic where I ask people why they avoid X, and then when they provide some reasons I reply with counterarguments. Another thing I would try to avoid is not questioning comments which seem to support doing X, for example by pointing out that it's easy to do, but questioning comments which seem to challenge those comments. Also, when articulating possible reasons for avoiding X, I would take some care with the emotional connotations of my wording. This is of course difficult, but one easy way to better approximate it is to describe both the pro-X and anti-X positions using the same kind of language, rather than describing just one and leaving the other unmarked. More generally, assymetry in how I handle the pro-X and anti-X cases will tend to get read as suggesting partiality; if I want to express impartiality, I would cultivate symmetry. That said, it's probably easier to just express my preferences as preferences.

0Lumifer11y

I think it's fine. Reasons that people provide might be strong or might be weak -- it's OK to tap on them to see if they would fall down. I would do the same thing to comments which (potentially) said "Yay images, we need more of them!". In general, I would prefer not to anchor the expectations of the thread participants, but not at the price of interference with figuring out of what does the territory actually look like. I didn't (and still don't) have a position to describe. Summarizing arguments pro and con seemed premature. This really was just a simple open question without a hidden agenda.

0TheOtherDave11y

All right.

-2Emile11y

You could put a "light" disclaimer, like "I'm curious" or "(not that I'm complaining)". Edit (post downvote): (not that I'm saying you should have) :D

0A1987dM11y

I read them this way too.

0Mestroyer11y

There's a good chance this is not a "fence", deliberately designed by some agent with us in mind, but a fallen tree that ended up there by accident/laziness.

7ChristianKl11y

There's a design choice on the part of LessWrong against avatar images. Text is supposed to speak for itself and not be judged by it's author. Avatar imaging would increase author recognition.

4Mestroyer11y

I think I agree with that. I do read author names, but I read them after I read the text usually. I frequently find myself mildly surprised that I've just upvoted someone I usually downvote, or vice versa.

0lmm11y

And yet names are visually quite distinct. I find authorship much more obvious here than on HN.

0ChristianKl11y

Most people are much better at remembering faces than at remembering names. Hacker News also has a lot more people and therefore you will interact with the same person less often.

4A1987dM11y

Why shouldn't it be?

-1Lumifer11y

I am not implying that it should, but to answer your question, because limits on accepted forms of expression are not necessarily a good thing. Not necessarily a bad thing, either. People already mentioned some pros (e.g. graphs and such help cross the inferential distance) and cons (e.g. images break the mental flow of some people).

0A1987dM11y

It doesn't feel like a limit to me, just something that very seldom occurs to me to do because I very seldom have any use for it. (I sometimes link to images -- maybe next time I'll consider including them directly in the comment.)

4gattsuru11y

I'd note that the short help for comments does not list the Markdown syntax for embedding images in comments, and even the "more comment formatting help" page is not especially clear. That LessWrong cultural encourages folk to write comments before writing Main or Discussion articles makes that fairly relevant.

4TheOtherDave11y

Some people embed graphics in their articles, and this is seen by many as a good thing. I suspect it's just individuals choosing not to bother with images.

2ChrisHallquist11y

Reading this comment... I suddenly feel very odd about the fact that I failed to include images in my Neuroscience basics for LessWrongians post, in spite of in a couple places saying "an image might be useful here." Though the lack of images was partly due to me having trouble finding good ones, so I won't change it at the moment.

2lsparrish11y

I find it harder to engage in System 2 when there are images around. Heck, even math glyphs usually trip me up. That's not to say graphics can't do more good than harm (for example, charts and diagrams can help cross inferential distance quickly, and may serve as useful intuition pumps) but I imagine that more images would mean more reliance on intuition and less on logic, hence less capacity for taking things to analytical extremes. So it could be harmful (given the nature of the site) to introduce more images.

0hyporational11y

I like my flow. I don't have anything against images if they are arranged in a way that doesn't distrupt reading. I'm not sure if lw platform allows for that.

0[anonymous]11y

Personally I find the absence of images mostly positive, and apparently helpful for staying in System 2 mode. This is a place where we analyze counter-intuitive propositions, so the absence of images may be critical to the optimal functioning of the community. That's not to say images don't have cognitive advantages (the information content can be processed more quickly than text, e.g.) but they can be distracting, and might actually tend to lead one to be less analytical and concise in the long run. Notice how an image-based meme may seem credible or hard to shoot down even when it represents a strawman argument (or even no argument at all). There's a reason Chick tracts are a thing.

[-]sixes_and_sevens11y70

Several months ago I set up a blog for writing intelligent, thought-provoking stuff. I've made two posts to it, and one of those is a photo of a page in Strategy of Conflict, because it hilariously featured the word "retarded". Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

I'm pretty sure there are other would-be bloggers on here who experience similar update-discipline issues. Would any of them like to form some loose cabal of blogging spotters, who can egg each other on, suggest topics, provide editorial and stylistic feedback, etc.?

EDIT: ITT: I'm a bit of a dick! Sorry, everyone!

[-]Vaniver11y110

Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere.

Are you sure the error is that you're posting too little to the blog, rather than that you're trying to have a blog in the first place?

0sixes_and_sevens11y

Is this intended as snark, or an actual helpful comment? Assuming the latter, I have what I consider to be sound motives for maintaining a blog. Unfortunately, I don't have sound habits for maintaining a blog, coupled with a bit of a cold-start problem. I doubt I am the only person in this position, and believe social commitment mechanisms may be a possible avenue for improvement.

9Vaniver11y

I was going for actual helpful comment. I personally don't have a blog because several attempts to have a blog failed. Afterwards, I was fairly sure that the reason why my blogs failed was because I like conversations too much and monologuing too little. I found that forums both had a reliable stream of content to react to, as well as a somewhat reliable stream of content to build off of. The incentive structure seemed a lot nicer in a number of ways. More broadly, I think a good habit when plans fail is to ask the question "What information does this failure give me?", rather than the limited question "why did this plan fail me?". Sometimes you should revise the plan to avoid that failure mode; other times you should revise the plan to have entirely different goals. My immediate practical suggestion is to create a LW draft editing circle. This won't give you the benefits of a blog distinct from LW, but eliminates most of the cold-start problem. It also adds to the potential interest base people who have ideas for posts but who don't have the confidence in their ability to write a post that is socially acceptable to LW (i.e. doesn't break some hidden protocol).

3hyporational11y

If you have any old material, you could consider posting those to get initial readership, even if you don't consider them especially high quality. I'd interpret Vaniver's comment more generally to mean that parts of your brain might disagree with this assessment, and you experience this as procrastination.

7Tenoke11y

Count me in if anything comes out of it.

4philh11y

Yes. (My current excuse for not even having made one post is that I started to experience wrist pain, and didn't want to make it worse by doing significant typing at home. It seems to be getting better now.)

2lmm11y

Maybe you should consider joining an existing blogging community - livejournal or tumblr or medium? They're good at giving you social prompts to write something.

7sixes_and_sevens11y

In retrospect, my previous response to this does seem pretty unwarranted. This was a perfectly reasonable and relevant comment that caught me at a bad time. I'd like to apologise.

-6sixes_and_sevens11y

2Lumifer11y

Consider your incentives. Actual (non-imaginary) incentives in your current life. What are the incentives for maintaining a blog? What do you get (again, actually, not supposedly) when you make a post? What are the disincentives? (e.g. will a negative comment spoil your day?) Is there a specific goal you're trying to reach? Is posting to your blog a step on the path to the goal?

0sixes_and_sevens11y

Are you requesting answers for my specific case, or just providing me with advice? (As an observation, which isn't meant to be a hostile response to your comment, people seem very keen to offer advice on LW, even when none has been requested.)

0Lumifer11y

Advice, I guess, in the sense that I think these are the questions you'd be interested in knowing the answers to (for yourself, not for posting here).

0[anonymous]11y

If I wanted to update a blog regularly, I would consider it imperative to put "update my blog" as a repeating item in my to-do list. For me, relying on memory is an atrocious way to ensure that something gets done; having a to-do list is enormously more effective.

0Ritalin11y

I tried translating the sequences. Gave up on the third post.

[-]Pablo11y70

The main problem in learning a new skill is maintaining the required motivation and discipline, especially in the early stages. Gamification deals this problem better than any of the other approaches I’m familiar with. Over the past few months, I’ve managed to study maths, languages, coding, Chinese characters, and more on a daily basis, with barely any interruptions. I accomplished this by simply taking advantage of the many gamified learning resources available online for free. Here are the sites I have tried and can recommend:

Codecademy. For learning

... (read more)

2Emile11y

I've been using Anki daily these past two or three months, and regularly-but-not-quite-daily maybe a year before that. I use it for a fair amount of different things (code, psychology, languages, ...)I recommend it, though it's not really "gamified".

[-]VincentYu11y60

Please add the open_thread tag (with the underscore) to the post.

3Vladimir_Nesov11y

Fixed.

[-]ColonelMustard11y60

Not sure where this goes: how can I submit an article to discussion? I've written it and saved it as a draft, but I haven't figured out a way to post it.

9Shmi11y

You don't have enough karma to post yet. Consider making some quality comments first.

5ColonelMustard11y

Thank you! One more - how much karma do I need? I was under the impression one needed 2 to post to discussion (20 to main), but presumably this is not the case. Is there an up to date list?

4Tenoke11y

I think the requirement is currently 5 karma to post to discussion.

-16Shmi11y

[-]Vaniver11y50

Eliezer posted to Facebook:

In My Little Pony: Friendship is Signaling, Twilight Sparkle and her companions defeat Nightmare Moon by using the Elements of Cynicism to prove to her that she doesn't really care about darkness.

My stab at it. I'm probably going to post it to FIMFiction in a day or so, but it's basically a first draft at this point and could doubtless use editing / criticism.

[-]fubarobfusco11y50

I formerly thought I had a politically-motivated stalker who was going through all my old comments to downvote them.

Now I wonder if I have a stalker who is trying to keep me at ~6000 total, ~200 30-day karma.

[-]hyporational11y40

A med student colleague of mine, a devout christian, is going to give a lecture on psychosexual development for our small group in a couple of days. She's probably going to sneak in an unknown amount of propaganda. With delicious improbability, there happen to be two transgender med students in our group she probably isn't aware of. To this day, relations in our group have been very friendly.

Any tips on how to avoid the apocalypse? Pre-emptive maneuvers are out of the question, I want to see what happens.

ETA: Nothing happened. Caused a significant update.

8fubarobfusco11y

This sounds like a situation in which some people present may consider some other people's beliefs to be an individual-level existential threat — whether to their identity, to their lives, or to their immortal souls. In other words, the problem is not just that these folks disagree with each other, but that they may feel threatened by one another, and by the propagation of one another's beliefs. Consider: "If you convince people of your belief, people are more likely to try to kill me." "If you convince people of your belief, I am more likely to become corrupted." We are surprised when a local NAACP leader has a calm meeting with a KKK leader. (But possibly not as surprised as the national NAACP leadership were.) One framework for dealing with situations like this is called liberalism. In liberalism, we imagine moral boundaries called "rights" around individuals, and we agree that no matter what other beliefs we may arrive at, that it would be wrong to transgress these boundaries. (We imagine individuals, not groups or ideas, as having rights; and that every individual has the same rights, regardless of properties such as their race, sex, sexuality, or religion.) Agreeing on rights allows us to put boundaries around the effects of certain moral disagreements, which makes them less scary and more peaceful. If your Christian colleague will agree, for instance, that it is wrong to kidnap and torture someone in an effort to change that person's sexual identity, they may be less threatening to the others.

0Lumifer11y

What would constitute an apocalypse? When you say "I want to see what happens" do you mean you want to let the situation develop organically but set certain boundaries, a cap on damages, so to say?

1hyporational11y

That's exactly what I mean. I'm not directing the situation, but will be participating. I'd like to confront and see people confront her religious bias, without the result being excessive flame or her being backed in a corner without a chance to even marginally nudge her mind in the right direction. She's smart, will not make explicit religious statements, and will back her claims with cherry picked reseach. Naturally the level of mindkill will depend on other participants too, and I will treat this as some sort of a rationality test if they manage to keep their calm. If they lose it I guess it's understandable. I guess I'll be using lots of some version of "agree denotationally, disagree connotationally".

0Lumifer11y

Are the participants Finnish? I am tempted to start remembering jokes about the volatile and emotional character of Finns... :-)

0hyporational11y

Finnish indeed, and even with our completely watered down version of belief in belief christianity there's always a religious nut or two to ruin your day. Volatile and emotional? Most lwers per capita was it? Is it because we're in the highest need for rationality?

0Shmi11y

Is she in-your-face christian or a live-and-let-live one?

0hyporational11y

Heavily leaning towards in-your-face on the spectrum. Has been very vocal on abortion issues for example. Thinks that homosexuality is a sin. Other than her religiousness, is a perfectly nice human being.

[-]Ritalin11y40

I've been out of things for a while; how goes Eliezer's book?

4[anonymous]11y

The rationality book? this is the last I've seen http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3a/miris_2013_summer_matching_challenge/9gth

0NancyLebovitz11y

http://hpmor.com/notes/progress-13-10-0/ Eliezer says he'll do a progress report on 11/1. I haven't heard any news otherwise.

4Tenoke11y

I don't think that 'Eliezer's book' refers to HPMOR. I think it is more likely that he is asking about the book based on the Sequences (for which this is probably the most recent thread).

[-]closeness11y40

Why isn't there a pill that makes a broken heart go away?

5Ritalin11y

Ask Gwern, he probably knows something that's good enough.

3Kaj_Sotala11y

There might be eventually.

3cousin_it11y

Something like that was discussed previously. Kevin recommended antidepressants in the comments.

1Lumifer11y

Just time is both necessary and sufficient.

1Nisan11y

It will get better over time.

0joaolkf11y

They are on it: http://www.academia.edu/2764401/If_I_could_just_stop_loving_you_Anti-love_biotechnology_and_the_ethics_of_a_chemical_breakup

-1drethelin11y

Arguably MDMA in the proper context. The chain of reasoning as as follows: One of the quickest traditional cures for sadness about a broken off relationship is a new relationship ---> the cure for a broken heart is to meet and fall in love with someone else as fast as possible ---> MDMA lowers inhibition and raises affection and touch (which are crucial for relationship formation) and theoretically should make the process of getting to know someone faster and happier ---> so if you take MDMA around the right people in the right place you can quickly fall into a new love.

-5JDelta11y

[-]NancyLebovitz11y30

Since I'm not sure whether this advice would be welcome in a recent discussion, I'm just going to start cold by describing something which has worked for me.

In an initial post, I explain what kind of advice I'm looking for, and I'm specific about preferring advice from people who've gotten improvement in [specific situation]. I normally say other advice is welcome, but you'd be amazed how little of it I get.

I believe it's important to head off unwanted advice early. I can't remember whether I normally put my limiting request at the beginning or end of a po... (read more)

1TheOtherDave11y

In my social circle, explicitly tagging posts as "I'm not looking for advice" seems to work pretty well at discouraging advice. I don't do it often myself though. And you're right, of course, that it is among other things an assertion of status, though of course it's also a useful piece of explicit information.

[-]niceguyanon11y20

Does anyone have any book recommendations on the topic of evidence based negotiation tactics? I have read Influence; Cialdini, thinking fast, and slow ; Kahneman , and Art of Strategy; Dixit and Nalebuff. These are great books to read but I am looking for something with a more narrow focus, there are lot's of books on amazon that get good reviews but I am unsure of which one would suit me best.

3Vaniver11y

Getting to Yes is a standard negotiation book; Difficult Conversations seems useful as a supplement for negotiation in non-business contexts (but, as a general communication book, has obvious business applications as well).

2niceguyanon11y

I picked these up per your suggestion. Thanks.

0Shmi11y

There is a sequel to Getting to Yes, "Getting past No", which is also good.

0niceguyanon11y

Thanks. I actually picked up the amazon suggested bundle, which included the sequel that you are speaking of.

0Shmi11y

Hope it helps you. I know that my negotiating skills improved considerably. I used to be afraid to dicker with car salesmen.

3niceguyanon11y

How many dealerships did you go to? I am really starting to play with the idea that if you aren't getting rejected enough then you probably aren't negotiating hard enough. The next time I go buy a car I will make sure to negotiate hard enough to get rejected from more than one dealership. If they don't let you walk out, then you probably haven't found their low point yet.

3Shmi11y

Last time? 3 or 4. Rejection is not quite the term. In my experience the sales guy eventually offers you his "best deal", you thank him (why is it there are virtually no women in these jobs?) for his time and stand up to leave. That's when he likely calls his manager who sweetens the deal a bit. YMMV. Once it seemed fair enough that I took it, rejecting "documentation fee", upsell and all other junk along the way. (Free service, extended warranty etc. should already be negotiated in at this point: this stuff is cheap for them, expensive for you.) Another time I still left, making it clear that I was ready to finish the deal, if only... then got a call later with some more concessions. Every time the "final" contract had unexpected charges added which had to be removed before signing. Admittedly, I never push it to the point where the salesperson hates me, so they clearly get a fair shake out of it, just not a lucrative one. One tactic that is nearly always useful (be it cars, electronics, appliances or anything else) is anchoring: showing the price of a comparable item, the book value, lease details posted on the manufacturer's site, anything that makes the seller to go for a version of "price match".

[-]Vaniver11y20

Steve Sailer on the Trolley Problem: [1] and [2]. Basically, to what degree is the unwillingness of people in the thought experiment to attempt to push the fat man the realization that pushing the fat man is an inherently riskier prospect than pulling a lever?

[-]Alejandro111y150

Noah Millman also comments:

“Throw the switch or not” is a natural choice actually presented by real conditions – switches imply choices by definition. “Push the fat man or don’t” isn’t a natural choice presented by real conditions – it’s a scenario concocted for an experiment. By definition, those cannot be the only options in the universe. And our brains can tell.
It seems to me that what characterizes the people who choose the “logical” answer – push the fat man – is not that they gave a less-emotional response but that they gave a less-inuitive, less-gestalt-based response. They were willing to accept the conditions of the problem as given without question. That’s a response to authority – they are turning off the part of their brains that feels the situation as a real one, and sticking with the part of the brain that reasons from unquestionable givens to undeniable conclusions.
There’s a place for that kind of response – but I would argue that answering questions of great moral import is emphatically not that place. Indeed, from the French Revolution to the Iraq War, modernity is littered with the corpses of those whose deaths were logically necessary for some hypothesized outc

... (read more)

[-]NancyLebovitz11y20

Hofstadter and AI-- trying to understand how people actually think rather than producing brute-force simulations for specific problems.

[-]Omid11y20

Is it rude to buy a treadmill if you live on the second floor of the apartment ?

3Jayson_Virissimo11y

Buying it? No. Using it while your downstairs-neighbor is home? Yes. A repetitive thumping can make trying to study hellishly difficult (for people sufficiently similar to me).

0Dorikka11y

To the extent that you believe the preferences of the person below you mirror your own, would it annoy you if the person above you started using a treadmill in their apt?

4Omid11y

I don't know what a treadmill upstairs sounds like.

0Desrtopa11y

Possibly; an elliptical machine may be more considerate, as it's less likely to produce noise or impact which will be noticed downstairs.

[-]niceguyanon11y20

Is there any research suggesting simulated out-of-body-experiences (OBE)(like this), can be used for self improvement? For example potential areas of benefits include triggering OBEs to help patients suffering from incorrect body identities, which is exciting.

For some time now, I have had this very strange fascination with OBE and using it to over come akrasia. Of course I have no scientific evidence for it, yet I have this strong intuition that makes me believe so. I'll do my best to explain my rationale. Often I get this idea, that I can trick mysel... (read more)

7TheOtherDave11y

A few potentially relevant observations: * The kind of dissociation you talk about here, where I experience my "self" as unrelated to my body, is commonly reported as spontaneously occurring during various kinds of emotional stress. I've had it happen to me many times. * It would not be surprising if the same mechanism that leads to spontaneous dissociation in some cases can also lead to the strong intuition that dissociation would be a really good idea. * Just because there's a mechanism that leads me to strongly intuit that something would be a really good idea doesn't necessarily mean that it actually would be. * All of that said: after my stroke, I experienced a lot of limb-dissociation... my arm didn't really feel like part of me, etc. This did have the advantage you described, where I could tell my arm to keep doing some PT exercise and it would, and yes, my arm hurt, and I sort of felt bad for it, but it's not like it was me hurting, and I knew I'd be better off for doing the exercise. It is indeed a useful trick. * I suspect there are healthier ways to get the same effect.

3ChristianKl11y

Do you have experience with OBEs? I personally have limited experience. I'm no expert but I know a bit. In my experience the kind of people who have the skills for engaging in out-of-body-experiences usually don't get a lot done. It rather increases akrasia then decreasing it. If you want to decrease akrasia associating more with your body is a better strategy than getting outside of it. That effect is really there. You are making a trade. You lose empathy. Stopping to care about other people means that you can't have genuine relationships. On the other hand rejections don't hurt as much and you can more easily put yourself into such a situation.

0NancyLebovitz11y

I don't think you're off your rocker, though dissociating at the gym might increase the risk of injury. I tentatively suggest that you explore becoming comfortable enough in your life that you don't need the hack, but I'm not sure that the hack is necessarily a bad strategy at present.

[-]Emily11y00

Does anyone know of a good online source for reading about general programming concepts? In particular, I'm interested in learning a bit more about pointers and content-addressability, and the Wikipedia material doesn't seem very good. I don't care about the language - ideally I'm looking for a source more general than that.

2Risto_Saarelma11y

Try the r/learnprogramming resource pages: free books, online stuff. Can't actually name a good general article on pointers. They're the big sticking point for anyone trying to learn C for the first time, but they end up just being this sort of ubiquitous background knowledge everyone takes for granted pretty fast. I did stumble into Learn C the Hard Way, which does get around to pointers. The C2 wiki is an old site for general programming knowledge. It's old, the navigation is weird, and the pages sometimes devolve into weird arguments where you have no idea who's saying what. But there's interesting opinionated content to find there, where sometimes the opinionators even have some idea what they're talking about. Here's one page on what they have to say about pointers. Also I'm just going to link this article about soft skills involved in programming, because it's neat.

[-]Dorikka11y00

Has anyone read Daniel Goleman's new book? Opinions?

[-]patrickmclaren11y00

Could anyone provide me with some rigorous mathematical references on Statistical Hypotheses Testing, and Bayesian Decision Theory? I am not an expert in this area, and am not aware of the standard texts. So far I have found

Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis - Berger
Bayesian and Frequentist Regression Methods - Wakefield

Currently, I am leaning towards purchasing Berger's book. I am looking for texts similar in style and content to those of Springer's GTM series. It looks like the Springer Series in Statistics may be sufficient.

6lukeprog11y

Berger is highly technical, not much of an introduction. On Bayesian statistics, Bayesian Data Analaysis is a classic. "Bayesian decision theory" usually just means "normal decision theory," so you could start with my FAQ. Though when decision theory is taught from a statistics book rather than an economic book, they use slightly different terminology, e.g. they set things up with a loss function rather than a utility function. For an intro to decision theory from the Bayesian statistics angle, Introduction to Statistical Decision Theory is pretty thorough, and more accessible than Berger.

0patrickmclaren11y

Great, thank you very much for the references. I am now reading your FAQ before moving onto the texts, I'll post any comments I have there.

[-][anonymous]11y00

[Codecademy][1]. For

... (read more)

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

[-]DataPacRat11y-10

MWI gives an interesting edge to an old quote:

"... there are an infinite number of alternate dimensions out there. And somewhere out there you can find anything you might imagine. What I imagine is out there is a bunch of evil characters bent on destroying our time stream!" -- Lord Simultaneous

... does the fact that there's been no obvious contact suggest that the answer to the transdimensional variant of the Fermi paradox is that once you've gone down one leg of the Trousers of Time, there's no way to affect any other leg, no matter how much you try to cheat?

3Risto_Saarelma11y

The Fermi paradox includes us knowing a lot about the density of stuff in the visible universe. You'd expect expansionistic life to populate most of a galaxy in short order since there are only the three dimensions to expand in. The Everett multiverse is a bit bigger. Would you still get a similar expansion model for a difficult to discover cheat, or could we end up with effects only observable in a minuscule fraction of all branches even if a cheat was possible, but was difficult enough to discover?

1[anonymous]11y

It may also suggest that there are also a bunch of good characters stopping the bad characters, and that they're doing a good job. Or that the bad guys don't do anything by half measures and any contact is overwhelmingly likely to result in total destruction. Anthropic effects explain why we haven't seen them. (This reasoning also applies to the original Fermi paradox by the way) Or maybe just that affecting other universes happens to be so costly w.r.t any value system that could potentially produce technology. We know so little about trans-universe physics that it's of very little use to speculate.

3DanielLC11y

We understand it quite well. It's just Schroedinger's equation.

5calef11y

Does the Schrodinger equation tell us how to increase the relative probability of interacting with an almost completely orthogonal Everett Branch? "Almost completely orthogonal" here bears qualifying: In classical thermodynamics, the concept of entropy is sometimes taught by appealing to the probability of all of the gas in a room happening to end up in a configuration where one half of the room is vacuum, and the other half of the room contains gas. After some calculation, we see that the probability of this happening ends up being (effectively) on the order of 10^(-10^23), give or take several orders of magnitude (not like it matters at that point). Now, that said, how confident are you that different Everettian earths are even at the same point of space time we are, given a branching, say, 10 seconds ago? Pick an atom before the split and pick its two copies after. Are they still within a Bohr radii of each other after after even a nanosecond? Their phases are already scrambled all to hell, so that's a fun unitary transformation to figure out. Sure, you can prepare highly quantum mechanical sources and demonstrate interference effects, but "interuniversal travel" for any meaningful sense of the word, is about as hard as simply transforming the universe itself, subatomically, atom for atom, controllably into a different reality. So in that sense, Schrodinger's equation tells us as much about trans-universe physics as the second law of thermodynamics tells us about building large scale Maxwell's Demons.

3DanielLC11y

The second law of thermodynamics tells us everything there is to know about building large scale Maxwell's Demons. You can't. What else is there to it? Schroedinger's equation isn't quite as good. It's not quite impossible. But it is enough to tell us that there's no way we'll ever be able to do it.

-2Shmi11y

The Schrodinger equation is not even at the right level of the relevant physics. It applies to non-relativistic QM. My guess is that DanielLC simply read the QM sequence and memorized the teacher's password. World splitting, if some day confirmed experimentally, requires at least QFT or deeper, maybe some version of the Wheeler-deWitt equation.

2DanielLC11y

The Schroedinger equation is sufficient for world splitting. It's just entanglement at a massive scale.

0Luke_A_Somers11y

QFT is a special case of the general form of the Schrodinger equation.

0Shmi11y

Link?

0Luke_A_Somers11y

General form the Schrodinger Equation: dPsi/dt = -iH/hbar Psi Quantum Field theories are not usually presented in this form because it's intrinsically nonrelativistic, but if you pick a reference frame, you can dump the time derivative on the left and everything else on the right as part of H and there you go. So it's equivalent. As calef says, there are good reasons not to actually do anything with it in that form.

0calef11y

This is a little chicken-or-the-egg in terms of "what's more fundamental?", but nonrelativistic QFT really is just the Schrodinger equation with some sparkles. For example, the language electronic structure theorists use to talk about electronic excitations in insert-your-favorite-solid-state-system-here really is quantum field theoretic--excited electronic states are just quantized excitations about some vacuum (usually, the many-body ground state wavefunction). Another example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondo_model You could switch to a purely Schrodinger-Equation-motivated way of writing everything out, but you would quickly find that it's extremely cumbersome, and it's not terribly straightforward how to treat creation and annihilation of particles by hand.

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