More of my research for Luke, this time looking into the polyamory literature.
I read Opening Up and The Ethical Slut; the former was useful, the latter was not. My general impression of the research is that:
the studied polyamorists are distinctly white, educated, urban or coastal, professional, older (how odd) middle/upper-class.
This means there is zero generalizability to whether polyamory would work in other groups and massive selection biases (few other groups are so well-equipped to leave a community not working for them), and even if a survey finds that polyamorists are 'average' in various dysfunctionals or pathologies, one needs to check that the average is the right average (ie. non-amorous educated professional whites).
These two points do not seem to be appreciated at all by many advocates (eg. the ones saying STDs are not a problem)
After pondering for a while on why I'm so fixated on making meaningless numbers (such as LW karma or Khan Academy points) go up as a result of my actions, I came up with a hypothesis: the brain uses such numbers as a proxy for societal status. An experimental consequence of this idea is that status-seeking people and low-status people try harder (possibly also for longer periods of time) to achieve video game-style "points".
Just a thought, really. If this experiment has actually been done, it'd be cool to read about it if anyone has a link. I don't have the resources to do it myself. Anyone reading this comment who can do it is certainly free to, but I doubt that's the case.
Came up with the idea while responding to a question on Formspring.
It's called a token economy. Game developers use dark arts in all kinds of ways to keep people playing; they even employ PhD psychologists.
http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/people.html
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/GDC2009_ValvesApproachToPlaytesting.pdf
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/
http://www.psychologyofgames.com/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php?page=1
Has Michael Vassar published any essays or articles or general things to read anywhere (other than this)? I get the impression that he's this supreme phenomenon from the people who describe his conversational ability. I've watched his Singularity Summit talk, and it was incredible, so I know it's not just in person that he's formidable.
I catch glimpses of his mighty cleverness in comments with phrases like "I always advocate increased comfort with lying." But there's no link to the Michael Vassar essay on All The Very Convincing Reasons You Should Be Comfortable With Lying. I'm assuming that's because it doesn't exist. That's not fair. I want to read his non-existent work.
I thought LWers might be interested in the work of Vi Hart (I did a quick search to make sure she hadn't been mentioned before). I think she is a great resource for recruiting people towards rationality. In terms of finding Joy in the Merely Real, she explains natural phenomena rationally, but in a way that literally can bring tears to my eyes.
Here is an example: Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant- Part 3 of 3
This is the final video of a three-parter, but I think most LWers can infer the background knowledge. If you enjoy it, you can go back and watch the first two parts.
A quote that sums up what her vlogs are often all about: "This is why science and mathematics are so much fun; You discover things that seem impossible to be true, and then get to figure out why it's impossible for them NOT to be."
FYI: I quit my day job last Monday and flew to San Francisco to start the program described at devbootcamp.com, which starts in full next Monday. Background.
I've pondered setting up some kind of "Mindkiller discussion mailing list" and trying to recruit people.
The idea would be to try to practice discussing these topics in a private forum without getting mindkilled. For example, we could try to have a sensible conversation about politics.
The main thing stopping me is that I think to work it'd need an excellent moderator who'd probably burn out quickly.
Too bad this isn't part of any sequence else I'd put it up as a rerun:
I'm pretty sure most new posters are not familiar with the data and arguments presented here unless they have started reading LW's sisters site Overcoming Bias (which btw I think more LW users should). In any case an updated discussion of this 4 years later seems appropriate.
Edit: Made a rerun post of this, please discuss it there.
How many people knew that evidential decision theory recommends cooperating in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma where the choices of the two agents playing are highly (positively) correlated?
I apparently just independently invented evidential decision theory while bored in my micro class by thinking "why wouldn't you condition your uncertainty about others' on what you choose? The cooperation between rational players in PDs can clearly happen." This sounded suspiciously like what evidential decision theory should be, and lo and behold, after class I found out that it is.
There is a new Stack Exchange Q&A site in public beta. It seems quite relevant to our interests.
Social dark arts and plotting are one of the main themes of HPMoR and I think they should have more of a place on LessWrong. "Bad signalling" and negative-from-baseline dark arts failures are often pointed out, but not lost opportunities for manipulation.
What are people's thoughts on this?
Feminism and the Disposable Male
Overall this particular video isn't that well made, but I think the basic argument is more or less correct. 7:00 to 8:00 is especially relevant to ethical thinking.
I looked again.
9:00 to 11:50 - She's saying the child-rearing techniques she describes lead to the "disposable man" attitudes in men and women.
11:50 to 13:10 - Attack on "dismantlers of gender roles" Set-aside programs, women-first policy, etc. reinforce "disposable man."
13:10 to - 14:00 And women-firsters get what they ask for. Feminist ONLY exploits the disposable man dynamic. Feminism = enforced chivalry.
14:00 - 15:00 Society succeeded because women were put first. And we don't need that dynamic any more. Call to action What's the worst that would happen if women no more valuable than men, and men no more valuable than women. If we keep following feminism, society will end by unbalancing.
15:00 - end We should celebrate manhood, and feminists don't want to. Instead, men come in "dead last, every time"
You are correct, in that I misread her call to action. Mostly because I was mindkilled about her definition of feminist. I'm not saying that no one acts how she describes from 11:50 - 14:00, but it's just not an inherent property of feminist to act and believe that way.
For example, I don't want to ignore male victim's of domestic violence, and I doubt most other feminists want to either. I like her call to action, but I think it is a feminist call, and I think her factual assertions from 14:00 to the end (especially "men come in dead last, every time") are almost entirely false.
I've lately been experimenting with taking different amounts of vitamin D. While I have found a definite improvement in mood and energy during the day when taking vitamin D first thing in the morning, I haven't found much impact on my excessive night-owlishness, such that I still don't get enough sleep and mood/energy are not yet optimal. It occurred to me that I might be subverting the effect by spending too much time at the computer in the evenings, since the monitor emits a lot of blue light.
And lo and behold, I've discovered that you can download a f...
Is programming a bad career to get into? Is it true that you can't work in it more than a couple of decades because all your skills will go obsolete and you'll be replaced by someone younger?
Are you serious? If you have an aptitude for coding/design/software architecture, and no other burning passion, programming is an excellent choice. While indeed changing rapidly, it is an easy discipline to update your skills cheaply and with almost no red tape. Besides, most people change careers on average more often than every 20 years, so no point looking that far ahead.
Jobs might not require coding literacy, but knowing how to write rudimentary code (in a scripting language like Python) makes a computer another tool at your disposal (a very very powerful one!). e.g.
(Also, being able to clarify ones thoughts enough to convey them unambiguously to a computer is possibly a useful skill in itself.)
What are the (reasonably) low-cost high-return lifehacks most people probably haven't heard about?
Spaced repetition comes immediately to mind. So do nootropics.
What about speed-reading? It seems to get bad rap or be dismissed as pseudoscience. So... is it real, and if it is, how useful is it?
These are the three I can think of... Are there any more?
(I seem to remember seeing 'mindfullness meditation' mentioned on LW a few times... No idea what it's actually good for, though.)
[Edited to fix weird propositional slip-up. Dismissed as pseudoscience, not by pse...
Reading some of Robin Hanson's older writting: If Uploads Come First
...What if uploads decide to take over by force, refusing to pay back their loans and grabbing other forms of capital? Well for comparison, consider the question: What if our children take over, refusing to pay back their student loans or to pay for Social Security? Or consider: What if short people revolt tonight, and kill all the tall people?
In general, most societies have many potential subgroups who could plausibly take over by force, if they could coordinate among themselves. But such
Apparently, Fuyuki City (the setting of Fate/stay night) is based on Kobe.
Also, the setting of Haruhi is based on Nishinomiya.
Kobe is here. And Nishinomiya is here.
Wonder if Eliezer's planning any epic fanfics after MoR...
A new science journal recently published a seriously crackpot paper, this has the abstract a link for the pdf. I first heard about it from Derek Lowe, who has also written two follow-up posts. The first has a couple of links discussing how news of the paper spread, while the second includes a link to the journal making excuses for why they published it.
...Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some
Aging and attitudes, the good news: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/thread/4252f4072cd75684#body
I recently learned of the startup Knewton. They're an education company that focuses on developing computer-based courses out of textbooks in a manner that lets each student progress at their own pace and learn with methods that have proven successful for them in the past. This project seems like a good way to grab some low-hanging fruit in the education sphere and to start the process of computer-driven personalization of education, which strikes me as potentially quite powerful.
Some other details: my understanding is that they are creating efficient mea...
After 40 days and 40 nights (plus a few), I've finished my little randomized double-blind placebo-controlled vitamin D sleep experiment: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#vitamin-d
Conclusion: it probably hurts sleep when you take it at night.
Accidental anti-akrasia effect I've recently discovered: I recently set my watch to hourly chime (first time I've used it in over 5 years) so that I could get up at least once an hour and walk around a bit. That's met with some success, but what I've found is that whenever the chime goes off, my sympathetic nervous system takes a jolt, and if I was in the middle of something unproductive, I start to berate myself with statements like "You're going to die someday, what have you got to show for it? Reading your RSS feeds? Writing emails? Come on, ya pan...
Intellectual Interests Genetically Predetermined? via FuturePundit.
...From personality to neuropsychiatric disorders, individual differences in brain function are known to have a strong heritable component. Here we report that between close relatives, a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders covary strongly with intellectual interests. We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to techn
Our brains are paranoid. The feeling illustrated by this comic is, I must unfortunately admit, pretty familiar.
HP:MoR is now not merely "fanfic", but an example of deconstruction-by-example:
So where do you go when all avenues explored with character and theme? You start tearing down the previous work. Good Fanfiction is a model for this. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality good example. Responds to the work by telling a new story while analyzing the nature of the old one, in this case by picking apart the nature of Wizard society. Hell, it's what Watchmen did to comics in the first place.
Does anyone know of any studies about the average life expectancy of Native Americans pre-columbus? Or any information at all better than a post on Yahoo Answers.
Hi! This is basically a question about sloppiness. I've recently noticed that I tend not to correct reports I do as part of my work sufficiently, I recently sent one to a coworker/supervisor and he criticised it for having too many careless mistakes. I then remembered that the supervisor for my diploma thesis had the same criticism. It may be connected to overconfidence bias - I noticed that when finishing work, it doesn't occur to me to double-check, I just assume I didn't make any mistakes.
Is there any hack that could help me to consistently remember avo...
In HPMoR chapter 60, at the very end of the chapter Quirrell is about to tell Harry why he thinks he is different but I cannot find the rest of the text in the subsequent context switches. Where does he answer Harry?
You can find it in chapter 63:
I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine, we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can be, in reality and not pretense. While you imagined yourself a child, Mr. Potter, you were a child. Yet there are other existences you could support, larger existences, if you wished. Why are you so free, and so great in your circumference, when other children your age are small and constrained? Why can you imagine and become selves more adult than a mere child of a playwright should be able to compose? That I do not know, and I must not say what I guess. But what you have, Mr. Potter, is freedom.
Why I think that the MWI is belief in belief: buy a lottery ticket, suicide if you lose (a version of the quantum suicide/immortality setup), thus creating an outcome pump for the subset of the branches where you survive (the only one that matters). Thus, if you subscribe to the MWI, this is one of the most rational ways to make money. So, if you need money and don't follow this strategy, you are either irrational or don't really believe what you say you do (most likely both).
(I'm not claiming that this is a novel idea, just bringing it up for discussion.)...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.