All of Nevin's Comments + Replies

This post is the most comprehensive answer to the question "what was really going on at Leverage Research" anyone has ever given, and that question has been of interest to many in the LW community. I'm happy to see it's been nominated for the year-end review; thank you to whomever did that!

Sorry about that. We will do our best to announce further in advance, since we really would like to accommodate people who are booked very far ahead of time.

Yes, but probably not advertised publicly. It will be Sunday evening. Details will be announced at the event, so ask someone who is there if you aren't.

I just meant the schedule. I've taken to calling it a diet since I'm avoiding it sortof the way people do with food.

The graph is a little misleading on how long it takes to recover, I'd say, since the falling out part was due to being quite sick. There is also an important additional note, which is that on E3 so far, I'm getting way less REM than I used to get with normal sleep (see plot of my baseline data below). As I eventually concluded with Uberman, it really seems like the standard E3 schedule has no possible way of giving me the amount of REM that I used to get (over two hours per night on nights when I would sleep 8-8.5 hours and feel well rested), so I'm going ... (read more)

The Zeo. It isn't designed to handle short naps, so you have to manually copy down the data right after a nap into a spreadsheet or notebook or something.

Small correction: I actually found Everyman 3 to be a very doable schedule at Burning Man. It's desirable to stay up really late since lots of neat stuff happens at night, and it's desirable to not need to sleep past 10am since it gets very hot. So a 3 hour core from 6-9am plus a few opportunistic naps in the shade is an excellent solution. Both Cathleen (who runs operations at Leverage) and I were on duty supporting Paradigm, the effective altruist camp, most of the week, and I think it's fair to say the quality of experience the camp achieved was due in ... (read more)

6jimrandomh
Thanks for doing this; I, too, am really looking forward to the cognitive-test data. I'm curious/concerned about the illness you mentioned. A lot of the argument against polyphasic sleep is that there may be poorly-documented negative health effects, and immunology is an area where downsides are likely to be found. Some infectious illnesses happen randomly, but it could be that polyphasic sleep is a risk factor and it would be bad to miss that, so investigating (or at least thoroughly reporting) things like that seems important.
4Peter Wildeford
What's "the diet"?
4FiftyTwo
What are you using to measure your REM/light/deep sleep?
2Gunnar_Zarncke
I wondered why Burning Man should disrupt polyphasic sleep except possibly by intoxication. But what I get from your earlier post and www.polyphasicsociety.com is that polyphasic has the following disadvantages: * requires strict sleeping patterns * requires discipline to keep the pattern * limited task and schedule flexibility Obviously you need a job and a family and friends where this is no problem. I have thought about trying DC1 which is the only option that might work with four children. I wonder what the consequences of falling out of polyphasic may be. From my own sleep deprivation 'experiments' I'd guess: * Involuntarily sleeping much longer than planned out of order, thus completely wrecking you schedule. * Being tired and drowsy for a time thus being unusually unproductive and potentially unreliable. From your graph I'd guess that falling out of polyphasic (accidentally or not) takes a week to recover. If such accidents happen too often (and once a month may be enough) all the disturbances this causes (missed deadlines, bad quality) may quickly eat up all the nominal efficiency gains from more awake hours. This all assumes that the saved sleep has no other positive benefits. There might be: * physical regeneration * subconscious learning (there are some posts on LW about the habit to reflect the lessons of the day before sleep) With these considerations in mind I decided to stay with my sleep rhythm (0:00 to 6:30). I don't want to risk long time health effects ('the candle that burns brighter burns half as long'). The main thing I took out of this are the recommendations about night lighting: http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/adaptation/night-lighting/

The new XKCD is highly relevant.

Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February.

This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading though the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions, so you can spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong.

The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.

Subtext: I wish I lived in this universe.

4wedrifid
Reading through the misconceptions page I discover that meteorites are not hot when they hit the earth! And after all this time thinking I could use them to finish off trolls.
9wedrifid
Wait, the mouseover says: It just occurred to me that my museum visits as a child deceived me. That hundred year old glass didn't flow! Lies! They've found panes upside down and sideways (with respect to thickness differentials) too.

Thanks Alexandros, this was well articulated.

Beyond PageRank, I feel this pattern has applicability in many areas of everyday life, especially those related to large organizations, such as employers judging potential employees by the name of the university they attended...

So a person who goes to a prestigious school and games the system in order to graduate [without actually getting smarter] is something of a "spam worker." The OBP process is incentivizing earning a degree from a good school, and taking the emphasis off of getting smart.

I'd s... (read more)

2maurice
I realy wish techies woudl not persist in blindly applying simplistic anologies to complex real world suituations. for recruitment its not quite the same its a lot harder to go to oxford or cambridge than a former polly - universities also provide networks and other advatages - hence the number of ex bullingdon club members in the current UK govenment. What your describing is the "selecting people like me" bias that occurs in recruitment - which is also eveident in Googles bias for peope like them from stamford.
4Alexandros
I really like the concept of a 'spam worker'. That would make interview panels into 'spam worker filters'. :) Since this article has done well, I will probably write down my thoughts on mitigation for a future article, but if you can't wait, the last section in the linked WebSci paper has most of the written text on mitigation I have. Unfortunately I don't have any advice for dealing with it as a content author, only from a system-wide perspective. Given the feedback here and new material I have explored since, there will probably be significant differences between that and the article here, but the core will probably remain in some form. The methods I have in mind (namely, discarding singletons such as Google and working on distributing the logic and focusing on local rather than global judgments) can probably be applied to real-world institutions and governments, but I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking about this as I have the online counterparts, so there is still work to be done there.

I don't think so, but I'm not sure. I just happened to be there for the day, I'm not a resident of the house.

To be fair, I don't think any of us were outraged at you. I think we were all trying to understand where exactly you make the distinction.

I find I think the hardest (i.e. think the most differently from normal, habitual thought) when I'm pushed right to where I draw choice-boundaries.

And actually I never quite wrapped my head around the basis of your view (I'm new to thinking about those things in such depth, since I've been surrounded by people who think like me). I'd like to continue the conversation sometime, in a more low-key environment.

Oh, and "Hi." I'm a lurker.

2komponisto
Just out of curiosity, are there a lot of people at the SIAI house who confine their participation on LW to lurking?

Any alternatives in mind?

The first thing that comes to mind is having no masthead image. Any image will presumably be misunderstood by some fraction of visitors, but the text alone is very clear. I can see why people like the current image; perhaps a solution is to replace it with a solid color for people arriving from Google or StumbleUpon.

The map image in the masthead confused me when I found LW, and might reduce the probability that casual Web-browsing would-be-rationalists would take the time to understand what LW actually is before moving on.

I'm new to the community; this post may not be structured like the ones you're used to. Bear with me.

If LW is anything like the few sites whose analytics numbers I've seen, a significant portion of traffic comes from Web searches (I would wildly guess 10-30% of their pageviews). According to the analytics I've seen on my own site, out of those landin... (read more)

An anecdote:

When I've had people shoulder surf while I was visiting the site, everyone asked, "LessWrong? What's that supposed to mean?" (5+ people). When I explained that it was a rational community where people tried to improve their thinking, they immediately began status attacks against me. One used the phrase "uber-intellectual blog" in a derogatory context and another even asked, "Are you going to come into work with a machine gun?" They often laughed at the concept.

Nobody commented on the graphic.

0Kevin
There's also a significant percentage of traffic that comes from Stumble Upon. Not sure how we can better optimize for people arriving for Stumble Upon, but certainly the current state is not ideal. There is a possibility of presenting different pages to people depending on their referrers...
1ata
It didn't deter me, but I didn't get it until someone explained it just recently. For a while, I was just thinking "What's that a map of? Is that where FHI is based? Is it the area in Santa Clara surrounding the SIAI House? Whatever it's a map of, is is relevant enough to put it at the top of every page?" (Actual answer from a minute googling street names: it's in San Francisco, but I don't know if there's any reason this particular location was chosen.) O'course, even for those who get it, it may not be the best illustration of the map/territory distinction, because the lower half isn't the territory either. It's just a more detailed map than the top half. Ceci n'est pas le territoire! Anyway, I doubt it will actively deter many people, but there are probably better possibilities.
0Jack
The map-territory metaphor is pretty central to what goes on here, so I kind of like it. I don't really know if it is a deterrent. Any alternatives in mind? I do think the logo could be a map of somewhere more interesting than Candlestick Park! And maybe a cooler place would keep googler's around. Or make it look a dojo.
0mattnewport
I have to admit I'd never really consciously noticed the image until someone recently pointed out that it symbolizes the map/territory distinction. I guess that is evidence that is not very eye catching or distinctive but neither is it particularly off-putting in my opinion.