Open thread, 21-27 April 2014

LW presents epistemic and instrumental rationality as practical advice for humans, based closely on the mathematical model of Bayesian probability. This advice can be summed up in two maxims: Obtain a better model of the world by updating on the evidence of things unpredicted by your current model. Succeed at your given goals by using your (constantly updating) model to predict which actions will maximize success.

Or, alternately: Having correct beliefs is useful for humans achieving goals in the world, because correct beliefs enable correct predictions, which enable goal-accomplishing actions. The way to have correct beliefs is to update your beliefs when their predictions fail.

Stating it this baldly gets me to wonder about alternatives. What if we deny each of these premises and see what we get? Other than Bayes' world, which other worlds might we be living in?

Suppose that making correct predictions does not enable goal-accomplishing actions. We might call this Cassandra's world, the world of tragedy — in which those people who know best what the future will bring, are most incapable of doing anything about it. In the world of heroic myth, it is not... (read more)

6[anonymous]11y

Replace religion with this dilemma and you have NS's Microkernel reliigon.

6Shmi11y

I don't see these as alternatives, more like complements. It's a memorable name, but it does not need to be called anything so dramatic, given that we live in this world already. For example, most of us make a likely correct prediction that if we procrastinate less then we will be better off, yet we still waste time and regret it later. Why this AIXIsm? We are a part of the world, and the most important part of it for many people, so updating your model of self is very Bayesian. Lacking this self-update is what leads to a "Cassandra's world".

4Tenoke11y

I'd tell you what method, I would use to evaluate the evidence to decide in which world we are, but it seems like you denied it in the premise. ;)

3Lumifer11y

That's an interesting post. Let me throw in some comments. I am not sure about the Cassandra's world. Here's why: * Knowing X and being able to do something about X are quite different things. A death-row prisoner might be able to make the correct prediction that he will be hanged tomorrow, but that does not "enable goal-accomplishing actions" for him -- in the Bayes' world as well. Is the Cassandra's world defined by being powerless? * Heroes in myth defy predictions essentially by taking a wider view -- by getting out of the box (or by smashing the box altogether, or by altering the box, etc.). Almost all predictions are conditional and by messing with conditions you can affect predictions -- what will come to pass and what will not. That is not a low-level world property, that's just a function of how wide your framework is. Kobayashi Maru and all that. As to the Buddha's world, it seems to be mostly about goals and values -- things on the subject of which the Bayes' world is notably silent.

2asr11y

Powerlessness seems like a good way to conceptualize the Cassandra alternative. Perhaps power and well-being are largely random and the best-possible predictions only give you a marginal improvement over the baseline. Or else perhaps the real limit is willpower, and the ability to take decisive action based on prediction is innate and cannot be easily altered. Put in other terms, "the world is divided into players and NPCs and your beliefs are irrelevant to which of those categories you are in." I don't particularly think either of these is likely but if you believed the world worked in either of those ways, it would follow that optimizing your beliefs was wasted effort for "Cassandra World" reasons.

3Lumifer11y

So then the Cassandra's world is essentially a predetermined world where fate rules and you can't change anything. None of your choices matter.

3fubarobfusco11y

Alternately, in such a world, it could be that improving your predictive capacity necessarily decreases your ability to achieve your goals. Hence the classical example of Cassandra, who was given the power of foretelling the future, but with the curse that nobody would ever believe her. To paraphrase Aladdin's genie: "Phenomenal cosmic predictive capacity ... itty bitty evidential status." Yes, a Zelazny or Smullyan character could find ways to subvert the curse, depending on just how literal-minded Apollo's "install prophecy" code was. If Cassandra took a lesson in lying from Epimenides, she mightn't have had any problems.

0fubarobfusco11y

You're right about the prisoner. (Which also reminds me of Locke's locked-room example regarding voluntariness.) That particular situation doesn't distinguish those worlds. (I should clarify that in each of these "worlds", I'm talking about situations that occur to humans, specifically. For instance, Bayes math clearly works for abstract agents with predefined goals. What I want to ask is, to what extent does this provide humans with good advice as to how they should explicitly think about their beliefs and goals? What System-2 meta beliefs should we adopt and what System-1 habits should we cultivate?) I think we're thinking about different myths. I'm thinking mostly of tragic heroes and anti-heroes who intentionally attempt to avoid their fate, only to be caught by it anyway — Oedipus, Agamemnon, or Achilles, say; or Macbeth. With hints of Dr. Manhattan and maybe Morpheus from Sandman. If we think we're in Bayes' world, we expect to be in situations where getting better predictions gives us more control over outcomes, to drive them towards our goals. If we think we're in Cassandra's world, we expect to be in situations where that doesn't work. That's pretty much exactly one of my concerns with the Bayes-world view. If you can be misinformed about what your goals are, then you can be doing Bayes really well — optimizing for what you think your goals are — and still end up dissatisfied.

0Lumifer11y

No, not really. Bayes gives you information, but doesn't give you capabilities. A perfect Bayesian will find the optimal place/path within the constraints of his capabilities, but no more. Someone with worse predictions but better abilities might (or might not) do better. Um, Bayes doesn't give you any promises, never mind guarantees, about your satisfaction. It's basically like classical logic -- it tells you the correct way to manipulate certain kinds of statements. "Satisfaction" is nowhere near its vocabulary.

0fubarobfusco11y

Exactly! That's why I asked: "To what extent does [Bayes] provide humans with good advice as to how they should explicitly think about their beliefs and goals?" We clearly do live in a world where Bayes math works. But that's a different question from whether it represents good advice for human beings' explicit, trained thinking about their goals. Edit: I've updated the post above to make this more clear.

0IlyaShpitser11y

A world with causes and effects. (Bayes' world as described is Cassandra's world, for the usual reasons of "prediction" not being what you want for choosing actions). ---------------------------------------- [ There was something else here, having to do with how it is hard to use causal info in a Bayesian way, but I deleted it for now in order to think about it more. You can ask me about it if interested. The moral is, it's not so easy to just be Bayesian with arbitrary types of information. ]

0fubarobfusco11y

Hmm. I think I know what you're referring to — aside from prediction, you also need to be able to factor out irrelevant information, consider hypotheticals, and construct causal networks. A world where cause and effect didn't work a good deal of the time might still be predictable, but choosing actions wouldn't work very effectively. (I suspect that if I'd read more of Pearl's Causality I'd be able to express this more precisely.) Is that what you're getting at, at all?

2IlyaShpitser11y

Well, when you use Bayes theorem, you are updating based on a conditioning event. But with causal info, it is not a conditioning event anymore. I don't think it is literally impossible to be Bayesian with causal info, but it sounds hard. I am still thinking about it. So I am not sure how practical this "be more Bayesian" advice really is. In practice we should be able to use information of the form "aspirin does not cause cancer", right? ---------------------------------------- [ I did not downvote the parent. ]

0Squark11y

For one thing, we already have strong evidence rationality is a useful idea: it's called science & technology. Cassandra's world: Mythical predictions seem to be unconditional whether Bayesian predictions are conditional on your own actions and thus can be acted upon. Buddha's world: Well, understanding your own values and understanding how to maximize them are two tasks none of which is redundant. I think rationality is useful in understanding your own values as well, for example by analyzing them through evolutionary psychology or cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, empirically understanding of our own values also improves when learning epistemic facts and analyzing hypothetical scenarios. Without rationality it is difficult to create sufficiently precise language for formulating the values.

[-]Vulture11y230

Pure curiousity question: What is the general status of UDT vs. TDT among yall serious FAI research people? MIRI's publications seem to exclusively refer to TDT; people here on LW seem to refer pretty much exclusively to UDT in serious discussion, at least since late 2010 or so; I've heard it reported variously that UDT is now standard because TDT is underspecified, and that UDT is just an uninteresting variant of TDT so as to hardly merit its own name. What's the deal? Has either one been fully specified/formalized? Why is there such a discrepancy between MIRI's official work and discussion here in terms of choice of theory?

[-]Wei Dai11y140

MIRI's publications seem to exclusively refer to TDT

Why do you say that? If I do a search for "UDT" or "TDT" on intelligence.org, I seem to get about an equal number of results.

people here on LW seem to refer pretty much exclusively to UDT in serious discussion

This seems accurate to me. I think what has happened is that UDT has attracted a greater "mindshare" on LW, to the extent that it's much easier to get a discussion about UDT going than about TDT. Within MIRI it's probably more equal between the two.

that UDT is just an uninteresting variant of TDT so as to hardly merit its own name

As I recall, Eliezer was actually the one who named UDT. (Here's the comment where he called it "updateless", which everyone else then picked up. In my original post I never gave it a name but just referred to "this decision theory".)

Has either one been fully specified/formalized?

There has been a number of attempts to formalize UDT, which you can find by searching for variations on "formal UDT" on LW. I'm not aware of a similar attempt to formalize TDT, although this paper gives some hints about how it might be done. It's not ... (read more)

2Vulture11y

Thanks! This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for. A lot of it was what I had sort of deduced from looking at MIRI docs and stuff, but having it laid out explicitly seems to have clicked the missing elements into place and I feel like I understand it much better now.

0[anonymous]11y

You might also find this honor's thesis by Daniel Hintze handy.

3Manfred11y

I'm not serious, but I'd say that there's little actual use of TDT because it requires us to solve the difficult problem of finding the right causal and logical structure of the problem - this can be handwaved in by the user, but doing that feels awkward. Folk-UDT ("just execute the best strategy") is sufficient for most purposes, both in application and in e.g. trying to understand logical uncertainty. On the other hand, using causal structure is what lets us consider hypotheticals properly - so TDT will not have some issues that typical-UDT does with hypotheticals about its own actions. On the mutant third hand, TDT's solution of adding logical nodes to the causal structure might just be a simplification of something deeper, so it's not like we (us non-serious decision-theory dilettantes) should put all our eggs in one basket.

1Douglas_Knight11y

What is an example of an issue that UDT has with hypotheticals that TDT does not?

1Manfred11y

The 5 and 10 problem is basically what happens when your agent asks "what are the logical implications if 5 is chosen?" rather than "If we do causal surgery such that 5 is chosen, what's the utility?" There are other ways to avoid the 5 and 10 problem, but I think they're less general than using causality.

3gsastry11y

Here's one attempt to further formalize the different decision procedures: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Hintze-Problem-class-dominance-in-predictive-dilemmas.pdf (H/T linked by Luke)

1Douglas_Knight11y

All the things you've heard are consistent and together they answer your final question by denying that there is a discrepancy in choice of theory, just in choice of name. (Not that I'm sure that all the things you've heard are true.)

0Vulture11y

That would make "TDT is underspecified" a rather odd thing for someone to say, though.

0IlyaShpitser11y

Good questions!

[-]Kaj_Sotala11y200

I was feeling lethargic and unmotivated today, but as a way of not-doing-anything, I got myself to at least read a paper on the computational architecture of the brain and summarize the beginning of it. Might be interest to people, also briefly touches upon meditation.

Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science (Andy Clark 2013, Behavioral and Brain Sciences) is an interesting paper on the computational architecture of the brain. It’s arguing that a large part of the brain is made up of hierarchical systems, where each system uses an internal model of the lower system in an attempt to predict the next outputs of the lower system. Whenever a higher system mispredicts a lower system’s next output, it will adjust itself in an attempt to make better predictions in the future.

EDIT: Just realized, this model explains tulpas. Also has connections to perceptual control theory, confirmation bias and people's general tendency to see what they expect to see, embodied cognition, the extent to which the environment affects our thought... whoa.

4Vulture11y

Could you elaborate? I haven't read the paper, but this connection doesn't seem obvious to me.

2Armok_GoB11y

O_O This explains SO MUCH of things I feel from the inside! Estimating a small probability it'll even help deal with some pretty important stuff. Wish I could upvote a million times.

[-]april_flower11y170

How strong is the evidence in favor of psychological treatment really?

I am not happy. I suffer from social anxiety. I procrastinate. And I have a host of another issues that are all linked, I am certain. I have actually sought out treatment with absolutely no effect. On the recommendation of my primary care physician I entered psychoanalytic counseling and was appalled by the theoretical basis and practical course of "treatment". After several months without even the hint of a success I aborted the treatment and looked for help somewhere else.

I then read David Burns' "Feeling Good", browsing through, taking notes and doing the exercises for a couple of days. It did not help, of course in hindsight I wasn't doing the treatment long enough to see any benefit. But the theoretical basis intrigued me. It just made so much more sense to be determined by one's beliefs than a fear of having one's balls chopped off, hating their parents and actively seeking out displeasure because that is what fits the narrative.

Based on the key phrase "CBT" I found "The now habit" and reading me actually helped to subdue my procrastination long enough to finish my ba... (read more)

7jobe_smith11y

I have suffered from social anxiety continuously and depression off and on since childhood. I've sought treatment that included talk therapy and medication. Currently I am doing EMDR therapy which may or may not end up being helpful, but I don't expect it to work miracles. Everyone in my immediate family has had similar issues throughout their lives. I feel your pain. Despite not being perfect and being in therapy, I feel like my life is going pretty well. Here is what has worked for me: Acceptance: Not everyone can be or should be the life of the party. Being quiet or reserved or shy is a perfectly acceptable way to live your life. You can still work on becoming comfortable in more social situations but you are fine right now. There are plenty of people who will like you just as you are, even if you social skills are far from perfect. Harsh self-judgement can make anxiety worse and lead to procrastination and depression. What I try to do as best I can is to just do whatever I feel like in the moment, and just let the world correct me. I try not to develop too many theories about how the world will react to me since I know from experience that those theories will be biased and pessimistic. Decide what you want from the world: I guess this is somewhat generic life advice, but it has really worked for me. I decided fairly early on what I wanted to get from the social world. I wanted 3 things. * marriage * children * a good career Deciding those things, I plugged away at getting them. I was completely incompetent at talking to women but with some help from e-harmony I found one who I was able to be comfortable with and who liked me. We got married 6.5 years ago and we have a 2 year old daughter and another child on the way. Professionally, I found a career that involves a minimum of politicking and no customer interaction. And yet it is both intellectually satisfying and highly remunerative. Even though neither my home life nor my professional life are perfect,

7witzvo11y

So, can you say more about what aspect of your environment is bugging you? Captivity?? Do you want to try living somewhere more "outdoors"?

2Tripitaka11y

I am imagining that some issues of depression/social anxiety might be a lot easier resolved in an ancestral environment. Especially the social anxiety part.

0april_flower11y

It was mainly a thought that occured to me to write down as the rest of the story wrote itself. My problem is more social anxiety, which of course pertains to the social environment. Moving of course will not help this anxiety one bit, more probably even amplify it.

6Lumifer11y

I think the evidence shows that it works for some people, doesn't work for other people, and the spectrum of outcomes stretches all the way from "miraculously fixed everything" to "made everything worse" :-/ Oh, and "some people" and "other people" refers not just to the person being treated, but to a patient/psychotherapist pair. It is fairly common for people to have no success with a chain of therapists until they find "the one" who clicks and can effectively help with whatever the problem is. Sorry, but there is really no answer to the question as posed.

0april_flower11y

So continue burning through therapists in the hope of being understood. Is there any shred of evidence that I should try psychoanalytic treatment again? From my impression the effect of it is similar to homeopathic treatment. How can I restate it to get a more answerable question?

0Lumifer11y

I don't know. Note that this answer is different from "continue with what you were doing". One of the points here is that any advice has to be highly personalized and generic recommendations are quite useless. As an aside, are you looking for a therapist to understand you, or to effect some change in you? I don't think you can get a useful answer from strangers on the 'net.

3ChristianKl11y

What does it mean for a dog to be procrastinating? Procrastination usually involves human wanting to do things that are not natural. I used to believe that procrastination was something very unique to me but today I believe that nearly everyone struggles with it to some extend. Even someone like Tim Ferriss who advises a dozen startups and writes a book at the same time still deals with it. People who are productive simply have found strategies to still be productive despite being imperfect humans. You already read Burns. How about doing 15 minutes per day of his exercises for the next year?

0april_flower11y

Indeed I can try again. Though social cues are quite powerful in maintaining the routine. Having options is nice. Also more varied experiences tend to stick better, like reading two different explanations of the same phenomenon.

0Lumifer11y

Not at all. Procrastination is letting near and immediate incentives overcome far and remote ones. People procrastinate by browsing the 'net instead of going running -- which one is more "natural"?

8ChristianKl11y

Going running for the sake of doing exercise isn't natural.

3drethelin11y

Browsing the net= being sedentary, saving energy, staying in a place you know is safe and has access to food and water. Running= Wasting a shit ton of energy and putting yourself into the world and at risk for no immediate gain. Seems obvious to me which you would be more naturally inclined to do.

3NancyLebovitz11y

I've heard the idea from Somatic Experiencing-- unfortunately, I haven't found anything that goes into detail about that particular angle, except that part of it seems to be about having a tribe-- it's not just about spending time out of doors. I'll be keeping an eye out for information on the subject, but meanwhile, you might want to look into Somatic Experiencing and Peter A. Levine.

3april_flower11y

This scratches on some things some popular people sometimes note: A feeling of being derooted, having no sense of belonging or meaning. Maybe this is a reason for the recent resurging of religious organizations. Of course if this vague shred of an idea has some truth to it one should be able to create or find a tribe substitute. I will look into it, thank you.

2James_Miller11y

Consider neurofeedback administered by a professional. In the U.S. it will cost between $50/200 a session. You probably need at least 20 sessions for permanent results, but you might be able to feel some effects during the first session.

0NancyLebovitz11y

Source of information about effectiveness and duration?

2James_Miller11y

None online. I have read several books on the topic and undergo it myself.

0NancyLebovitz11y

If you don't mind, what were the books, and what changes have you noticed in yourself?

2James_Miller11y

Protocol Guide for Neurofeedback Clinicians (very expensive but the best); The Neurofeedback Solution How to Treat Autism, ADHD, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Stroke, PTSD, and More; and Getting Started with Neurofeedback (Norton Professional Books). Neurofeedback has many different targets. I have used it to become more relaxed and focused. Most of what I learned came from talking to neurofeedback professionals. I strongly suggest you not experiment on yourself, but rather do so under the care of a professional.

2MarkL11y

Existent. But psychological treatment is in it's infancy. I am not a licensed mental health professional, but watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_rI2N6Fco Now, go find a therapist who's at least 45 years old, preferably 50-plus, is not burned out, and loves what they do. It doesn't really matter what the therapeutic modality is. Don't go to a thirty-something CBT-weenie. Edit: A bunch of recent posts on my blog are about therapy. May or may not be useful: http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/

0Tripitaka11y

some personal anecdotes /data points from someone in a similar situation (social anxiety,depression,procrastination to the point of dropping out of uni,going abroad): I was lucky with my CBT-psychotherapist,they helped me unravelling that big knot of connected issues. I am still suffering, but now equipped to deal with it. That said, I decided to travel for 8month (NZ),basically as frontal override for some of my issues. Be aware traveling with mental issues can terribly backfire; you are on your own without your usual escape strategies. Depending on your flavour of issues, strategies to get around that vary but expect and be resolved to have the same bad days like at home. Having heaps of money to get your own room/room service/fast food/return tickets helps; ensure a really solid safety net from home (someone to lend you money,do minor services for you,people to call at strange times, people to call you regularly). Do not expect the condition "abroad" to change you quickly- you'll still find it harder to get to know people than others. Expect lots of gras is greener-fallacy; I caught my brain giving the exactly same reasons for going home early that it gave month ago for going away. That said,was going away a good decision? Yes. Was it the optimal decision? I am not sure.

0drethelin11y

Making friends is hard with social anxiety but I think it's your best bet.

0[anonymous]11y

Who are you, what are your physical and social environments like, and do you do the obvious things like lifting weights (or at least similar if you're female) and eating "right"? The only reason to pay someone for non-specific therapy is if you don't have any friends, and even then you can't be truly honest without risking being institutionalized.

8kalium11y

Disagree. Frequent discussion of one's anxieties can be a heavy burden on a friendship, and it's vulnerable to cascading failures. If I have four friends and spread my worries evenly between them, and one finds this exhausting and decides to spend less time with me, then I have three friends I can talk to, each of whom will suddenly find me even more stressful to be around.

-24[anonymous]11y

-1kalium11y

It's not useful to discuss whether or not anxiety, depression, or procrastination is a "disease." It either is or isn't a useful way to adapt to the current environment, and if it's not useful you want to change either your reaction or your environment.

-2Eugine_Nier11y

If by psychological treatment, you mean the Freudian kind, that's mostly BS.

[-]2ZctE11y140

I get confused when people use language that talks about things like "fairness", or whether people are "deserving" of one thing or another. What does that even mean? And who or what is to say? Is it some kind of carryover from religious memetic influence? An intuition that a cosmic judge decides what people are "supposed" to get? A confused concept people invoke to try to get what they want? My inclination is to just eliminate the whole concept from my vocabulary. Is there a sensible interpretation that makes these words meaningful to atheist/agnostic consequentialists, one that eludes me right now?

[-]fubarobfusco11y160

Here are some things people might describe as "unfair":

Someone shortchanges you. You buy what's advertised as a pound of cheese, only to find out at home that it's only four-fifths of a pound; the storekeeper had their thumb on the scale to deliberately mis-weigh it.
Someone passes off a poor-quality item as a good one. You buy a sealed box of cookies, only to find out that half of them are broken and crumbled due to mishandling at the store.
Someone entrusted with a decision abuses that trust to their advantage. The facilities manager of a company doesn't hire the landscaping company that makes the best offer to the company, but instead the one that offers the best kickback to the facilities manager.
Someone uses a position of power to take something that isn't theirs; especially when the victim can't do anything about it. A boy's visiting grandmother gives him $50 to buy a video game for his birthday; but as soon as the grandmother has left, the boy's mother takes the money away and uses it to buy liquor for herself.
Someone abandons a responsibility, leaving it to others to cover. Four people go out to dinner together; and the bill comes to $100. One person excuses h

... (read more)

[-]Lumifer11y170

What sorts of things do you see in common among these situations?

Your list seems a bit... biased.

Let's throw in a couple more situations:

A homeless guy watches a millionaire drive by in a Lamborghini. "That's not fair!" he says.
An unattractive girl watches an extremely cute girl get all the guys she wants and twirl them around her little finger. "That's not fair!" she says.
A house owner learns that his house will be taken away from him under an eminent domain claim by the state which wants a developer to build a casino on the land. "That's not fair!" he says.
A union contractor is undercut on price by a non-union contractor. "That's not fair!" he says.

[-]blacktrance11y100

While people say "That's not fair" in the above examples and in these, it seems there are two different clusters of what they mean. In the first group, the objection seems to be to self-serving deception of others, particularly violation of agreements (or what social norms dictate are implicit agreements). Your examples don't involve deception or violation of agreements (except perhaps in the case of eminent domain), and the objection is to inequality. I find it strange that the same phrase is used to refer to such different things.

[-]Kaj_Sotala11y180

I think you could say that in both groups, people are objecting because society is not distributing resources according to some norm of what qualities the resource distribution is supposed to be based on.

In the first group of examples, people are deceiving others and violating agreements, and society says that people are supposed to be rewarded for honest behavior and keeping agreements.

For the second group of examples:

The homeless person example is a bit tricky, since there are multiple different norms that they might be appealing to, but suppose that the homeless person used to be a hard worker before he got laid off and lost his home. The homeless person may then be objecting that society is supposed to reward a willingness to put in hard work, whereas he doesn't perceive the millionaire as having worked equally hard. Or, the homeless person may think that society should provide some minimum level of resources to everyone, and the fact that he has nothing while another person has millions demonstrates a particularly blatant violation of this rule.
There's a social ideal saying that people should be rewarded for their "internal" characteristics (like honesty) rather t

... (read more)

7Lumifer11y

However looking at reality, the phrase is used in all these ways, isn't it?

8Eugine_Nier11y

As Bart Wilson mentions here, a century ago the word "fairness" referred exclusively to the first cluster. However, due to various political developments during the past century it has drifted and now refers to a confused mix of both.

3blacktrance11y

Indeed it is, which is evidence for the two different types of situations feeling similar to people.

4fubarobfusco11y

That's odd ... I was specifically trying to choose examples that would be relatively uncontroversial — cases of cheating, betrayal of trust, abuse of power, and so on; as opposed to cases of mere inequality of outcome.

4Lumifer11y

That's a bias, isn't it? :-) If you're choosing examples to construct a definition from, already having a definition in mind makes the exercise pointless. If you choose examples of fraud and abuse of power you essentially force the definition of "unfair" be "fraud and abuse of power".

8fubarobfusco11y

Wow, and here I thought I'd be dinged for including such mildly politicized examples as the police one and the collective-bargaining one. Instead, I get dinged for not including a bunch of stuff likely to provoke a political foofaraw about class, gender, or eminent domain? Weird. Okay, this is getting excessively meta. I'm done here.

-8Lumifer11y

-3Eugine_Nier11y

Nickpick: Your third example: Is similar to one of fubarobfusco's examples:

0Lumifer11y

There is a subtle, but important difference. Many people (here and elsewhere) would consider the exercise of eminent domain powers by the state to be ethical and correct application of state powers for the betterment of society -- a few suffer but for the greater good.

-3Eugine_Nier11y

Yes, and if the example had involved a road or other public works project, as opposed to immediately selling the land to a developer, your objection would have been appropriate.

2Lumifer11y

Oh, but the developer will provide jobs, and serve as an attractor for other businesses, and generally lift the area economically, and pay taxes into state coffers, and there will be gallivanting unicorns under the rainbows, and the people will look at the project and say "This is good". If you believe what the state will tell you.

0Eugine_Nier11y

So whether that example fits with the first set depends on whether the state's claim that the project is good is true, and thus whether this example it is perceived as fitting with them depends on whether the perceiver believes the claim. Similarly, the Lamborghini example fits if one accepts the Marxist theory about the origin of income inequality. Now we come to your example of the two girls. It's hard to make it an example of "fraud or abuse of power" (although it might be possible with enough SJ-style rhetoric about how beauty is an oppressive social construct). Notice that it is similar to the Lamborghini example otherwise, in particular it seems like the kind of thing that fits in the category whose archetypical member is the Lamborghini example. So we can now reconstruct a history of the meaning of "unfair". Originally, i.e., about a century ago, it meant basically "fraud, cheating, or abuse of power". As Marxism became popular it expanded to include income inequalities, which fit that definition according to Marxist theory. Later as differences of income became one of the archetypical examples of "unfairness" and as the theory underlying its inclusion became less well-known, more things such as the two girls example came to be included in the category. See the history of verbs meaning "to be" in Romance Languages for another (less mind-killing) example of how semantic drift can produce these kinds of Frankencategories.

-2Lumifer11y

I think it's simpler, without getting Marxism involved. The key word is "entitlement". If you feel entitled to something, then if you don't have it, someone is cheating you out of your right -- it's unfair! Doesn't really matter who, too -- nowadays people point at the universe and shout "Unfair!" :-/

0blacktrance11y

The general principle seems to be that there's an expectation of certain behavior, but one person acts deceptively in a way that harms the other people.

[-]Alsadius11y120

It's not a theistic concept - if anything, it predates theology(some animals have a sense of fairness, for example). We build social structures to enforce it, because those structures make people better off. The details of fairness algorithms vary, but the idea that people shouldn't be cheated is quite common.

8IlyaShpitser11y

I am with Stanislaw Lem -- it's hard to communicate in general, not just about fairness. I find so many communication scenarios in life resemble first contact situations..

4ChristianKl11y

It's a cultural norm. If someone constantly defects in prisoner dilemma he's violating the norm of fairness and deverses to be punished for doing so.

2Eugine_Nier11y

Except that in a lot of accusations of "unfairness" there is no obvious prisoner-dilemma-defection going on.

3ChristianKl11y

Not lynching rich bankers means choosing to cooperate. Having a social landscape that's peaceful and without much violence isn't something to take for granted.

2Lumifer11y

That is not a prisoner's dilemma.

2ChristianKl11y

We sort of have an informal agreement of the proletarians not making a revolution and hanging the rich capitalists in return for society as a whole working in a way that makes everyone better of. Rich bankers not fulfilling their side of working to make everyone in society better of is defecting from that agreement.

-3Lumifer11y

No, we don't have anything of that sort. Marx was wrong. He is still wrong.

1ChristianKl11y

Marx argued that a revolution is the only way to create meaningful social change. That's not what I'm saying in this instance. Political power is justified in continental Europe through the social contract. Hobbes basically made the observation that every men can kill very other man in the state of nature and that we need a sovereign to wield power to prevent this from happening. Even British Parliamentary Style debate that's not continental in nature usually doesn't put the same value on freedom as a political value as people in the US tend to do. As far as the US goes the American dream is a kind of informal agreement. You had policies like the New Deal to keep everyone in society benefiting from wealth generation. Then in the last 3 decades most of the new wealth went to the upper class instead of being distributed through the whole society as it had been in the decades before that point.

1Lumifer11y

Marx argued for a lot of things. The particular thing that I have in mind here is his position that the society consists of two classes -- a dispossessed ("alienated") proletariat and fat-cat capitalists, that these two classes are locked in a struggle, and that the middle class is untenable and is being washed out. This is the framework which your grandparent comment relied on. It was wrong and is wrong.

0Douglas_Knight11y

I don't think saying "That is not a prisoner's dilemma" is a useful way of communicating "those players don't exist." Also, the topic at hand is what do people mean by "fair," not whether the situations they do or do not call fair are real situations.

0ChristianKl11y

The notion of "middle class" is involves having more than two sides. People calling themselves "upper-middle class" is a very American thing to do. In the US ideal a person of middle class is supposed to own his own home and therefore own capital. Workers do organize in unions and use their collective bargaining power to achieve political ends in the interests of their members. When a union makes a collective labor agreement with industry representatives you do have two clearly defined classes making an agreement with each other. In the late 19th century a bunch of unions did support the communist ideal of revolution but most of them switched. Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce do have political power. Money of capitalists funds a bunch of think tanks who do determine a lot of political policy. Do you think that the Chamber of Commerce isn't representing the interest of a political class of capitalist? Yes, individual people might opt out of being part of politics. We aren't like the Greek who punished people by death for not picking political sides. Lastly, I would point out that I speak about political ideas quite freely and without much of an attachment. It might be that you take a point I'm making overly seriously.

0Lumifer11y

Ah. OK then.

1Eugine_Nier11y

How would you apply that to Lumifer's second example?

2ChristianKl11y

The usual way groups of girls deal with this is to call the girl who actually twirls around a lot of guys around her little finger a slut. The punishment isn't physical violence but it's there.

2Torello11y

The sense of fairness evolved to make our mental accounting of debts (that we owe and are owed) more salient by virtue of being a strong emotion, similar to how a strong emotion of lust makes the reproductive instinct so tangible. This comes in handy because humans are highly social and intelligent and engage in positive-sum economic transactions, so long as both sides play fair... according to your adapted sense of what's fair. If you don't have a sharp sense of fairness other people might walk all over you, which is not evolutionarily adaptive. See "The Moral Animal" or "Nonzero" by Robert Wright, or the chapter "Family Vaules" in Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works." This sense of fairness may have been co-opted at other levels, like a religious or political one, but it's quite instinctual. Very young children have a strong sense of fairness before they could reason to it, just as they can acquire language before they could explicitly/consciously reason from grammar rules to produce grammatical sentences. It's very engrained in our mental structure, so I think it would take quite an effort to "wipe the concept."

1iconreforged11y

So, as I've heard Mike Munger explain it, fairness is evolution's solution to the equilibrium outcome selection problem. "Solution to the what?" you ask. This would be easy to explain if you're familiar with the Edgeworth box. In a simplified economy consisting of two people and two goods, where the two people have some combination of different tastes and different initial baskets of things. Suppose that you have 20 oranges and 5 apples, and that I have 3 oranges and 30 apples, and that we each prefer more even numbers of fruits than either extreme. We can trade apples and oranges to make each of us strictly better off, but there's a whole continuum of possible trades that make us better off. And with your highly advanced social brain, you can tell that some of these trades are shit deals, like when I offer you 1 apple for 12 of your oranges. Even though we'd both mutually benefit, you'd be inclined to immediately counteroffer with something a closer to the middle of the continuum of mutually beneficial exchanges, or a point that benefits you more as a reprimand for my being a jerk. Dealing fairly with each other skips costly repeated bargaining, and standing up to jerks who deviate from approximate fairness preserves the norm. This is the sort of intuition that we're trying to test for in the Ultimatum game.

1Lumifer11y

"Fairness" generally means one out of two things. Either it's, basically, a signal of attitude -- to call something "fair" is to mean "I approve of it" -- or it is a rhetorical device in the sense of a weapon in an argument. I think that people generally have gut ideas about what fairness entails, but they are fuzzy, bendable, and subject to manipulation, both by cultural norms and by specific propaganda/arguments.

1michaelkeenan11y

According to Moral Foundations Theory, fairness is one of the innate moral instincts. According to Scott Adams, fairness was invented so children and idiots can participate in arguments. I think we have a fairness instinct mostly so we can tell clever stories about why our desire for more stuff is more noble than greed.

0Squark11y

It might be that "fairness" is part of our ingrained terminal values. Of course it doesn't mean you shouldn't violate "fairness" when the violation is justified by positive utility elsewhere. However, beware of over-trusting your reasoning.

0Username11y

Tracing the memetic roots back, you could say that 'fairness' derives from the assumption that all humans have equal inherent worth, which I suppose you could link back to religious ideals. Natural rights follow from this same chain, but it's not obvious to me what concepts came first and caused the others (never mind what time they were formalized). If you want to strike it from your thinking, keep in mind that fairness is a core assumption of our social landscape, for better or worse. It can be worth keeping solely because people might hate you if you don't.

-1Eugine_Nier11y

The word "fairness" has been subject to a lot of semantic drift during the past century. Here is a blog post by Bart Wilson, describing the older definition, which frankly I think makes a lot more sense.

[-]Metus11y140

Humans are diverse.

I mean this not only in the sense of them coming all kinds of shapes, colours and sizes, having different world views and upbringings attached to them, but also in the sense of them having different psychological, neurological and cultural makeup. It does not sound like something that needs to explicitly said but apparently it needs to be said.

Of course first voices have realised that the usual population for studies is WEIRD but the problem goes deeper and further. Even if the conscientious scientist uses larger populations, more representative for the problem at hand, the conclusions drawn tend to ignore human diversity.

One of the culprits is the concept of "average" or at least a misuse of it. The average person has an ovary and a testicle. Completely meaningless to say, yet we are comfortable in hearing statements like "going to college raises your expected income by 70%" (number made up) and off to college we go. Statements like these suppress a great deal of relevant information, namely the underlying, inherent diversity in the population. Going to college may increase lifetime earnings, but the size of this effect might be highly depend... (read more)

[-]fubarobfusco11y160

It was surprising to see that the camel has two humps, that is, one part of the population seems to be incapable of learning programming, while the other is.

The study you're probably thinking of failed to replicate with a larger sample size. While success at learning to code can be predicted somewhat, the discrepancies are not that strong.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/

The researcher didn't distinguish the conjectured cause (bimodal differences in students' ability to form models of computation) from other possible causes. (Just to name one: some students are more confident; confident students respond more consistently rather than hedging their answers; and teachers of computing tend to reward confidence).

And the researcher's advisor later described his enthusiasm for the study as "prescription-drug induced over-hyping" of the results ...

Clearly further research is needed. It should probably not assume that programmers are magic special people, no matter how appealing that notion is to many programmers.

4ShardPhoenix11y

The failure to replicate was of their test, not of the initial observation. Specifically it was considered interesting why the distribution of grades in CS (apparently typically two-humped) was different from eg mathematics (apparently typically one-humped). As far as I know this still remains to be explained.

[-]Kaj_Sotala11y120

See also the comments of Yvain's What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It? for a broad selection of examples of how human minds vary.

7raisin11y

Oh, now I realized the point of that article was the comments, not the article itself. Thanks for clarifying this!

9IlyaShpitser11y

There are three separate issues: (a) The concept of averaging. There is nothing wrong with averages. People here like maximizing expected utility, which is an average. "Effects" are typically expressed as averages, but we can also look at distribution shapes, for instance. However, it's important not to average garbage. (b) The fact that population effects and subpopulation effects can differ. This is true, and not surprising. If we are careful about what effects we are talking about, Simpson's paradox stops being a paradox. (c) The fact that we should worry about confounders. Full agreement here! Confounders are a problem. ---------------------------------------- I think one big problem is just the lack of basic awareness of causal issues on the part of the general population (bad), scientific journalists (worse!), and sometimes even folks who do data analysis (extremely super double-plus awful!). Thus much garbage advice gets generated, and much of this garbage advice gets followed, or becomes conventional wisdom somehow.

3Lumifer11y

That depends. Mostly they are used as single-point summaries of distributions and in this role they can be fine but can also be misleading or downright ridiculous. The problem is that unless you have some idea of the distribution shape, you don't know whether the mean you're looking at is fine or ridiculous. And, of course, the mean is expressly NOT a robust measure.

-4Punoxysm11y

The Eurythmics said it best: I travel the world and the seven seas Everybody's looking for something Some of them want to use you Some of them want to get used by you Some of them want to abuse you Some of them want to be abused

[-]apeterson11y120

I've been struggling with how to improve in running all last year, and now again this spring. I finally realized (after reading a lot of articles on lesswrong.com, and specifically the martial arts of rationality posts) that I've been rationalizing that Couch to 5k and other recommended methods aren't for me. So I continue to train in the wrong way, with rationalizations like: "It doesn't matter how I train as long as I get out there."

I've continued to run intensely and in short bursts, with little success, because I felt embarrassed to have to walk any, but I keep finding more and more people who report success with programs where you start slowly and gradually add in more running.

Last year, I experimented with everything except that approach, and ended up hurting myself by running too far and too intensely several days in a row.

It's time to stop rationalizing, and instead try the approach that's overwhelmingly recommended. I just thought it would be interesting to share that recognition.

5Nisan11y

You might also want to work on eliminating embarrassment.

0raisin11y

Any guides on how to do that?

4khafra11y

Rejection Therapy is focused in that direction.

4Error11y

That game is terrifying just to think about.

0Metus11y

Awesome, do you have more like that?

1[anonymous]11y

Maximize embarrassment until you're no longer capable of feeling shame from the foibles and sensibilities of mere humans.

0Nisan11y

Psychological theories like IFS would recommend charitably interpreting the inclination to embarrassment as a friendly impulse to protect oneself by protecting one's reputation. For example, some people are embarrassed to eat out alone; a charitable interpretation is that part of their mind wants to avoid the scenario of an acquaintance of theirs seeing the lonely diner and concluding that they have no friends, and then concluding that they are unlikable and ostracizing them. Or a minor version of the same scenario. Then one can assess just how many assetts are at stake: Realistically, nothing bad will happen if one eats out alone. Or one might decide that distant restaurants are safe. The anticipation of embarrassment might respond with further concerns, and by iterating one might arrive at a more coherent mental state.

3niceguyanon11y

Have you considered not running as your primary exercise program? If you aren't specifically going for the performance of running, I would shelve it and instead cut calories (assuming you have extra weight to lose) and lift heavy things at the gym. Distance running is great for distance running. I have been in multiple running groups and they are great for achieving goals like 26.2 miles, but after that, I wanted to optimize for looks and not for long distances (any more).

1apeterson11y

Unfortunately, I live in a rural area where gyms are hard to come by. I have enjoyed running for its own sake in the past, that's a part of why I want to get back into running shape, but I will try to add in some body weight exercises as well as my running.

1Lumifer11y

You don't need a gym to exercise. Google up "paleo fitness", Crossfit is full of advice about how to build a basic gym in your garage, etc. etc.

0niceguyanon11y

That's great, it would be such a problem to not like running and not live near a gym. Good luck.

1TylerJay11y

The best general advice I can give you is: 1. Be honest with yourself when determining your current abilities. There's no shame in building slowly. It just means you get to improve even more. 2. Not every day is a hard day. There are huge benefits to varying your workouts. If you're running about the same distance each day you run, you're doing it wrong. Some days should be shorter, more intense intervals broken up by very slow jogs or walks, while other days should be "active recovery" days of short, slow runs, while other days you might go for distance and a sustained pace. Just to give an idea, even elite athletes will not usually do more than 2-3 hard (interval) days each week. You will want to start with 0 or 1. 3. Watch your volume: Slowly increase your total miles / week over time. Make sure you start low enough not to get repetitive stress injuries. I was once a fairly successful runner and have a lot of experience with designing training programs for both distance running and weightlifting. I'd be happy to help you design your running program or to look over your program once you do some research and put something together. Let me know!

0Lumifer11y

A side question: from a joint-stress point of view, is it better to have a heavily cushioned running shoe or it's better to go for minimal shoes and avoid heel strike and running on hard surfaces?

5TylerJay11y

That's a tough question, and one I've actually struggled to answer myself. If you ask anyone in the mainstream competitive running community, they'll tell you to get a good, cushioned running shoe, but also to work on your form to develop a good midfoot strike. Runners often to barefoot drills and other drills to develop proper midfoot strike, but still run in cushioned running shoes. They'll also go running on the beach barefoot if they can to improve foot strength and form. Repetitive stress injuries (shin splints, stress fractures, joint and tendon problems) are the single most common injury in runners and have taken me out of the game many times, even when actively trying to prevent them and with proper coaching. Proper shoes and good running form are both supposed to reduce these injuries. However, there are a lot of successful barefoot runners and I do think there is something to learn from the ancestral health and fitness communities. There are a lot of runners who go completely barefoot and a lot who use minimalist footwear like Vibrams and don't report any issues. They claim that your body mechanics are better barefoot and I have to agree that we were built to run barefoot. However, a lifetime of wearing shoes could definitely make a difference on whether or not running barefoot is still a good idea. I suspect that you just have to be a lot more careful with barefoot running and that it's probably not a good idea for your joints or back longterm to run barefoot or minimal with high volume for years. But honestly, I don't know if it's any worse than doing it with cushioned running shoes. Runners in proper shoes also have joint problems when they get older.

0[anonymous]11y

Do you mean walk-run-walk-run in a single session? Or that you do short intense sessions with no walking?

0apeterson11y

I would just set up short runs around my apartment that were all "run" no walk and gradually increase my distance. But one of the problems was that I just wasn't out there very long. It was a convenient excuse when I was busy to just run a 15 minute loop instead of run/walking for 30 minutes+.

0MathiasZaman11y

Is there any specific reason why you've been avoiding those approaches (e.g. where you slowly increase)? You mention that you told yourself "It isn't for me," but haven't told us why. Something I've had trouble with now that I'm starting to run is finding a running/jogging speed that takes as little energy, while still not walking. The last time I ran I finally found it and severely decreased the time I spend walking. It might be helpful to find that speed. I can guarantee you that it will feel very slow.

0apeterson11y

It's mostly just the contrast between how I learned running in High school cross country and what's actually recommended now. There were no real rest days, we ran 5 days a week and we were supposed to run at least once on the weekends. We ran hill reps two days a week, and long runs on the other days. We were all on the same training program regardless of where we started from. What I've read recently is that about 4 days a week is a better way to do it, at least during your early progress, with a mixture of long slow runs and some interval work outs once you've reached a good level of fitness.

[-]NancyLebovitz11y110

Research on mindfulness meditation

Mindfulness meditation is promoted as though it's good for everyone and everything, and there's evidence that it isn't-- going to sleep is the opposite of being mindful, and a mindfulness practice can make sleep more difficult. Also, mindfulness meditation can make psychological problems more apparent to the conscious mind, and more painful.

The difficulties which meditation can cause are known to Buddhists, but have not yet known by researchers or the general public. The commercialization of meditation is part of the problem.

0ChristianKl11y

It's opposite in some regards but not all of them. Both sleep and mindfulness meditation usually lead to very little beta wave activity in the brain. I don't have a Zeo myself but it wouldn't surprise me if I could reach a state in meditation where I'm mindful but the Zeo labels me as sleeping. As far as researching whether meditation improves how well you feel, I think that's hard. 5 years ago, if you asked me how I'm feeling than a real answer might be good or bad. Maybe even 7 different stages of a Likert scale. Today a full answer might take 5 minutes because I have awareness of a lot of stuff that goes on inside myself. If you simply compare the values towards those 5 years ago I don't think that would tell you very much. There was a while when I tried to keep numbers about my daily happiness level but after a while I simply gave up because it didn't seem to provide useful insight because they reference points aren't stable.

0raisin11y

After I started meditating mindfully, my anxiety got worse, a lot worse. I talked about this on meditation forums and they said it means that "I'm working on my problems" and I should just keep doing it more and more and I would somehow overcome it. Well, I tried to, but my anxiety only got worse. Currently I have a small break from meditating.

-1ChristianKl11y

How do you know that you are meditating mindfully? If you ask that question on a meditation forum they have no way to know whether you are doing things right. If you want help in this venue it would help if you describe exactly what you think you are doing when you are "meditating mindfully". It would also help to know what you exactly observed that makes you conclude that your anxiety got worse.

0raisin11y

After I made that post I thought I should have put "tried" before "meditating mindfully", but then I forgot about it. You're right, I'm probably not doing it correctly. I focus on my breath, but it's of course really hard for me and I don't know if I'm doing it properly. More specifically I focus on the feeling when air goes in and out of my nose. The problem is that I can either focus on my breath and breath forcefully, or I daydream and breath naturally. This process feels like a cat chasing its tail. In the "mindfulness in simple English" they said that I shouldn't control my breathing, but I don't know how to do that. It's really hard for me to focus on my breath without trying to control it. What exactly I observed? Usually I feel more tense and focus on myself more after I've meditated. I'm not sure if I can give more specific examples because I haven't kept a diary about this.

3ChristianKl11y

As far as I understand some traditional Buddhist do advocate to feel the air going in and out of your nose. I think that practice might make sense for people who aren't present in their head. For Western intellectuals who already spent a lot of time in their head I think it makes more sense to feel the breath in the belly. Here on LW we also don't meditate with the main purpose of speaking spiritual experiences. Opening the third eye isn't the point of the exercise for us but it might be for some Buddhists who like focusing on the breath and if do that I feel that part of my attention is on the chakra generally called third eye. To speak in a bit more New Age language focusing on your belly instead of your nose will make you more grounded. From a more Western perspective good German physiotherapy says that it's beneficial to breath with the belly instead of breathing higher in the body. My first meditation book was from Aikido master Koichi Tohei. Tohei advocates a type of meditation where one is focused on the tan-diem as the locus of attention while meditating. The tan-diem is a chakra around an two finger breadth under the belly button. Tohei also calls it the center of the body and the one-point. After googling a bit around the solar plexus might also be a good point but you don't need to focus on a single point. The belly is good enough as an area. If you are completely unable to be in a state where you don't control your breath and don't day dream start by focusing on deep long breathes will being focused on the belly and go for maximum length of breaths. It's unfortunate that I have to use words like chakra while speaking on LW but those words have some use. You don't need to believe that chakras really exist. Just take them as crude approximations that the kind of people with experience of meditation use. Unfortunately I also don't have good scientific evidence to back up what I said. Meditation increases self awareness. That's the point. The interes

0raisin11y

I tried what you suggested. I sat in one position for 50 minutes and tried to focus on the feeling of breathing in my belly (see how I tabooed my earlier use of "meditating mindfully"?) Here's what I observed: At first it was a bit hard to find the breathing, it's more subtle than the feeling in my nostrils. But I was able to occasionally focus and my focus gravitated towards that region close to the belly button. It feels better to focus on my belly than on my nostrils. Focusing on nostrils feels heavy and shallow, while focusing on belly feels a bit more light and deep. What surprised me most was that I felt like I was actually able to focus on the feeling in my stomach without trying to control my breathing as much. At least I was able to more easily convince that this was the case. It feels like nostrils are so close to where the act of breathing happens, while my belly is more distanced from this thing that does the breathing. It feels more like focusing on an external object. It was mostly fantasizing and daydreaming and I was able to focus only for short periods of time, maybe a few seconds and just occasionally. I got obsessive-compulsive thoughts like "focus on your nostrils", but I tried to be mindful about those and mostly succeeded. I was a bit tense and at least at one point I noticed my heartbeat was quite fast, which made me more anxious. Part of this tenseness was due to the fact that I decided a poor posture when I started. I decided not to change this posture along the way. I feel more relaxed than when I started and I don't usually feel like that when I've meditated. So overall, a positive experience, placebo or not.

0ChristianKl11y

Great. Thank you for sharing your experience. It sounds like you are moving in the right direction. The fact that your heartbeat gets fast and an emotion comes up that makes you anxious is no bad sign. If you stay present and your body processes the emotion it's dealt with. After processing strong emotions my body usually feels more relaxed than before. In meditation tension can rise to uncomfortable levels. Then the body recognizes the tension as unnecessary and the tension falls off. I think 50 minutes are probably too much for you at your stage. Staying focused for 50 minutes is very hard and you are likely to lose your focus. In your situation I would rather go for 10 or 15 minutes for meditating alone. Set an alarm clock. Once you reach the point where you feel like you can focus for longer periods of time you can increase the time you meditate. If you want to spent more time writing down what you experienced like you just did is very useful. It allows you to make sense of the experience. That's what diary writing is about. I personally keep information like that in my own Evernote account and don't have a physical diary that could lie around that someone could notice. You don't need to talk with the kind of people who would look down on you for having a diary about the fact that you have a diary. The point of writing things done in a diary is to refine your thinking. You force yourself to bring clarity into your thought. For me writing a post on LW like the one above about why I recommend focusing on the belly instead of the nose, refines my own thinking about meditation. Using you and LW as an audience instead of simply writing down my thoughts in a private journal has advantages or disadvantages. When writing for an LW audience I have to be more careful with terms like chakra then when I'm just writing for myself. Writing emails to friends can also be useful to refine your thoughts. You probably have a bunch of different friends with different perspect

0raisin11y

I'm not sure if I got anything else out of your post, but I will try to focus on my belly the next time I meditate. The chakra and third eye stuff didn't bother me, just maybe confused a little, but I have a vague feeling of what they might describe. I've actually downloaded the Feeling Good handbook, but reading the whole book is currently a pretty daunting task. That questionare seems easy so it might just be something I could do. Diary is also something I've tried to do, but akrasia has prevented me from doing it frequently (I'm also embarrassed if someone notices I'm keeping a diary which is of course really stupid and something I should work on). Thanks for being kind, I expected a more hostile reply.

0moridinamael11y

One piece of advice, sort of a shot in the dark but aimed at addressing a common failure mode. If you were trying to force yourself to meditate while sitting in an uncomfortable position or for excessive lengths of time, don't do that. All you're doing is training yourself to be pissed off and tense about meditating. Try just sitting comfortably in a chair and focusing on your breath for ten minutes, or even just five minutes at first if it's really that arduous.

0ChristianKl11y

I agree. Just be sure that you sit in a stable position. I personally can sit comfortably in lotus. It's a learned skill but it's not something you need to learn to be able to meditate and if you focus on it at the beginning you focus on the wrong thing.

0Tenoke11y

Thanks, this is one of the very few meditation papers that seem to be worth reading, since as they observe:

[-]fire_alarm11y100

How do I decide whether to get married?

My girlfriend of four years and I are both graduating college.
I haven't found employment yet, and she's returning home for work.
As near as I can tell, we're very compatible.

Pros

We are very fond of each other, get a lot of value out of each other's time.
We've been able to talk about the subject sanely.
Status
We agree on religion and politics.
Married guys make more on average, but the arrow of causality could point in either direction or come from something else.
Financial benefits

Cons

Negative Status associated with marrying young?
No jobs yet, no clear home or area to live in.
She sometimes gets mad at me for things I'm "just supposed to know" to do, not do, say, or not say. I'm not sure if she's right and I'm a jerk.

She has said that she doesn't want to marry me if she's just my female best friend that I sleep with. But I don't know how to evaluate what she's asking. There are a number of possibilities. Maybe I don't feel the requisite feelings and thus she wouldn't want to be married. Maybe I do have the feelings and I have no way to evaluate whether I do or not. Maybe I'm not ever going to feel some extra undetec... (read more)

[-]ChristianKl11y140

In your list you didn't mention the topic of getting children. If you marry someone with the intention of spending the rest of your life together with them, I think you should be on the same page with regards to getting children before you marry.

[-]Lumifer11y120

What exactly do you think/hope will change between the current situation (which I assume involves you two living together) and the situation if you were to marry?

[-]ephion11y110

Don't get married unless there is a compelling reason to do so. There's a base rate of 40-50% for divorce, and at least some proportion of existing marriages are unhealthy and unhappy. Divorce is one of the worst things that can happen to you, and many of the benefits of marriage to happiness are because happier people are more likely to get married in the first place.

9Shmi11y

What are her feelings about you? Are you "just" her "male best friend that she sleeps with"? Your post comes across as rather asymmetric. Aren't you "both concerned" that she had too many relationships and so may decide that you are not for her precisely because she has these "points of comparison"? I suspect that she is the dominant partner in this relationship, possibly because she is more mentally mature, and this is often a warning flag. Do you get mad at her for things she is just supposed to know to do, say or not say? Anyway. DO NOT GET MARRIED YET until you figure out how to be an equal in this relationship (and if you think that you are, then you are fooling yourself).

5Squark11y

I don't know what is the significance of marriage for you, except symbolic. IMO the truly critical point is having kids. You probably want to have stable income before that. Regarding things you're "just supposed to know": same thing happens to me with my wife. Haven't stopped us from being together for 10 years and raising a 4 year old son. Different people see things differently and have different assumptions on what is "obvious". The important thing is being mutually patient and forgiving (I know it's easier said than done, but it's doable). Regarding the "extra feeling". Don't really know what to tell you. It is difficult to compare emotional experiences of different people. When our relationship started, it was mad, passionate infatuation. Now it's something calmer but it is obvious to me we love each other. I had few relationships apart from my wife and virtually no serious relationships. Never bothered me.

0A1987dM11y

And married women make less, so even assuming the arrow of causality is entirely from marital status to income it's not clear to me what would happen to your combined income.

49eB111y

Even if your combined income decreases, your combined consumption probably increases, because many goods are non-rivalrous in a marriage situation. See here for a discussion.

0Eugine_Nier11y

I believe you meant decreases.

1gwern11y

I think he means increases. If your consumption decreases, then your standard of living is falling and that doesn't sound good at all.

0A1987dM11y

Good point, but doesn't that also apply to unmarried cohabitation? EDIT: BTW, the bottom of your post says “[...] marriage makes family income go up via the large male marriage premium minus the small female marriage penalty”, which answers my question upthread.

2Lumifer11y

It also applies in interesting ways to communal living. In fact, given the magnitude of the effect, the question becomes "Why would anyone ever live alone?". And the fact that a lot of people do this, by choice, leads into interesting directions...

09eB111y

Yes it does, so it's not really an argument for the act of marriage itself, but on marriage-like behaviors.

-10[anonymous]11y

[-]passive_fist11y90

This isn't a question, just a recommendation: I recommend everyone on this site who wants to talk about AI familiarize themselves with AI and machine learning literature, or at least the very basics. And not just stuff that comes out of MIRI. It makes me sad to say that, despite this site's roots, there are a lot of misconceptions in this regard.

[-]Squark11y170

Not like I have anything against AI and machine learning literature, but can you give examples of misconceptions?

2Punoxysm11y

Not so much a specific misconception, but understanding the current state of AI research and understanding how mechanical most AI is (even if the mechanisms are impressive) should make you realize that being a "Friendly AI researcher" is a bit like being a unicorn tamer (and I mean that in a nice way - surely some enterprising genetic engineer will someday make unicorns). Edit: Maybe I was being a little snarky - my meaning is simply this: Given how little we know about what actual Strong AI will look like (And we genuinely know very very little), any FAI effort will face tremendous obstacles in transforming theory into practice - both in the fact that the theory will have been developed without the guidance that real-world constraints and engineering goals provide, and the fact that there is always overhead and R&D involved in applying theoretical research. I think many people here underestimate this vast difference.

0ChristianKl11y

Some people might underestimate the difficulty. On the other hand even if doing FAI research is immensely difficult that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do FAI research. The stakes are to high to avoid doing the best we can.

0Squark11y

I think that if we only start friendliness research when we're obviously close to building an AGI, it will be too late.

4Punoxysm11y

I think that almost all research done before that will have to be thrown out. Maybe the little that isn't will be worth it given the risks, but it will be a small amount.

2Squark11y

How did you reach that conclusion? To me it seems very unlikely. For example it seems that there's a good chance the AGI will have something called "utility function". So we can start thinking of what is the correct utility function for a FAI even if we don't know how to build an optimizer around it. We can study problems like decision theory to better understand the domain on the utility function. etc.

1Punoxysm11y

It's not clear at all that AGI will have a utility function. But furthermore, bolting a complex, friendly utility function onto whatever AI architecture we come up with will probably be a very difficult feat of engineering, which can't even begin until we actually have that AI architecture.

2Squark11y

That's something I'm willing to take bets on. Regardless, it is precisely the type of question we better start studying right now. It is a question with high FAI-relevance which is likely to be important for AGI regardless of friendliness. I doubt it. IMO AGI will be able to optimize any utility function, that's what makes it an aGi. However, even if you're right, we still need to start working on finding that utility function.

3Punoxysm11y

I question both of these premises. It could be like you or I, in the sense that it simply executes a sequence of actions with no coherent or constant driving utility function (even long-term goals are often inconsistent with each other), and even if you could demonstrate to it a utility function that met some extremely high standards, it would not be persuaded to adopt it. Attempting to build in such a utility function could be possible, but not necessarily natural at all; in fact I bet it would be unnatural and difficult. I understand your rebuttal to "friendliness research is too premature to be useful" is "It is important enough to risk being premature", but I hope you can agree that stronger arguments would put forward stronger evidence that the risk is not particularly large. But let's leave that aside. I'll concede that it is possible that developing a strong friendliness theory before strong AI could be the only path to safe AI under some circumstances. I still think that it is mistaken to try to ignore intermediate scenarios and focus only on that case. I wrote about this in a post before, How to Study AGIs safely which you commented on.

1Squark11y

I doubt the first AGI will be like this, unless you count WBE as AGI. But if it will, it's very bad news, since it would be very difficult to make it friendly. Such an AGI is akin to an alien species which evolved under conditions vastly different from ours: it will probably have very different values.

0Risto_Saarelma11y

So for example when Stuart Russell is saying that we really should get more serious about doing Friendly AI research, it's probably because he's a bit naive and not that familiar with the actual state of real-world AI?

1asr11y

I have updated my respect for MIRI significantly based on Stu Russell signing that article. (Russell is a prominent mainstream computer scientist working on related issues; as a result his opinion I think has substantially more credibility here than the physicists.)

-1XiXiDu11y

If you don't think that MIRI's arguments are convincing, then I don't see how one outlier could significantly shift your perception, if this person does not provide additional arguments. I would give up most of my skepticism regarding AI risks if a significant subset of experts agreed with MIRI, even if they did not provide further arguments (although a consensus would be desirable). But one expert does clearly not suffice to make up for a lack of convincing arguments. Also note that Peter Norvig, who coauthored 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach' with Russell, does not appear to be too worried.

-1Punoxysm11y

I mean to say that if you understand the work of Russell or other AI researchers, you understand just how large the gap is between what we know and what we could possibly apply friendliness to. Friendliness research is purely aspirational and highly speculative. It's far more pie-in-the-sky than anti-aging research, even. Nothing wrong with Russell calling for pie-in-the-sky research, of course, but I think most people don't understand the gulf. When somebody says something like "Google should be careful they don't develop Skynet" they're demonstrating the misunderstanding that we even have the faintest notion of how to develop Skynet (and happily that means AI safety isn't much of a problem).

1Risto_Saarelma11y

I've read AIMA, but aren't really up speed on the last 20 years of cutting edge AI research, which it addresses less. I don't have the same intuition about AGI concerns being significantly more hypothetical than anti-aging stuff. For me that would mean something like "any major AGI development before 2050 or so is so improbably it's not worth considering", given how I'm not very optimistic on quick progress in anti-aging. This would be my intuition if I could be sure the problem looks something like "engineer a system at least as complex as a complete adult brain". The problem is that an AGI solution could also be "engineer a learning system that will learn to behave at human level or above intelligence at human life timespan or faster", and I have much shakier intuitions about what the minimal required invention is for that to happen. It's probably still ways out, but I have nothing like the same certainty of it being ways out as I have for the "directly engineer an adult human brain equivalent system" case. So given how this whole thread is about knowing the literature better, what should I go read to build better intuition on how to estimate limits for the necessary initial complexity of learning systems?

0ChristianKl11y

What do you mean with the term "mechanical"?

1Nornagest11y

I'm guessing Punoxysm's pointing to the fact that the algorithms used for contemporary machine learning are pretty simple; few of them involve anything more complicated than repeated matrix multiplication at their core, although a lot of code can go into generating, filtering, and permuting their inputs. I'm not sure that necessarily implies a lack of sophistication or potential, though. There's a tendency to look at the human mind's outputs and conclude that its architecture must involve comparable specialization and variety, but I suspect that's a confusion of levels; the world's awash in locally simple math with complex consequences. Not that I think an artificial neural network, say, is a particularly close representation of natural neurology; it pretty clearly isn't.

0Punoxysm11y

I agree with you on both counts - that most human cognition is simpler than it appears in particular. But some of it isn't, and that's probably the really critical part when we talk about strong AI. For instance, I think that a computer could write a "Turing Novel" that would be indistinguishable from some human-made fiction with just a little bit of human editing, and that would still leave us quite far from FOOMable AI (I don't mean this could happen today, but say in 10 years).

0passive_fist11y

OK. I've seen a lot of people here say that Eliezer's idea of a 'Bayesian intelligence' won't work or is stupid, or is very different from how the brain works. Those familiar with the machine intelligence literature will know that, in fact, hierarchical Bayesian methods (or approximations to them) are the state of the art in machine learning, and recent research suggests they very closely model the workings of the cerebral cortex. For instance, refer to the book "Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd edition" (by Han and Kamber) and the 2013 review "Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science" by Andy Clark: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8918803 The latter article has a huge number of references to relevant machine learning and cognitive science work. The field is far far larger and more active than many people here imagine.

0gwern11y

Nonpaywalled Clark link: http://users.monash.edu/~naotsugt/Tsuchiya_Labs_Homepage/Bryan_Paton_files/Commentary%20.pdf

8ChristianKl11y

Do you have a recommendation for a resource that explains the basics in a decent matter?

5Nectanebo11y

What would you consider the "very basics"? What are some of the most blatant? Sorry to ask a question so similar to Squark's.

[-][anonymous]11y90

A koan:

A monk came to Master Banzen and asked, "What can be said of universal moral law?"

Master Banzen replied, "Among the Tyvari of Arlos, all know that borlitude is highly frumful. For a Human of Earth, is quambling borl forbidden, permissible, laudable or obligatory?"

The monk replied, "Mu."

Master Banzen continued, "Among the Humans of Earth, all know that friendship is highly good. For a Tyvar of Arlos, is making friends forbidden, permissible, laudable or obligatory?"

The monk replied, "Mu," and asked no... (read more)

[-]gjm11y110

Shouldn't Banzen's second question be something like "For a Tyvar of Arlos, is making friends frumful, flobulent, grattic, or slupshy?"?

4[anonymous]11y

I don't really know anything about the Tyvar of Arlos, so I'm pretty confused on this front, but I'm fairly sure you're relating a Talmudic anecdote, not a Zen one ;-). "Forbidden, permissible, laudable, or obligatory" says to me that we're contemplating halachah.

6[anonymous]11y

I would hope you don't know anything about them—they were made up on the spot. ^_^ And yes, I suppose the style here might well have been influenced from more than one place.

4Nornagest11y

Sounds to me like the master's jumping to more conclusions than the student is, here. His response makes sense if he wanted to break a sufficiently specific deontology (at least at interspecies scope), but there are a lot of more general things you could say about morality that aren't yet ruled out by the student's question.

2Shmi11y

How is this a failure of imagination? Why is the question parochial?

0[anonymous]11y

Parochial because he mistook a local property of mindspace for a global one; unimaginative because he never thought of frumfulness when considering what things a mind might value. "Good" is no more to a Tyvar than "frumful" to Clippy or "clipful" to a human.

1drethelin11y

this is silly. Good is a quite useful concept that easily stretches to cover entities with different preferences, but even if it does not, it's STILL meaningful, and your clippy example shows us exactly why. The meaning of clipful, something like "causes there to be more paperclips" or whatever, is perfectly clear to if not really valued by humankind.

0fubarobfusco11y

Is "good" what many sorts of intelligent beings strive to do? Then "good" is such things as self-improvement, rationality, survival of one's values, anti-counterfeiting of value, personal survival, and resource acquisition. For any intelligent being that does not expend energy to survive will be washed away by entropy. And so, "good" is universal. (The sage Omohundro does not call it "good", though; that is a novice's word.) Is "good" the noise that one group of one species of social creatures say when they comfort and praise their tribemates? Then "good" is such things as singing with a regular melody and rhythm, or setting up certain sorts of economic deals among tribemates and others; or leading the tribe's warriors to dismember the others instead of being dismembered themselves; and it is parochial.

0[anonymous]11y

Ah, I see I was unclear. By "is no more to a Tyvar" I meant "is no more significant to a Tyvar" rather than "is no more comprehensible to a Tyvar." Sorry; my fault.

[-]ChristianKl11y80

How good is the case for taking adderall if you struggle with a lot of procrastination and have access to a doctor to give you a prescription?

0Vulture11y

It worked reasonably well for me.

2ChristianKl11y

For what kind of timeframe? Do the effects stay the same over time? Are there meaningful side effects?

5Vulture11y

Disclaimer: This stuff varies from person to person. I had already tried a number of similar medications before going on generic adderall, all without success. I've been on it now for almost a year, and it's had a noticeable effect on my ability to concentrate on tasks and feel motivated to complete them. Often when I am struggling to focus on something to the point of not getting anything done, I'll suddenly realize that I didn't take my pill that morning. As far as I can tell these effects have been pretty consistent since the first week or so that I started taking it, although it's possible that there was a "ramping up" period that I've since forgotten about. In terms of side effects, I didn't need to take caffeine for the first few weeks while I acclimated to the drug, and was sort of jittery in an irritating way. That died down, obviously, although it remains stupendously unwise for me to take the pill at 10:30 or so or later, since it then keeps me up the following night.

0Douglas_Knight11y

What other drugs did you try?

2Vulture11y

Strattera and Focalin, and possibly another one that I'm forgetting.

3Douglas_Knight11y

When you say "without success" do you mean that these drugs did nothing useful, or just that they weren't good enough? I don't know strattera, but I think of methylphenidate (focalin) as very similar to amphetamine (adderall). Certainly methylphenidate is weaker than amphetamine, but I'd expect it to be a pretty good predictor of whether the amphetamine would work. So I am very surprised that I think you are saying that the one worked and the other didn't, which is why I'm asking for clarification.

2Vulture11y

Strattera was actually quite a while ago (sadly I don't remember the generic name) but I'm pretty sure it had no noticeable effect. I should probably clarify that the focalin actually did have a noticeable effect, but it was very weak and it had the same sleep-disturbing side effects as adderall, so it was not really worth it.

0Douglas_Knight11y

Thanks!

[-]Metus11y70