I ate something I shouldn't have the other day and ended up having this surreal dream where Mencius Moldbug had gotten tired of the state of the software industry and the Internet and had made his personal solution to it all into an actual piece of working software that was some sort of bizarre synthesis of a peer-to-peer identity and distributed computing platform, an operating system and a programming language. Unfortunately, you needed to figure out an insane system of phoneticized punctuation that got rewritten into a combinator grammar VM code if you wanted to program anything in it. I think there even was a public Github with reams of code in it, but when I tried to read it I realized that my computer was actually a cardboard box with an endless swarm of spiders crawling out of it while all my teeth were falling out, and then I woke up without ever finding out exactly how the thing was supposed to work.
Is there a name for this following bias?
So I've debated a lot of religious people in my youth, and a common sort of "inferential drift", if you can call if that, is that they believe that if you don't think something is true or doesn't exist, then this must mean that you don't want said thing to be true or to exist. It's like a sort of meta-motivated reasoning; they are falsely attributing your conclusions due to motivated reasoning. The most obvious examples are reading any sort of Creationist writing that critiques evolution, where they pretty explicitly attribute accepting the theory of evolution to a desire for god to not exist.
I've started to notice it in many other highly charged, mind-killing topics as well. Is this all in my head? Has anyone else experienced this?
I used to get a lot of people telling me I was an atheist because I either didn't want there to be a god or because I wanted the universe to be logical (granted, I do want that, but they meant it in the pejorative Vulcan-y sense). I eventually shut them up with "who doesn't want to believe they're going to heaven?" but it took me a while to come up with that one.
I don't understand it either, but this is a thing people say a lot.
Robin Hanson defines “viewquakes” as "insights which dramatically change my world view."
Are there any particular books that have caused you personally to experience a viewquake?
Or to put the question differently, if you wanted someone to experience a viewquake, can you name any books that you believe have a high probability of provoking a viewquake?
Against Intellectual Monopoly converted me from being strongly in favor of modern copyright to strongly against it.
The Feynman Lectures on Computation did this for me by grounding computability theory in physics.
CFAR has a class on handling your fight/flight/freeze reaction this Saturday Sept 28th.
The sympathetic nervous system activation that helps you tense up to take a punch or put on a burst of speed to outrun an unfriendly dog isn't quite so helpful when you're bracing to defend yourself against an intangible threat, like, say, admitting you need to change your mind.
Once of CFAR's instructors will walk participants through the biology of the fight/flight/freeze response and then run interactive practice on how to deliberately notice and adjust your response under pressure. The class is capped at 12, due to its interactive nature.
An iteration of this class was one of the high points of the May 2013 CFAR retreat for me. It was extraordinarily helpful in helping me get over various aversions, be less reactive and more agenty about my actions, and generally enjoy life more. For instance, I gained the ability to enjoy, or substantially increased my enjoyment of, several activities I didn't particularly like, including:
It also helped substantially with CFAR's comfort zone expansion exercises. Highly recommended.
Anyone here familiar enough with General Semantics and willing to write an article about it? Preferably not just a few slogans, but also some examples of how to use it in real life.
I have heard it mentioned a few times, and it sounds to me a bit LessWrongish, but I admit I am too lazy now to read a whole book about it (and I heard that Korzybski is difficult to read, which also does not encourage me).
I noticed that in the survey results from last year that there was a large number of people who assigned a non-trivial probability to the simulation hypothesis, yet identified as atheist.
I know this is just about definitions and labels, so isn't an incredibly important issue, but I was wondering why people choose to identify that way. It seems to me that if you assign a >20% chance to us living in a computer simulation that you should also identify as agnostic.
If not, it seems like you are using a definition of god which includes all the major religions, yet excludes our possible simulators. What is the distinction that you think makes the simulation not count as theism?
Probably these people use a definition of theism that says that a god has to be an ontologically basic entity in an absolute sense, not just relative to our universe. If our simulators are complex entities that have evolved naturally in their physical universe (or are simulated in turn by a higher level) then they don't count as gods by this definition.
god has to be an ontologically basic entity
Also, the general definition of God includes omniscience and omnipotence, but a simulator-god may not be either, e.g. due to limited computing resources they couldn't simulate an arbitrarily large number of unique humans.
Calling myself an agnostic would put me in an empirical cluster with people who think gods worthy of worship might exist, and possibly have some vague hope for an afterlife (though I know not all agnostics believe these things). I do not think of potential matrix overlords the way people think of the things they connect to the words "God" and "gods". I think of them as "those bastards that (might) have us all trapped in a zoo." And if they existed, I wouldn't expect them to have (real) magic powers, nor to be the creators of a real universe, just a zoo that looks like one. I do not think that animals trapped in a zoo with enclosure walls painted with trees and such to look like a real forest should think of zookeepers as gods, even if they have effectively created the animals' world, and may have created the animals themselves (through artificial breeding, or even cloning), and I think that is basically analogous to what our position would be if the simulation hypothesis was correct.
Why are there so few people living past 115?
There's an annoying assumption that no parent would want their child to have a greatly extended lifespan, but I think it's a reasonable overview otherwise, or at least I agree that there's not going to be a major increase in longevity without a breakthrough. Lifestyle changes won't do it.
I've been working on a series of videos about prison reform. During my reading, I came across an interesting passage from wikipedia:
In colonial America, punishments were severe. The Massachusetts assembly in 1736 ordered that a thief, on first conviction, be fined or whipped. The second time he was to pay treble damages, sit for an hour upon the gallows platform with a noose around his neck and then be carted to the whipping post for thirty stripes. For the third offense he was to be hanged.[4] But the implementation was haphazard as there was no effective police system and judges wouldn't convict if they believed the punishment was excessive. The local jails mainly held men awaiting trial or punishment and those in debt.
What struck me was how preferable these punishments (except the hanging, but that was very rare) seem compared to the current system of massive scale long-term imprisonment. I would much rather pay damages and be whipped than serve months or years in jail. Oddly, most people seem to agree with Wikipedia that whipping is more "severe" than imprisonment of several months or years (and of course, many prisoners will be beaten or raped in prison). Yet I think if you gave people being convicted for theft a choice, most of them would choose the physical punishment instead of jail time.
I'm reminded of the perennial objections to Torture vs Dust Specks to the effect that torture is a sacred anti-value which simply cannot be evaluated on the same axis as non-torture punishments (such as jail time, presumably), regardless of the severities involved..
Maybe it's a part of human hypocrisy: we want to punish people, but in a way that doesn't make our mirror neurons feel their pain. We want people to be punished, without thinking about ourselves as the kind of people who want to harm others. We want to make it as impersonal as possible.
So we invent punishments that don't feel like we are doing something horrible, and yet are bad enough that we would want to avoid them. Being locked behind bars for 20 years is horrible, but there is no speficic moment that would make an external observer scream.
Video playback speed was mentioned on the useful habits repository thread a few weeks ago and I asked how I could do the same. Youtube's playback speed option is not available on all videos. Macs apparently have a plug-in you can download, I don't own a mac so that's not helpful. You could download the video then play it back, but that wastes time. I just learned a solution that works across all OS' with out the need to download the video first.
copy youtube url, ctrl v on vlc mainscreen
Less Wrong and its comments are a treasure trove of ethical problems, both theoretical and practical, and possible solutions to them (the largest one to my knowledge; do let me know if you are aware of a larger forum for this topic). However, this knowledge is not easy to navigate, especially to an outsider who might have a practical interest in it. I think this is a problem worth solving and one possible solution I came up with is to create a StackExchange-style service for (utilitarian, rationalist) ethics. Would you consider such a platform for ethical questions to be useful? Would you participate?
Possible benefits:
Making existing problems and their answers easier to navigate through the use of tagging and a stricter question-answer format.
Accumulation of new interesting problems.
The closest I have found is http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/ethics, which doesn't appear to be very active and it being a part of a more traditional philosophy forum might be a hindrance.
Edit: a semi-relevant example.
An interesting concept I haven't seen mentioned on LW before: deconcentration of attention.
“Deconcentration of attention is opposite to concentration and can be interpreted as a process of dismantling of the figures in the field of perception and transformation of the perceptual field into a uniform (in the sense that no individual elements could be construed as a perceptual figure) background.”
Seems slightly pseudosciencey, but perhaps valuable.
I have a half written post about the cultural divisions in the environmentalist movement that I intend to put on a personal blog in the nearish future. (Tl;Dr there "Green" groups who advocate different things in a very emotional/moral way vs. "Scientific" environmentalists)
I've been thinking about comparisons between the structure of that movement and how future movements might tackle other potential existential risks, specifically UFAI. Would people be interested in a post here specifically discussing that?
Just thinking... could it be worth doing a website providing interesting parts of settled science for laypeople?
If we take the solid, replicated findings, and remove the ones that laypeople don't care about (because they have no use for them in everyday life)... how much would be left? Which parts of human knowledge would be covered most?
I imagine a website that would first provide a simple explanation, and then a detailed scientific explanation with references.
Why? Simply to give people idea that this is science that is useful and trustworthy -- not the things that are too abstract to understand or use, and not some new hypotheses that will be disproved tomorrow. Science, as a friendly and trustworthy authority. To get some respect for science.
The average science PhD is two standard deviations out from the population mean in terms of intelligence, has spent ~8-10 years learning the fundamental background required to understand their field, and is deeply immersed in the culture of science. And these are the 'newbs' of the scientific community; the scrappy up-and-comers who still need to prove themselves as having valuable insights or actual skills.
So yes, for all practical purposes the barrier to genuine understanding of scientific theories and techniques is high enough that a layman cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding of the field.
And if we want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand, the priest is the archetypal example of mysterious authority.
How high is "high-IQ" and how low is "low IQ" in your book?
Someone with an above-average IQ of 115-120, like your average undergrad, visibly struggles with 101 / 201 level work and is deeply resistant to higher-level concepts. Actually getting through grad school takes about a 130 as previously mentioned, and notable scientists tend to be in the 150+ range. So somewhere from 84-98% of the population is disqualified right off the bat, with only the top 2-0.04% capable of doing really valuable work.
And that's assuming that IQ is the only thing that counts; in actuality, at least in the hard sciences, there is an enormous amount of technical knowledge and skill that a person has to learn to provide real insight. I cannot think of a single example in the last 50 years which fits your narrative of the smart outsider coming in and overturning a well-established scientific principle, although I would love to hear of one if you know any.
No, I don't want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand.
So no more trusting chemotherapy to treat your cancer? The internet to download your music, or your iPod to play it? A fixed wing aircraft to transport you safely ...
I am sitting on an unpublished and (depending on how much I want to do) potentially almost complete puzzle game, thus far entirely my own work, and I need to decide what to do with it. I wrote most of it starting almost 4 years ago, and mostly stopping a year after that, as a way to teach myself to program. I've revisited it a few times since then, performing lots of refactoring and optimization as my coding skills improved, and implementing a couple of new ideas as I thought them up. Currently the game mechanics are pretty polished. With a few weeks of bug fixes I would say publishable. I've made and tested 40 levels. Because they are short, I would like to make 2 or 3 times as many before publishing. I estimate that this would take several months at the rate I am currently able to devote free time to it. Lastly, the artwork, sound effects, and music are sorely lacking. I would need to commission an artist skilled at 3D modeling, rigging, skinning, and animation to make at least 2 human models (1 male, 1 female), and one giant spider model, with about 20 animations each (the human models can share skeletons and animations). I could use something like this for music, and something ...
My friend did an extremely simple Unity game (with nice graphics and music), added AdMob advertising, put an Android version as a free game on Google Play, and gets about 20 dollars a month (during the recent half of the year, and the number seems stable). That's the only data point I have.
I suppose your game would be better (but I don't really know what the players value), so... let's make a wild guess that it could make 50 dollars a month during the following 5 years. That's like 5×12×50 = 3000 dollars total. Maybe! If you need 9 months to finish it (beware the planning fallacy!), it is 300 dollars per month of work. I don't know how much time during the month you would spend coding. Discounting for the planning fallacy and the uncertainty of outcome, let's make it, say, 100 dollars per month of work.
Of course, besides money you get some additional benefits such as feeling good and having a nice item in your portfolio (probably irrelevant for most jobs you consider).
You can publish it on google play now, as it is... and if you later decide so, edit the storyline, add a level or two, and sell it on PC later.
The advantage is that a) you get some money now, and b) when the final version is ready, you will already have a few fans, which will be more likely to buy it. (Another advantage is that if your game has some bugs or other problems, you can use the feedback to polish the game before you start charging players. I suspect a paying customer will be more angry about bugs.)
Much to my surprise, Richard Dawkins and Jon Stewart had a fairly reasonable conversation about existential risk on the Sept. 24, 2013 edition of The Daily Show. Here's how it went down:
STEWART: Here's my proposal... for the discussion tonight. Do you believe that the end of our civilization will be through religious strife or scientific advancement? What do you think in the long run will be more damaging to our prospects as a human race?
In reply, Dawkins says Martin Rees (of CSER) thinks humanity has a 50% chance of surviving the 21st century, and one cause for such worry is that powerful technologies could get into the hands of religious fanatics. Stewart replies:
STEWART: ...[But] isn't there a strong probability that we are not necessarily in control of the unintended consequences of our scientific advancement?... Don't you think it's even more likely that we will create something [for which] the unintended consequence... is worldwide catastrophe?
DAWKINS: That is possible. It's something we have to worry about... Science is the most powerful to do whatever you want to do. If you want to do good, it's the most powerful way to do good. If you want to do evil, it's the most powerfu...
The Relationship Escalator-- an overview of assumptions about relationships, and exceptions to the assumptions. The part that surprised me was the bit about the possibility of dialing back a relationship without ending it.
Poll Question: What are communities are you active in other than Less Wrong?
Communities that you think are closely related to Less Wrong are welcome, but I am also wondering what other completely unrelated groups you associate with. How do you think such communities help you? Are there any that you would recommend to an arbitrary Less Wronger?
Contra dance. Closely correlated with LessWrong; also correlated with nerdy people in general. I would recommend it to most LessWrongers; it's good even for people who are not generally good at dancing, or who have problems interacting socially. (Perhaps even especially for those people; I think of it as a 'gateway dance.')
Other types of dance, like swing dance. Also some correlation with LessWrong, somewhat recommended but this depends more on your tastes. Generally has a higher barrier to entry than contra dancing.
My local hackerspace, and broadly the US and European hacker communities. This is mainly because information security is my primary focus, but I find myself happier interacting with hackers because in general they tend not only to be highly outcome-oriented (i.e., inherently consequentialist), but also pragmatic about it: as the saying goes, there's no arguing with a root shell. (Modulo bikeshedding, but this seems to be more of a failure mode of subgroups that don't strive to avoid that problem.) The hacker community is also where I learned to think of communities in terms of design patterns; it's one of the few groups I've encountered so far that puts effort into that sort of community self-evaluation. Mostly it helps me because it's a place where I feel welcome, where other people see value in the goals I want to achieve and are working toward compatible goals. I'd encourage any instrumental rationalist with an interest in software engineering, and especially security, to visit a hackerspace or attend a hacker conference.
Until recently I was also involved in the "liberation technology" activism community, but ultimately found it toxic and left. I'm still too close to t...
I was wondering if anyone had any opinions/observations they would be would be willing to share about Unitarian Universalism. My fiancee is an atheist and a Unitarian Universalist, and I have been going to congregation with her for the last 10 months. I enjoy the experience. It is relaxing for me, and a source of interesting discussions. However, I am trying to decide if my morality has a problem with allying myself this community. I am leaning towards no. I feel like they are doing a lot of good by providing a stepping stone out of traditional religion for many people. I am however slightly concerned about what effect this community might have on my future children. I would love to debate this issue with anyone who is willing, and I think that would be very helpful for me.
I'm seeing a lot of comments in which it is implicitly assumed that most everyone reading lives in a major city where transportation is trivial and there is plenty of memetic diversity. I'm wondering if this assumption is generally accurate and I'm just the odd one out, or if it's actually kinda fallacious.
(I can't seem to figure out poll formatting. Hm.)
I'm back in school studying computer science (with a concentration in software engineering), but plan on being a competent programmer by the time I graduate, so I figure I need to learn lots of secondary and tertiary skills in addition to those that are actually part of the coursework. In parallel to my class subjects, I plan on learning HTML/CSS, SQL, Linux, and Git. What else should be on this list?
Preliminaries: Make sure you can touch type, being able to hit 50+ wpm without sweat makes it a lot easier to whip up a quick single-screen test program to check up something. Learn a text editor with good macro capabilities, like Vim or Emacs, so you can do repetitive structural editing of text files without having to do every step by hand. Get into the general habit of thinking that whenever you find yourself doing several repetitive steps by hand, something is wrong and you should look into ways to automate the loop.
Working with large, established code bases, like Vladimir_Nesov suggested, is what you'll probably end up doing a lot as a working programmer. Better get used to it. There are many big open-source projects you can try to contribute to.
Unit tests, test-driven development. You want the computer to test as much of the program as possible. Also look into the major unit testing frameworks for whatever language you're working on.
Build systems, rigging up a complex project to build with a single command line command. Also look into build servers, nightly builds and the works. A real-world software project will want a server that automatically builds the latest version of th...
I know actuaries have huge tables of probabilites of death at any given age based on historical data. Where can I find more detailed data for cause of death? Can someone point me to similar tables for major life events such as probabilites of being robbed, laid off, being in an accident of some kind, getting divorced and so on?
I am becoming a believer in being prepared and even if there is no cost-effective preventative measure, being mentally prepared for an event is very beneficial too in my experience.
It seems to be pretty well decided that (as opposed to directly promoting Less Wrong, or Rationality in general), spreading HPMoR is a generally good idea. What are the best ways to go about this, and has anyone undertaken a serious effort?
I came to the conclusion, after considering creating some flyers to post around our meetup's usual haunts, that online advocacy would be much more efficient and cost effective. Then, after thinking that promotion on large sites with high signal to noise is mostly useless, realized that sharing among smaller communiti...
When it comes to typical online forums signatures are a good way to promote things. Take a quote of HPMOR and attach a link to it.
Why is "downvoted" so frequently modified by "to oblivion"? Can we please come up with a new modifier here? This is already a dead phrase, a cliche which seems to get typed without any actual thought going into it. Wouldn't downvoting "to invisibility" or "below the threshold" or even just plain "downvoting", no modifier, make a nice change?
I prefer 'to oblivion' over all your suggested alternatives. Why do you think it should change?
Is the problem of measuring rationality related to the problem of measuring programming skill? Both are notoriously hard, but I can't tell if they're hard for the same reason...
A personal anecdote I'd like to share which relates to the recent polyphasic sleep post ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip6/polyphasic_sleep_seed_study_reprise/ ): My 7 year old son who always tended to sleep long and late seems to have developed segmented sleep by himself in the last two weeks. He claims to wake e.g. at 3:10 AM gets dressed, butters his school bread - and gets to bed again - in our family bed. It's no joke. He lies dressed in bed and his satchel is packed. And the interesting thing is: He is more alert and less bad tempered than before. He doe...
Do I have a bias or useful heuristic? If a signal is easy to fake, is it a bias to assume that it is disingenuous or is it an useful heuristic?
I read Robert Hanson's post about why there are so many charities specifically focusing on kids and he basically summed it up as signalling to seem kind, for potential mates, being a major factor. There were some good rebuttals in the comment sections but whether or not signalling is at play is not the point, I'm sure to a certain degree it is, how much? I don't know. The point is that I automatically dismiss th...
I am wondering what a PD tournament would look like if the goal was to maximize the score of the group rather than the individual player. For some payoff matrices, always cooperate trivially wins, but what if C/D provides a greater net payoff than C/C, which in turn is higher than D/D? Does that just devolve to the individual game? It feels like it should, but it also feels like giving both players the same goal ought to fundamentally change the game.
I haven't worked out the math; the thought just struck me while reading other posts.
[LINK] A day in the life of an NPC. http://www.npccomic.com/2011/10/19/beautiful-day/?utm_source=PW%2B&utm_medium=468x60&utm_content=Beauty&utm_campaign=PW%2B468x60%2BBeauty%2B
Ilya Shkrob's In The Beginning is an attempt to reconcile science and religion. It's the best such attempt that I've seen, better than I thought possible. If you enjoy "guru" writers like Eliezer or Moldbug, you might enjoy this too.
I haven't found one, so I'll try to summarize here:
"Prokaryotic life probably came to Earth from somewhere else. It was successful and made Earth into a finely tuned paradise. (A key point here is the role of life in preserving liquid water, but there are many other points, the author is a scientist and likes to point out improbable coincidences.) Then a tragic accident caused individualistic eukaryotic life to appear, which led to much suffering and death. Evolution is not directionless, its goal is to correct the mistake and invent a non-individualistic way of life for eukaryotes. Multicellularity and human society are intermediate steps to that goal. The ultimate goal is to spread life, but spreading individualistic life would be bad, the mistake has to be corrected first. Humans have a chance to help with that process, but aren't intended to see the outcome."
The details of the text are more interesting than the main idea, though.
Hold on, is he trying to imply that prokaryotes aren't competitive? Not only does all single-celled life compete, it competes at a much faster pace than multicellular life does.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.