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.
Welcome to Urbit [http://www.urbit.org/2013/09/24/urbit-intro.html]
I love the smell of Moldbug in the morning.
3David_Gerard10y
For an example of fully rampant Typical Mind Fallacy in Urbit, see the security
document
[https://github.com/urbit/urbit.github.io/blob/master/olddoc/2013-08-22-Chapter-7-security.markdown].
About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into
Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network should
work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved
whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained.
The very first thing people will do with the Urbit system is try to mess with
its assumptions, in ways that its creators literally could not foresee (due to
Typical Mind Fallacy), though they might have been reasonably expected to (given
the real world as data).
0ChristianKl10y
I love those dream posts in the open threads.
7arundelo10y
Note that [explaining-the-joke](http://rot13.com/)
[[explaining-the-joke](http://rot13.com/)]rirelguvat hc gb gur pbzchgre orvat n
pneqobneq obk vf yvgrenyyl gehr.
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.
This seems pretty close to a Bulverism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism]
0JQuinton10y
That does seem close to Bulverism. But what I described seem to be happening at
a subconscious bias level, where people are somewhat talking past each other due
to a sort of hidden assumption of Bulverism.
-2Transfuturist10y
Then perhaps...
>implying Bulverism
6blacktrance10y
I've heard it called "psychologizing".
-1ChristianKl10y
If someone else accuses you of engaging in motivated reasoning that's ad
hominem.
5Jayson_Virissimo10y
No, that is a mere assertion (which may or may not be true). If they claimed
that he is wrong because he is engaging in motivated reasoning, then that would
be ad hominem.
0blashimov10y
Wait, what? This might be a little off topic, but if you assert that they lack
evidence and are drawing conclusions based on motivated reasoning, that seems
highly relevant and not ad hominem. I guess it could be unnecessary, as you
might try to focus exactly on their evidence, but it would seem reasonable to
look at the evidence they present, and say "this is consistent with motivated
reasoning, for example you describe many things that would happen by chance but
nothing similar contradictory, so there seems to be some confirmation bias" etc.
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?
I'm not sure if it is possible or has a high chance of success to give someone a
book in the hope of provoking a viewquake. Most people would detect being
influenced. Compare with trying to give people the bible to convert them doesn't
work either even though it also could provoke a viewquake - after all the bible
is also much different from other common literature. To actually provoke a
viewquake it must be a missing piece either connecting pieces or buildig on them
and thus causing an aha moment. And the trouble is: This depends critically on
your prior knowledge thus not every book will work on everyone.
Compare with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development]
7drethelin10y
If someone will actually get through the density of the text, moldbug has been
known to provoke a few viewquakes.
7sixes_and_sevens10y
I know of a few former-theists whose atheist tipping point was reading Susan
Blackmore's The Meme Machine [http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/019286212X]. I recall
being fairly heavily influenced by this myself when I first read it (about
twelve years ago, when it was one of only a small handful of popular books on
memetics), but suspect I might find it a bit tiresome and erroneous if I were to
re-read it.
2drethelin10y
I tried to read it a few years after reading a bunch of dawkins and found it
hard to get through
6RomeoStevens10y
A microecon textbook given to a reflective person.
5Scott Garrabrant10y
The Sequences.
4JoshuaZ10y
"1493" and "The Better Angels of Our Nature"
6NancyLebovitz10y
What was the viewquake for you in 1943?
7JoshuaZ10y
Primarily how much biology and ecosystems could have largescale impacts on
society and culture in ways which stayed around even after the underlying issue
was no longer around. One of the examples there is how the prevalence of
diseases (yellow fever, malaria especially) had long-term impacts on differences
in North American culture in both the South and the North.
3closeness10y
Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky.
3pragmatist10y
Reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations prompted the biggest
viewquake I've ever experienced, substantially changing my conception of what a
properly naturalistic worldview looks like, especially the role of normativity
therein. I'm not sure I'd assign it a high probability of provoking a viewquake
in others, though, given his aphoristic and often frustratingly opaque style. I
think it worked for me because I already had vague misgivings about my prior
worldview that I was having trouble nailing down, and the book helped bring
these apprehensions into focus.
A more concrete scientific viewquake: reading Jaynes, especially his work on
statistical mechanics, completely altered my approach to my Ph.D. dissertation
(and also, incidentally, led me to LW).
3Moss_Piglet10y
The Anti-Christ would be my #1 pick, for both versions of the question.
Stumbling on Happiness is a good second choice though.
1passive_fist10y
The biggest world-shattering book for me was the classic, Engines of Creation by
K. Eric Drexler. I was just 21 and the book had a large impact on me. Nowadays
though, the ideas in the book are pretty mainstream, so I don't think it would
have the same effect for a millenial.
1Risto_Saarelma10y
While it's overoptimistic and generally a bit all over the place, Kurzweil's The
Singularity is Near might still be the most bang for the book single
introduction to the "humans are made of atoms" mindset you can throw at someone
who is reasonably popular science literate but hasn't had any exposure to
serious transhumanism.
It's kinda like how The God Delusion might not be the most deep book on the
social psychology of religion, but it's still a really good book to give to the
smart teenager who was raised by fundamentalists and wants to be deprogrammed.
0passive_fist10y
After reading Engines of Creation, The Singularity is Near didn't have nearly as
much effect on me. I just thought, "Well, duh" while reading it. I can imagine
how it would affect someone with little exposure to transhumanist ideas though.
I agree with you that it's a good choice.
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:
improv games
additional types of social dance
conversations with strangers
public speaking
It also helped substantially with CFAR's comfort zone expansion exercises. Highly recommended.
For those of us who can't be in Berkeley in < 1 week's notice, can you go into
more detail on the methods?
7benkuhn10y
A bit. Most of the techniques were developed by one of the CFAR instructors, and
I can't reproduce his instruction, nor do I want to steal his thunder. The
closest thing you can find out more about is mindfulness-based stress reduction.
(But the real value of the class is being able to practice with Val and ask him
questions, which unfortunately I can't do justice to in a LW comment.)
3FiftyTwo10y
Would you be able to post a summary for people unable to attend? I find the
topic very interesting, but habitually reside in a different continent,.
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 just started rereading Science and Sanity and maybe the project will develop
into a lesswrong post.
When it comes to Korzybski being difficult to read I think it's because the idea
he advocates are complex.
As he writes himself:
It's a bit like learning a foreign language in a foreign language. In some sense
that seems necessary. A lot of dumb down elements of General Semantics made it
into popular culture but the core seems to be intrinsicly hard.
0RomeoStevens10y
Non-violent communication is the intellectual heir of E-prime which was the heir
of semantic concerns in General Semantics. Recent books on the subject are well
reviewed. It is a useful tool in communicating across large value rifts.
4ChristianKl10y
I don't think it makes sense to speak of a single framework as the heir of
General Semantics. General Semantics influenced quite a lot.
General Semantics itself is quite complex. Nonviolent communication is pretty
useless when you want to speak about scientific knowledge. General Semantics
notions of thinking about relations and structure are on the other hand are
quite useful.
1fubarobfusco10y
Does Rosenberg cite Bourland (or Korzybski) anywhere? I thought these were
independent inventions that happened upon some tangential ideas about
non-judgmental thinking.
0RomeoStevens10y
I had thought that there was a link in someone Rosenberg worked with developing
it but now I can't find anything. The elimination of the "to-be" verb forms does
not seem explicit in NVC methodology. I think you are correct and they are
independent.
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.
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.
Hmm, that is a distinction that is pretty clear cut. However most people who
believe in god believe that all people have ontologically basic souls.
Therefore, since they think ontologically basic is nothing particularly special,
I do not think that they would consider that a particularly important part of
the definition of a god.
5ChristianKl10y
If you read the survey questions God get's defined as an ontologically basic
entity for the sake of the survey.
2Scott Garrabrant10y
Oh. I was looking at the excel data and missed that. Oops. Maybe this means a
lot more people agree with me than I thought.
5Alejandro110y
They might think that being ontologically basic is a necessary condition for
being a god, but not a sufficient condition. Then simulators are not gods, but
souls are not gods either because they do not satisfy other possible necessary
conditions: e,g, having created the universe, or being omnipotent, omniscient
and omnibenevolent (or at least being much more powerful, knowing and good than
a human), etc.
Or perhaps, they believe being ontologically basic is necessary and sufficient
for being a god, but interpret this not just as not being composed of material
parts, but in the stronger sense of not being dependent on anything else for
existing (which souls do not satisfy because they are created by God, and
simulators don't because they have evolved or have been simulated in turn).
(ETA: this last possibility probably applies to some theists but not the
atheists you are talking about.)
0Scott Garrabrant10y
What is your response to the argument I gave below?
6Alejandro110y
They are indeed logically distinct questions. However, up to a few years ago all
or almost all people who said yes to 1 also said yes to 2. The word "theism" was
coined with these people in mind and is strongly associated with yes to 2 and
with the rest of the religious memeset.
Thus, it is not surprising that many people who only accept (or find likely) 1
but not 2 would reject this label for fear of false associations. Since people
accepting both 1 and 2 (religionists) tend to differ philosophically very much
in other things from those accepting 1 but not 2 (simulationists), it seems
better to use a new technical term (e.g. "creatorism") for plain yes to 1,
instead of using a historical term like "theism" that obscures this difference.
0Randaly10y
Yes. I disagree with them.
(Eliminating the supernatural aspect explains the human mind, and explains away
God.)
0Scott Garrabrant10y
Disagree with simulatarians about whether or not we are simulated?
0Randaly10y
Disagree with theists that people have ontologically basic souls; further
disagree with the claim that the 'ontologically basic' / 'supernatural' aspect
of a god is unimportant to its definition.
(What theists think is not relevant to a question about the beliefs of people
who not self-identify as theists.)
2Scott Garrabrant10y
I feel like there are two independent questions:
1) Does there exist a creator with a mind?
2) Are minds ontologically basic?
I think that accurately factors beliefs into 2 different questions, since there
are (I think) very few people who believe that god has an an ontologically basic
mind yet we do not.
I do not think it is justified to combine these questions together, since there
are people who say yes to 1 but not 2, and many many people who say yes to 2 but
not 1.
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.
Hmm. I was more thinking about a physics simulation by something that is nothing
like a human than an ancestor simulation like in Bostrom's original argument. I
think that most people who assign a non-trivial chance to ancestor simulation
would assign a non-trivial chance to physics simulation.
I don't think either variety is very similar to a zoo, but if we were in a
physics simulation, I do not think our relationship with our simulators is
anything like a animal-zookeeper relationship.
I also think that you should taboo the word "universe," since it implies that
there is nothing containing it. Whatever it is that we are in, our simulators
created all of it, and probably could interfere if they wanted to. They are
unlikely to want to now, since they went so long without interfering so far.
4Mestroyer10y
It may have once meant that, like the word "atom" once meant "indivisible." But
that's not how people seem to use it anymore. Once a critical mass of people
start misusing a word, I would rather become part of the problem than fight the
inevitable.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
If you were using the word that way, then it seems they are "creators of a
(real) universe."
4Emile10y
Theism usually involves God as the explanation of why the world exists, and why
we are conscious. In usual simulation scenarios, a world happens through physics
and natural selection etc. And then a copy of part of that world is made. Yes,
the copying process "made" the copy, but most explanations of how the copied
world is the way it is (from the point of view of those in it) still has to do
with physics, natural selection, etc. and not the copying process.
In other words, "who designed our world?" is more relevant than "who created our
world?".
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..
There's a post on Overcoming Bias about this here
[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/in-favor-of-flogging.html].
5roystgnr10y
The key quote, "Incarceration destroys families and jobs, exactly what people
need to have in order to stay away from crime." If we had wanted to create a
permanent underclass, replacing corporal punishment with prison would have been
an obvious step in the process.
Obviously that's not why people find imprisonment so preferable to torture,
though; TheOtherDave's "sacred anti-value" explanation is correct there. It
would be interesting to know exactly how a once-common punishment became seen as
unambiguously evil, though, in the face of "tough on crime" posturing,
lengthening prison sentences, etc.
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.
It is, incidentally, not obvious to everyone that the desire to create a stable
underclass didn't drive our play a significant role in our changing attitudes
towards prisons... in fact, it's not even obvious to me, though I agree that
they didn't play a significant role in our changing attitudes towards torturing
criminals.
-1Moss_Piglet10y
Because corporal punishment is an ancient display of power; the master holding
the whip and the servant being punished for misbehavior. It's obviously
effective, and undoubtedly more humane than incarceration, but it's also
anathema to the morality of the "free society" where everyone is supposed to be
equal and thus no-one can hold the whip.
(Heck, even disciplining a child is considered grounds to put the kid in foster
care; if you want corporal punishment v incarceration, that's a hell of a
dichotomy. And for every genuinely abused kid CPS saves, how many healthy
families get broken up again?)
The idea is childish and unrealistic, but nonetheless popular because it plays
on the fear and resentment people feel towards those above them. And in a
democracy, popular sentiment is difficult to defeat.
2Lumifer10y
Don't look at it from the perp point of view, look at it from an
average-middle-class-dude or a suburban-soccer-mom point of view.
If there's a guy who, say, committed a robbery in your neighborhood, physical
punishment may or may not deter him from future robberies. You don't know and in
the meantime he's still around. But if that guy gets sent to prison, the state
guarantees that he will not be around for a fairly long time.
That is the major advantage of prisons over fines and/or physical punishments.
4Desrtopa10y
On the other hand, making people spend long periods of time in a low-trust
environment surrounded by criminals seems to be a rather effective way of
elevating recidivism when they do get out, so the advantage as implemented in
our system is on rather tenuous footing.
And of course, the prison system comes with the major disadvantage that
imprisoning people is a highly expensive punishment to implement.
0Lumifer10y
I am not arguing that prisons are the proper way to deal with crime. All I'm
saying is that arguments in favor of imprisonment as the preferred method of
punishing criminals exist.
2A1987dM10y
That's only an advantage if the expected cost to society of keeping him in
prison is less than the expected cost (broadly construed) to society of him
keeping on robbing.
0Lumifer10y
The relevant part: "look at it from an average-middle-class-dude or a
suburban-soccer-mom point of view".
They do have political power and they don't do expected-cost-to-society
calculations.
0A1987dM10y
I guess I just hadn't interpreted "point of view" close enough to literally.
1knb10y
This is totally obvious, I'm not sure why you felt you needed to point that out.
The point of my comment is that it is interesting that prison isn't viewed as
cruel, even though it's obviously more harsh than alternatives. Obviously there
are other reasons people prefer prison as a punishment for others.
0TheOtherDave10y
well, short of death.
1Lumifer10y
Death is an existential punishment :-/
-1A1987dM10y
Dunno about that -- peak-end rule.
-2ChristianKl10y
It's not about harshness but about the concept of the important for physical
integrity for human dignity.
1knb10y
Isn't freedom important for human dignity? It seems that any kind of punishment
infringes on human dignity to some extent. Also, remember that prisoners are
often subject to beatings and rape by other prisoners or guards--something which
is widely known.
-3ChristianKl10y
According to the standard moral doctrine it's not as central as bodily
integrity. The state is allowed to take away freedom of movement but not bodily
integrity or force people to work as slaves.
That's a feature of the particular way a prison is run.
2Lumifer10y
There is a "standard moral doctrine"??
2ChristianKl10y
Yes, I consider things like the UN charter of human rights the standard moral
doctrine.
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.
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.
“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.
This is a game I like to play with myself actually. I sit and observe my
surroundings, consciously removing labels from the objects in my visual field
until it's clear that everything is one big continuity of atoms. It's fun and
brings back for me that childlike feeling of seeing thing for the first time
again. I have to be in the right frame of mind to do it and it's much harder
when in a man-made environment (where everything is an object) than in nature.
But I've never had a word for it before, so thanks.
4Username10y
Actually, I'd be interested to hear what other mental games LWers play to amuse
themselves.
Some more games I play:
* 'Fly arounds,' where I visualize my perspective moving around the room,
zooming out of the walls of the building I'm in, and exploring/getting new
views on places I know. It's fun to 'tag' an imaginary person and see what
their perspective moving through an average day would be.
* 'People watching,' where I pick a person walking by and try to read their
actions and relationships with the people they're with. They then get a full
backstory and life.
* 'Contingency.' What would happen if a car drove through the door right
now/that guy pulled a gun/I suddenly realized that I am actually Jason
Bourne? This xkcd [http://xkcd.com/337/] puts it best.
I feel that these last two are pretty common.
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?
If you haven't yet read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, I recommend it.
As an aside, I find it convenient to think of a significant part of
environmentalism as purely religious movement.
1FiftyTwo10y
Thats a good analogy. By recycling plastic bottles you are displaying your
virtue, whatever the extent of the practical consequences.
1Oscar_Cunningham10y
Is there anything you've learnt that's particular about groups trying to tackle
x-risk in particular? If not, you could just make a post describing what you've
learnt about groups that challenge big problems. Generality at no extra cost.
0FiftyTwo10y
Political and social movements as a whole are so massive and varied that I don't
think I could really give much non-trivial analysis. I'm not sure there's really
a separate category of 'big problem' that can be separated out, all movements
think their problem is big, and all big problems are composed of smaller
problems.
I make the comparison between UFAI and environmentalism because its probably the
only major risk that presently is really in public consciousness,* so provides a
model of how people will act in response. E.g. the solutions that technical
experts favour may not be the ones that the public support even if they agree on
the problem.
*A few decades ago nuclear weapons might have also been analogous, but, whether
correctly or not, the public perception of their risk has diminished.
0Thomas10y
Yes. As I see, a lot of Greens are Misanthropes. Do you cover this aspect?
8fubarobfusco10y
From what I can tell, it's actually a teeny-tiny number of people, but they get
disproportional media coverage for reasons that should be obvious considering
the interests of those doing the covering.
3blacktrance10y
FWIW, while I've not met many misanthropic greens in real life, about half of
the greens I've met on the Internet range from mildly to extremely misanthropic.
7Viliam_Bur10y
Sometimes the whole internet seems to be filled by misanthropic people, so I am
not sure how much evidence this is about misanthropy of greens.
2FiftyTwo10y
I wouldn't say misanthropic, maybe more a matter of scope insensitivity and an
overromanticised view of the 'natural' state of the world. But I think they
genuinely believe it would make humans better off, whereas truly misanthropic
greens wouldn't care.
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.
Wikipedia seems close enough to what you're describing ... and improving
Wikipedia (plenty of science pages are flagged as "this is hard to understand
for non-specialists) seems like the easiest way to move it closer.
8Viliam_Bur10y
The wikipedia contains millions of topics, so the subset of "settled science" is
lost among them. Creating a "Settled Science" portal could be an approximation.
As an example of where my idea differs from the wikipedia approach: the
wikipedia Science portal [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Science] displays
a link to article about Albert Einstein. Yes, Albert Einstein was an important
scientist, but his personal biography is not science. So one difference would be
that the "settled science encyclopedia" would not include Einstein or any other
scientist (except among the references). Only the knowledge, which could be also
used on a different planet with different history and different names and
biographies of the scientists.
Also, in wikipedia you have a whole page about a topic. Some parts of the page
may be settled science, other parts are not; but both parts are on the same
page, in the same encyclopedia. It would be cognitively easier for a reader to
know "if it is on SettledScienceEncyclopedia.com", it is settled science.
EDIT: I agree [http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/] that
improving scientific articles on wikipedia, not just making them more correct
but also more accessible to wide public, is a worthy goal.
7ChristianKl10y
It could be worth doing but it's a hard task.
Take a subject like evolution.The fact that evolution happens is setteled
science for a long time. On the other hand if you take a school book on
evolution that was written 30 years ago there a good chance that it has examples
of how one species is related to another species that got overturned when we got
genome data.
5Moss_Piglet10y
People used to respect Science, as an abstract mysterious force which Scientists
could augur and even use to invoke the odd miracle. In a way, people in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Scientists in a similar way to how
pre-Christian Europe saw priests; you need one on hand when you make a decision,
and contradict them at your peril, but ultimately they're advisers rather than
leaders.
That attitude is mostly gone now, but it could be useful to bring it back.
Ordinary people are not going to provide useful scientific insights or otherwise
helpfully (1) participate in the process, so keeping them out of the way and
deferential is going to be more valuable then trying to involve them. There
seems to be a J curve between 100% scientific literacy and old-school
Science-ism, and it seems to me at least that climbing back up to an elitist
position is the option most likely to actually work in our lifetimes.
1. If anything, the more easily lay people can lay their hands on scientific
materials the worse the situation is; the Dunning-Kruger effect and a lack
of actual scientific training / mental ability means that laypeople are
almost certain to misinterpret what they read in ways which disagree with
the actual scientific consensus. Just look at the huge backlash against
biology and psychometry these days; most of the people I've argued with in
person or online have no actual qualifications but feel entitled to opinions
on the issues because they stumbled through an article on pub-med and know
the word methodology.
4satt10y
Is this true? It pattern matches to a generic things-were-better-in-the-old-days
complaint and I'm not sure how one would get a systematic idea of how much
people trusted science & scientists 100-200 years ago.
(Looking at the US, for instance, I only find results from surveys
[http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c7/c7s3.htm] going back to the late 1950s
[http://www.jstor.org/stable/2748607]. Americans' confidence in science seems to
have fallen quite a lot between 1958 and 1971-2, probably mostly in the late
1960s, then rebounded somewhat before remaining stable for the last 35-40 years.
I note that the loss of trust in science that happened in the 1960s wasn't
science-specific, but part of a general loss of confidence experienced by almost
all institutions people were polled about.)
Citizen science [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science] seems like
evidence against this idea.
1Lumifer10y
I disagree. I strongly disapprove of treating scientists as high priests of
mystical higher knowledge inaccessible to mere mortals.
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.
First, there is no logical connection between your first paragraph and the
second one and I don't see any reason for that "so, yes".
Second, that claim is, ahem, bullshit. I'll agree that someone with low IQ
"cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding", but for such people
this statement is true for much more than science. High-IQ laymen are quite
capable of understanding the field and, often enough, pointing out new
approaches which have not occurred to any established scientists because, after
all, that's not how these things are done.
No, I don't want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand.
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 ... (read more)
Not reality. 41% of people in the US are enrolled in college (in 2010) Source
[http://nces.ed.gov/fastFacts/display.asp?id=98]. If we assumed that the US has
representative IQ and use a 15 SD IQ scale, then the top 41% of IQs are all
people with IQ of at least 103.41. I calculated that average IQ of a the top 41%
of the population on wolfram alpha. (It is easy, because by definition, IQ
follows a normal distribution.) I got 114.2.
If US citizens between 18 and 24 are representative of the entire population in
terms of IQ, it is literally impossible for the average IQ of an undergrad
student to be 115 or higher.
7Moss_Piglet10y
Hmm. I'm not 95% confident of then number I gave, but I haven't been able to
turn up anything disconfirming.
I did a bunch of research on the heritability of IQ last year for a term paper
and I repeatedly saw the claim that university students tend to be 1sd above the
local population mean, although that may not apply in a place with more liberal
admissions practices like the modern US. More research below, and I'll edit in
some extra stuff tomorrow when my brain isn't fried.
Some actual data here (IQs estimated from SAT scores, ETS data as of 2013)
[http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-college-major/]
Surprisingly, at least looking at science / engineering / math majors, it looks
like people are smarter than I would have guessed; Physics majors had the
highest average at 133 with Psychology majors pulling up the rear with 114, and
most of them are clustered around 120 - 130. For someone who deals with
undergrads, that is frankly shockingly high.
Outside of the sciences, even the "dumbest" major, social work, managed a 103
and a lot of the popular majors are in the 105-115 range. Another big surprise
here too; Philosophy majors are really damn bright with a 129 average, right up
under Math majors. Never would have guessed that one.
Still, it's obvious that the 115-120 figure I gave was overly optimistic. Once I
look at some more data I will amend my initial post so that it better reflects
reality.
3blashimov10y
Naive hypothesis: Given the Flynn effect, and that college students are younger
than the general population, could that explain the difference? That Coscott's
conditional "If US citizens between 18 and 24 are representative of the entire
population in terms of IQ" is false?
0Kaj_Sotala10y
IQ tests are at least supposed to be normed for the age group in question, in
order to eliminate such effects, but I don't know how it's done for the
estimates in question.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
I think that is likely.
-1Lumifer10y
I don't have specific ranges in mind, but I think I'd call grad-student level
sufficiently high-IQ.
Not necessarily overturning a principle, but rather opening up new directions to
expand into. How about Woz, Jobs, Gates, all that crowd? They were outsiders --
all the insiders were at IBM or, at best, at places like Xerox PARC.
Of course, but you don't trust a process you don't understand. You trust either
people or the system built around that process. If your doctor gives you a pill
to take, you trust your doctor, not the biochemistry which you don't understand.
If you take a plane across the Atlantic, you trust the system that's been
running commercial aviation for decades with the very low accident rate.
8Viliam_Bur10y
They were outsiders of business companies, not of science. It's not like Gates
never learned math at school, and then miraculously proved Fermat theorem in his
dreams. It's more like he took mostly some else's work, made a few smart
business decisions, and became extra rich.
7passive_fist10y
It's impractical for every single person to understand every single scientific
theory. Even the domain of 'settled science' is far larger than anyone could
hope to cover in their lifetime.
It's true that scientific authority is no substitute for evidence and
experiment, but as Elezier pointed out in one of the streams (I can't find the
link right now), it's not like scientific authority is useless for updating
beliefs. If you have to make a decision, and are stuck in choosing between the
scientific consensus opinion and a random coin toss, the scientific consensus
opinion is a far far better choice, obviously.
'Trust', in this context, doesn't mean 100% infallible trust in scientific
authority. If you take the alternative route and demand that everyone be
knowledgeable in everything they make choices in, you wind up in situations like
the current one we're having with climate change, where scientists are pretty
much screaming at the top of their lungs that something has to be done, but it's
falling on deaf political ears partly because of the FUD spreaded by
anti-science groups casting doubt on scientific consensus opinion.
5Lumifer10y
Funny that you mention that.
I consider myself a reasonably well educated layman with a few functioning brain
cells. I've taken an interest in the global warming claims and did a fair amount
of digging (which involved reading original papers and other relevant stuff like
Climategate materials). I'll skip through all the bits not relevant to this
thread but I'll point out that the end result is that my respect for "climate
science" dropped considerably and I became what you'd probably describe as a
"climate sceptic".
Given the rather sorry state of medical science (see Ioannidis
[http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124],
etc.), another area I have some interest in, I must say that nowadays when
people tell me I must blindly trust "science" because I cannot possibly
understand the gnostic knowledge of these high priests, well, let's just say I'm
not very receptive to this idea.
5passive_fist10y
Regardless of whether you personally agree with the consensus on climate change,
the fact is that most politicians in office are not scientists and do not have
the requisite background to even begin reading climate change papers and
materials. Yet they must often make decisions on climate change issues. I'd much
prefer that they took the consensus scientific opinion rather than making up
their own ill-formed beliefs. If the scientific opinion turns out to be wrong, I
will pin the full blame on the scientists, not the decision makers.
And, as I'm saying, this generalizes to all sorts of other issues. I feel like
I'm repeating myself here, but ultimately a lot of people find themselves in
situations where they must make a decision based on limited information and
intelligence. In such a scenario, often the best choice is to 'trust'
scientists. The option to 'figure it out for yourself' is not available.
0Lumifer10y
In general I would agree with you. However, as usual, real life is complicated.
The debate about climate has been greatly politicized and commercialized. Many
people participating in this debate had and have huge incentives, (political,
monetary, professional, etc.) to bend the perceptions in their favor. Many
scientists behaved... less than admirably. The cause has been picked up (I might
even say "hijacked") by the environmental movement which desperately needed a
new bogeyman, a new fear to keep the money flowing. There has been much
confusion -- some natural and some deliberately created -- over which questions
exactly are being asked and answered. Some climate scientists decided they're
experts on economics and public policy and their policy recommendations are
"science".
All in all it was and is a huge and ugly mess. Given this reality, "just follow
the scientific consensus" might have been a good prior, but after updating on
all the evidence it doesn't look like a good posterior recommendation in this
particular case.
3Thomas10y
Imagine, you have something like this back in 1900.
Do you remember how settled was that the Universe is slowing down at its
expansion? The only thing wasn't settled was the slowing rate - is it big enough
to stop one day and reverse. 20 years ago.
Just now, they discuss Big Bang. Settled long ago.
I am not saying your idea isn't good. It is, but the controversy is imminent.
1FiftyTwo10y
What would this do that Wikipedia and encyclopaedias don't do?
3ChristianKl10y
Wikipedia contains plenty of scientific claims that are open to be overturned by
new experiments.
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 ... (read more)
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).
If the payoff is that low, it's not worth working in the storyline (which is
what would take 9 months (Edit: typo)). I'm already making a decent wage as a
TA. It could still be worth publishing roughly as-is. But I'm hoping I can get
away with publishing to PC/Mac/Linux and charging a few dollars per player.
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.)
From what you say, it sounds like it would be quite a while before ad revenue
from a free game would pay back what I spent on commissioning
[http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/80762/3d-artist-commission] 3D
artists
[http://altiz-studio.deviantart.com/journal/3D-COMMISSION-PRICE-337418779].
An ad banner like in AdMob would interfere with gameplay quite a lot. The
control scheme is designed for full keyboard (but would work well with a game
controller with joysticks). It would take significant work to translate it to a
tablet screen (a cell phone screen is definitely too small). Maybe this kind of
annoyance would be a feature if I was trying to sell a full version that was
ad-free alongside it, but my game is complicated and I expect will take some
getting into it, and I think this would just drive most people away and earn it
1-star ratings.
I'm not that worried about bugs that would significantly damage user experience
in gameplay. I've been playing it for a while myself (Until Minecraft, it was my
favorite game to play while listening to debates). The remaining few ones are
basically just results of things I've added recently, like smooth camera
transitions when you're playing as a spider and you crawl on a wall. (which has
caused the camera to wiggle a little bit under some conditions, I think it's due
to numerical instability in the way I made it rotate to follow the character)
The bugs I would expect to take time to fix are the ones that only show up on
other platforms than the one I've played on (PC), and I can find those by
looking through the way my game interacts with the operating system (saving
user-created files, loading them, browsing for them, changing screen resolution,
accessing preferences files). It's not necessary to play through the game to
find them. The outside view says "There will be more bugs than you expect, and
it doesn't take much to ruin user experience." To which I respond that I have
published software before [http://ccmc.gsfc.
5[anonymous]10y
It's not going to be worth spending nine months making a complicated storyline
that players will press A to skip. Save it for an RPG.
Would would be worth doing, if you can do it well, is to take elements of a
storyline that set a tone, and integrate it into the game to provide a unique
setting (eg Braid, Binding of Isaac). But don't do a convoluted plot that pops
up between levels.
2Mestroyer10y
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read "memories"
of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a
little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story
that I came up with for the player to play through. Edit: Double post, sorry. It
looked like it wasn't submitting my comment so I copied the text opened a new
tab, checked to see that the comment wasn't there, and then pasted, but
apparently the other comment was just late to show up.
0[anonymous]10y
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read "memories"
of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a
little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story
that I came up with for the player to play through.
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... (read more)
Jon's what I call normal-smart. He spends most of his time watching TV, mainly
US news programs, and they're quite destructive to rational thinking, even if
the purpose is for comedic fodder and to discover hypocrisy. He's very tech
averse, letting the guests he has on the show come in with information he might
use, trusting (quite good) intuition to fit things into reality. As such, I like
to use him as an example of what more normal people feel about tech / geek
issues.
Every time he has one of these debates, I really want to sit down as moderator
so I can translate each side, since they often talk past each other. Alas, it's
a very time restricted format, and I've only seen him fact check on the fly once
(Google, Wikipedia).
The number thing was at least partly a joke, along the lines of "bigger than 10
doesn't make much sense to me" - scope insensitivity humor. I've done similar
before.
2John_Maxwell10y
I'm beginning to think that we shouldn't be surprised by reasonably intelligent
atheists having reasonable thoughts about x-risk. Both of the two reasonably
intelligent, non-LWer atheists I talked to in the past few weeks about LW issues
agreed with everything I said on them and said that it all seemed sensible and
non-surprising. Most LW users started out as reasonably intelligent atheists.
Where did the "zomg everyone is so dumb and only LW can think" meme originate
from, exactly? Is there any hard data on this topic?
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.
I did that for a while. It was popular at mathcamp so I started, but I haven't
done it recently. Maybe I'll start again.
2drethelin10y
I'm going to second Contra Dance. It's really fun and easy to start while having
a decent learning curve such that you don't hit a skill ceiling fast. Plus you
meet lots of people and interact with them in a controlled, friendly,
cooperative fun fashion.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
I am actually planning on having a contra dance at my wedding.
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... (read more)
The only two communities I am currently active in right now (other than
career/family communities) are Less Wrong and Unitarian Universalism.
In the past had a D&D group that I participated very actively in. I think that
the people I played D&D with in high school had a very big and positive effect
on my development.
I think that I would like to and am likely to develop a local community of
people to play strategy board games in the future.
4knb10y
Do you mean online communities or IRL?
3Scott Garrabrant10y
Both
3FiftyTwo10y
I'm active in UK competitive debating (mainly real life, but I also run some
discussion forums).
[Good question. Its interesting to see the variety of people's responses.]
3Tuxedage10y
I'm pretty active in lots of social activist/environmentalist/anarchist groups.
I sometimes join protests for recreational reasons.
1FiftyTwo10y
Could you give examples?
3beoShaffer10y
I'm active in Toastmasters and martial arts (mostly the community of my specify
school). Overall Toastmasters seems pretty effective at its stated goals of
improving public speaking and leadership skills. Its also fun (at least for me).
Additionally, both force me to actually interact with other people, which is
nice and not something that the rest of my live provides.
3blacktrance10y
I'm active in (though not really a member of) the "left-libertarian" community,
associated with places like Center for a Stateless Society (though I myself am
not an anarchist) and Bleeding Heart Libertarians. I'm also a frequent reader
and occasional commenter on EconLog.
Less related, I'm an active poster on GameFAQs and on a message board centered
around the Heroes of Might and Magic game series.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
I also used to be active on GameFAQs. For about a year in 2004 it was most of my
internet activity, specifically the Pikmin boards. That was a long time ago
though when I was a high school freshman.
1Username10y
Orthogonal to LW, I'm very active in my university's Greek community, serving as
VP of a fraternity. It's been excellent social training and I've had a very
positive experience.
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.
The UU "Seven Principles and Purposes" seem like a piece of virtue ethics. If
you don't mind this particular brand of it, then why not.
From Wikipedia:
If you discard the ornamental fluff in this "philosophy" and "focus on making
this life better for all of us", then it's as good a guideline as any.
2Scott Garrabrant10y
As I said in responding to another comment, this is the part of UU that I relate
to. However, the problem is that while UUs might be slightly above average
rationality, "we can use reason when we can" means that beliefs come from
thinking for yourself as opposed to reading e.g. the bible, and the stuff they
come up with by thinking for themselves is usually not all that great by my
standards. I am worried that I am giving UU too much credit because they happen
to use the word "reason," when in reality they mean something very different
than what I mean.
7Viliam_Bur10y
They are just humans, aren't they? I am afraid that at this moment it is
impossible to assemble a large group of people who would all think on LW-level.
Not including obvious bullshit, or at least not making it a core of group
beliefs, is already a pretty decent result for a large group of humans.
Perhaps one day CFAR will make a curricullum that can replicate rationality
quickly (at least on suitable individuals) and then we can try to expand
rationality to mass level. Until then, having a group without obviously insane
people in power is probably the best you can get.
You already reflected on this, so just: don't emotionally expect what is not
realistic. They are never going to use reason as you define it. But the good
news is that they will not punish you for using reason. Which is the best you
can expect from a religious group.
3Scott Garrabrant10y
I found this comment very helpful. Thanks.
3Viliam_Bur10y
You inspired me to google whether there are UU in Slovakia. None found, although
there are some in the neighbor countries: Czech [http://unitaria.cz/], Hungary
[http://www.unitarius.hu/].
I wonder whether it would be possible to create a local branch here, to draw
people, who just want to feel something religious but don't want to belong to a
strict organization, away from Catholicism (which in my opinion has huge
negative impacts on the country). There seem to be enough such people here, but
they are not organized, so they usually stay within the churches of their
parents.
The problem is, I am not the right person to start something like this, because
I don't feel any religious need; for me the UU would be completely boring and
useless. I am not sure if I could pretend interest at least for long enough to
collect a group of people, make them interested in the idea, put them into
contact with neighbor UUs, and then silently sneak away. ;-)
Also, I suspect the religion is not about ideas, but about organized community.
(For example, the only reason you are interested in UU is because your fiancee
is. And your fiancee probably has similar reasons, etc.) Starting a new
religious community where no support exists, would need a few people willing to
sacrifice a lot of time and work -- in other words, true believers. Later, when
the community exists, further recruitment should be easier.
Well, at least this is the first social engineering project I feel I could have
higher than 1% chance of doing successfully, if I decided to. (Level 3 of
Yudkowsky Ambition Scale
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ehd/the_yudkowsky_ambition_scale/] in a local scope?)
2Scott Garrabrant10y
Here are some things you should know:
Unitarian Universalism is different from Unitarianism. UU is basically a
spin-off of Unitarianism from when they combined with Universalism in 1961 in
North America. As a result, there are very few UU churches outside of NA.
Unitarianism is on average more Christian than UU, and there exist some UU
congregations that also have a Christian slant. (The one I was talking about is
not one of them) I have also heard that some UU churches are considerably more
tolerant of everything other than Christianity than they are of Christianity.
(Probably because their members were escaping Christianity) The views change
from congregation to congregation because they are decided from the bottom up
from the local congregants.
The UUA [http://www.uua.org] has free resources, such as transcribed sermons you
could read, for people who wanted to start a congregation.
I think I gain some stuff from it that is not directly from my fiancee. I don't
know if it is enough to continue going on my own. It is a community that roughly
follows strategy 1 of the belief signalling trilemma
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/iot/the_belief_signaling_trilemma/], which I think is
nice to be in some of the time. The sermons are usually way too vague, but have
produced interesting thoughts when I added details to them on my own and then
analyzed my version. There is also (respectful) debating, which I think I find
fun regardless of who I am debating with. I like how it enables people to share
significant highs or lows in their life, so the community can help them. There
are pot-lucks and game nights, and courses on philosophy and religions. There is
also singing, which I am not so crazy about, but my fiancee loves.
1shminux10y
What do you mean and what do they mean by "reason"? If you are not sure, maybe
it's something to ask at the next meeting.
1Scott Garrabrant10y
They are reaching many of the wrong conclusions. I think this might be because
their definition of "use reason" is just to think about their beliefs, which is
not enough. When I say "use reason," I mean thinking about my beliefs in a
specific way. That specific way is something that I think a lot of us have
roughly in common on less wrong, and it would take to long to describe all the
parts of it now. To point out a specific example, one UU said to me "There are
some mysteries we can never get answers to, like what happens when we die," and
then later "I am a firm believer in reincarnation, because I have had
experiences where I felt my past lives." I never questioned to her that she had
those experiences, and argued a bit and was able to get her to change her first
statement, because reincarnation experiences were evidence against it, which I
thought was an improvement. However, not noticing how contradictory these
beliefs were is not something I would call "reason."
Perhaps what is bothering me is a difference in cognitive ability, and UUs
version of "reason" is as much as I can expect from the average person. Or,
perhaps these are people who are genuinely interested in being rational, and
would be very supportive of learning how, but have not yet learned. It could
also be that they just want to say that they are using "reason."
1shminux10y
Do you guys discuss Effective Altruism? It could be one way to inject a bit more
reason.
2Scott Garrabrant10y
Not much. That is a good idea. I was considering hosting a workshop on
rationality through the church. If I ever go through with it, that will probably
be part of it. My parents' UU church had a class on what QM teaches us about
theology and philosophy.
2TheOtherDave10y
I'm not really invested enough in the question to debate it, but I know plenty
of atheists (both with and without children) who are active members of UU
churches because they get more of the things they value from a social community
there than they do anywhere else, and this seems entirely sensible to me. What
effects on your future children are you concerned about?
2Scott Garrabrant10y
I am concerned that they will treat supernatural claims as reasonable. I
consider myself rational enough to be able to put up with some of the crazy
stuff many UU individuals believe (beliefs not shared by the community). I am
worried that my children might believe them, and even more worried that might
not look at beliefs critically enough.
6TheOtherDave10y
Yes, they will treat supernatural claims as reasonable, and expect you (and your
kids) to treat them that way as well, at least in public, and condemn you (and
your kids) for being rude if you (they) don't.
If you live in the United States, the odds are high that your child's school
will do the same thing.
My suggestion would be that you teach your children how to operate sensibly in
such an environment, rather than try to keep them out of such environments, but
of course parenting advice from strangers on the Internet is pretty much
worthless.
2Scott Garrabrant10y
I actually do not think that is true. They will treat supernatural claims as
reasonable, but would not condemn me for not treating them as reasonable. They
might condemn me for being avoidably rude, but I don't even know about that.
We actually plan on homeschooling, but that is not for the purpose of keeping
kids out of an insane environment as much as trying to teach them actually
important stuff.
I do, however, agree with your advice.
3Prismattic10y
If your elementary-schooler goes around insistently informing the other little
kids that Santa isn't real, you will likely be getting an unhappy phone call
from the school, never mind the religious bits that the adults actually believe.
3Scott Garrabrant10y
Good thing we are homeschooling then!
0ChristianKl10y
What's your moral system? If you get value from the community it's probably more
moral to focus your efforts on donating more for bed nets than on the effect
that you have on the world through being a member of that community.
2Scott Garrabrant10y
Wouldn't it be nice if I understood that?
I think it is not productive to analyze anything as being moral by comparing it
to working for money for bed nets. Most everything fails.
I think I might have made a mistake in saying this was a moral issue. I think it
is more of an identity issue. I the the consequences for the world of me being
Unitarian are minimal. Most of the effect is on me. I think the more accurate
questions I am trying to answer are:
Are Unitarians good under my morals? Do their shared values agree with mine
enough that I should identify as being one?
I think the reason this is not a instrumental issue for me, and rather an
epistemic issue, is because I believe the fact that I will continue to go to
congregation is already decided. It is a fun bonding time which sparks lots of
interesting philosophical discussion. If I were not in my current relationship,
I would probably bring that question back on the table.
I realize that this does not change the fact that the answer is heavily
dependent on my moral system, so I will try to comment on that with things that
are specific to UU.
I generally agree with the 7 principles of UU, with far more emphasis on "A free
and responsible search for truth and meaning." However, these principles are not
particularly controversial, and I think most people would agree with most of
them. The defining part of UU, I think, is the strategy of "Let's agree to
disagree on the metaethics and metaphysics, and focus on the morals themselves
which are what matters." I feel like this could be a good thing to do some of
the time. Ignore the things that we don't understand and agree on, and work on
making the world better using the values we do understand and agree on. However,
I am concerned that perhaps the UU philosophy is not just to ignore the
metaethics and metaphysics temporarily so we can work together, but rather to
not care about these issues and not be bothered by the fact that we appear
confused. This I do not a
2ChristianKl10y
Why are metaphysics important?
Why are metaethics important?
0Scott Garrabrant10y
They are important because they are confusing. Of all the things that might
possibly cause a huge change to my decision making, I think understanding open
questions about anthropic reasoning is probably at the top of the list. I
potentially lose a lot by not pushing these topics further.
1ChristianKl10y
For most people I don't think that meta ethical considerations have a huge
effect on their day to day decision making.
Metaphysics seems interesting. Do you think that you might start believing in
paranormal stuff if you spend more effort on investigating metaphysical
questions? What other possible changes in your metaphysical position could you
imagine that would have a huge effects on your decision making?
Going to UU won't stop you from discussing those concepts on LessWrong.
I'm personally part of diverse groups and don't expect any one group to fulfill
all my needs.
0Scott Garrabrant10y
I do not think that I will start believing in paranormal stuff. I do not know
what changes might arise from changes in my metaphysical position. I was not
trying to single out these things as particularly important as much as I am just
afraid of all things that I don't know.
This is good advice. My current picture of UU is that it has a lot of problems,
most of which are not problems for me personally, since I am also a rational
person and in LW. I think UU and LW are the only groups which I am actively a
part of other than my career. I wonder what other viewpoints I am missing out
on.
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.
A city of ~200,000 people if you include the outlying rural areas, in which you
can go from the several block wide downtown to farmland in 4-5 miles in the
proper directions. Fifteen minutes from another city of 60,000 which is very
much a state college town. Forty minutes away from a city of nearly 500,000
people.
Granted the city of ~200,000 has a major university and a number of biotech
companies.
1beoShaffer10y
Its somewhat inaccurate in my case (I live in the suburbs of a semi-major city).
0linkhyrule510y
A lot of the CFAR/MIRI core lives in Berkeley.
0ChristianKl10y
I think living in a big city is the standard that most people here consider
normal. It's like living in the first world. We know that there are people from
India who visit but we still see being from the first world as normal.
When you have the choice between living in a place with memetic diversity or not
living in such a place the choice seems obvious.
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... (read more)
Regarding touch-typing, do you find yourself reaching 'top speed' often while
programming?
7Lumifer10y
It's not really about typing large amounts of text quickly, it's basically about
(1) not having to pay attention to the keyboard, your fingers should know what
do without taking up mindspace; and
(2) your typing being able to keep up with your thinking -- the less your brain
has to stop and wait for fingers to catch up, the better.
0Viliam_Bur10y
Yes, this is a critical skill. Especially when someone is learning programming,
it is so sad to see their thinking interrupted all the time by things like:
"when do I find the '&' key on my keyboard?", and when the key is finally found,
they already forgot what they wanted to write.
This part is already helped by many development environments, where you just
write a few symbols and press Ctrl+space or something, and it completes the
phrase. But this helps only with long words, not with symbols.
7gwern10y
It's not the top speed, it's the overhead. It is incredibly irritating to type
slowly or make typos when you're working with a REPL or shell and are tweaking
and retrying multiple times: you want to be thinking about your code and all the
tiny niggling details, and not about your typing or typos.
2sketerpot10y
For a decent summary, here's a pretty well-written survey paper on cloud
computing. [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf].
It's three years old now, but not outdated.
8sketerpot10y
It's a good start, but I notice a lack of actual programming languages on that
list. This is a very common mistake. A typical CS degree will try to make sure
that you have at least basic familiarity with one language, usually Java, and
will maybe touch a bit on a few others. You will gain some superpowers if you
become familiar with all or most of the following:
* A decent scripting language, like Python or Ruby. The usual recommendation is
Python, since it has good learning materials and an easy learning curve, and
it's becoming increasingly useful for scientific computing.
* A lisp. Reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
[http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html] will teach you this,
and a dizzying variety of other things. It may also help you achieve
enlightenment, which is nice. Seriously, read this book.
* Something low-level, usually C.
* Something super-low-level: an assembly language. You don't have to be good at
writing in it, but you should have basic familiarity with the concepts. Fun
fact: if you know C, you can get the compiler to show you the corresponding
assembly.
You should take the time to go above-and-beyond in studying data structures,
since it's a really vital subject and most CS graduates' intuitive understanding
of it is inadequate. Reading through an algorithms textbook in earnest is a good
way to do this, and the wikipedia pages are almost all surprisingly good.
When you're learning git, get a GitHub [https://github.com/] account, and use it
for hosting miscellaneous projects. Class projects, side projects, whatever;
this will make acquiring git experience easier and more natural.
I'm sure there's more good advice to give, but none of it is coming to mind
right now. Good luck!
0Jayson_Virissimo10y
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I intended the list to include only skills that make
you a more valuable programmer that aren't explicitly taught as part of the
degree. Two Java courses (one object-oriented) are required as is a Programming
Languages class that teaches (at least the basics of) C/C++, Scheme, and Prolog.
Also, we must take a Computer Organization course that includes Assembly
(although, I'm not sure what kind). Thanks for the advice.
2Viliam_Bur10y
In school you are typically taught making small projects. Make a small
algorithm, or a small demonstration that you can display an information in an
interactive user interface.
In real life (at least in my experience), the applications are typically big.
Not too deep, but very wide. You don't need complex algorithms; you just have
dozens of dialogs, hundreds of variables and input boxes, and must create some
structure to prevent all this falling apart (especially when the requirements
keep changing while you code). Also you have a lot of supporting functionality
in a project (for example: database connection, locking, transactions, user
authentification, user roles and permissions, printing, backup, export to pdf,
import from excel, etc.). Again, unless you have structure, it falls apart. And
you must take good care of many things that may go wrong (such as: if the user's
web browser crashes, so the user cannot explicitly log out of the system, the
edited item should not remain locked forever).
To be efficient at this, you also need to know some tools for managing projects.
Some of those tools are Java-specific, so your knowledge of Java should include
them; they are parts of the Java ecosystem. You should use javadoc syntax to
write comments; JUnit to write unit tests; Maven
[http://books.sonatype.com/mvnex-book/reference/public-book.html] to create and
manage projects, some tools to check your code quality, and perhaps even Jenkins
[http://jenkins-ci.org/] for continuous integration. Also the things you already
have on your list (HTML, CSS, SQL, git) will be needed.
To understand creating web applications in Java, you should be able to write
your own servlet
[http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/servlet/http/HttpServlet.html], and
perhaps even write your own JSP tag
[http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/servlet/jsp/tagext/IterationTag.html].
Then all the frameworks are essentially libraries built on this, so you will be
able to learn them as needed.
6Vladimir_Nesov10y
There is another aspect of working on big projects that seems equally important.
What you are talking about I'd call "design", the skill of organizing the code
(and more generally, the development process) so that it remains intelligible
and easy to teach new tricks as the project grows. It's the kind of thing
reading SICP and writing big things from scratch would teach.
The other skill is "integration", ability to open up an unfamiliar project
that's too big to understand well in a reasonable time, and figure out enough
about it to change what you need, in a way that fits well into the existing
system. This requires careful observation, acting against your habits, to
conform to local customs, and calibration of the sense of how well you
understand something, so that you can judge when you've learned just enough to
do your thing right, but no less and not much more. Other than on a job, this
could be learned by working a bit (not too much on each one, lest you become
comfortable) on medium/large open source projects (implementing new features,
not just fixing trivial bugs), possibly discarding the results of the first few
exercises.
0LM780510y
I've TAed a class like the Programming Languages class you described. It was
half Haskell, half Prolog. By the end of the semester, most of my students were
functionally literate in both languages, but I did not get the impression that
the students I later encountered in other classes had internalized the
functional or logical/declarative paradigms particularly well -- e.g., I would
expect most of them to struggle with Clojure. I'd strongly recommend following
up on that class with SICP, as sketerpot suggested, and maybe broadening your
experience with Prolog. In a decade of professional software engineering I've
only run into a handful of situations where logic programming was the best tool
for the job, but knowing how to work in that paradigm made a huge difference,
and it's getting more common [https://github.com/clojure/core.logic].
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.
I've been using this
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate].
5Douglas_Knight10y
CDC [http://wonder.cdc.gov/] has every death certificate, although they only let
you look at aggregated information.
2RomeoStevens10y
Oh wow, a highly motivated person can do significant original mortality research
via their online tool. You can generate cause of death graphs for almost any
sort of cohort you might care about.
2PECOS-910y
Let me know if you find anything useful. I'm working on a project
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hgm/open_thread_may_1731_2013/915h] (though I haven't
done anything on it since making that post).
fubarobfusco's reply to that post might be useful to you too.
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... (read more)
This got me to read it. Quote was about only wanting to rule the world to get
more books or something to that effect.
4gwern10y
Of course, you should only do this where the forum has made the foolish choice
to allow signatures. (One of the things I appreciate about Reddit/LW compared to
forums is how they strongly discourage signatures.)
0Scott Garrabrant10y
Convince me of this claim that you think is well decided.
I am not convinced that from the viewpoint of a non-rationalist that HPMoR
doesn't have many of the same problems as Spock. I can see many people reading
the book, feeling that HP is too "evil," and deciding that "rationality" is not
for them.
Also, EY said "Authors of unfinished stories cannot defend themselves in the
possible worlds where your accusation is unfair." This should swing both ways.
If it turns out that HP goes crazy because he was being meta and talking to
himself too much, then spreading HPMoR is probably not as good an idea.
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?
Slang vocabulary tends to become more consistent and repetitive over time in my
experience. New phrases will appear and then go to fixation until everyone uses
them. The only answer is to try to be as creative as possible in your own word
choices.
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...
I think they're different, though with some overlap.
Rationality applies to a much wider range of subjects, and involves dealing with
much more uncertainty.
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... (read more)
I remember reading somewhere (sorry, no link) that waking up at the midnight,
and then going to sleep again after an hour or so, was considered normal a few
hundred years ago. Now this habit is gone, probably because we make the night
shorter using artificial lights.
0Gunnar_Zarncke10y
Yes. I know. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep] I knew that beforehand. That was
the reason I wasn't worried when my children woke up at night and crawled into
our family bed (some other parents seem to worry.about the quality of their
childrens sleep).
But I'm surprised that he actually segmented and that it went this far. I
understood that artificial lighting - and we have enough of that - suppresses
this segmentation.
0Viliam_Bur10y
Perhaps it is not the light per se, but the fact that when you stay awake at
evening, and wake up on alarm clock in the morning, the body learns to give up
the segmented sleep to protect itself from the sleep deprivation. Maybe the time
interval for your children between going to sleep and having to wake up is large
enough.
0Gunnar_Zarncke10y
Possibly. But he has been a late riser always and he doesn't really go to sleep
earler than before. In fact he get earler than before. But maybe his sleep
pattern just changes due to normal development.
My older son (9 years) also sometimes gets up in the night to visit the family
bed. But I guess he is not awake long. He likes to build things and read or
watch movies (from our file server) until quite late in the evening (often 10
PM). We allow that because he has no trouble getting up early.
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... (read more)
That's like asking whether someone is a freedom fighter or a terrorist.
Every heuristic involves a bias when you use it in some contexts.
1niceguyanon10y
Yes, but does it more often yield a satisfactory solution across many contexts
if yes, then I'd label it a useful heuristic and if it is often wrong I would
label it a bias.
2[anonymous]10y
You're not using your words as effectively as you could be
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ic/the_virtue_of_narrowness/]. Heuristics are mental
shortcuts, bias is a systematic deviation from rationality. A heuristic can't be
a bias, and a bias can't be a heuristic. Heuristics can lead to bias. The
utility of a certain heuristic might be evaluated based on an evaluation of how
much computation using the heuristic saves versus how much bias using the
heuristic will incur. Using a bad heuristic might cause an individual to become
biased, but the heuristic itself is not a bias.
0Viliam_Bur10y
I agree with your last sentence. The important thing should be how much good
does the charity really do to those children. Are they really making their lives
better, or is it merely some nonsense to "show that we care"?
Because there are many charities (at least in my country) focusing on providing
children things they don't really need; such as donating boring used books to
children in orphanages. Obviously, "giving to children in orphanages" is a
touching signal of caring, and most people don't realize that those children
already have more books than they can read (and they usually don't wish to read
the kind of books other people are throwing away, because honestly no one does).
In this case, the real help to children in orphanages would be trying to change
the legislation to make their adoption easier (again, this is an issue in my
country, in your part of the world the situation may be different), helping them
avoid abuse, or providing them human contact and meaningful activities. But most
people don't care about the details, not even enough to learn those details.
0NancyLebovitz10y
I suspect there's also some sentimentality about books in play.
2ChristianKl10y
Yes, throwing a book away is nearly like burning it. Giving it to an orphanage
is completely guilt free.
-2Eugine_Nier10y
This depends on what you mean by "care", i.e., they care about children in the
sense that they derive warm fuzzies from doing things that superficially seem to
help them. They don't care in the sense that they aren't interested in how much
said actions actually help children (or whether they help them at all).
6Sabiola10y
I think that most people just never question the effectivity of the charities
they donate to. It's a charity for xxx, of course it helps xxx!
-2Eugine_Nier10y
And yet they question the effectivity of the things they do for themselves.
8Viliam_Bur10y
Well, because that's in near mode.
If I do something for myself, and there is no obvious result, I see that there
is no obvious result, and i disappoints me. If I do something for other people,
there is always an obvious result: I feel better about myself.
-2Eugine_Nier10y
This is more or less the distinction I was going for.
Why isn't this equally true for doing things for oneself?
6Viliam_Bur10y
Because other people reward you socially for doing things for other people. If
you do something good for person A, it makes sense for a person A to reward you
-- they want to reinforce the behavior they benefit from. But it also makes
sense for an unrelated person B to reward you, despite not benefiting from this
specific action -- they want to reinforce the general algorithm that makes you
help other people, because who knows, tomorrow they may benefit from the same
algorithm.
The experimental prediction
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/]
of this hypothesis is that the person B will be more likely to reward you
socially for helping person A, if the person B believes they belong to the same
reference class as person A (and thus it is more likely that an algorithm
benefiting A would also benefit B).
Now who would have a motivation to reward you for helping yourself? One
possibility is a person who really loves you; such person would be happy to see
you doing things that benefit you. Parents or grandparents may be in that
position naturally.
Another possibility is a person who sees you as a loyal member of their tribe,
but not a threat. For such person, your success is a success of the tribe is
their success. They benefit from having stronger allies; unless those allies
becoming strong changes their position within the tribe. So one would help
members of their tribe who are significantly weaker... or perhaps even
significantly stronger... in either case the tribe becomes stronger and the
relative position within the tribe is not changed. The first part is teachers
helping their students, or tribe leaders helping their tribe except for their
rivals; the second part is average tribe members supporting their leader.
Again, the experimental prediction
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/]
would be that when you join some "tribe", the people stronger than you will
support you at th
4NancyLebovitz10y
Anecdotal verification: one of my friends said that when he was running out of
money, it made sense for him to buy meals for other people. Those people didn't
reciprocate, but third parties were more likely to help him.
4Viliam_Bur10y
Then I guess people from CFAR should go to some universities and give lectures
about... effective altruism. (With the expected result that the students will be
more likely to support CFAR and attend their seminars.) Or I could try this in
my country when recruiting for my local LW group.
I guess it also explains why religious groups focus so much on charity. It is
difficult to argue against a group that many people associate with "helping
others", even if other actions of the group hurt others. The winning strategy is
probably making the charity 10% of what you really do, but 90% of what other
people associate with you.
EDIT: Doing charity is the traditional PR activity of governments, U.N., various
cults and foundations. I feel like reinventing the wheel again. The winning
strategies are already known and fully exploited. I just didn't recognize them
as viable strategies for everyone including me, because I was successfully
conditioned to associate them with someone else.
8NancyLebovitz10y
Among other things, charity is a show of strength.
0Viliam_Bur10y
Sure. For example if you are donating money, you display your ability to make
more money than you need. And if you donate someone else's money (like a church
that takes money from state), you display your ability to take money from
people, which is even more impressive.
0drethelin10y
wow this is an insanely better version of my comment.
0drethelin10y
Because it's considered good to even try to help someone else so you care less
about outcomes. EG donating to charity is a good act regardless of whether you
check to see if your donation saved a life. On the other hand, doing something
for yourself that has no real benefits is viewed as a waste of time.
2A1987dM10y
How comes practitioners of (say) homoeopathy haven't all gone bankrupt then?
0Eugine_Nier10y
Just because you question something, doesn't mean you reach the correct answer.
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.
The game you are talking about should not be called PD.
The solution will be for everyone to pick randomly, (weighted based on the
difference in C/C and D/D payoff) until they get a C/D outcome, and then just
picking the same thing over and over. (This isn't a unique solution, but it
seems like a Schelling point to me.)
4RolfAndreassen10y
The Prisoner's Dilemma is technically defined as requiring that this not be the
case, precisely so that one doesn't ahve to consider the case (in iterated
games) where the players agree to take turns cooperating and defecting. You are
considering a related but not identical game. Which is of course totally fine,
just saying.
If you allow C/D to have a higher total than CC, then it seems there is a
meta-game in coordinating the taking-turns - "cooperating" in the meta-game
takes the form of defecting only when it's your turn. Then, the players maximise
both their individual scores and the group score by meta-cooperating.
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.
Yeah, I know. I don't agree with the text, but I think it's interesting anyway.
7ChristianKl10y
What makes it interesting?
8Kaj_Sotala10y
Based on that summary, I'd say that it's interesting because it draws on enough
real science to be superficially plausible, while appealing to enough emotional
triggers to make people want to believe in it enough that they'll be ready to
ignore any inconsistencies.
Superficially plausible: Individuals being selfish and pursuing their own
interest above that of others is arguably the main source of suffering among
humans, and you can easily generalize the argument to the biosphere as a whole.
Superorganisms [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism] are indeed quite
successful due to their ability to suppress individualism, as are multi-celled
creatures in general. Humans do seem to have a number of adaptations that make
them more successful by reducing individualistic tendencies, and it seems
plausible to claim that even larger superorganisms with more effective such
adaptations could become the dominant power on Earth
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/bs3/intelligence_explosion_vs_cooperative_explosion/].
If one thinks that there is a general trend of more sophisticated superorganisms
being more successful and powerful, then the claim that "evolution is not
directionless" also starts to sound plausible. The "humans have a chance to help
with that process but aren't intended to see the outcome" is also plausible in
this context, since a true intelligent superorganism would probably be very
different from humanity.
"Evolution leads to more complex/intelligent creatures and humans are on top of
the hierarchy" is an existing and widely believed meme that similarly created a
narrative that put humans on top of the existing order, and this draws on that
older meme in two ways: it feels plausible and appealing for many of the same
reasons why the older meme was plausible, and anyone who already believed in the
old meme will be more inclined to see this as a natural extension of the old
one.
Emotional triggers: It constructs a powerful narrative of progress that places
humans
2NancyLebovitz10y
I'd add slow-to-moderated paced, low-pitched sounds to the list of vastness
indicators.
I'm not sure about music with fast heavy bass rhythm, though that may also be a
sort of vastness.
7fubarobfusco10y
Sounds like an attempt to reconcile, not science and religion in general, but
specifically science and the Christian concepts of the Fall and original sin; or
possibly some sort of Gnosticism.
(Aleister Crowley made similar remarks about individuality as a disease of life
in The Book of Lies, but didn't go so far as to attribute it to eukaryotes.)
0knb10y
Well the relevant story (God banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden) is
in Genesis, so it's in the Torah as well. Gnostics considered the Fall a good
thing--it freed humanity from the Demiurge's control.
4Moss_Piglet10y
Holy crap that's easily the stupidest thing I've read this week.
7NancyLebovitz10y
Downvoted for insult + not giving a reason.
0[anonymous]10y
I don't mean to say your conclusion is wrong, but I'd like to point out that if
Eliezer's ideas were summed up as one paragraph and posted to some other
website, many people there would respond using the same thought process that you
used. Anyway, a text can be wrong and still worth reading. I think the text I
linked to is very worth reading. If you get halfway through and still think that
it's stupid, let me know - I'll be pretty surprised.
2knb10y
I like this. Like all good religion, it's an idea which feels true and profound
but is also clearly preposterous.
It reminds me of some concepts in animes I liked, like the Human Instrumentality
Project in Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Ragnarok Connection in Code Geass.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 ... (read more)
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 ... (read more)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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...
Petrov Day: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/
Does "Don't judge me for X" mean "Don't reduce my status in your mind to account for X"?
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... (read more)
Robin Williams is transhumanism friendly.
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... (read more)
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.