Last week, after a lot of thought and help from LessWrong, I finally stopped believing in god and dropped my last remnants of Catholicism. It is turned out to be a huge relief, though coping with some of the consequences and realizations that come with atheism has been a little difficult.
Do any of you have any tips you noticed about yourself or others after just leaving religion? I've noticed a few small habits I need to get rid of, but I am worried I'm missing larger, more important ones.
Are there any particular posts I should skip ahead and read? I am currently at the beginning of reductionism. Are their any beliefs you've noticed ex-catholics holding that they don't realize are obviously part of their religion? I do not have any one immediately around me I can ask, so I am very grateful for any input. Thank you!
Well, here at LessWrong, we follow a thirty-something bearded Jewish guy who, along with a small group of disciples, has performed seemingly impossible deeds, preaches in parables, plans to rise from the dead and bring with him as many of us as he can, defeat evil, and create a paradise where we can all live happily forever.
So yeah, getting away from Catholic habits of thought may be tough. With work, you'll get there though...
Speaking from experience: don't kneejerk too hard. It's all too easy to react against everything at all implicitly associated with a religion or philosophy that you now reject the truth-claims of and distort parts of your personality or day to day life or emotions or symbolic thought that have nothing to do with what you have rejected.
Don't forget that reversed stupidity is not intelligence; a belief doesn't become wrong simply because it's widely held by Catholics.
Similarly, there's no need to be scared of responding positively to art or other ideas because they originated from a religious perspective; if atheism required us to do that, it would be almost as bleak a worldview as it's accused of being. Adeste Fideles doesn't stop being a beautiful song when you realize its symbols don't have referents. I think of the Christian mythology as one of my primary fantasy influences—like The Lord of the Rings, Discworld, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Doctor Who—so, if I find myself reacting emotionally to a Christian meme, I don't have to worry that I'm having a conversion experience (or that God exists and is sneakily trying to win me over!): it's perfectly normal, and lawful, for works of fiction to have emotional impact.
It reminds me of Transactional Analysis saying the best way to keep people in mental traps is to provide them two scripts: "this is what you should do if you are a good person", but also "this is what you will do if you become a bad person (i.e. if you refuse the former script)". So even if you decide to rebel, you usually rebel in the prescribed way, because you were taught to only consider these two options as opposites... while in reality there are many other options available.
The real challenge is to avoid both the "good script" and the "bad script".
What are the most effective charities working towards reducing biotech or pandemic x-risk? I see those mentioned here occasionally as the second most important x-risk behind AI risk, but I haven't seen much discussion on the most effective ways to fund their prevention. Have I missed something?
So AI has a good claim to being the most effective at reducing x-risks, even the ones that aren't AI risk.
You're ignoring time. If you expect a sufficiently powerful FAI to arise, say, not earlier than a hundred years from now, and you think that the coming century has significant x-risks, focusing all the resources on the FAI might not be a good idea.
Not to mention that if your P(AI) isn't close to one, you probably want to be prepared for the situation in which an AI never materializes.
From wikipedia article on rejection therapy:
"At the time of rejection, the player, not the respondent, should be in a position of vulnerability. The player should be sensitive to the feelings of the person being asked."
How does one implement this? One of my barriers to social interactions is the ethical aspect to it; I feel uncomfortable imposing on others or making them uncomfortable. Using other people for one's own therapy seems a bit questionable. Does anyone have anything to share about how to deal with guilt-type feelings and avoid imposing on others with rejection therapy?
It's argued there's a risk that in the event of a global catastrophe, humanity would be unable to recover to our current level of capacity because all the easily accessible fossil fuels that we used to get here last time are already burned. Is there a standard, easily Googlable name for this risk/issue/debate?
To anyone out there embedded in a corporate environment, any tips and tricks to getting ahead? I'm a developer embedded within the business part of a tech organization. I've only been there a little while though. I'm wondering how I can foster medium-term career growth (and shorter-term, optimize performance reviews).
Of course "Do your job and do it well" tops the list, but I wouldn't be asking here if I wanted the advice I could read in WSJ.
From personal observations
"Do your job and do it well"
most emphatically does not top the list. Certainly you have to do an adequate job, but your success in a corporate environment depends on your interpersonal skills more than on anything else. You depend on other people to get noticed and promoted, so you need to be good at playing the game. If you haven't taken a Dale Carnegie course or similar, do so. Toastmasters are useful, too. In general, learning to project a bit more status and competence than you think you merit likely means that people would go along with it.
Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.
If you are an above average engineer/programmer etc. but not a natural at playing politics, consider exploring your own projects. If you haven't read Patrick McKenzie's blog about it, do so. On the other hand, if striking out on your own is not your dream, and you already have enough drive, social skills and charisma to get noticed, you are not likely to benefit from whatever people on this site can tell you.
Perhaps we could be more specific about the social / political skills. I am probably not good at these skills, but here are a few things I have noticed:
Some of your colleagues have a connection between them unrelated to the work, usually preceding it. (Former classmates. Relatives; not necessarily having the same surname. Dating each other. Dating the other person's family member. Members of the same religious group. Etc.) This can be a strong emotional bond which may override their judgement of the other person's competence. So for example, if one of them is your superior, and the other is your incompetent colleague you have to cooperate with, that's a dangerous situation, and you may not even be aware of it. -- I wish I knew the recommended solution. My approach is to pay attention to company gossip, and to be careful around people who are clearly incompetent and yet not fired. And then I try to take roles where I don't need their outputs as inputs for my work (which can be difficult, because incompetent people are very likely to be in positions where they don't deliver the final product, as if either they or the company were aware of the situation on some level).
If someone compl...
I'd beware conflating "interpersonal skills" with "playing politics." For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn't have those skills.
Second, I think that the "playing politics" part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.
My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn't make that much of a difference, because they're sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.
Here's an idea for enterprising web-devs with a lot more free time than me: an online service that manages a person's ongoing education with contemporary project management tools.
Once signed up to this service, I would like to be able to define educational projects with tasks, milestones, deliverables, etc. against which I can record and monitor my progress. If I specify dependencies and priorities, it can carry out wazzy critical path analysis and tell me what I should be working on and in what order. It can send me encouraging/harassing emails if I don't...
Does anyone have good resources on hypnosis, especially self-hypnosis? I'm mostly looking for how-tos but effectiveness research and theoretical grounding are also welcome.
In the spirit of Matthew McConaughey's Oscar acceptance speech, who is the you-in-ten-years that you are chasing?
I am currently teaching myself basic Spanish. At the moment, I'm using my library's (highly limited) resources to refresh my memory of Spanish learned in high school and college. However, I know I won't go far without practice. To this end, I'd like to find a conversation partner.
Does anyone have any recommendation of resources for language learners? Particularly resources that enable conversation (written or spoke) so learners can improve and actually use what they are learning? The resource wouldn't have to be dedicated solely to Spanish learning. Eventually, I want to learn other languages as well (such as German and French).
ROI in learning a foreign language is low, unless it is English. But if you must, I would say the next best thing to immersive instruction would be to watch spanish hulu as an aid to learning. You'd get real conversions at conversational speeds.
You're assuming that the correlation is purely causal and none of the increased income correlating with language learning is due to confounds; this is never true and so your ROI is going to be overstated.
This works out to 7.8% and 3.6% on initial investment respectively.
Most people have discount rates >4%, which excludes the latter. Throw in some sort of penalty (50% would not be amiss, given how many correlations crash and burn when treated as causal), and that gets rid of the former.
Language learning for Americans just doesn't work out unless one has a special reason.
(Unless, of course, it's a computer language.)
As an aside, I am surprised how hostile US Americans can be when it is suggested to learn another language.
Personally, I find most suggestions and discussion of Americans learning other languages to be highly irritating. They have not considered all of the relevant factors (continent sized country with 310m+ people speaking English, another 500m+ English-speakers worldwide, standard language of all aviation / commerce / diplomacy / science / technology, & many other skills to learn with extremely high returns like programming), don't seem to care even when it is pointed out that the measured returns are razor-thin and near-zero and the true returns plausibly negative, and it serves as an excuse for classism, anti-Americanism, mood affiliation with cosmopolitanism/liberalism, and all-around snootiness.
It doesn't take too many encounters with someone who is convinced that learning another language is a good use of time which will make one wealthier, morally superior, and more open-minded to start to lose one's patience and become more than a little hostile.
It's a bit like people who justify video-gaming with respect to terrible studies about irrelevant cognitive benefits (FPSe...
Disclaimer: I won't listen to the podcast, because I am boycotting any medium that is not text.
Good news! Freakonomics is, along with Econtalk and patio11, one of the rare podcasts which (if you had click through) you can see provides transcripts for most/all of all their podcasts.
Recommendations for good collections of common Deep Wisdom? General or situation specific would be helpful (e.g. all the different standard advice you get while picking your college major, or going through a tough break up).
I am curious about whether Borderline Personality Disorder is overrepresented on LessWrong compared to the general population.
Is Wikipedia's article on BPD a good description of your personality any time in the past 5 years? For the sake of this poll, ignore the specific "F60.31 Borderline type" minimum criteria.
[pollid:678]
You are bound to 'find' that BPD is overrepresented here by surveying in this manner. (hint: medical student syndrome)
There are probably checklist to diagnose Borderline Personality Disorder that are much better than simply reading a Wikipedia article and thinking about whether it applies to you.
Because it's a group of people who are excited for years about a rule for calculating conditional probability?
Yeah, I'm not serious here, but I will use this to illustrate the problem with self-diagnosis based on a description. Without hard facts, or without being aware how exactly the distibution in the population looks like, it's like reading a horoscope.
Do I feel emotions? Uhm, yes. Easily? Uhm, sometimes. More deeply than others? Uhm, depends. For longer than others? I don't have good data, so, uhm, maybe. OMG, I'm a total psycho!!!
Is anyone going to be at the Eastercon this weekend in Glasgow? Or, in London later in the year, Nineworlds or the Worldcon?
ETA: In case it wasn't implied by my asking that, I will be at all of these. Anyone is free to say hello, but I'm not going to try to arrange any sort of organised meetup, given the fullness of the programmes of these events.
What's a good Bayesian alternative to statistical significance testing? For example, if I look over my company's email data to figure out what the best time of the week to send someone an email is, and I've got all possible hours of the week ordered by highest open rate to lowest open rate, how can I get a sense of whether I'm looking at a real effect or just noise?
Does anyone know of a way to collaboratively manage a flashcard deck in Anki or Mnemosyne? Barring that, what are my options so far as making it so?
Even if only two people are working on the same deck, the network effects of sharing cards makes the card-making process much cheaper. Each can edit the cards made by the other, they can divide the effort between the two of them, and they reap the benefit of insightful cards they might not have made themselves.
I found this on Twitter, specifically related to applications for the blind (but the article is more general-purpose): Glasses to simulate polite eye contact
Having read only the article and the previously-mentioned tweet, and no comments and knowing nothing about what it actually looks like, I'm predicting that it falls into the uncanny valley, at best.
I was wondering if there are any services out there that will tie charitable donations to my spending on a certain class of good, or with a certain credit card. E.g. Every time I buy a phone app or spend on in-app purchases, a matching amount of money goes to a particular charity.
Hi, I've been intermittently lurking here since I started reading HPMOR. So now I joined and the first thing I wanted to bring up is this paper which I read about the possibility that we are living in a simulation. The abstract:
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are al...
I don't have enough karma to create my own post, so I'm cross posting this from a gist
Pascal's Wager and Pascal's Mugging as Fixed Points of the Anthropic Principle
Pascal's Wager and Pascal's Mugging are two thought experiments that explore what happens when rational skepticism meets belief. As skepticism and belief move towards each other, they approach a limit such that it's impossible to cross from one to the other without some outside help.
Pascal's Wager takes the point of view of a rational being attempting to make a decision ...
I was brought up a pretty devout Catholic, but I stopped going to church and declared myself an atheist to my family before I got out of high school. I have always been pretty proud of myself for having the intelligence and courage to do this. But today I realized that I follow a thirty-something bearded Jewish guy who, along with a small group of disciples, has performed seemingly impossible deeds, preaches in parables, plans to rise from the dead and bring as many of us as he can with him, defeat evil, and create a paradise where we can all live happily ...