Per a discussion on IRC, I am auctioning off my immortal soul to the highest bidder over the next week. (As an atheist I have no use for it, but it has a market value and so holding onto it is a foolish endowment effect.)
The current top bid is 1btc ($120) by John Wittle.
Details:
I will provide a cryptograpically-signed receipt in explicit terms agreeing to transfer my soul to the highest bidder, signed with my standard public key. (Note that, as far as I know, this is superior to signing in blood since DNA degrades quickly at room temperature, and a matching blood type would both be hard to verify without another sample of my blood and also only weak evidence since many people would share my blood type.)
Payment is preferably in bitcoins, but I will accept Paypal if really needed. (Equivalence will be via the daily MtGox average.) Address: 17twxmShN3p6rsAyYC6UsERfhT5XFs9fUG (existing activity)
The auction will close at 4:40 PM EST, 13 June 2013
My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern (over which I continue to claim copyright); transfer does not cover any souls of gwerns in altern
I am really disappointed in you, gwern. Why would you use an English auction when you can use an incentive-compatible one (a second price auction, for example)? You're making it needlessly harder for bidders to come up with valuations!
(But I guess maybe if you're just trying to drive up the price, this may be a good choice. Sneaky.)
Sorry to ruin the fun but I'm afraid this sale is impossible. Gwern lacks the proprietary rights to his own soul. As the apostle St Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians (chapter 6), "Or know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body." It clearly states that "you are not your own" which at least applies to baptized Christians (and as a confirmed Catholic, it may even apply to a higher degree). Unless gwern provides some scriptural basis for this sale, it cannot proceed. Even when Satan tempted Christ, the only proferred exchange was worship in return for temporal power. There are no cases (even hypothetical ones) of a direct sale of one's soul in the Church's Tradition.
In exchange for ruining this sale, I'll pray for your soul for free.
That's because Satan knows there's no such thing as a soul, and he is
disinclined to lie [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SatanIsGood].
2gwern10y
This seems inapplicable to me; I haven't agreed to sell my soul yet, and so far
the bidding hasn't been too active so it will hardly be for 'a great price'.
5[anonymous]10y
I believe the "great price" is referring to God sacrificing Jesus to redeem the
souls of all humanity, including (presumably) you.
But I'm hardly a biblical scholar; see below, lol.
0gwern10y
Sure, but presumably I still have control over the disposition of my soul,
otherwise that's basically a Calvinist theology, no?
1[anonymous]10y
I'd like to ruin gwern's sale too, but my misspent youth as a philosophy major
just came back to haunt me.
[EDIT: This paragraph is completely wrong; see below. The end of 1 Corin 6:19
does not say "you are not your own"; it literally says "and [it] is not your
own" (= καὶ οὐκ ἐστε ἑαυτῶν) with an omitted subject. The only real possibility
is the subject of the previous phrase, which you rendered as "your members." (=
τὸ σῶμα ὑμῶν) I find this problematic (and not "clearly stated"), because σῶμα
means both the Church as a group (usually in the form, "the body of Christ") and
the physical body, as it does in e.g. Mat 10:28: "Do not be afraid of those who
kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can
destroy both soul and body in hell."]
Since in context 1 Corin 6:12-20 is about sexual immorality, I find the latter
interpretation more compelling.
Regarding the Catholic tradition, time was when the Church claimed the authority
to discharge sin from the soul in exchange for money.
you still benefit infinitely by bargaining him down to an agreement like torturing you every day via a process that converges on an indefinitely large but finite total sum of torture while still daily torturing you & fulfilling the requirements of being in Hell.
A tactic that almost definitely should be referred to as "Gabriel's Horn."
Note that if you can get a high price from Satan on your own soul (e.g. rulership of a country), this is a no-lose arbitrage deal since souls are fungible goods.
My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern (over which I continue to claim copyright); transfer does not cover any souls of gwerns in alternate branches of the multiverses inasmuch as they have not consented.
What? This is lame. The definition of the soul as used by 16th century Catholic theology, which is friendly to information theory, is clearly the common sense interpretation and assumed among reasonable people. Sure some moderns love the definition you use but they are mostly believers of moralistic therapeutic deism, one hardly needs more evidence of their lack of theological expertise.
I certify that my soul is intact and has not been employed in any dark rituals such as manufacturing horcruxes; I am also a member in good standing of the Catholic Church, having received confirmation etc. Note that my soul is almost certainly damned inasmuch as I am an apostate and/or an atheist, which I understand to be mortal sins.
Not sure how much I can trust the word of a damned. After all, lying is no more of a mortal sin than apostasy. And for an atheist there is no extra divine punishment for lying.
Ah, but can we take your word for it? IIRC, you are one of my fellow damned...
2shminux10y
I am not sure. I have never been baptized, so where my soul ends up depends on
whether exclusivism, inclusivism, conditionalism or universalism is true.
0gwern10y
I'm pretty sure that by Catholic dogma, you would count as definitely damned due
to lack of baptism and knowing of the Church but refusing to convert to it.
That's an interesting comparison, but I'm selling my soul, and it looks like he was just selling his time:
Mehta, an atheist, once held an unusual auction on eBay: the highest bidder could send Mehta to a church of his or her choice. The winner, who paid $504, asked Mehta to attend numerous churches, and this book comprises Mehta's responses to 15 worshipping communities, including such prominent megachurches as Houston's Second Baptist, Ted Haggard's New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Willow Creek in suburban Chicago.
Huh, reading this made me realize that there's apparently still a small bit of
my brain that doesn't alieve [http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Alief] in atheism.
For a moment I considered whether I should try to get some profit out of selling
my soul as well, and then felt uncomfortable over the idea, thinking "I should
hold onto it, just in case..."
0gwern10y
I actually really decided to do the auction when I thought about the topic and
realized that it didn't bother me at all. Might as well profit from my lack of
belief/alief.
8Douglas_Knight10y
The quitclaim doesn't help here. It merely quits your claim, which is relevant
if ownership is disputed, but it doesn't give any more rights to the buyer than
to anyone else (just more documentation of the quit). You should have been
suspicious when taterbizkit mentioned that you can sell quitclaim deeds for a
single item to multiple buyers.
6gwern6y
After some unfortunate imperial entanglements, the sale has been completed:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
I, the undersigned, do irreversibly sign over to the purchaser possession of my soul, karmic balance, or whatsoever ontologically basic mental system might underly my own consciousness, in the event that we live in a functionally dualistic or monistically spiritual universe, for the sum of $121 USD on this June the Eleventh 2013 (with delayed payment calculated at 9% interest compounded annually), to be paid to the PayPal account identifiable as gwern0@gmail.com If our universe is reductionistic, and yet, some alien agency continues to compute the mental processes of our minds after death, giving us pleasurable or painful experiences based on how optimized our earthly behavior was as measured against some criteria, then I explicitly sign over possession of the weight of all the actions I took in life over to the purchaser, with the resolution of any problems to be determined by the aforementioned alien agent.
This day being the Seventh of June 2017, I now accept payment of $144 from the purchaser such that the above terms are binding.
- --
Gwern Branwen
gwern0@gmail.com
Bitcoin hash: 00000000000000000055b0bee08bfeb235bc60bc22a27951501d78b10883484a
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----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6TheOtherDave10y
conversely, if Satan insists on my soul, I can let Satan have my soul and use
yours instead.
5Gnnthkcclqnrx10y
FYI, according to galactic law, transactions like this are valid only to the
extent that the implicit metaphysics of the contract is correct. If you wish to
guarantee the property rights of your soul's new owner, you should add a meta
clause indicating valid interpretive generalizations of content and intent.
6gwern10y
I'm afraid I can't afford a barrister admitted to the Trantor bar to look over
the contractual details, but thanks for the advice.
4JohnWittle10y
Heh, I would have bid 0.5btc if I had known I would be the only bidder...
7Vaniver10y
This makes this exchange
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hlo/open_thread_june_215_2013/945i] all
the more amusing.
2FourFire10y
I'm obviously missing something, but tally ho, I'll find out eventually!
8Vaniver10y
A second-bid auction is one where all bidders submit their maximum willingness
to pay, and then the bidder willing to pay the most pays what the second-highest
bidder was willing to pay. An English auction is where bidders submit bids which
they will have to pay, with the idea that once the second-highest bidder will
stop raising the bid once they pass their threshold.
There's a lot of theoretical work showing that second-bid auctions are
all-around more efficient. English auctions can encourage the highest bidder to
overbid, and the winner's curse refers to the phenomenon that the winner of an
auction is generally the person who overestimated its value by the most. Second
bid auctions mitigate that by making them pay only the second highest estimate.
If JohnWittle is the only bidder in the auction, then in a second-bid auction he
would receive gwern's soul for free, but because this is an English auction, he
has to pay his full bid, and so loses out for dramatically overestimating its
market value- like gwern planned all along!
2badger10y
I'm don't specialize in auctions, but this sounds wrong. A second-price auction
and an English auction are strategically equivalent in most formal models.
Nearly all auctions yield identical revenue and allocations when bidders are
risk-neutral expected utility maximizers with independent values. Experimentally
[http://faculty.som.yale.edu/shyamsunder/ExperimentalEconomics/auctions-a-survey.pdf],
the second-price auction tends to generate more revenue than an English auction,
at least in the case of private values.
With common or correlated values (where the winner's curse shows up), I'd think
sealed bid auctions would lead to more winner overbidding than English or Dutch
auctions. In these cases though, you really don't have to worry about efficiency
since everyone values the item equally.
0Vaniver10y
I should have been clearer by 'all-around'; I meant that the incentives are
lined up correctly, the costs are lower (every person only needs to submit one
bid, and does not need to expend any effort monitoring the auction), gets exact
results without requiring massive numbers of bids, and more information is
conveyed by the end of the auction.
0TheOtherDave10y
Well, yes, technically that's true... but what prevents/discourages gwern (or
his accomplice) from submitting an $N-1 bid (where N is the current sole bid
amount)?
5Vaniver10y
Typically, second-bid auctions are sealed, and all opened at once at the end of
the auction, so it won't be known that JohnWittle has bid, or how much he has
bid, until the auction is over.
0TheOtherDave10y
Ah. (nods) That makes sense.
0gwern10y
If I were going to do that, I would simply have set a reserve price.
0TheOtherDave10y
Not the same thing, surely? Submitting an N-1 bid causes the top bidder to pay
effectively their bid... in effect turning a second-bid auction into an English
auction as defined above. Setting a reserve price sets a floor that has no
relationship to the top bidder's bid.
But sure, the fact that you didn't set a reserve price also suggests that you
wouldn't take advantage of this loophole in your counterfactual second-bid
auction.
4Larks10y
What if these are in fact the same thing, in extension if not intention? Then
you would be selling your computational pattern, in contradiction with
2gwern10y
I think that's unlikely enough that I'm willing to risk a tort of fraud if that
turns out to be the case and I cannot convey my soul without also selling my
personal copyright.
3listic10y
You definitely should auction it off in other places, where prospective buyers
value such things much higher.
6gwern10y
What other forums might value my soul? As a purchase, it's really most useful
for atheists willing to do a simple expected-value calculation and hedge against
a tail risk (theism); but for most people, buying a soul is largely otiose.
7TheOtherDave10y
Wait.... it seems you're suggesting that the expected value of a soul to an
atheist exceeds the otiosity threshold. Did I read that right? I'm interested in
your reasoning, if so.
Either way: the expected entertainment value to me of purchasing your soul far
exceeds the expected value of the soul itself, and I suspect that's not
uncommon, so I doubt the theological implications are a primary factor.
1gwern10y
It depends on one's subjective uncertainty. I know there are atheists who have
been persuaded by visions or Pascal's wager that they were wrong, so the risk
would seem to be real, and given the stakes, $120 seems like chump change for
insurance - even if you try to defeat a Pascal's wager by bounded utility, the
bound would have to be extremely large to be plausible...
9Douglas_Knight10y
If atheists thinks that there's a small chance that they will turn into theists
and be glad to be in possession of a spare soul, then they must think that
theists value spare souls. So it would seem more valuable to theists, who don't
have to multiply the value of the transaction by the small chance.
There are some differences between typical theists and the hypothetical
atheist-turned-theist. In particular, the theist has had a lifetime to keep a
clean soul. But many theists think they do a bad job. If the spare soul has tail
risk value to an atheist, it should have more value to the bad theists. The
other difference is that the atheist is not a believer at the time of the
transaction. Perhaps the belief of the theist makes it a greater sin to trade in
souls.
But it seems like a lot of details have to go right for it to be a better deal
for the atheist than the theist.
0TheOtherDave10y
Mm. Are you suggesting that the subjective uncertainty of a typical atheist on
this question causes expected value to exceed the otiosity threshold? Or merely
that there are some atheists for whom this is true? I'll agree with the latter.
Though, thinking about this, surely this would be much more likely for theists,
no? So wouldn't the maximum expected value of your soul likely be higher,
thereby securing you a higher sale price, in a theist community? (Preferably one
with a sense of humor about theology.)
3CronoDAS10y
Hindus and some other groups may disagree with that. ;)
If you can find evidence that they are correct, you could have a fraud claim. However, the contract defines the soul being sold as that described by the Judeo-Christian philosophers.
What do you intend to do with your soul(s) as defined by other schools of
philosophy?
By Plato's theory of Ideal Forms, selling your soul would be tantamount to
selling bits of the gods - and man has no claim to the gods. I'd advise against
this lest you wish to become fate-brothers with Prometheus.
Ah, Socrates supposes there that the soul is "like the divine" as opposed to the
body which is like mortal things. He means that the soul is in the class of
things that are unchanging, immutable, invisible, and grasped by the intellect
rather than the senses, He doesn't say anything about the soul being a 'part of
the gods'. And it doesn't sound like he's thinking of anything like the
Prometheus myth, given the things he associates with the soul (ideal, invisible,
immutable, etc.).
If you asked Plato about selling your soul, I think he would think you were just
being silly.
0Zaine10y
If something was divine, then it was under the domain of the gods; I was making
a simple extrapolation.
0[anonymous]10y
Yeah, but that's not a sound inference, given the context. No mention is made
there of the gods, and the context pulls wide away from reading 'divine' in
terms of traditional Greek mythology. I see no reason to think Socrates (or
Plato) thinks any of that stuff was real.
1Decius10y
Are you accepting bids in things other than currencies commonly used for
exchange? I would like to offer a finely crafted narrative instead of bitcoins.
2gwern10y
Hm, is your narrative so compelling that I would accept jam tomorrow
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam_tomorrow] instead of bitcoin today?
0thomblake10y
Upvoted for the multilayered pun
0Decius10y
I offer no guarantees regarding the quality, completeness, or any other details
of said narrative (save that it will be a narrative, delivered within 90 days of
acceptance of terms, with payment in full due immediately on receipt), although
I will accept your input, if you want me to, on length, theme, setting, genre
and/or other details.
As for the relative value of narratives and btc, I can say only that I have not
written for any commonly recognized currency.
Accepting this offer would subject you to a considerable amount of downside
risk, as well as a considerable amount of upside risk. However, people who
auction their soul are not typically averse to these types of risk.
4gwern10y
Mm, I'm afraid that due to the hyperinflation over the past few decades of
narrative and subsequent debasement (>3.2m
[http://ffnresearch.blogspot.com/2010/07/fanfictionnet-story-totals.html] on
FanFiction.net alone), I can't accept any amount of it without guarantees of its
quality. Nothing personal - it's the law
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiers%27_law#Reverse_of_Gresham.27s_Law_.28Thiers.27_Law.29].
0Decius10y
What would you accept as sufficient evidence of quality?
6[anonymous]10y
A Hugo Award, I presume.
6gwern10y
Or a Nebula, Locus, or World Fantasy Award. I'd also accept a Nobel or Man
Booker (for magical realism).
0Decius10y
Which one do you want? I can have a crack team of ninja liberate it from the
current owner and deliver it to you, but that will cost significantly more than
your soul.
2gwern10y
Well then, I'm afraid we would be unable to reach a mutually beneficial
agreement - I would be better off retaining my soul under such a sale.
1Decius10y
You could also earn or steal your own frikkin' literature award.
The typical narrative written by a winner of a high-prestige award is worth
significantly more than a few btc in straight commercial value. I acknowledge
that my narrative will very likely have negative commercial value (it would take
more work to sell it than it would be purchased for), or I would be selling
narratives and they would be too valuable to me to offer to you.
The thing is, I wouldn't offer anything based on its cash value, because I value
your soul only slightly more than you do. My hope was to find something that you
would prefer to btc as the price of your soul. A narrative set to music might be
particularly appropriate, since it would allow you to say that you sold you soul
for a song.
0gwern10y
While that is tempting, I am sufficiently amused that I will be able to say I
sold my soul for bitcoins and - diminishing returns - selling it for a song
isn't amusing enough to sell it on the cheap to you. Anyway, it would violate
the terms I've already set.
0Decius10y
Fair enough. Enjoy your bitcoin.
0elharo10y
I flashed back to Bill Wilingham's Proposition Player
[http://www.amazon.com/Proposition-Player-Bill-Willingham/dp/156389808X]. Highly
recommended for an amusing fantasy take on this particular deal.
0Michelle_Z10y
I laughed out loud when I read this. I'm not incredibly surprised someone would
bid, but at the same time, disappointed.
I am confused. This Washington Post article appears to describe a preliminary study which suggests that politics is less of a mindkiller if you ask people to bet money on their beliefs.
And I am confused because what appear to be my attempts to find the paper resulted in two papers with entirely different abstracts. And papers. Example:
Abstract 1:
"Our conclusion is that the apparent gulf in factual beliefs between members of different parties may be more illusory than real."
Abstract 2:
"Partisan gaps in correct responding are reduced only moderately when incentives are offered, which constitutes some of the strongest evidence to date that such patterns reflect sincere differences in factual beliefs."
Maybe this will help?
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/55494.html
[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/55494.html]
I scraped the last few hundred pages of comments on Main and Discussion, and made a simple application for pulling the highest TF-IDF-scoring words for any given user.
I'll provide these values for the first ten respondents who want them. [Edit: that's ten]
EDIT: some meta-information - the corpus comprises 23.8 MB, and spans the past 400 comment pages on Main and Discussion (around six months and two and a half months respectively). The most prolific contributor is gwern with ~780kB. Eliezer clocks in at ~280kB.
This was my eventual plan, but I haven't settled on a general corpus to compare
it to yet.
4Kawoomba10y
Can you comment on your methodology - tools, wget scripts or what?
2sixes_and_sevens10y
Scraping is done with python and lxml, and the scoring is done in Java. It came
about as I needed to brush up on my Java for work, and was looking for an
extensible project.
I also didn't push it to my personal repo, so all requests will have to wait
until I'm back at work.
2Richard_Kennaway10y
Yes please. I have no idea what they will look like.
2sixes_and_sevens10y
suffering -> 25.000
god -> 24.508
does -> 24.383
causal -> 21.584
np -> 21.259
utility -> 20.470
agi -> 20.470
who -> 20.169
pill -> 19.353
bayesian -> 18.965
u1 -> 17.567
The word 'who' seems to come up a lot for the contributors at the more prolific
end of the scale. I don't have a satisfactory answer why this should be the
case. Your contribution comprises ~170kB of plain text.
0[anonymous]10y
If I'm counting the replies correctly, nine respondents requested them so far.
I'd like my word values. Thank you!
2sixes_and_sevens10y
political -> 28.733
power -> 27.093
moldbug -> 26.135
structural -> 24.192
he -> 24.082
reactionary -> 23.480
blog -> 21.973
good -> 21.373
social -> 20.470
his -> 20.470
very -> 20.169
Your contribution is ~167kB.
0ArisKatsaris10y
May I have mine? Thanks.
0sixes_and_sevens10y
moral -> 35.017
thread -> 34.250
bob -> 25.163
preferences -> 24.383
eu -> 23.739
column -> 23.537
matrix -> 23.419
mugging -> 22.367
pascals -> 21.479
lord -> 19.515
eg -> 19.266
Your contribution to the corpus is ~100kB.
0FiftyTwo10y
An alternative would be to ask people for donations to Against Malaria
Foundation or your preferred charity.
0Dorikka10y
I'd like mine, please.
4sixes_and_sevens10y
gvrq -> 9.457
puppies -> 8.784
cute -> 7.141
creprag -> 7.119
gb -> 6.901
rewind -> 6.305
fvatyr -> 5.100
deck -> 4.838
stuff -> 4.816
vf -> 4.739
boom -> 4.221
As mentioned to other respondents, rot13 really messes with TF-IDF. I'm still
not sure of the best way to deal with this.
0Douglas_Knight10y
If someone uses rot13, that is a highly informative. Is there any principled
reason to like quoted words showing up, but not liking rot13? Anyhow, I think
the disappeal of rot13 for TF-IDF is that it seems like a lower level feature
than words. In particular, it is wasteful for it to show up more than once, if
you're only doing top 11.
In some sense, I think the reason that the low level feature of rot13 is mixing
with the high level feature of words is that you've jumped to the high level by
fiat. Before looking a word frequency, you should look at letter frequency. With
a sufficiently large corpus, rot13 should show up already there. I doubt that
the corpus is big enough to detect the small usage by people here, but I think
it might show up in bigrams or trigrams. I don't have a concrete suggestion, but
when you look at bigrams, you should use both corpus bigrams and document letter
frequencies to decide which document bigrams are surprising.
0sixes_and_sevens10y
You've already surmised why rot13 words are undesirable. Just to check, are you
suggesting I use n-gram frequency to identify rot13 words, or replace TF-IDF
with some sort of n-gram frequency metric instead?
0Douglas_Knight10y
You could use TF-IDF on n-grams. That's what I was thinking. But when I said to
combine combine the local n-gram frequencies and the global n+1-gram frequencies
to get a prediction of local n+1-gram frequencies to compare against, you might
say it's too complicated to continue calling it TF-IDF.
If all you want to do is recognize rot13 words, then a dictionary and/or bigram
frequencies sound pretty reasonable. But don't just eliminate rot13 words from
the top 11 list; also include some kind of score of how much people use rot13.
For example, you could use turn every word to 0 or 1, depending on rot13, and
use TF-IDF. But it would be better to score each word and aggregate the scores,
rather than thresholding.
What I was suggesting was a complicated (and unspecified) approach that does not
assume knowledge of rot13 ahead of time. The point is to identify strange letter
frequencies and bigrams as signs of a different language and then not take as
significant words that are rare just because they are part of the other
language. I think this would work if someone wrote 50/50 rot13, but if the
individual used just a little rot13 that happened to repeat the same word a lot,
it probably wouldn't work. (cf. "phyg")
There are two problems here, to distinguish individuals and to communicate to a
human how the computer distinguishes. Even if you accept that my suggestion
would be a good thing for the computer to do, there's the second step of
describing the human the claim that it has identified another language that the
individual is using. The computer could report unusual letter frequencies or
bigrams, but that wouldn't mean much to the human. It could use the unusual
frequencies to generate text, but that would be gibberish. It could find words
in the corpus that score highly by the individual's bigrams and low by the
corpus bigrams.
0Douglas_Knight10y
mine, please.
0sixes_and_sevens10y
sats -> 22.952
htt -> 22.810
sat -> 22.157
princeton -> 21.356
mathematicians -> 17.903
crack -> 16.812
harvard -> 16.661
delete -> 16.563
proofs -> 15.745
graph -> 15.565
regressions -> 15.301
Your corpus comprises ~77kB of plain text.
0Vaniver10y
I'd like mine, please!
4sixes_and_sevens10y
because -> 41.241
p -> 38.129
should -> 34.016
sat -> 33.974
much -> 33.113
cholesterol -> 33.056
evidence -> 32.444
iq -> 32.092
comments -> 31.454
scores -> 30.690
clear -> 28.899
Your contribution comprises ~284kB of plain text, and is the thirteenth-largest
in the corpus.
2Vaniver10y
Thanks!
Interestingly, the only one of those that I recognize as clearly one of my
verbal quirks is "clear," which I use a lot in "it's not clear to me that ...",
but it barely made it onto the list. I participate in most of the discussions on
intelligence testing, so it's no surprise that "sat," "iq," and "scores" are
high. "Cholesterol" seems likely to be an artifact from a single detailed
conversation about it, and then apparently I like words like "because,"
"should," and "much" more than normal, which is not that surprising given my
general verbosity. I know I use the word "evidence" more than the general
population, but am surprised I use it that much more than LW, and "comments" is
unclear. Probably meta-discussion?
4sixes_and_sevens10y
Most incidence of "comments" seems to be in the context of moderator actions.
There are 44 occurrences in your contribution to the corpus, which is around
50,000 words.
As for "evidence", there are 70 occurrences in 50,000 words. So on average,
every 715th word you say in comments is "evidence".
Haha, I should've foreseen [http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/8qfv]
"maitzens", "causal", "argument" & "turtle" showing up there. (I'm lucky your
corpus didn't go back far enough to capture this never-ending back-and-forth
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2q7/open_thread_september_2010_part_2/2njh], otherwise
my top 10 would probably be nothing but "HIV", "AIDS", "cases", "CDC",
"Duesberg", "CD4", and such.) Thanks for running the numbers.
0TheOtherDave10y
Sure, why not? Thanks!
0sixes_and_sevens10y
x -> 98.136
confidence -> 87.600
value -> 66.797
agree -> 65.843
endorse -> 63.750
ok -> 60.507
said -> 59.640
evidence -> 54.869
say -> 54.185
bamboozled -> 53.497
values -> 53.122
Your contribution comprises ~420kB of plain text, and is the fifth largest in
the corpus.
0arundelo10y
Cool! This (judging the relevance of words in documents in a corpus and
analogous problems) is a subject I muse about sometimes. Thanks for introducing
me to TF-IDF.
I'd like my top scoring words please.
2sixes_and_sevens10y
comte -> 17.852
m1 -> 12.664
grumble -> 9.813
altruism -> 8.787
rotating -> 8.442
olive -> 8.150
comtes -> 8.025
m -> 7.383
workshop -> 7.157
egoistic -> 6.916
happiness -> 6.475
Your contribution comprises ~21kB of plain text.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Curious to hear mine.
2sixes_and_sevens10y
intelligence -> 17.119
machine -> 15.353
environments -> 15.052
reference -> 13.546
machines -> 12.304
views -> 12.253
legg -> 12.252
friedman -> 11.417
papers -> 10.792
we -> 10.536
exercises -> 9.532
Your contribution to the corpus amount to ~47kB of plain text. For reference,
Eliezer is ~190kB and gwern is ~515kB. The scores are unadjusted for document
size and not amazingly meaningful outside of this specific context.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Huh, that seems different from what I'd have expected - but then again, I'm not
sure of what I would have expected. Thanks.
4sixes_and_sevens10y
I've just fixed a bug in my scraper that was causing it to abandon 25% of the
corpus. This has ended up tripling your contribution. Some new values for you:
agi -> 37.328
intelligence -> 22.367
moral -> 21.010
agis -> 20.087
eea -> 18.647
takeoff -> 17.500
credences -> 17.108
machine -> 16.902
our -> 16.222
environments -> 15.919
deer -> 15.761
This retains a similar "flavour" to the previous set, (AGI and ev-psych). The
best way I've found to interpret it is "what sort of words describe what I use
Less Wrong to talk about?"
As an interesting side-note, rot13 really messes with TF-IDF.
4Kaj_Sotala10y
Okay, that feels like it makes more sense. I'm a little confused about the
"deer", though.
6sixes_and_sevens10y
Blame this comment
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/g5k/three_kinds_of_moral_uncertainty/86bg?context=1#comments].
2Kaj_Sotala10y
Hah, okay.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
You're not distinguishing original from quoted text, then?
0sixes_and_sevens10y
It's not obvious to me that I should. TF-IDF is about identifying key terms in a
document. Quoted text counts towards that.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
That depends on what "the document" is. Everything appearing in a posting by a
given author, or all of the text written by a given author?
0sixes_and_sevens10y
"The document" is my wild sample that I've gone out and caught. TF-IDF tells me
what it's broadly about. For this purpose, quoted text provides useful
information.
If I want to infer personal facts about the author (beyond "what are the key
terms in the posts they write"), it would make sense to weight original text
higher than quoted text, but it would also make sense to use something other
than TF-IDF for that purpose.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning I heard of a government initiative, "Books on Prescription". It's a list of self-help books drawn up by some committee as actually having evidence of usefulness, and which are to be made available in all public libraries. They give a list of evidence-based references.
The evidence, a list of scientific studies in the literature.
I have not read any of the books (which is why I'm not posting this in the Media Thread), but I notice from the titles that a lot of them are based on Cognitive Behavioural Techniques, which are generally well thought of on LessWrong.
The site also mentions a set of Mood-boosting Books, "uplifting novels, non-fiction and poetry". These are selected from recommendations made by the general public, so I would say, without having read any of them, of lesser expected value. FWIW, here's the list for 2012 (of which, again, I have read none).
I notice that almost all of those books are about things that are considered
"mental problems" (the exceptions being chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and
relationship problems, which are nevertheless specific problems). So if a
self-help book isn't about a particular problem (like How to Win Friends and
Influence People and The Seven Habits), or the problem it talks about isn't
primarily psychological (like Getting Things Done), then it won't appear on that
list regardless of how good it is.
(Stating my opinions here so that you won't have to guess: My brother, who seems
quite sensible and whom I admire very much, states that all three of the books
mentioned here are very good. Getting Things Done taught me one extremely useful
lesson, probably among the top five most useful things I have ever learned. I
have little evidence, apart from this stuff, that any of these books are
useful.)
Improving my social skills is going to be my number one priority for a while. I don't see this subject discussed too much on LW, which is strange because it's one of the biggest correlates with happiness and I think we could benefit a lot from a rational discussion in this area. So I was wondering if anyone has any ideas, musings, relevant links, recommendations, etc. that could be useful for this. Stuff that breaks from the traditional narrative of "just be nicer and more confident" is particularly appreciated. (Unless maybe that is all it takes.)
Optional background regarding my personal situation: I am a 19 yo male (as of tomorrow) who is going to enter college in the fall. I'm not atrociously socially inadept, e.g. I can carry on conversations, can be very bold and confident in short bursts sometimes, I have some friends, I've had girlfriends in the past. However, I also find it very hard to make close friends that I can hang out with one on one, I sometimes find myself feeling like I'm taking a very submissive role socially, and I feel nervous or "in my head" a lot in social interactions, among other things. Not to be melodramatic, but I find myself wishing a decent amount that I had more friends and was more popular.
Improving my social skills is going to be my number one priority for a while. I don't see this subject discussed too much on LW, which is strange because it's one of the biggest correlates with happiness and I think we could benefit a lot from a rational discussion in this area.
Discussion on lesswrong on that subject would most likely not be rational. Various forms of idealism result in mind killed advice giving which most decidedly is not optimized for the benefit of the recipient.
Stuff that breaks from the traditional narrative of "just be nicer and more confident" is particularly appreciated. (Unless maybe that is all it takes.)
Get out of your house, go where the people are and interact with them. Do this for 4 hours per day for a year (on top of whatever other incidental interactions your other activities entail). If "number one priority" was not hyperbole that level of exertion is easily justifiable and nearly certain to produce dramatic results. (Obviously supplementing this with a little theory and tweaking the environment chosen and tactics used are potential optimisations. But the active practice part is the key.)
I agree that when social skills are usually discussed, various forms of idealism
tend to result in mind killed advice. The standard set of advice in particular
seems to mostly ignore the fact that a) status exists, i.e. it is very possible
to be liked and not respected, and sometimes the latter overpowers the former
and b) some people genuinely have large personality flaws that make them
unpleasant to be around.
I was hoping LessWrong would be able to avoid this idealism, as they do in most
other areas, which is why I posted here. Do you think that LessWrong would be
worse than average in this regard? Why? And do you think there is anywhere I
could have a rational discussion about this stuff?
Like I said in another post in this thread, I don't think it's at all a given
that if you socialize enough, you will eventually develop good social skills,
and I think that reading a bit of stuff on the subject in the last month helped
me about as much as all the social experiences I've had in the last year.
But something about the idea of making it a priority to spend x amount of time a
day specifically seeking out social interactions makes sense and is appealing to
me. I don't know if four hours a day is the right amount - I will have to
experiment, but I can very much see myself implementing something like this.
One problem with widely recommending this is that it seems to me like many, if
not most people are not at all in a position to reliably be able to follow this
advice. But I imagine someone with low to moderate social skills on a college
campus probably can.
0Vaniver10y
Sure, but it should be ~30 minutes of reading a day and ~4 hours of interaction
a day. Practice is what leads to skill development, and unpleasantly enough,
only hard practice (i.e. focusing on the parts you're bad at, not the parts
you're good at) really counts.
8drethelin10y
Practice Practice Practice Practice Practice. You have to go out of your way to
hang out with people to get any good at being fun to hang out with. WARNING:
This does not mean you have to spend time at loud parties or bars or clubs.
While they pretend to be areas for socializing, they're not really. It's one
thing if you enjoy dancing or drinking, but places that are less loud and
crowded are a lot better for conversation.
4gothgirl42066610y
I've done this and it didn't really work. Maybe it worked a little, but not at a
very fast rate. To be honest, I think reading a small amount of social skills
stuff and thinking about how to solve the problem a little helped much more than
all the "practice" I've done in the last year or so.
Obviously you can't take this to the extreme and expect that you can instantly
go from Michael Cera to Casanova just by sitting alone reading stuff and
watching videos in your room, but I don't think the statement "If you spend
enough time in social interactions, you will inevitably develop good social
skills" is at all true either.
I kind of despise the former and love the latter. :\
8Viliam_Bur10y
Did you try dancing lessons?
I hated dancing before I learned it, but I love it now. I am very bad at
"learning by copying others", but with good explicit education I became a decent
dancer.
(Note: Almost everyone adviced me against explicit learning, because they said
it wouldn't be "natural" or "romantic". I ignored all this advice, and now no
one complains about the result. Contrary to predictions, learning the steps
explicitly helped me to improvise later. Seems like people just have a strong
taboo about applying reductionism to romantic activities like dancing.)
2Nisan10y
Interesting; no one has ever told me that dancing lessons are a bad idea. I
think we live in very different cultures. (Other things you have said in the
past have also given me his impression.)
No, no, no, this was a bad explanation on my part. No one told me that dancing lessons are bad idea per se... only that my specific learning style is.
This is what works best for me: Show me the moves. Now show me those moves again very slowly, beat by beat. Show me separately what feet do; then what hands and head do. Tell me at which moment which leg supports the weight (I don't see it, and it is important). When and how exactly do I signal to my girl what is expected from her. (In some rare situations, to get it, I need to try her movements, too.) I still don't get it, but be patient with me. Let me repeat the first beat, and tell me what was wrong. Again, until it is right. Then the second beat. Etc. Then the whole thing together. Now let's do the same thing again, and again, and again, exactly the same way. Then something "clicks" in my head, and I get the move... and since that moment I can lead, improvise, talk during dance, whatever. -- As a beginner I was blessed with a partner who didn't run away screaming somewhere in the middle of this. Later my learning became faster, partially because I learned to ask the proper questions. And I had a good luck to dancing tea... (read more)
Now, that's about the only possible way to learn to play anything non-trivial on
instruments such as the guitar; therefore, these people
1. believe that all guitar music is ugly and robotic, or
2. have no idea of how people learn to play, or
3. are confused and/or talking through their asses (e.g. some part of them deep
down is saying ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don't deserve
to get the social status I got from it’)
(not necessarily with probabilities within an order of magnitude of each other).
4Viliam_Bur10y
I completely agree with you (which is why I persisted in my learning style).
From my experience it seems to me many people are confused like this.
Possible explanation: We learn some things by copying or early in childhood, and
we learn some other things explicitly. I guess this makes many people think that
skills are divided to "explicitly teachable" and "explicitly unteachable", using
some heuristics, such as: "if it is usually learned at school, it is teachable",
"if I tried to learn it and failed, it is unteachable", "it is teachable only if
I perfectly understand how it works", etc.
It probably adds to confusion that we don't see how other people learned their
skills. Similarly to attribution fallacy, if we see someone good at doing X, it
is easier to assume that it is a part of their nature, not a learned skill. (And
those people may support us in this opinion, for example because it discourages
the competition.) Seems to me this is pretty frequent in art. Also, sometimes
the idea of "unteachable skill" is a good excuse for not learning and doing
something.
Even those people who learned e.g. playing guitar may not propagate the idea
automatically to other aspects of their lives.
0Richard_Kennaway10y
Sometimes people don't see how they themselves learned something. When you ask
them, they confabulate empty phrases like "it's a knack", or "eventually you
just get it", or the like. They generally suck at explaining. So, ignore them
and move on.
0A1987dM10y
I was assuming that those people had themselves learned to dance at some point,
so unless it was a very long time ago and/or they suck at introspection they
knew how they did it. If you were talking about people who didn't themselves
know how to dance, then replace ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did
don't deserve to get the social status I got from it’ with ‘I'm jealous those
people can dance and I can't, but I can't be bothered to learn it myself, so in
order to put them down I'll tell them that their grapes are sour’.
4Viliam_Bur10y
Maybe there are two learning styles -- copying and explicit -- each of them
having their set of advantages and disadvantages. (Perhaps an analogy to System
1 and System 2.)
Learning by copying is faster and it does not require cooperation from the
person you copy. On the other hand, copying is imperfect, and you cannot copy
what you don't see. Learning explicitly is slower and requires a good
explanation; which requires a good introspection from the person who explains.
So maybe this is an instance of "the last will be first". -- People who are good
at learning by copying, use learning by copying as their favorite learning
style. People who are bad at learning by copying can compensate by focusing on
explicit learning.
Under these assumptions, the "copying" people have a fast start, because many
activities are simple and can be learned by copying. Then when it comes to more
complex activities, they usually continue copying, get some mediocre results,
and stop there. And even there, they probably get those mediocre results faster
than an "explicit" person. -- They really believe that learning by copying is
superior, because this is what worked for them. Learning explicitly is just a
strange ritual done at school; and I suspect that even there they try to copy
the teachers.
On the other hand, "explicit" people learn slowly and are completely dependent
on good learning materials. Sometimes the good materials are available, and
allow them to reach mastery in complex things. The whole school system is
designed for this. Sometimes the materials are unavailable or misleading (e.g.
because the topic is mindkilling), and they are lost. These are the "book smart"
people. -- They believe in explicit learning, because this is what worked for
them.
These are just extreme descriptions, I guess most people use learning by copying
in some areas and explicit learning in other areas. They may have an explanation
about which style is better in which situation. There are things th
0gothgirl42066610y
Sorry for only commenting on the irrelevant taboo topic you touched on, but this
is interesting to me. I have been reading some PUA stuff lately and it seems to
me that the whole point is that it is not describing something that ordinary
humans learn naturally, but instead prescribing something extraordinary that you
can do to set yourself apart from the crowd in order to attract the hottest girl
in the club that every other guy in there is hitting on. And even then it only
works via the law of averages, and requires one to override one's natural
intense aversion to rejection in order to pursue a more rational strategy
adapted for a modern world in which you can talk to someone once and never see
them again.
Am I wrong about this?
These days PUA refers to so many things that I need to be more specific. The sources that helped me were "The Mystery Method" by Mystery, "How To Become An Alpha Male" by Carlos Xuma, "Married Man Sex Life" by Athol Kay. I would also recommend "The Blueprint Decoded" by RSD.
Yes, there are many sources that only tell you "do this, do that, and if it does not work, just do it again". I guess this is what most customers want: "Don't bother me with explanations, just give me a quick fix!" This is how most people approach everything. Well, if there is a demand for something, the market will provide a product. And these days it is a huge business. Ten years ago, it was more like geeks experimenting and sharing their results and opinions... a bit similar to Quantified Self today, just less scientific, and sometimes more narrowly focused.
Overcoming aversion to rejection, doing many approaches to convert given rates of success into greater absolute numbers, doing something extraordinary to stand out of the crowd... those are the fixes. Applied incorrectly they could be even harmful. (Receiving a lot of rejection can make you more r... (read more)
A more accurate way of putting that is that the man is the first to break
plausible deniability. If you also take into account non-verbal, indirect
signals (where if the recipient isn't interested they can just pretend to not
notice and nothing bad happens), most of the times the very first move is the
woman's, both according to this report about Britain
[http://www.sirc.org/publik/advanced_flirting.shtml] and in my experience in
both Italy and Ireland: I can't say I can recall ever getting a positive
reaction from approaching a woman who wasn't already smiling at me. Now, a guy
who has good social skills but poor introspection may only approach women who
are smiling at them but not be consciously aware that he's preselecting women
that way; likewise, a socially savvy but not introspectively savvy woman may not
be consciously aware that she's smiling at the guy she likes; as a result, it
feels to them like it's the man who's initiating the interaction, which I guess
is the main cause of that confusion.
0gothgirl42066610y
Interesting. Although "if she's smiling at you, she likes you" seems like it
wouldn't hold true when you're trying to flirt with acquaintances.
0A1987dM10y
With people you already know, the kinds of indirect signals (where if the
recipient isn't interested they can just pretend to not notice and nothing bad
happens) are different (and not all of them are entirely non-verbal), but
otherwise the same kind-of applies.
2gothgirl42066610y
Do you know what these indirect signals are? This seems like useful information.
0A1987dM10y
I think I know it when I see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it] them (at least some of
the time -- there might be more of them that I'm not noticing), but I can't
think of a good intensional
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/nh/extensions_and_intensions/] description of them (and
it doesn't seem polite to me to point at extensional examples based on actual
people, even in anonymized form).
It probably also depends on what common knowledge
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_%28logic%29] exists or does not
exist among the two of you, incl. what culture you're in.
3Viliam_Bur10y
To be fair, I have filtered the reasonable parts of PUA. There is also a lot of
crap [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law]. And most of the focus is
on the short-term relationship -- the ending part is based solely on "Married
Man Sex Life". (I guess that reflects the needs of a typical customer -- and
perhaps even a typical PUA guru. Also, the society does give rather decent
advice on "beta" traits; the "alpha" is the missing part, so teaching it is more
popular and profitable.)
Yeah, this is difficult to explain (so outside view suggests I am prone to
rationalization here). I agree with the examples you gave. And yet... the
society gives contradictory and incomplete information on this. Consider saying:
"If you have an expensive foreign car, you are more likely to get pretty girls."
Say it at one place, and you will get: "Duh, news at 11." Say it at another
place, and you will get: "You sexist! How dare you! Not all women are like that.
Bringing an expensive car would never impress me."
So we have two separate magisteria here. In one universe, you only get girls by
being bold and rich. In other universe, you only get girls by being polite and
patient. Both messages are given by the society, none of them is literally a
secret. Yet they seem contradictory, and how to successfully put them together,
that is kind of a secret. Because people living in one universe typically deny
the existence of the other universe.
Perhaps the information is all out there, in pieces, but you need some level of
social skills to put it all correctly together. Judging by the popularity of
PUAs, many people lack this skill. I certainly did.
I guess the nerds would appreciate a more precise advice; which parts of jocks'
behavior are necessary for the desired effect, and which can be left out. Which
is the 20% that brings 80% of the result. Otherwise, the price is too high
[http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html]. PUA explains how to get some of what
jocks get, without having to
6gothgirl42066610y
[deleted]
3Viliam_Bur10y
The more incentive to develop the skills before the college. You are right that
if you approach ten girls every night in the same environment, sooner or later
someone will notice. I would suggest training your skills somewhere else, and
use the interaction in college only to maintain the level you already have. --
For example if you are uncomfortable making eye contact, train it somewhere
else, but when you become comfortable with it, do it every day at the college to
strenghten the habit. -- If you change your college behavior slowly and without
obvious effort, people won't notice. It will be just "growing up".
I recommend two powerful branches of modern magic
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/ve/mundane_magic/], called "reductionism" and
"conditioning". The first one can literally crush mountains to sand, the second
one can be used by a wizard to transform themselves. The most successful school
of these branches is CBT
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy].
What exactly makes you feel shame? What words do you hear or what video do you
see in your mind when you consider talking to an attractive girl? First step,
write it down, in as much detail as you can (not publicly). For example: "If I
say 'hello' to a girl, she will run away screaming / start laughing at me /
coldly ignore me / call the cops." (Merely writing it down helps to dispell the
magic, because you notice how silly it is.) Second step, try to trace when and
how did this idea get into your mind, and what evidence do you have about its
literal truth. Was it said or suggested to you by someone when you were 10 years
old? What is the probability that the person (a) had a correct model of the
world, (b) had a motivation at given moment to give you a literally correct
information, and (c) you understood and remembered it perfectly? Or it is
something that happened to you in the past? Are there some specific things about
(a) you, (b) the person you are going to interact with, (c) the environme
4gothgirl42066610y
[deleted]
4Sabiola10y
Yes, 'not taking "no" for an answer' is very creepy!
2A1987dM10y
Note also that people vary a lot in their propensity to say no in spite of
pressure to the contrary, so if you're someone who hardly ever has much trouble
with that [http://lesswrong.com/lw/67f/influence_manipulation/4cs0] and you
generalize from one example...
(I've recently seen lots of anecdotal evidence that ‘if she hasn't withdrawn
from the interaction, she must be enjoying it’ isn't a viable heuristic for
certain people.)
-1Viliam_Bur10y
If there is a web discussion about something, people naturally extend the
meaning of something. Let's take LW for an obvious example: It started with
epistemic rationality, and expanded even to rational toothpaste
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/cqz/rational_toothpaste_a_case_study/].
So by the same mechanism, I would expect that if you make a web community
discussing "creepiness", the scope will naturally grow. -- The example you
linked doesn't seem creepy to me, assuming it was on a dating website. (A
context could make it creepy: for example if the same man keeps sending this
message repeatedly to the same woman.)
You know, haters gonna hate. Try avoiding the obvious haters, and don't leave
written records that could fall in wrong hands.
I guess a proper protocol for dating a schoolmate is to invite them somewhere
outside of the school (some interesting place, or for a walk). In school, just
be friendly. This way you leave an obvious exit. Also, the girl may appreciate
your discretion.
If you are nervous about approaching strange girls, the time limit also reduces
your stress. Gradually you will start feeling relaxed while doing it. That is
the time to approach someone else without using the time limit.
Always start with easy and progress to more difficult. Start complimenting the
people you know, and progress to strangers. The more you do it, the more
"natural" it will feel to you. (I use scare quotes around "natural", because
"natural" simply means: learned and practiced long time ago, and "not natural"
means: learned yesterday, have not practice yet. You become "natural" by
practice, not by being born with the ability.) At first just practice, but with
enough experience you will learn the scale of reactions, when people are just
polite and when they are really happy... and then at some moment, when you get a
happy reaction, you can ask whether it is okay to talk.
Sorry, the advice ends here -- this is not a PUA forum, and some people don't
like this topic. I ho
3gothgirl42066610y
This actually makes a lot of sense. "Only show attraction to girls outside of
school/work, so that they are aware that you compartmentalize your life in such
a way that they will not have to deal with the topic of romance with you at
school/work if they are not inclined to do so." This is why at a school dance
it's okay to go and rub your crotch on the butt of a girl you treat completely
non-sexually during the day.
EDIT: And now the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace makes a lot more
sense.
That's fine, I understand that you probably have better things to do. Thank you
for the advice/discussion, and good luck in your future endeavors. :)
0A1987dM10y
That's pretty much what I do instinctively, except that the compartments are
more gerrymandered than that (and they're not much clearer to my System 2 than
(say) grammatical rules), and they depend on who the woman is (and, to a lesser
extent, on what we're talking about) but not much on where we are (e.g., with
some people I'll do the hover hand thing in pictures, with others I'm perfectly
comfortable putting a hand on their thigh during class).
(This might be part of a same pattern as Feynman's observation that it's common
for European physicists to talk about their work in bars but rare for American
physicists.)
2A1987dM10y
Actually, I think the lack of context makes it creepier.
Being that explicit so early in a conversation is usually considered impolite.
(There's no need to explicitly mention the bedroom -- they're on a dating site,
she knows you mean that even if you just say you want to hang out.) Therefore,
it demonstrates a lack of familiarity with politeness norms, and possibly with
social interactions in general. In more usual contexts, it would instead
demonstrate that you can afford flouting politeness rules without much of a
status hit, but when you're talking to someone who knows basically nothing about
you other than what you're communicating at the moment (for all she knows, you
could be a sexual predator, a dork who basically never talks to women in
meatspace, or even an uFAI), countersignalling is a bad idea
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/1sa/things_you_cant_countersignal/].
Also, it pattern-matches a kind of guy who gets very resentful, sometimes in a
scary way, when he doesn't get his way. (And for some reason they seem to always
be awful at writing -- “your beautiful”, “knew to the area”...)
0A1987dM10y
That just mean that you're too sober. Drink more and try again.
0gothgirl42066610y
But then the next morning you end up with even more shame to deal with. :(
0A1987dM10y
Not necessarily -- there are things I used to never do when sober because I
assumed I would regret them, then I once did them when drunk, noticed that the
(social) consequences weren't anywhere near as negative as I had feared and were
in fact quite positive, and now I often do them even when I'm sober.
0A1987dM10y
Do they? Because saying “not all women are like that” has the implicature
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalar_implicature] that some women are.
1A1987dM10y
What do you care what the traditional roles in Western society are, so long as
you're both happy?
What fraction of the time do they succeed? (And when they do, how do you know
that part of the reason why they had picked Susan rather than Jane in the first
place was that on some level they already knew that they had less of a chance
with the latter than with the former?)
0gothgirl42066610y
Presumably if women rarely initiate and instead expect men to approach them, a
man who frequently approaches women will be much more likely to find sex/a
relationship than a man who just waits around for women to do the initiating.
I don't know. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. But I am sure they
succeed more than they would if, like me, they never tried.
That definitely is part of it.
0A1987dM10y
OK, I thought you meant something like “I used to be in a relationship, but it
had been initiated by the woman, which is untraditional; we were uncomfortable
with that, and eventually we broke up as a result”, rather than “I used to be in
a relationship, then for whatever reason we broke up, but I hadn't been the one
to initiate it so I don't know how to initiate another one”; never mind. (I have
heard a few women make the latter complaint before, though none of them
mentioned the traditional roles.)
0Sabiola10y
You must have been doing something right! I bet you'll have great success if you
follow Villiam's advice.
0gothgirl42066610y
Haha, I hope so.
0NancyLebovitz10y
How has this worked out for you?
0gothgirl42066610y
Can you rephrase this question? I'm not sure what you're asking.
4NancyLebovitz10y
Are you happy with the number and quality of relationships? Your dubiousness
about not initiating seemed to be about it seeming weird rather than practical
drawbacks.
0gothgirl42066610y
[deleted]
2A1987dM10y
This is not an actual explanation of the asymmetry -- why do men prefer to keep
their preference mysterious less than women prefer to keep theirs mysterious?
why do women have less of a disincentive to teach men's preferences to their
competitors than men do?
Which official story? People preferring (brutally simplifying while trying to
stay polite) to marry older, richer people but to sleep with younger, sexier
people isn't that rare a trope as far as I can tell.
4sediment10y
My impression is that there are many different shades with respect to this,
ranging from 'explicitly learning social skills which others may learn
implicitly' to 'behaviour intended to trick, force, pressure, or otherwise
outright manipulate girls into bed with you' - with a great deal in between.
4NancyLebovitz10y
A man's negative take on PUA [http://therawness.com/reader-letters-1-part-4/].
A woman's mostly negative take on PUA
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007I5HRQU/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=clarthor-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B007I5HRQU],
though she thinks that a little PUA can be useful for men who are afraid to talk
to women. Getting into the PUA sub-culture can leave men worse off.
Both have put a lot of thought into it.
My take is that PUA seems to be set in a universe where no one likes anyone
else.
5Viliam_Bur10y
Funny thing is that I agree with the first article, I just have completely
different connotations to that.
Yes, the stuff Mystery teaches really is dumbed down. Which is good, because
some guys start so dumb that they need this; sometimes they have problems to
understand even this. I was there once. And the stuff helped me to get out of
there.
It feels to me like saying: "The elementary schools are so dumb, I learned much
more at university!" -- Sure, good for you! Also, well-played sir; you gently
reminded us of your higher status. The competition among PUA bloggers is strong
these days; many authors have to market themself as beyond-PUA to be able to
sell their PUA products. (Nothing wrong about that, I would probably do the same
thing if I weren't too lazy to blog.)
I also agree with the rest of the article. If you take a mentally unstable
person and teach them PUA, you will get a mentally unstable person with some PUA
skills. And therefore... I mean, if you take a mentally unstable person and
teach them Java programming, you will get a mentally unstable person with some
Java skills. Perhaps it is socially unresponsible to teach mentally unstable
people anything that increases their powers without fixing their problems first.
But that is not a problem specific to PUA industry.
EDIT: Changed my mind about this.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hlo/open_thread_june_215_2013/94so]
Men helping low-status men to overcome their lack of social skills... is an
evidence that no one likes anyone else? (Ten years ago, the help was provided
online for free, only later it developed into a profitable industry.)
But they don't focus on liking women, do they? Well, they often don't. To make a
fair comparison, how often do seduction (sorry, relationship) articles,
magazines, and books for women talk about liking men, respecting their agency,
et cetera?
And maybe the people criticizing PUAs just focus too much on the bad parts, and
ignore the nicer parts
[http://marriedmansexlife.c
3A1987dM10y
And if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them to use a weapon, you
will get a mentally unstable person with some weapon-using skills. This may be
more undesirable than a mentally unstable person with some Java skills.
0A1987dM10y
On reading that again one month later... I indeed got that wrong. Edited to say
it like a normal person.
0Viliam_Bur10y
Uhm, you are right about this; my mistake
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/]. I
focused too much on winning the debate
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/]. Apologies to everyone.
I still think that the benefits of publishing PUA advice are probably higher
than the costs, but it would be difficult to defend this claim. (We would need
to get data: how many clueless frustrated guys finally got their relationships
right; how many naive girls were pumped and dumped by mentally unstable guys
with pickup skills; the further impact of both on the society; etc. And even
then we would have to make a value judgement about how much we care about a
damsel in distress versus an expendable low-status male.)
2NancyLebovitz10y
The first link said that PUA could leave people in worse shape than it found
them-- and Clarisse Thorn (second link) said the same.
Good point about PUA cultivating friendships between men. I'd missed that part.
Still, it doesn't do a good job of encouraging friendliness between
romantic/sexual partners.
9Viliam_Bur10y
Compared with... relationship advice for women? (For example
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules]: don't call him and rarely return his
calls; stop dating him if he doesn't buy you a romantic gift for your birthday
or valentine's day; don't see him more than once or twice a week). How much of
the PUA criticism -- that it helps narcissist people develop their sense of
grandiosity and become emotional vampires -- applies to that, too? Perhaps the
narcissism is more socially acceptable for women, because... uhm... yay, women!
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Applause_light] ?
Could we agree on a gender-neutral version that literature about "success" in
relationships typically does not do a good job of encouraging friendliness
between romantic/sexual partners? (And of course, there are always a few
exceptions
[http://marriedmansexlife.com/2012/11/can-your-wife-be-your-best-friend/].)
(Or perhaps even more generally that literature about maximizing X does not do a
good job at maximizing Y?)
1NancyLebovitz10y
That's a reasonable question. However, I have no idea to what extent women take
The Rules seriously, while there's a lot of evidence that some fraction of the
men here take PUA very seriously.
5Viliam_Bur10y
How about avoiding labels completely, and asking directly about behavior? Let's
make gender-neutral or gender-reversed questions for men and women, taboo all
jargon, and see how many of them will report using the given strategy.
For example: "Do you sometimes pretend to be unavailable, even if you have free
time, just to make yourself more scarce?" Or: "If the person you are dating
becomes too proud of themselves, do you slightly criticize them in order to
bring them back to earth?"
A woman can learn gender-reversed versions of some PUA advice from a magazine or
hear it from her friends; she does not have to identify with any label. And she
does not have to read any specific book, because all the information is already
out there. Advice for women about manipulating men is generally not shocking and
controversial. "The Rules" is a book that strongly pattern-matches PUA advice (a
name similar to "The Game", simplistic bullet-point advice), which was probably
intentional, to create controversy and increase sales... but it's not like women
never read the specific ideas before in other books and magazines. (Okay, this
one is probably new: "Don't Discuss The Rules with Your Therapist".)
0gothgirl42066610y
Thank you for the links! I will most likely read the first link at some point,
and maybe the second one eventually.
(From the about page of the blog linked to:)
WOW, I have been looking for a website like this for a few months now. Again,
thank you!
2A1987dM10y
Me too.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/b5r/not_all_signallingstatus_behaviors_are_bad/7pg5?context=1#comments]
0sediment10y
I don't think the overlap between club-type dancing and the type of dancing that
one takes lessons to learn is very large, though.
7Viliam_Bur10y
I don't have much experience with club dancing, but at the few occasions, I was
there with a girl who I previously danced ballroom-style with, and we mostly
danced jive [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jive_%28dance%29] or quickstep
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickstep] or cha-cha
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha-cha-cha_%28dance%29], just with shorter steps
to take less space and not move across the room. We had fun, and the feedback
from other people was positive.
But even with the club-type dancing, somehow it got much easier for me once I
became good at ballroom dances. Maybe I got more confident, maybe I learned to
follow the rhythm, maybe I started to understand some movement patterns;
probably all of that together.
0gothgirl42066610y
Yeah, this is what I'm thinking.
A big problem I have with club dancing is that I am 6'6", and I feel (probably
at least somewhat accurately) that I am unusually visible and that any move I do
is being judged by at least a few people. So I end up just standing there, then
immediately realizing "this is much more awkward than dancing really poorly is",
then concluding "Oh my god, no matter what I do I am doomed, I have to get out
of here right now", then leaving, then sitting alone feeling like there is
something very flawed about me.
I will get over this someday by applying a dedicated effort, but right now there
are more important self-improvement projects. Until then I just will stay far
away from any dance where I can't get drunk beforehand.
0sediment10y
Well, I agree that it needn't be at the top of your to-do list. In fact, I'm not
sure you need worry about getting over it at all, really. Not enjoying hanging
out/dancing in clubs is no serious character defect, and plenty of people share
your preference. By the way, happy birthday (or was that yesterday?)
0drethelin10y
club dancing is basically doing whatever you feel like to the beat. This is a
lot easier if you have a repertoire of moves from other styles of dance or
activity that you can instantiate. Also what Villiam_Bur said.
4TheOtherDave10y
The best advice I've ever received along these lines is "treat people as though
they were already close friends." In my case, that mostly means having
conversations with them about topics I actually care about, as opposed to
conventional topics.
IME, this weirds a number of people out, who subsequently don't interact with me
much, but that's not necessarily a problem.
It also causes people to think I'm coming on to them, which is sometimes a
problem, but was less of one when I was in the dating pool.
1gothgirl42066610y
I always interpreted that piece of advice as meaning something more along the
lines of "Be as enthusiastic and casual when you're hanging out with a
relatively new acquaintance as you would be when you're hanging out with an old
friend." This seems like decent advice, but it's very difficult for me to
actually put into action, and it also seems like it would make some people very
uncomfortable.
But your take on it is interesting. I'm not 100% sure I can picture it, however.
Could you maybe give some sort of example of this strategy in use?
7TheOtherDave10y
If "enthusiastic and casual" characterizes how you differentially treat your
close friends, then sure, I'd say go for that. It doesn't for me, especially.
What I find differentially characterizes my relationships with close friends is
that I can start a conversation with whatever has recently been on my mind,
however unconventional an opening gambit, and we will mutually engage at a
fairly high-bandwidth level. (And vice-versa)
E.g., I recently started a conversation (or, well, replied to "So what's up?")
with "I've been thinking a lot lately about how to tell the difference between a
lack of motivation that signals lack of genuine interest in doing something,
versus a lack of motivation that doesn't, and one thing I'm noticing is that if
I ask myself 'Self, are you looking forward to getting out of this slump and
being enthused for that project again?' myself sometimes says 'yes!' and
sometimes says 'meh.' and I wonder if that's correlated."
And, yes, I agree that it makes some people uncomfortable. I generally operate
on the principle that my goal is not to make close friends out of everyone, nor
even to make as many close friends as possible, merely to make close friends
without wasting a lot of time. If 19 people respond "Oh look I must be going"
and the 20th engages with me and we find each other mutually interesting, I
generally consider that a win.
0gothgirl42066610y
Do you think by any chance you could give a percentage estimation on how many
people respond well, poorly, and neutrally to this strategy? (Or something along
those lines.) This is interesting to me.
3TheOtherDave10y
Offhand, I don't know.
It's most relevant at parties and large social gatherings where I don't know
anyone, and I don't really think in terms of percentages-of-people in such
situations so much as how quickly I find someone worth talking to.
Over 95% of the time, I'd say the result is a little bit of chitchat followed by
the person and I both talking to someone else. Whether that's responding well,
poorly, or neutrally I don't know; that seems to be the default condition at
parties.
Less than 1% of the time, the result is the other person's eyes lighting up in
what I've come to label the "oh look, one of my people!" expression, and I make
a new friend. Probably not much less than 1%, though.
(By way of establishing scale, I'd say I try this ~50 times in a given year...
I'm not a terribly outgoing guy, and generally prefer to hang out in smaller
groups or just stay home with my husband, but I'm reasonably socially ept when I
do go out.)
That said, I also have a reputation in my social circle for being kind of
intense and a little out there, but interesting to talk to if you're interested
in, well, talking. Which also creates a second-order effect, where friends
introduce me to friends of theirs who share this trait because we'd really enjoy
each other, and more generally where my social environment self-selects.
2jooyous10y
It might help to precise-ify some of the language around what you mean by "more
friends" and "more popular"? What kind of friends? What kind of popularity? Are
there types of friends or popularity you don't want? Also, what kind of people
can you usually hang out with one-on-one?
0gothgirl42066610y
I think a decent litmus test for a "friend" is someone who you enjoy spending
time with, and who you can reliably invite to hang out with you. You could
rephrase this I suppose as someone who you enjoy spending time with, who enjoys
spending time with you, where this knowledge is mutually available. Right now I
only have one friend who clearly meets the criteria for this definition, though
I have a few that come close. My tentative goal is to have five such friends,
maybe by Thanksgiving break or so in college.
I'll admit that it's hard for me to find people who I genuinely relate to, enjoy
spending time with and can feel comfortable "being myself" around, and I'm not
sure if this has something to do with my own social strategies or if this is an
unchangeable thing.
Popularity is a little more hard to pin down. I think what I want includes a mix
of these qualities:
* In general, people like me
* In general, people respect me
* I have a wide range of acquaintances that I can talk to on friendly terms
* To the extent that my social group resembles a tribe, I have a relatively
high level of tribal status. (I'm not sure if college social groups will
resemble a tribal hierarchy to the same extent that high school does or this
is something people leave behind.)
* I am seen as high-status, i.e. someone who it is desirable to be friends
with.
* My friends value me - i.e. people will invite me to parties and the like
because they will enjoy my presence there.
Obviously some of this is kind of unrealistic and selfish but it's an ideal, I
guess.
5falenas10810y
These goals are not as hard as you'd think to achieve. I've basically gotten all
of these by being active in several organizations on campus.
Just doing that gave more opportunities to talk to people, which as drethelin
said, is very useful. If you take charge in organizing things, it helps a huge
amount with social respect/status. The wide range of acquaintances happens by
default.
You do have to make the effort to start hanging out with people outside the
regular meetings though. It's pretty easy to do that if the meeting is just
before a meal time, because then there's the convenient suggestion of eating
together. In other cases, invite them to a party, along with several other
people. Being known as the one who organizes groups is very useful for your
goals.
0gothgirl42066610y
Thank you for the advice!
This is comforting.
Out of curiosity, what kind of organizations are you active in? I'm trying to
think of stereotypical campus organizations and isolate ones that I would enjoy,
and I can't come up with too many. I like chess, so I guess if there's a chess
club on campus I'll at least check it out, but that's all I can think of.
5BrassLion10y
I speak from experience: Go to something new every week, or every day early when
classes are light. As much as you can stand. You figure out what you like by
trying things and not going back to lame events.
I am an introvert, and I found it easy to make friends in college in the right
clubs. When everyone shares an interest, it's easy repeatedly meet people and
interact.
1gothgirl42066610y
I will strongly consider doing this. Thank you.
0falenas10810y
I'm in Secular Alliance, Queers and Associates, my school's circus club,
massage, and our BDSM club. There are a few others that I go to when I can, but
those are the main ones.
I second BrassLion's advice. Also, look at all the clubs ones that seem
interesting, and sign up for their listhost as a reminder to go to them.
0gothgirl42066610y
Wow, that must be interesting.
0falenas10810y
Yep, I enjoy it a lot. Came my first year in college because I was vaguely
curious, and it ended up becoming a pretty big part of my life!
-1syllogism10y
So, are you trans?
If so, the queer clubs are a slam dunk, if you get along okay with that "type".
One thing to bear in mind is, a lot of the opening chatter will be about gender
and sexuality issues, which gets a little tiresome. Just accept that this is the
new smalltalk for these spaces --- instead of talking about sports or what your
major is, young queer kids often ask each other about coming out stories, etc.
People are also trying on the role --- it's all new and unfamiliar to them, too.
Many are unused to having an in-group, and overdo "tribe signalling".
I guess I'm just advising you to be wary of the fundamental attribution error in
these spaces, which can make people seem very narrow.
You can also turn this around and realise that there are ways you can help
people avoid making the fundamental attribution error with you, too. For
instance, if you're recently transitioning, I imagine that will feel really
weird for a while. It's okay to talk about that! You can excuse some of your
awkwardness this way, and I expect most of the folks in these spaces will find
that quite endearing.
7Emile10y
I'm pretty sure he meant "19 yo as of tomorrow" and not "male as of tomorrow",
though I did consider teasing him about that (which may be what you are doing!
Those things can be hard to tell online).
7syllogism10y
Well with the username I really thought it more likely he was trans. Shrug.
7Qiaochu_Yuan10y
This is a nice Bayes learning opportunity. It's reasonable to infer that a
female-looking username makes someone more likely to be female, maybe twice as
likely (not much more than that; this is the internet and people give themselves
weird usernames all the time, and actual women may avoid using female-looking
usernames in male-dominated forums to avoid drawing attention to their gender).
However, the base rate of transsexualism, even within a community as unusual as
LW, is still incredibly low and requires a lot of evidence to overcome (e.g.
someone telling you they're transsexual).
7syllogism10y
Do you really think 1/3rd of users named gothgirl* would be male? I'd guess
something like 1-10%, compared with 1-3% transsexualism on LW:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/]
5Desrtopa10y
On Less Wrong in particular, I would assign a high likelihood to various
permutations of "gothgirl" being ironic, rather than sincere self expression of
the user.
2Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Yeah, sure. This is the internet. (Acknowledged that the base rate of
transsexualism on LW is higher than I had expected.)
0[anonymous]10y
That isn't the relevant number. The likelihood ratio is P(named gothgirl |
female) / P(named gothgirl | male), not P(female | named gothgirl) / P(male |
named gothgirl).
6Emile10y
(for what it's worth, I didn't reason using base rates, I just remember an early
comment by gothgirl420666 saying he was male and only took that name for the
lulz)
4katydee10y
Oh hey, what's up?
3Larks10y
You thought his username gave you over 13 bits of evidence?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexualism#Prevalence]
I likely committed some level of base-rate fallacy though (regardless of what the truth turns out to be). Trans* is more available to me because I hang out in queer communities, and know multiple transgender people.
The username contains more than 13 bits of information (being 14 characters
long) so this might not be too unreasonable.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
Transsexualism seems way overrepresented in geeky circles: off the top of my
head, I could think of seven MtF and two FtM transsexuals within my circle of
acquaintances, and there might be a few that I'm forgetting. LW definitely
matches the definition of a "geeky community", so assuming a relatively high
base rate would have been reasonable to me, based on my experience.
Suppose the placebo effects exists; if you believe you will get better, then you will indeed get recover.
B(h) -> h
Unfortunately, it only works if you believe you will get better - and it could be hard to see why it'd be rational to believe that in the first place. Fortunately, rationalists have a solution to this problem.
We're scientific sorts of people, so we believe in the placebo effect - that is:
B( B(h) -> h )
and we're also logical sort of people, so we believe lob's theorem
I have been constantly thinking recently: Your voice impacts a lot in your presentation, and it's one of those things that people generally take for granted. And it's not just your speak pattern and filler words that I'm referring to, but also intonation, fluency and so on. I would maybe risk saying that it can be as important as your appearance, or even more. (If you stumble every five or ten words, you can't really convey your ideas, can you?)
In this vein, is there a viable alternative for someone who wants to improve his own voice? I already thought about a voice acting tutor, but I generally prefer ways in which I could improve without having to pay a tutor.
I suggest practice in groups. Does Toastmasters [http://www.toastmasters.org/]
charge money, and do they have any meetings near you?
0letter710y
Sadly, no. I'm from Brazil, there are a few Toastmasters in my country, but all
of them are a plane travelling distance away.
3Turgurth10y
Advice [http://lesswrong.com/lw/453/procedural_knowledge_gaps/3hwk] from the
Less Wrong archives.
1Sabiola10y
You could practice by yourself by reading out loud. I really should do that
again myself, too - I have the tendency to speak too fast, and not pause enough
for breath, which leads to me *gasp*ing for air a lot. Try to relax and pay
attention to your breath. It's a bit weird speaking aloud by yourself, but I
think it helps. If you're braver than me, you could even record yourself and
listen back, to hear how you'd sound to others.
0sixes_and_sevens10y
I have wanted to do some sort of speech training for a few years, but can't seem
to find an appropriate avenue to investigate. The closest I've found is media
training, but it tends to only cater towards corporate clients.
Oxytocin is known to dampen amygdala's 'fight, flight or freeze' responses.
Oxytocin production is increased during bonding behaviors (e.g. parent-child, pets, snuggling / Karezza).
If 1, 2 and 3 are true, we could reduce the effect of an ugh field by petting a dog, hugging a baby or snuggling (but not orgasming) with a lover -- before confronting the task that induces the ugh field.
Disclaimer: I am not a brain scientist, so the terminology, logic and the entire idea may be wrong.
Playing a team sport. Killing other people with your allies in combat. Being
held in captivity and/or abused severely enough.
1Vladimir_Golovin10y
Hmm, this is surprising. At first I thought you're providing examples of bonding
behaviors that don't raise oxytocin levels, but decided to google anyway, and
voila: Oxytocin and the Biopsychology of Performance in Team Sports, Gert-Jan
Pepping and Erik J. Timmermans
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3444846/].
The second example, killing others with allies in combat, seems to be similar to
team sports. However, the third one, being held in captivity / abused, seems to
be different in kind. Do you have any sources on it?
Edit: I wonder if playing a team-based competitive game like Team Fortress 2 has
any effect on oxytocin levels, in addition to dopamine effects that are typical
for video games?
3MixedNuts10y
Do you have a source on oxytocin and sex with vs without orgasm? My
understanding was that sex increased oxytocin secretion pretty much the same
whether you orgasmed or not.
3Vladimir_Golovin10y
Here's the closest one I could find: Specificity of the neuroendocrine response
to orgasm during sexual arousal in men
[http://joe.endocrinology-journals.org/content/177/1/57.full.pdf+html]. Also,
Wikipedia article on oxytocin says that "The relationship between oxytocin and
human sexual response is unclear" and cites multiple studies on oxytocin and
orgasm, but none of them seem to show any major effect.
So my impression is that oxytocin secretion per se is not heavily affected by
orgasm (there is a short-term rise, but that's about it.) However, orgasm
significantly affects two other hormones, dopamine and prolactin (also shown in
the study I linked above). After an orgasm, dopamine drops and prolactin rises
and keeps surging, supposedly for about two weeks (which seems established, but
I don't have a source handy.)
Here's a study that shows that prolactin rises after an orgasm in men and women
but sex without orgasm doesn't affect prolactin levels: Orgasm-induced prolactin
secretion: feedback control of sexual drive?
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11835982?dopt=Abstract]:
My current crude thinking is as follows:
1. Orgasm leads to low dopamine and high prolactin (oxytocin release is
negligible).
2. Low dopamine means low motivation (is the Coolidge effect
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect] a hard-coded exception?).
3. High prolactin means satiation.
4. When confronting an ugh field, one needs oxytocin and dopamine, but not
prolactin.
5. Therefore it's better to avoid the post-orgasmic dopamine and prolactin
changes.
0MixedNuts10y
Thanks!
Moving back from the biological basis to the introspective level, I'd expect the
high-prolactin afterglow state to reduce anxiety enough to compensate for
decreased motivation. (This might be related to whether one gets wired up or
sleepy after sex, which has surprisingly large individual variation.) Easy
enough to set up a randomised trial.
0Vladimir_Golovin10y
You probably meant high-oxytocin afterglow.
0MixedNuts10y
No. High oxytocin is present whether you orgasm or not, as we just established.
I expect this to help productivity. I also expect that orgasm would
* Hurt productivity, because "so sleepy and satisfied, why do anything?" (from
low dopamine, possibly from high prolactin)
* Help productivity, because "feeling so relaxed, doing things that normally
make me so anxious and icky is so easy right now" (from high prolactin; sex
without orgasm (high-oxytocin, low-prolactin) does provide some pleasant
feelings but not this specific effect)
* Help productivity overall, relative to sex without orgasm
1AspiringRationalist10y
I wonder if taking oxytocin supplements might work even better for this.
I'll definitely be trying it in one way or another, though.
2Vladimir_Golovin10y
Alas, oxytocin supplements (there is a nasal spray, if I remember correctly)
don't seem to work. When released naturally, it's released where it matters and
in precise amounts, while the shotgun approach of the nasal spray makes it easy
to miss the correct dosage and delivery location, which may cause various
adverse effects.
Warning: my source on the above is a popular book, Cupid's Poisoned Arrow
[http://www.amazon.com/Cupids-Poisoned-Arrow-Harmony-Relationships/dp/1556438095]
-- but, to their credit, they do cite their scientific sources. If Kindle had a
way of copying / quoting text from its books, I'd look up the relevant paragraph
for you.
Edit: The sources (had to type them manually):
* M. Ansseau, et al., "Intranasal Oxytocin in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder",
1987: 231-236.
* G. Paolisso, et al., "Pharmacological Doses of Oxytocin Affect Plasma Hormone
Levels Modulating Glucose Homeostasis in Normal Man", 1988: 10-16.
Edit 2: Here's the relevant part on the nasal spray (had to post it via a
screenshot because Kindle does not allow copy/pasting text):
http://imgur.com/kyysmbo [http://imgur.com/kyysmbo]
6wedrifid10y
For this reason (and in particular for the purpose of text-to-speech) I use
calibre and the Kindle plugin to convert my kindle books to a less artificially
restricted format.
1Vladimir_Golovin10y
I've found a way to copy/paste from Kindle! Their software reader, at least the
Windows version
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311], allows
copying:
0[anonymous]10y
I think that common-sense reasoning states that if the idea of doing something
makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps you should make yourself comfortable
before doing it. To me, this "using oxytocin to counteract ugh fields" idea
isn't obviously more credible or more useful than this common-sense idea.
0Vladimir_Golovin10y
If an ugh field is indeed a form of an amygdala hijack, one will have a hard
time consciously making oneself comfortable with the task, because the amygdala
responds faster than the rational brain. A neurochemical hack might work better.
3[anonymous]10y
What sort of neurochemical hack? Gwern's page on nicotine suggests it could be
used to reward certain behaviors, thus perhaps breaking down ugh fields. I
haven't tried that yet (I only read that a few days ago) but I've had a great
deal of success using nicotine (specifically snus) to break down my general
acedia and aversion to activity.
0Vladimir_Golovin10y
I meant the hack I outlined in the original post: increasing oxytocin via
bonding behaviors to dampen amygdala's fear response.
0[anonymous]10y
What I said was "make yourself comfortable", and it seems to me like petting a
dog, hugging a baby, and snuggling are all ways of making oneself comfortable.
Maybe I was unclear, though.
So on the topic of effective altruism, I've been thinking about the benefits of a "can't beat 'em? join 'em" type strategy for improving the world. Examples:
Wish South Africa would stop apartheid? Don't protest it, there will be lots of people doing that. Instead, try to gain power within the South African government and become F. W. de Klerk. (Arguably that role is more noble anyway, since you'd be relinquishing power instead of trying to gain power for yourself and people like you.)
Want to make China a democracy? Join the communist part
I'll say what I said on facebook: The most effective paths historically for the
bettering of the human condition are technology and trade. The net effect of the
republican party on american well-being, however crazy they are, is way smaller
than cheap cellphones or widespread computers or good public transportation. You
can spend 20 years getting to a position of power as a republican or you can
spend 20 years inventing energy storage systems or cheap and accessible travel
or healthy but palatable alternatives to snack foods that are more achievable
and have the positive benefit of providing you with experience and connections
that aren't based 100 percent on lies.
5fubarobfusco10y
We should ask ourselves, "How much of my impression of what sorts of
interventions are effective comes from fact, and how much from the
self-promotion of people who would like to solicit my assistance or deter my
interference?"
4FiftyTwo10y
Depends on your comparative advantage. For many people its easier to become a
moderately successful politician than meaningfully change the progress of world
technological development.
0ChristianKl10y
When it comes to creating public transportation look at the case of the Uber
amendment
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/dc-city-councils-uber-amendment-would-force-sedans-to-charge-5x-taxi-prices-and-kill-uberx/]
in DC. If you have bad people in political control they won't allow you to set
up your cheap and accessible public transportation.
5TimS10y
In practice, desire to implement reform-from-within is a strong negative to
promotion to positions that could implement the change. If the organization
thought your issue was a problem, they probably would address it without your
intervention. Since they don't, that means they don't agree that your issue is a
problem.
One could adopt a false persona for years to get the promotions to powerful
positions. But you still might not get the promotion. And do you want to be a
faithful cog in implementing bad policy in the meantime?
And even if you did, you still might not be in position to make the change you
want. With the benefit of hindsight, we know Gorbachev could and did make major
reforms. But could he have predicted that at the beginning of his career, even
if he wanted to?
4Kaj_Sotala10y
Also, if you adopt a false persona over a sufficiently long time, there's a risk
of that becoming your real persona.
0John_Maxwell10y
Spies do it all the time, right? Maybe this should be called the "infiltration
strategy" or something. Sounds sexier.
Although spies do have handlers whose entire career consists of guiding them in
their missions, and being a spy is what they are getting paid to do. That seems
like a decent amount of social pressure not to defect. I wonder what defection
rates for spies are like? What ways are spies selected for low defection
probability aside from being citizens of their home country? I've heard that the
NSA doesn't like to hire people who have smoked marijuana.
I'm wondering if CFAR ever tried to approach Rowling for a permission to get HPMoR monetized for charitable and transhumanist purposes, on whichever terms.
Probably safer to do that after HPMoR is finished. Otherwise there is a chance she would forward the letter to her lawyer, the lawyer would send a cease and desist letter to CFAR, and then what?
If the same thing happens after HPMoR is finished, it can be removed from web and shared among LW members in ways that give plausible deniability to CFAR. But you can't have plausible deniability while Eliezer continues to write new chapters.
JKR is on the record as no longer opposing non-slash fanfiction
[http://www.chillingeffects.org/fanfic/notice.cgi?NoticeID=522]:
so this is probably a bit paranoid. But I suppose your second paragraph makes
sense.
4Risto_Saarelma10y
A big part of the cease-fire between IP holders and fanfic authors is probably
the unwritten rule that the fanfic shall not be directly monetized.
8gwern10y
Sometimes written, too. For example, in Japanese doujins, we have the Touhou
Project/ZUN issuing an explicit license where Touhou creators are given
permission to do their thing, but if they want to sell their works outside a
convention like Reitaisai or a doujin-focused reseller like Toranoana, they have
to contact him and work out a licensing agreement.
It's a bit of a truism that you can't do micropayments to cover the true marginal cost of serving a webpage, adding a user to your service, or other Internet activities, because the gap between free and epsilon is psychologically larger than the gap between epsilon and a dollar. It occurs to me that this curious psychology seems to map onto a logarithmic utility in money: Clearly the difference between lim(x to zero)[log(x)] and log(epsilon) is larger than the difference between log(epsilon) and log(1) for any finite value of epsilon. I'm not sure if this actually explains anything, but I thought it was kind of neat.
Incidentally, I'm confused over the fact that so few sites or people seem to use
Flattr [https://flattr.com/], despite it basically solving this problem. (Well,
it's microdonations rather than micropayments, so you can't really require your
users to pay anything, but still.)
4RolfAndreassen10y
Which came first, the massive user base or the many clients? Looks like a
classic chicken-egg [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html]
problem to me.
Edit to add: Which being said, I just signed up for it as a creator. :)
2[anonymous]10y
I've not noticed websites I like using flattr, so I have no reason to sign up
for it.
Very few people use it, so it's not worth it for sites to sign up for it.
0[anonymous]10y
Can you tell where the microdonation comes from? It seems to me that you could
pull a kickstarter-like business model and promise goods/services in exchange
for a donation up front.
0Kaj_Sotala10y
People can choose to donate either anonymously or non-anonymously, so I guess
that it could work.
6ChristianKl10y
The interesting thing about that observation is that it's very much about how
the internet get's used in the West. In China where a lot of internet use
happens in internet cafés where uses pay the internet café by the hour
micropayments for virtual goods are used more frequently than in the West.
Additionally transaction costs are a big deal when it comes to micropayments.
Paypal's micromayment fee is 5% + $0.05 per transaction. If we would have cheap
micropayment there a chance that a greater ecosystem of services that need
micropayments can grow.
Bitcoin did promise being cheap but still have some substantial transaction
costs. On the other hand Ripple (https://ripple.com/ [https://ripple.com/])
provides the opportunity of a cost of $0.0001 per transaction.
0[anonymous]10y
Regarding Ripple, I thought that in the United States, financial institutions
were required to know their users' identities. I don't see how this isn't
blatantly illegal.
0ChristianKl10y
Two nodes in the Ripple network that trade trust each other know their
identities. The actual trade happens between those two nodes.
But even if they need to do more know-your-customer formalities I don't see why
that should push the price much higher.
Google Ventures does invest
[http://gigaom.com/2013/05/14/google-ventures-invests-in-opencoin-the-firm-behind-bitcoin-exchange-ripple/]
in the company behind Ripple, so they seem to believe it's legal.
1A1987dM10y
The inconvenience [http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/] of
setting up a payment method may play some role.
The desire to employ your Stoicism on a higher difficulty setting, coupled with the habit of seeing other people as obstacles can make you care less about other people. You root for them to be worse then they are. I used to wish that a gi
You can't control whether or not the girl will hit or insult you. As a result
hoping that she would do one of those things goes against stoicist ideals.
It's much better to seek out-of-comfort zone experiences where you can control
that you have the experience. Instead of depending on the bully in the bus to
provide an experience in which you can grow you can go and have fun dancing in
the bus.
A year ago I was in a personal development seminar that's partly about improving
one's charisma and finding the courage to do what one likes.
At the end of the day there's live music and most people just sit there
listening and watching the musicians. I went and danced in alone in front of
>200 people because I felt like dancing. I got a bunch of positive social
feedback for it.
Stoicism doesn't have to be about having no fun and doing nothing. It's rather
about reducing negative emotions.
2drethelin10y
It seems like the actual correct play would be to go and DO HARD THINGS. Those
will naturally more negative emotions and also be more useful.
0ChristianKl10y
Hard things where you are still in control.
But the amount of hard things that you can effectively do during a short bus
ride is limited.
I personally like standing in the bus without leaning on anything and read a
book. All stability that I need gets provided by standing on my own feet.
2Desrtopa10y
I've done this fairly often (I wouldn't call it particularly hard, but I'm used
to reading and walking at the same time, so I suppose that probably functions as
practice,) but I don't think it functions as useful practice for doing anything
else that I might plausibly have reason to do.
0ChristianKl10y
It's not super hard but it's harder than what most people do when they travel
via a bus. I would guess that it's harder than what most LessWrong readers do
when the travel via a bus. Realistically I don't think I will convince people on
lesswrong to go dancing in a bus in public transport.
It's an exercise that trains physical stability. I myself could see the
difference in my salsa dancing after doing it for a month. At the same time I
find that the physical activity makes my mind more alert and I can put more
cognitive resources the book better than I would by sitting down in the bus.
RSS feeds for user's comments seem to be broken with the update to how they display on the page. To see how, just look at eg. http://lesswrong.com/user/Yvain/overview/.rss . It contains a bunch of comments from other people than Yvain. This is pretty annoying, hope it's fixed soon. I'm subscribed to tens of users' comment feeds and it's the main way I read LW. Today all of those feeds got a bunch of spurious updates from the new other-people-comments on everyone's comments page.
Also, some months back there was another change to userpages and it broke all... (read more)
The subset of people who are Anki users and members of the competitive conspiracy might be interested in the Anki high score list addon I wrote: Ankichallenge
This suggests that studies about partisan confusion about truth are overblown. I haven't had a chance to look at the actual paper yet, but the upshot is that this study suggests that while there is a lot of prior evidence that people are likely to state strong factual errors supporting their own partisan positions, they are substantially less likely to occur when people are told they will be given money for correct statements. The suggestion is that people know (at some level) that their answers are false and are saying them more as signaling than anything else.
Alternative explanation: They're shutting up and multiplying.
Most people have gone through the education system. Most people know how to
guess the teacher's password. Most people have learned better than to assume
their answers will be counted correct just because they have (in their opinions)
good reasons for holding those answers.
Does putting an incentive on getting the answers "right" lead to "right"
answers, or does it lead to people answering the way they expect you to treat as
being right? My own educational history suggests the latter.
2[anonymous]10y
I can't parse this bit:
Going by the syntax, it seems like you're saying "that this study suggests that
all the studies [about certain things] are less likely to occur [under certain
circumstances]", i.e. the study you're talking about was about the frequency of
other types of studies. This doesn't seem to make sense.
1JoshuaZ10y
There are studies which show that people across the political spectrum answer
many factual questions in ways that don't reflect the factual data, and they do
so in ways that support their own political ideology if they were true. This
research shows that this effect goes down a lot when people are told they will
be paid for how many correct answers they give.
2[anonymous]10y
nod That doesn't seem to be a possible interpretation of your original sentence.
1JoshuaZ10y
Is the edited version better?
2[anonymous]10y
Yeah, the new version seems quite clear (except that this looks like a typo:
"people are likely to make likely to state strong factual errors").
Has anyone on LW compiled a list of books/subjects to read/learn that basically gives brings you through all the ideas discussed on LW?
The sequences are the obvious answer, but it's nice to go into subjects a little more in-depth, plus the sequences are somewhat frustrating to navigate (every article in the sequences has links to plenty of other articles, so it's hard to attack the sequences in linear fashion).
The most linear way to read Eliezer's Sequences is in chronological order by date of original posting, although it might not be the best way.
Mind you it will be a good approximation of the best way. His posting order was dominated by needing to explain requisite knowledge before explaining later concepts. Perhaps the most obvious optimisation when it comes to reading is just skipping the parts that aren't interesting.
Definitely - there's a lot of concepts that seem rather obvious to me, while
others take me a lot longer to wrap my head around, so I've been skipping the
ones that are really obvious to me.
1[anonymous]10y
this might resemble the kind of list you were looking for:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2un/references_resources_for_lesswrong/
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2un/references_resources_for_lesswrong/]
I want to improve my exposition and writing skills, but whenever I think "what do I know that I can explain to people that isn't explained well elsewhere?" not much comes to mind. I think that happens because it is hard to just do a search of everything that I know. The main topics that I know are math and rationality (mostly LW epistemic rationality, but also a little instrumental and LW moral philosophy). So I ask:
What is a topic in math or rationality that you wish were explained better or explained at a different level (casual, technical, etc... (read more)
I want to improve my exposition and writing skills, but whenever I think "what do I know that I can explain to people that isn't explained well elsewhere?" not much comes to mind
If improving your skills is your main goal, you should just write, regardless of whether better explanations already exist elsewhere. Actually, such explanations already existing could even be an advantage, as it provides you with feedback: after writing your own, you can look up existing ones and compare what you did better and what you did worse.
I see what you are saying, but I would be more motivated if it felt like I was
doing useful work, and I don't really know what to write about. So I kind of am
looking for inspiration/motivation and ideas.
5Qiaochu_Yuan10y
Are you sure? I wish this was what motivated me, but I've learned from writing
about math for awhile [http://qchu.wordpress.com/] that what I'm most motivated
to write about is precisely what I'm most curious about at the moment. The
usefulness of the writing has very little effect on my ability to actually
finish it. (For example, I think it would be really useful to write an
introduction to some of the material in Jaynes. But this hasn't motivated me to
actually do so yet.) You should try writing a few things first, of varying
usefulness and curiousness, and see which thing you actually feel motivated to
finish.
3Manfred10y
What do you really wish someone had explained to you 2 years ago?
0Fhyve10y
The two things that come to mind are things that I am still learning. General
category theory (rather than category theory for the purpose of x), and a higher
level structural and general viewpoint on Bayes (rather than basic articles on
how to compute Bayes theorem and what it means). Also something on what actually
happens when you extend mathematical logic using Bayesian probability. I could
probably start on the second one right now...
0maia10y
Writing about things you are still learning would probably be a great idea,
actually. It would likely help you learn them better (research shows that in
peer-to-peer tutoring, the tutors benefit more than tutees). And you can always
leave in placeholders that give you more to write about: "I don't know why this
is yet, but I'm going to look it up and write about it later."
You might also have an unfair advantage, in that since you have newly learned
it, you'll have a better perspective from which to explain it to people who
aren't familiar with the material.
2[anonymous]10y
If you want to practice writing, but you can't think of any fun (or... fun-like)
ways to practice writing, it may be a good idea to practice in a way that isn't
fun, instead of waiting for something fun to come along. If lack of motivation
turns out to be actually problematic, then searching for a more motivating topic
is a potential solution, but there are lots of other, potentially better
solutions.
3Qiaochu_Yuan10y
There are tools you can use to solve this problem! Have you tried mindmapping
everything you know, e.g. with FreeMind
[http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page]?
At least in math, many topics are explained well at some high level but not
explained well at a lower level. There's always more work to be done explaining
math to the general population; the gulf between what could be explained and
what has already been explained is absurd.
2Zaine10y
Pretend you're to have a conversation with a friend in which you need to explain
a topic before proceeding. Write your dialogue.
2NancyLebovitz10y
That seems like the wrong question to start with for casual writing. Some
version of it might make sense for academic publishing.
Is there some math you're having fun with that you'd like to try explaining?
If you'd like a great big project, how about rationality for people of average
intelligence?
0Fhyve10y
Why do you think that is a wrong question? I am mostly asking because I want
something interesting to write about, that I would be motivated to write.
The math that I am having fun with I don't know thoroughly enough to explain
(and I am learning it from a really good piece of exposition
[http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4221]).
The rationality one looks like fun, I will see if I can do some of it. First
step, hack it into pieces so I am not working on a massive supergoal project,
but a small project instead.
2NancyLebovitz10y
My guess was that it was a wrong question because it seems to stop you very
early.
If having your writing be useful is a primary motivation, then maybe "what do I
know well that I can explain to people which they aren't likely to have seen
already?" would be better.
Another might be "what's something interesting that I know well that a good many
people haven't heard of?".
I notice I am confused about Godel's theorem, and I'm hoping there are enough mathematically minded folks here to unconfuse me. :-)
My recollection from my undergraduate days is that Godel's theorem states that given any sufficiently powerful formal system (i.e. one powerful to encode Peano arithmetic) there are statements that can be made in that system that can neither be proven true nor proven false. I.e. the system is either incomplete or inconsistent, and generally incomplete is what seems to happen.
Here's what confused me: I've noticed several recent... (read more)
A bit of a long shot but I am a recent Psychology (BSc) Graduate who currently lives in London and is looking for a job. Does anyone know of any positions in the rationality sector (anywhere) or any science/research/anything else like that around London (or not) that I can look into? Or any other general advice, recommendations etc.
Naive evo-psych seems to imply that having a big family should make me more attractive, for two reasons: 1) it's evidence that my genes cause many surviving kids, 2) more people will share resources to help my kids survive. But that doesn't seem to work in real life. Why?
"Real life" doesn't even remotely resemble the ancestral environment. In the modern world, a big family is evidence about your cultural background, especially the relationship between your cultural background and contraception, and that might be a turn-off for some. This is the same kind of phenomenon that makes having extra fat evidence, in the ancestral environment, that you were good at acquiring food and other resources, but in the modern world it's evidence that you're poor or lack access to good food or lack self-control or whatever.
Yeah, saying "evo-psych doesn't work" is one way to answer my question :-)
5Qiaochu_Yuan10y
I mean, I'd rather say "evo-psych has a certain domain of applicability, and
also it's not the only force that shapes human behavior, and also most people
who try to apply evo-psych don't understand the evolutionary-cognitive boundary
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/yi/the_evolutionarycognitive_boundary/], and..."
It seems a little presumptuous to say "if I naively apply this idea, I get
something that looks wrong, therefore this is a dumb idea" instead of saying "if
I naively apply this idea, I get something that looks wrong, therefore I may
have applied it in a dumb way." Have you read an actual textbook on evolutionary
psychology?
6cousin_it10y
Nope. I was kind of hoping some expert would answer.
To reformulate the question, is there some easy way to see that my prediction is
wrong without going out and checking? The arguments in your first comment apply
to all of evo-psych equally. Your second comment mentioned the
"evolutionary-cognitive boundary" which doesn't seem to be what I want, unless
I'm missing something...
0Qiaochu_Yuan10y
It was an example of how people can incorrectly apply evolutionary psychology.
Anyway, despite my previous comment, it's not clear to me that your prediction
is in fact wrong.
2Douglas_Knight10y
Do you (not) observe this both with males and females?
Baboons are supposed to be a good model for human social structure, though not
as smart as apes. They are matrilocal, so they don't know how big the male's
family was. The female's status is largely determined by alliances, which are
made of family blocks. They do get some grooming work out of allies. They might
be able to get work out of low status females, who love to hold high status
babies, but the mothers don't trust them, perhaps out of fear for the baby,
perhaps out of fear of status contagion. Anyhow, since (2) is true, it's hard to
measure (1). But it is probably better to look at anthropological evidence than
baboons.
Large families mean low infant mortality and low maternal mortality. Low infant
mortality might be due to good genes, or good provisioning. A woman from a large
family might provide genetic protection against maternal mortality, but not a
man from a large family. If infant mortality is due to bad infant genes,
siblings testify to this kind of gene, but it might not be different from other
kinds of robustness that can be measured in adulthood. If it's paternal
provisioning, then maybe it's evidence that the man inherited dad strategy genes
(vs cad strategy), but hunter-gatherer couplings probably were not long term so
the large family is not highly informative. The farming environment seems like
it should select for the behavior you suggest, but people usually assume it
didn't last very long so didn't shape much.
0TimS10y
Why does evo. psych imply this result? The fact that you can spawn healthy
children may make you more attractive to an additional potential mate, but the
potential mate must also consider whether you can provide resources to support
additional children.
This seems like the opposite of what evo. psych would predict. Your relatives
might be willing to provide you more support if you have more kids, but why
would strangers be more willing to support you based on your reproductive
fitness? As for relatives of additional potential spouses, the considerations of
I discussed above still apply.
0moridinamael10y
Well, the more kids are in a family, the less resources can be allocated to each
child, all other things being equal. That said, it isn't obvious to me that your
premise is true. I have found that my esteem for somebody grows for some reason
when I learn they have siblings.
the thought experiment goes: 'Hey, suppose we have a radioactive particle that enters a superposition of decaying and not decaying. Then the particle interacts with a sensor, and the sensor goes into a superposition of going off and not going off. The sensor interacts with an explosive, that goes into a superposition of exploding and not exploding; which interacts with the cat, so the cat goes into a superposition of being alive and dead. Then a human looks at the cat,' and at this point Schrödinger stops, and goes,
Why, then, don't more people realize that many worlds is correct?
Note that you are using Eliezer!correct, not Physics!correct. The former is based on Bayesian reasoning among models with equivalent predictive power, the latter requires different predictive power to discriminate between theories. The problem with the former reasoning is that without experimental validation it is hard to agree on the priors and other assumptions going into the Bayesian calculation for MWI correctness. Additionally, proclaiming MWI "correct" is not instrumentally useful unless one can use it to advance physical knowledge.
'hey, maybe at that point half of the superposition just vanishes, at random, faster than light'
It's worse than that, actually. In some frames it means not just FTL but also back in time. But given that this is unmeasurable, it matters not in the slightest if you adopt the Physics!correct definition.
Note that the OP wasn't asking about physicists, but people... explicitly
"bright middle school children" for example.
It's certainly possible that the lack of differential predictive power or
experimental validation for MWI explains that, but I'm inclined to doubt it.
6shminux10y
Good point, I missed it in my original reading. Certainly "bright middle school
children" are unlikely to spontaneously discover the definition of correctness
which matches either Eliezer!correct or Physics!correct. Certainly it's still an
open issue for adult professionals.
-2Vratko_Polak10y
I am going to try and provide short answer, as I see it. (Fighting urge to write
about different levels of "physical reality".)
Many Words is an Interpretation. An interpretation should translate from
mathematical formalism towards practical algorithms, but MWI does not go all the
way. Namely, it does not specify the quantum state an Agent should use for
computation. One possible state agrees with "Schroedinger's experiment was
definitely set up and started", another state implies "cat definitely turned out
to be alive", but those certainties cannot occur simultaneously.
Bayesian inference in non-quantum physics also changes (probabilistic) state,
but we can interpret it as a mere change of our beliefs, and not a change in the
physical system. But in quantum mechanics, upon observation, the "objective"
state fitting our knowledge changes. MWI says "fitting our knowledge" is not a
good criterion of choosing quantum state to compute with (because no state can
be fitting enough, as example with Shroedinger's cat shows) and we should
compute with superposition of Agents. MWI may be more "objectively correct", but
it does not seem to be more "practical" than Copenhagen interpretation. So
physicists do like to cautiously agree with MWI, then wave hands, proclaim
"Decoherence!" and at the end use Copenhagen interpretation as before.
Introductory books emphasize experiments, and experimental results do not come
in form of superpositioned bits. So before student gets familiar enough with
mathematical formalism to think about detectors in superposition, Copenhagen is
already occupying slot for Interpretation.
Consider a circularly polarized standing wave with the electric field of the
form E=E0cos(kz)(cos(wt)x-hat - sin(wt)y-hat).
2Manfred10y
Ah, I see. They're offset along the z-direction, rather than in the x-y plane.
Huh.
5shminux10y
My mind was blown when I saw it first, so ingrained was the "fact" that E and B
are normal to each other for waves in vacuum. I had to recalculate B several
times before I believed it. Which makes me worried that some other physics
"facts" I now believe unquestioningly have similar holes.
I'd like to put out a call for anecdata, if I may:
Lately I've been wondering how much of a causal connection there is between happiness/fulfillment and willpower (or, conversely, akrasia) levels. I feel like I'm not especially fulfilled or happy in my life right now, and I can't help but feel intuitively that this is one cause of the difficulty I seem to have in focusing, concentrating, and putting effort into what I want to. However, I've no idea whether there's actually anything in this.
So: I guess I wondered if anyone has any personal accounts of (medi... (read more)
This is definitely the case according to my experiences and pretty much every
self-help text I've ever read. You might want to check out this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broaden-and-build
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broaden-and-build]
0sediment10y
I'll take a look; thanks pal.
3TheOtherDave10y
Well, I certainly find that the two are correlated... when my mood is low, I
don't get much done compared to when my mood is elevated.
Whether that's because getting things done influences my mood (and something
else influences my productivity), or whether my mood influences my productivity
(and something else influences my mood), or whether neither is true (and
something else influences both), or various combinations, is harder to tease
out.
My impression is that all three are true at different times.
0sediment10y
Right. It figures that causation would go the other way, at least - that the
presence of akrasia would cause bad mood. Indeed, akrasia is pretty much defined
as that which makes you unhappy, right?
2falenas10810y
When I have above usual levels of productivity, I'm moderately happier than the
norm. When I have below usual levels, I'm much unhappier than normal.
0[anonymous]10y
I've noticed the converse seems to be true in me, at least to a degree: getting
useful work done causes me to feel happier. I have not noticed happiness causing
me to get more useful work done.
0CAE_Jones10y
I have noticed both, but happiness does seem to improve more after the start of
useful work than useful work improves after an increase in happiness. I might
describe it as certain types of work requiring a threshold level of happiness to
initiate, among other requirements.
I've been noticing this tendency for years and trying to use it to my advantage
(much to the annoyance of all the mainstream types who only inquire into my
methods when they fail). A particular anecdote that comes to mind is how, after
weeks of not managing to care enough to complete any assignments for a course
that I like so little as to have since given up on, I discovered HPMoR, which I
read in one sitting, other than the ten minutes in the middle where I stopped to
complete one of these assignments.
Happiness in / Happiness out, so to speak, except that happiness is obviously
not the only activation condition, so attempting to use it without the others
present just wastes happiness. (The trouble is how one goes about recognizing
the necessary activation conditions for useful work and their presence/absence
so as to avoid wasting happiness unnecessarily.)
0[anonymous]10y
Interesting. My correlations go in the opposite direction.
I'm interested. If you plan on posting semi-regularly or irregularly, please
consider adding an RSS feed. It's the only way to follow sites that don't have a
regular update schedule.
0Thomas10y
I did it, hope it works.
2ZankerH10y
Nope, it seems you've added the RSS feed of http://hexahost.com/blogs
[http://hexahost.com/blogs] , http://hexahost.com/blogs/?feed=rss2
[http://hexahost.com/blogs/?feed=rss2]
0Thomas10y
True, it's a mess right now...
1tut10y
Please add it to the list of blogs by LWers in the wiki.
1Thomas10y
Thank you, I did.
0Bruno_Coelho10y
I've see only a math post. Do you plan to write in what kind of topics?
0Thomas10y
Math, physics, coding, strategy games, conflicts, the (near) future as I see it,
promoting some contrarian views.
I don't approve many common views, I think I can see through several established
misconceptions. Still, I could be wrong now and then.
2sanddbox10y
If you think you're only wrong "every now and then", then you haven't really
learned much from LW.
3Thomas10y
Good point. To avoid being wrong, one may restrict himself to write about common
accepted things, like 2+2=4. What is boring.
But I will say something very controversial. Like "faster rotating planets are
warmer than slowly rotating, everything else equal". Most people "know" it is
the other way around. Then I will try to decompose this statement to some well
known and thus boring facts.
Risky strategy I know.
0sanddbox10y
Oh, don't get me wrong (no pun intended) - I don't think it's a bad thing to be
frequently wrong. It's only bad to a) refuse to change your opinion and b) not
realize you're wrong.
FWIW, most of my pages on gwern.net seem like they'd count as 'long texts', but
my just concluded font A/B test using 2 sans-serif and 2 serif fonts doesn't see
any difference in reading time when you split by serif:
http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts [http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#fonts]
-2A1987dM10y
That only tests for the averages AFAICT -- there might well be people who read
serif fonts faster and people who read sans-serif fonts faster.
4gwern10y
Since I don't know whether I like the Big Endians or Little Endians, I only care
about the average.
Anyone have a good idea of where to park an "emergency fund" type account, and especially resources that talk about this? Most of my money is sitting in a checking account right now, which I have realized is not so good, but I want to keep most of it liquid (and the remainder might not be enough to start an index fund account with Vanguard).
You only need an emergency fund if you do not have access to credit at reasonable terms. Investments you don't touch outside of emergencies coupled with open lines of credit should outperform excessive "emergency" savings. After all, lines of credit are typically free when you don't use or need them, while not getting the best rate of return on your savings isn't.
Surely the relevant question is whether I'm likely to not have access to credit
at reasonable terms during an emergency, no?
4ThrustVectoring10y
I don't really see many emergencies that can be handled by cash but not by a
loan for cash. If you're solvent and people want dollars later, then they will
lend you money. If you're not solvent, then whether your immediate liquidity is
in credit or cash doesn't make a big difference since you're still not solvent.
If nobody wants dollars later (say, asteroid), then it's unlikely that having
dollars now is going to fix any emergencies.
4Lumifer10y
I don't find that obvious. There is a whole host of issues here, starting with
time constraints (e.g. you need money within 24 hours and you can get a loan in
five business days) and ending with information asymmetry issues of which
lenders are acutely cognizant ("you say you're solvent, but can you prove it?").
If your "access to credit" is a couple of credit cards, yeah, you can get cash
fast enough but the terms are rarely what I'd call "reasonable". If you'd
actually need a new loan or a line of credit... I don't think I would want to
rely on that in an emergency.
0ThrustVectoring10y
How often do you really need money within 24 hours? If you can't get the cash
within a day, what bad consequences are going to happen?
If it's a purchase under $5000, then you can handle it with a credit card. You
then have 21 days to come up with the money or else pay 20% APR. That's plenty
of time if you have, say, stocks you can sell. For larger purchases, you can
either save for it with an explicit plan, or negotiate a payment plan.
0Lumifer10y
In an emergency I expect to need money right now, on the time scale of hours.
1ThrustVectoring10y
How many times have you needed money immediately in your life, and how much
money have you needed for those incidents? Personally, I do not recall ever
spending more than a hundred dollars without at least a day's warning. Then
again, I don't own a car, which is a big cause for emergency spending - but
really that ought to have it's own fund treated as self-insurance.
1Lumifer10y
Well, if you want to approach this properly... :-)
...then you'll need to evaluate the probability density of situations in your
life where not having a certain amount of cash on hand will lead to severely
negative outcomes (aka high costs). I expect that you'll have much difficulty in
trying to form a reasonable estimate (see Nassim Taleb and the general Black
Swan concept). Notably, limited amount of historical data (as in, e.g. your
personal experience) is not all that good a basis for estimations.
There is also a whole bunch of other factors in play -- do you have kids? do you
travel much? outside of the US? etc. etc.
0[anonymous]10y
What sort of emergency do you have in mind?
0Lumifer10y
Example 1: medevac.
Example 2: You live up north, it's winter, and your house's heating just died.
If you don't fix it by the time the house cools down to below freezing, some of
your water pipes will burst.
0[anonymous]10y
Maybe you could drain all your pipes in the latter case. But I imagine there are
other emergencies, of course.
0TheOtherDave10y
That's fair. I'd been thinking about the general class of "people who need money
now for an emergency," many of whom find it difficult to secure credit, rather
than the class of "people who have a lot of wealth in non-liquid forms who need
money now for an emergency," who presumably don't.
2ThrustVectoring10y
I was thinking more in terms of "there's an expenses function e(t), and a cash
availability function s(t), and a cost function f( e(t) - s(t) ), and this cost
function is zero at e(t)-s(t) = 0, but is a lot softer at e(t) > s(t) than
people fear due to credit cards and lines of credit, and can be quite costly at
s(t) >> e(t)"
Except that e(t) and s(t) really should be probability distributions, but that
just hurts my head to try and explain coherently. This is literally my fourth
attempt at writing up a better description of the reasoning behind my posts.
If e(t) is slightly bigger than s(t), you borrow money from credit cards or
other lines of credit at poor interest rates, then pay off those debts in the
however many days it takes to get liquid cash from other sources (say, stocks).
If e(t) is much bigger than s(t), then you negotiate a payment plan or suffer
the consequences of not being able to pay expenses right now.
And of course there's the time costs in optimizing this sort of thing. A
percentage point for a thousand dollars over a year comes out to ten dollars,
which I roughly approximate as an hour of time. Which means that you probably
ought to spend your optimization power on minimizing the amount of work you need
to put into your finances. Which, in turn, means automatic bill payment, and
regular transfers of excess cash from your checking account into your preferred
investment account.
2syllogism10y
I've been doing this wrong, and this advice will likely save me a few thousand
dollars. Thanks.
2A1987dM10y
I have a partly irrational aversion to owing money, which I maybe should edit
out of myself.
2Eliezer Yudkowsky10y
This is a really good point that I can't believe I never thought of before.
0Lumifer10y
That assumes there is price for liquidity which you are paying. I am not sure
this is the case for most normal people (as opposed to, say, those who invest
into private equity) now because other than real estate most other available
investments are quite liquid.
Essentially, most of people's investments are bank accounts and market
securities (again, real estate is the big exception). Liquidity shouldn't be an
issue here.
2ThrustVectoring10y
For recent college graduates, their best investment opportunity is early
repayment of their student loans. It's essentially guaranteed 4-5% return
(whatever their loan rate happens to be). Note that this "investment" is
completely illiquid.
1gwern10y
Hm, is it really? If you're paying back your loans early, couldn't you then, in
case of need, cease paying for a time equivalent to how much you paid and then
resume paying? You'd just be right back on schedule.
4elharo10y
It depends on the terms of the loan. Some loans may allow you to skip payments
if you're ahead. Most I've seen don't though. But either way, if you need $5000
cash right now because your significant other ran their car into someone's
living room and you need to pay bail and a lawyer, or the levees are collapsing
and you have to split town, you can't get the $5000 back from an early repaid
loan.
0ThrustVectoring10y
Your loan may vary. For me, all it does is give me a few extra dollars a month.
0Lumifer10y
That's often but not necessarily true, especially on a post-tax basis (and
especially if your alternative is putting money into tax-advantaged vehicle like
401(k) or IRA).
0maia10y
A very good point, and I've considered that. So far I have a very short credit
history (I am young and haven't had much time to establish one), so the interest
on the credit card I have is quite high and the limit is (relatively) low.
There's some possibility I could borrow from my parents, but I'd prefer not to
depend on that too much.
2ThrustVectoring10y
The particular advice I gave is less relevant to young people, since they have
less savings and tend to have better investment opportunities in terms of paying
off student loan and other long-term debt. Paying off student loans is
effectively an investment that you can never sell back for ready cash, so you'd
need savings in something that's actually somewhat liquid.
More on point, if you don't have access to enough emergency credit, that is the
perfect reason to essentially have a self-insurance fund. That fund should cover
perhaps a couple thousand dollars - anything more than that and you can
typically work out a payment plan or tap your less-liquid investments.
0elharo10y
Eric Tyson's Personal Finances for Dummies
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1118117859/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA]
discusses this. He recommends putting your emergency fund into a tax-free money
market with check writing privileges. I keep about 2-3% of my liquid assets in
such an account, and maybe another 2% in checking and savings accounts at
regular banks (one online, plus two local banks in locations where I live and
work.) However the percentages aren't as important as the absolute numbers. You
need a local account (or a fire-resistant safe that's rated for at least 60
minutes against tools and torch) for when you need a lot of cash right away, and
enough cash across your cash accounts for maybe six months of living expenses.
Lines of credit can be useful, but banks do have an annoying habit of cancelling
them at the worst possible times; e.g. when the whole economy is imploding as it
did in 2008 and clients aren't paying their bills either.
0NancyLebovitz10y
Typo: the link doesn't work, and the link title should be "Personal Finance for
Dummies".
0elharo10y
fixed. Thanks.
0wubbles10y
Some banks offer money market accounts, or even a savings account might be a
good idea.
6wmorgan10y
I was on the subway the other day and Sovereign Bank had bought up all the ad
spots advertising in big print "MONEY MARKET ACCOUNT. 0.6% APY. $100,000
MINIMUM." The interest rate offered on a smaller deposit is presumably less than
that, and yet the bank thought this deal would be appealing enough to advertise.
This makes a year of "emergency fund" holdings in a money market account
approximately worth the change in the couch. I don't see how that's enough of a
difference from a checking account to worry about.
5huh10y
Capitol One offers savings accounts yielding 0.75% APY with no minimum deposit.
I've used them for over 10 years with no hassles. Your general point about low
yields still applies, though.
I would estimate an opportunity cost of 3 hours per year to set up the account,
shuffle money around, periodically monitor the balance, and pay taxes on the
interest. This opportunity cost will vary depending on how efficient one is with
paperwork. Whether this is worthwhile depends on the size of the emergency fund
and the alternative options for increasing marginal income via an equivalent
time investment.
0[anonymous]10y
For what it's worth, a money market fund might also be a good idea. It looks
like historically, it has been extremely rare for a money market fund to
decrease in value.
Does anyone have anything to say or have any links regarding mortality salience, existentialism, or determinism as a source of motivation? Traditionally these are seen as a hindrance to motivation and may lead to fatalism and existential angst.
This previous post is the type of discussion I am looking for. Can confrontation of mortality and existential catharsis lead to motivation and hack akrasia?
Here's one answer.
In the summer of 1922, the Paris weekly newspaper L'Intrasigeant posed as their
"Man on the street" question
"An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such
a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that
death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this
prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people
between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment
of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you're concerned, what would you do in this
last hour?"
The novelist Marcel Proust responded:
"I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to
die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies,
it -- our life -- hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain
of a future, delays them incessantly.
But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would
become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss
visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss
X, making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves
back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we
shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been
enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening."
1shminux10y
I suspect that without mortality salience I would have more trouble getting out
of bed and doing something useful every morning. Or I would just play games
forever.
I'm wondering if the following statement is true: The word "ought" means whatever we ought to believe that it means.
Now, certainly, that statement could be false. There could be a society whose code of ethics states that you must disagree with the code of ethics. But I'm asking whether or not it is false, for us actual humans. And it might be false if you take "we" to mean someone like Adolf Hitler: perhaps Hitler professed his actual beliefs about ethics, and people nowadays think Hitler was so horrible that if Hitler believed somethin... (read more)
For a reflectively consistent
[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reflective-equilibrium/] person (let's call
her Alice), the word "ought" according to Alice means whatever Alice ought
according to Alice believe that it means.
I think this Noah Smith disquisition on "derp" might be a useful thing to refer people to when one gets tired of referring them to PITMK. It crystalizes for me why I find a lot of political commentary unbearable to read/listen to.
Politics is the mind killer for a variety of reasons besides ridiculously strong
priors that are never swayed by evidence. Strong priors isn't even the entirety
of the phenomena to be explained (though it is a big part), let alone a
fundamental explanation.
Also, I really like Noah's post (and was about to post it in the current open
thread before I found your post). Not only did Noah attach a word to a pretty
commonly occurring phenomenon, the word seems to have a great set of
connotations attached to it, given some goals about improving discourse.
0FiftyTwo10y
PITMK?
0Vaniver10y
Most likely Politics Is The Mind-Killer
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/].
Max Tegmark will be giving a talk, "The future of life: a cosmic perspective”, on June 10 at 12:30pm. The event is open to the public and free of charge, and will take place on the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Department of Physics, 20 Parks
Road, Oxford OX1 3PU (Google maps). More details here.
For those who believe that the US is a democracy in the sense that public policy is an aggregate of public opinion, how do you deal with the fact that 42% of the US population don't know that Obamacare is actually law?
If the population doesn't even know about the easy facts, how do you expect a democracy in which public policy is driven by public discourse to work?
I'm currently in a weeklong design meeting. On Monday, the guy leading the
meeting proposed a schedule for what we were doing when, in which my
presentation was Monday, a likely followup for my presentation was Friday, and
various other things were true. Some people objected, and he changed some stuff,
though not those two things. Nobody objected to it, and it's the schedule we're
using.
I have no idea what we're going to do this afternoon or tomorrow, and I was
surprised by what we did yesterday and this morning. At no time have I ever
known, I didn't bother to listen when it was announced. I don't care what we
discuss when, as long as I know when my topics are so I can prep.
Still, I'm happy to say that our schedule is an aggregate of public opinion.
Would you disagree?
I approach public policy in a democracy similarly. Sure, most of us don't know
anything about anything, but I'm not sure how much that really matters.
That being said, I'm also not sure how much I endorse public policy driven by
public discourse. "Worst system in the world except for everything else we've
ever tried" comes to mind.
0ChristianKl10y
By that definition the political decisions in most non-democratic states are
also driven by public opinion.
2TheOtherDave10y
Maybe; I'm not sure.
I mean, these terms are fuzzy, but to continue with my analogy... consider the
following (tiny subset of all) possible processes:
* [A] "the guy leading the meeting proposed a schedule, and that's the schedule
we're using; there was no opportunity to object nor any expectation of such
an opportunity."
* [B] "the guy leading the meeting proposed a schedule, some people objected,
he changed some stuff, nobody objected, and that's the schedule we're using;
most people paid no attention and don't really care"
* [C] "everyone in the room was asked to propose a schedule, the various
proposed schedules were merged in some standardized fashion and a composite
schedule was generated; we're using the composite schedule"
I would say there's some property P() for which P(A) < P(B) < P(C) where P()
bears some relationship (perhaps partially homologous, perhaps simply analogous)
to what we're calling "democracy" here. At some point it's a question of where
we draw a fairly arbitrary threshold line.
I'm inclined to draw the line such that B and C are both "democratic" and A is
not.
It seems to me that you're drawing the line such that only C is "democratic."
If I'm correct, then I guess my answer to your question is "I don't believe the
US is a democracy, nor do I endorse it being one; I can't imagine what a
democracy comprising human minds would even look like."
I suspect I'm misunderstanding you, though.
0ChristianKl10y
I'm interested in power. A and B describe outcomes.
It makes a difference whether the person who leads the meeting changes the
schedule when objections happen because he's nice or because he if forced to
change.
When it comes to Obamacare I don't think the issue is that 42% of the US
population don't care about it. From my perception of US politics a lot of
people in the US care a great deal about the issue.
It's a problem when you can better convince the voting public by buying TV ads
then you can convince them through good policy.
0Randy_M10y
Could be that your perception is not of the same group of people as don't know
it is law when polled.
0ChristianKl10y
72%
[http://www.yourblackworld.net/2012/02/black-politics-2/gallup-poll-finds-72-of-americans-believe-obamacare-is-unconstitional/]
of American seem to believe that it's unconstitutional so they care to some
extend about it.
0TheOtherDave10y
Yes, I would agree that regardless of what label we assign to the U.S. political
system, power is not equally distributed within it, and the people "leading the
meeting" are not reliably (or typically) "nice," and policy selected for some
goal other than being convincing typically isn't as convincing as well-designed
propaganda.
3Kaj_Sotala10y
Note that this isn't particularly specific to the US. The situation is pretty
much the same in every country, AFAIK.
(Usual informational hazard warning to attract attention. Warning before compulsory dedicating your attention: it's only the usual hazard. (Collective disappointed sigh))
Interesting smackd..., ah, discussion, between XiXiDu and Aris Kats Aris. If the link doesn't work, it's the Google+ discussion also linked to from the top of this blog post.
A small note: "Katsaris" is my last name and a single word, it doesn't split
into "Kats Aris". :-)
7Kawoomba10y
Your name is an anagram goldmine ripe for a bonanza. From the litany "as a Sir
Tarski" to my "sis, Aria Stark" (works just phonetically), your name implies a
role "as AI Risk tsar".
I'd really like it if someone could explain to me what Aaronson is saying here:
I've often heard the argument which says that not only is there no free will, but the very concept of free will is incoherent. Why? Because either our actions are determined by something, or else they're not determined by anything, in which case they're random. In neither case can we ascribe them to "free will."
For me, the glaring fallacy in the argument lies in the implication Not Determined ⇒ Random. If that was correct, then we couldn't have complexity classes lik
Aaronson is just trying to make the point that it's possible to make a formal
distinction between nondeterminism and randomness. Mathematically, a
nondeterministic function is a function that returns a set of values rather than
a value, and a random function is a function that returns a probability
distribution over values rather than a value. The fact that we can make such a
formal distinction suggests that we ought to also be able to make an informal
distinction.
0[anonymous]10y
Well, he's saying that. I don't know which part of this is the part you're
having trouble with.
5smk10y
I was confused by the way he was using the term "non-determinism". Then I read
this:
-Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange
[http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/632/what-is-the-difference-between-non-determinism-and-randomness]
Assuming that person was correct, then it seems like Aaronson is responding to
an argument that uses the physics sense of "non-determined", but replying with
the CS sense--which I'm thinking makes a difference in this case. But that's
just what it seems like to me--I must be misunderstanding something (probably a
lot of things).
4ESRogs10y
This was my feeling as well, that Aaronson was inappropriately using the
technical definition of "nondeterministic" from CS in a context where that
wasn't the intended meaning.
People who are nervous and unsure about learning a new skill are often advised to "fake it till you make it." That has never been very helpful for me; I think I concentrate on the "fake" part too much, which just makes me nervous that any moment the jig will be up.
Anyway, there's an older, simpler way to express the same idea, which works much better: I'm practicing. It's not fake, it's just practice. Thinking that way makes me want to get back to work, instead of worry about getting caught; after all, I'm not doing anything wrong.
Fairly banal once I write it down, but it's been helpful.
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
In a competitive and efficient market, he'll profit on average to the tune of
the risk-free interest rate (~2% or so now) but higher since renting is not
risk-free. So you could start by figuring out his risks in renting out to you.
5AspiringRationalist10y
The real estate market is far from efficient. Transaction costs are very high
and good data is hard to come by. I think a bottom-up approach would be far more
accurate than an economics-based approach that uses assumptions that are
extremely inaccurate for this situation.
4RolfAndreassen10y
Hang on, his return on his capital may be the risk-free rate plus risk
compensation, but Omid's $1000/month is not the landlord's capital, it's his
revenue! Unless you have a good way of mapping rent payments onto the amount of
capital tied up in the building, I don't see how your answer is useful.
-2gwern10y
Revenue from a renter is simply investment income, and we'd expect the income
from an apartment-bond to, like any other investment, be squeezed down to equal
other investments after adjusting for risk and diversification and taxes etc.
2RolfAndreassen10y
Yes. I do not see how this answers my objection. You still have not provided a
way of dividing up the $1000 into money used for maintenance and money taken out
as profit, which was the original question. All you've said is that the second
component should be equal to 3% or so of the investment; since we have no idea
what the investment was, this is unhelpful.
The investment income is the revenue from the renter less expenses in running
the building.
3ThrustVectoring10y
There's also a non-obvious positive risk, too. Specifically, the appreciation of
real estate prices. If the landlord owns a $120k house that they expect to
increase in value 1%/year over their mortgage rate, then that's another
$100/month that the landlord doesn't have to get in rent.
In other words, the landlord is holding an equity position in the real estate
they are leasing to you. This equity position can appreciate, giving a
non-rent-collection profit source that increases the price they are willing to
pay for the real estate in the first place, lowering their profit as a
percentage of capital invested.
0gwern10y
But it can also fall, as we witnessed not too many years ago... Any speculation
on real estate will already have been priced in and the expected profit from
buying a house minimal.
0ThrustVectoring10y
To borrow your phrasing - in a competitive and efficient market, the expected
profit from buying a house is equal to the risk-free interest rate. So my math
actually was rather bogus - I should have talked about how the landlord should
expect his $20k equity stake to appreciate at the risk-free interest rate (~2%),
which would shave $400/year off the amount of collected rent needed to justify
the house price in the first place.
4Vaniver10y
Based on guidelines I've come across, I would be surprised if it were much more
than $50, and that's generally the estimate without taking into account the
costs of not renting out the property if you can't find tenants.
I have a question. Assume that non-profit MIRI develops a fAGI (I like the acronym this way). They realise they can use the fAGI to generate profit. Taking for granted they only wish to make enough profit to sustain the institution free of donor-support, would they then be able to switch to a for-profit institution, despite having created the fAGI while non-profit?
Everyone has found a way around the question; I asked it poorly, so I'll be clearer: if a piece of technology is developed at an institution dependent upon donations from private individuals t... (read more)
I have a question. Assume that non-profit MIRI develops a fAGI (I like the acronym this way). They realise they can use the fAGI to generate profit. Taking for granted they only wish to make enough profit to sustain the institution free of donor-support, would they then be able to switch to a for-profit institution, despite having created the fAGI while non-profit?
If MIRI (or anyone else) create an AGI that is friendly to them they can do whatever they goddamn please.
Nitpick:
They might not be able to do some things they want to do, but wouldn't want to
want to do. But I agree that "making a profit" would no longer be a concern.
This does not seem obvious to me. Humans have a strong competitive drive; I do
not see why profit should necessarily drop out of a post-Friendly Singularity
society, even if what we buy with our Shiny Future Moniez are perhaps status
goods. Moreover, considerations of acausal trade to increase the probability of
AI being Friendly seem to suggest that its inventors should get some sort of
reward. This said, it is of course not clear that such a profit would be taken
out in US dollars.
-1TimS10y
Let's taboo "nonprofit." If a tax deductible charity starts making more than de
minimis business profit, the charity is no longer eligible to offer tax
deductions. But the purpose and mission of any charity is not tied to its tax
status. In fact, there are many charities that haven't procedurally qualified to
give tax deduction for donations.
But as others have said, I'm not sure why this would be a problem if MIRI had a
foom fAGI.
Per a discussion on IRC, I am auctioning off my immortal soul to the highest bidder over the next week. (As an atheist I have no use for it, but it has a market value and so holding onto it is a foolish endowment effect.)
The current top bid is 1btc ($120) by John Wittle.
Details:
- I will provide a cryptograpically-signed receipt in explicit terms agreeing to transfer my soul to the highest bidder, signed with my standard public key. (Note that, as far as I know, this is superior to signing in blood since DNA degrades quickly at room temperature, and a matching blood type would both be hard to verify without another sample of my blood and also only weak evidence since many people would share my blood type.)
- Payment is preferably in bitcoins, but I will accept Paypal if really needed. (Equivalence will be via the daily MtGox average.) Address:
- The auction will close at 4:40 PM EST, 13 June 2013
- My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern (over which I continue to claim copyright); transfer does not cover any souls of gwerns in altern
... (read more)17twxmShN3p6rsAyYC6UsERfhT5XFs9fUG(existing activity)Just increased my subjective probability that John Wittle is Satan.
I am really disappointed in you, gwern. Why would you use an English auction when you can use an incentive-compatible one (a second price auction, for example)? You're making it needlessly harder for bidders to come up with valuations!
(But I guess maybe if you're just trying to drive up the price, this may be a good choice. Sneaky.)
Having read about auctions before, I am well-aware of the winner's curse and expect coordination to be hard on bidding for this unique item.
Bwa ha ha! Behold - the economics of the damned.
Sorry to ruin the fun but I'm afraid this sale is impossible. Gwern lacks the proprietary rights to his own soul. As the apostle St Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians (chapter 6), "Or know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body." It clearly states that "you are not your own" which at least applies to baptized Christians (and as a confirmed Catholic, it may even apply to a higher degree). Unless gwern provides some scriptural basis for this sale, it cannot proceed. Even when Satan tempted Christ, the only proferred exchange was worship in return for temporal power. There are no cases (even hypothetical ones) of a direct sale of one's soul in the Church's Tradition.
In exchange for ruining this sale, I'll pray for your soul for free.
You are wrong about this - here's the inflection of the word: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B5%E1%BC%B0%CE%BC%CE%AF#Ancient_Greek
"ἐστε" is second person plural ("you are") NOT third person singular ("it is").
applause
A tactic that almost definitely should be referred to as "Gabriel's Horn."
Note that if you can get a high price from Satan on your own soul (e.g. rulership of a country), this is a no-lose arbitrage deal since souls are fungible goods.
What? This is lame. The definition of the soul as used by 16th century Catholic theology, which is friendly to information theory, is clearly the common sense interpretation and assumed among reasonable people. Sure some moderns love the definition you use but they are mostly believers of moralistic therapeutic deism, one hardly needs more evidence of their lack of theological expertise.
Not sure how much I can trust the word of a damned. After all, lying is no more of a mortal sin than apostasy. And for an atheist there is no extra divine punishment for lying.
One person who did this years ago spun the event into a book, a popular blog, and endless speaking gigs.
That's an interesting comparison, but I'm selling my soul, and it looks like he was just selling his time:
If you can find evidence that they are correct, you could have a fraud claim. However, the contract defines the soul being sold as that described by the Judeo-Christian philosophers.
I am confused. This Washington Post article appears to describe a preliminary study which suggests that politics is less of a mindkiller if you ask people to bet money on their beliefs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/03/if-you-pay-them-money-partisans-will-tell-you-the-truth/
And I am confused because what appear to be my attempts to find the paper resulted in two papers with entirely different abstracts. And papers. Example:
Abstract 1:
"Our conclusion is that the apparent gulf in factual beliefs between members of different parties may be more illusory than real."
Abstract 2:
"Partisan gaps in correct responding are reduced only moderately when incentives are offered, which constitutes some of the strongest evidence to date that such patterns reflect sincere differences in factual beliefs."
http://huber.research.yale.edu/materials/39_paper.pdf
http://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bullockgerberhuber.pdf?343c0a
I realize the dates on the papers are different, but the shifts seem very dramatic. Thoughts?
I scraped the last few hundred pages of comments on Main and Discussion, and made a simple application for pulling the highest TF-IDF-scoring words for any given user.
I'll provide these values for the first ten respondents who want them. [Edit: that's ten]
EDIT: some meta-information - the corpus comprises 23.8 MB, and spans the past 400 comment pages on Main and Discussion (around six months and two and a half months respectively). The most prolific contributor is gwern with ~780kB. Eliezer clocks in at ~280kB.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning I heard of a government initiative, "Books on Prescription". It's a list of self-help books drawn up by some committee as actually having evidence of usefulness, and which are to be made available in all public libraries. They give a list of evidence-based references.
General page for Books on Prescription.
The reading list.
The evidence, a list of scientific studies in the literature.
I have not read any of the books (which is why I'm not posting this in the Media Thread), but I notice from the titles that a lot of them are based on Cognitive Behavioural Techniques, which are generally well thought of on LessWrong.
The site also mentions a set of Mood-boosting Books, "uplifting novels, non-fiction and poetry". These are selected from recommendations made by the general public, so I would say, without having read any of them, of lesser expected value. FWIW, here's the list for 2012 (of which, again, I have read none).
Iain Banks is dead.
"They speak very well of you".
-"They speak very well of everybody."
"That so bad?"
-"Yes. It means you can´t trust them."
Improving my social skills is going to be my number one priority for a while. I don't see this subject discussed too much on LW, which is strange because it's one of the biggest correlates with happiness and I think we could benefit a lot from a rational discussion in this area. So I was wondering if anyone has any ideas, musings, relevant links, recommendations, etc. that could be useful for this. Stuff that breaks from the traditional narrative of "just be nicer and more confident" is particularly appreciated. (Unless maybe that is all it takes.)
Optional background regarding my personal situation: I am a 19 yo male (as of tomorrow) who is going to enter college in the fall. I'm not atrociously socially inadept, e.g. I can carry on conversations, can be very bold and confident in short bursts sometimes, I have some friends, I've had girlfriends in the past. However, I also find it very hard to make close friends that I can hang out with one on one, I sometimes find myself feeling like I'm taking a very submissive role socially, and I feel nervous or "in my head" a lot in social interactions, among other things. Not to be melodramatic, but I find myself wishing a decent amount that I had more friends and was more popular.
Discussion on lesswrong on that subject would most likely not be rational. Various forms of idealism result in mind killed advice giving which most decidedly is not optimized for the benefit of the recipient.
Get out of your house, go where the people are and interact with them. Do this for 4 hours per day for a year (on top of whatever other incidental interactions your other activities entail). If "number one priority" was not hyperbole that level of exertion is easily justifiable and nearly certain to produce dramatic results. (Obviously supplementing this with a little theory and tweaking the environment chosen and tactics used are potential optimisations. But the active practice part is the key.)
No, no, no, this was a bad explanation on my part. No one told me that dancing lessons are bad idea per se... only that my specific learning style is.
This is what works best for me: Show me the moves. Now show me those moves again very slowly, beat by beat. Show me separately what feet do; then what hands and head do. Tell me at which moment which leg supports the weight (I don't see it, and it is important). When and how exactly do I signal to my girl what is expected from her. (In some rare situations, to get it, I need to try her movements, too.) I still don't get it, but be patient with me. Let me repeat the first beat, and tell me what was wrong. Again, until it is right. Then the second beat. Etc. Then the whole thing together. Now let's do the same thing again, and again, and again, exactly the same way. Then something "clicks" in my head, and I get the move... and since that moment I can lead, improvise, talk during dance, whatever. -- As a beginner I was blessed with a partner who didn't run away screaming somewhere in the middle of this. Later my learning became faster, partially because I learned to ask the proper questions. And I had a good luck to dancing tea... (read more)
These days PUA refers to so many things that I need to be more specific. The sources that helped me were "The Mystery Method" by Mystery, "How To Become An Alpha Male" by Carlos Xuma, "Married Man Sex Life" by Athol Kay. I would also recommend "The Blueprint Decoded" by RSD.
Yes, there are many sources that only tell you "do this, do that, and if it does not work, just do it again". I guess this is what most customers want: "Don't bother me with explanations, just give me a quick fix!" This is how most people approach everything. Well, if there is a demand for something, the market will provide a product. And these days it is a huge business. Ten years ago, it was more like geeks experimenting and sharing their results and opinions... a bit similar to Quantified Self today, just less scientific, and sometimes more narrowly focused.
Overcoming aversion to rejection, doing many approaches to convert given rates of success into greater absolute numbers, doing something extraordinary to stand out of the crowd... those are the fixes. Applied incorrectly they could be even harmful. (Receiving a lot of rejection can make you more r... (read more)
I needed fewer than 13 bits of evidence: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/
I likely committed some level of base-rate fallacy though (regardless of what the truth turns out to be). Trans* is more available to me because I hang out in queer communities, and know multiple transgender people.
Suppose the placebo effects exists; if you believe you will get better, then you will indeed get recover.
Unfortunately, it only works if you believe you will get better - and it could be hard to see why it'd be rational to believe that in the first place. Fortunately, rationalists have a solution to this problem.
We're scientific sorts of people, so we believe in the placebo effect - that is:
and we're also logical sort of people, so we believe lob's theorem
and hence we believe we'll be healed
and hence, by the placebo effect,
And we're healed!
I have been constantly thinking recently: Your voice impacts a lot in your presentation, and it's one of those things that people generally take for granted. And it's not just your speak pattern and filler words that I'm referring to, but also intonation, fluency and so on. I would maybe risk saying that it can be as important as your appearance, or even more. (If you stumble every five or ten words, you can't really convey your ideas, can you?)
In this vein, is there a viable alternative for someone who wants to improve his own voice? I already thought about a voice acting tutor, but I generally prefer ways in which I could improve without having to pay a tutor.
A lifehack idea: using oxytocin to counteract ugh fields:
Ugh fields might be a form of an amygdala hijack.
Oxytocin is known to dampen amygdala's 'fight, flight or freeze' responses.
Oxytocin production is increased during bonding behaviors (e.g. parent-child, pets, snuggling / Karezza).
If 1, 2 and 3 are true, we could reduce the effect of an ugh field by petting a dog, hugging a baby or snuggling (but not orgasming) with a lover -- before confronting the task that induces the ugh field.
Disclaimer: I am not a brain scientist, so the terminology, logic and the entire idea may be wrong.
Reminder: Boston is hosting a megameetup on July 13-14.
So on the topic of effective altruism, I've been thinking about the benefits of a "can't beat 'em? join 'em" type strategy for improving the world. Examples:
- Wish South Africa would stop apartheid? Don't protest it, there will be lots of people doing that. Instead, try to gain power within the South African government and become F. W. de Klerk. (Arguably that role is more noble anyway, since you'd be relinquishing power instead of trying to gain power for yourself and people like you.)
- Want to make China a democracy? Join the communist part
... (read more)Jaan Tallinn AMA on reddit.
I'm wondering if CFAR ever tried to approach Rowling for a permission to get HPMoR monetized for charitable and transhumanist purposes, on whichever terms.
Probably safer to do that after HPMoR is finished. Otherwise there is a chance she would forward the letter to her lawyer, the lawyer would send a cease and desist letter to CFAR, and then what?
If the same thing happens after HPMoR is finished, it can be removed from web and shared among LW members in ways that give plausible deniability to CFAR. But you can't have plausible deniability while Eliezer continues to write new chapters.
It's a bit of a truism that you can't do micropayments to cover the true marginal cost of serving a webpage, adding a user to your service, or other Internet activities, because the gap between free and epsilon is psychologically larger than the gap between epsilon and a dollar. It occurs to me that this curious psychology seems to map onto a logarithmic utility in money: Clearly the difference between lim(x to zero)[log(x)] and log(epsilon) is larger than the difference between log(epsilon) and log(1) for any finite value of epsilon. I'm not sure if this actually explains anything, but I thought it was kind of neat.
I reviewed A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy at my blog ("Modern Stoicism – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"). It's a philosophy book that's focused on being actionable, not just a historical survey, but I think it too-casually brushes off some of the unpleasant side effects of stoicism.
... (read more)RSS feeds for user's comments seem to be broken with the update to how they display on the page. To see how, just look at eg. http://lesswrong.com/user/Yvain/overview/.rss . It contains a bunch of comments from other people than Yvain. This is pretty annoying, hope it's fixed soon. I'm subscribed to tens of users' comment feeds and it's the main way I read LW. Today all of those feeds got a bunch of spurious updates from the new other-people-comments on everyone's comments page.
Also, some months back there was another change to userpages and it broke all... (read more)
The subset of people who are Anki users and members of the competitive conspiracy might be interested in the Anki high score list addon I wrote: Ankichallenge
This suggests that studies about partisan confusion about truth are overblown. I haven't had a chance to look at the actual paper yet, but the upshot is that this study suggests that while there is a lot of prior evidence that people are likely to state strong factual errors supporting their own partisan positions, they are substantially less likely to occur when people are told they will be given money for correct statements. The suggestion is that people know (at some level) that their answers are false and are saying them more as signaling than anything else.
Edit:Clarify
Has anyone on LW compiled a list of books/subjects to read/learn that basically gives brings you through all the ideas discussed on LW?
The sequences are the obvious answer, but it's nice to go into subjects a little more in-depth, plus the sequences are somewhat frustrating to navigate (every article in the sequences has links to plenty of other articles, so it's hard to attack the sequences in linear fashion).
The most linear way to read Eliezer's Sequences is in chronological order by date of original posting, although it might not be the best way.
Mind you it will be a good approximation of the best way. His posting order was dominated by needing to explain requisite knowledge before explaining later concepts. Perhaps the most obvious optimisation when it comes to reading is just skipping the parts that aren't interesting.
I want to improve my exposition and writing skills, but whenever I think "what do I know that I can explain to people that isn't explained well elsewhere?" not much comes to mind. I think that happens because it is hard to just do a search of everything that I know. The main topics that I know are math and rationality (mostly LW epistemic rationality, but also a little instrumental and LW moral philosophy). So I ask:
What is a topic in math or rationality that you wish were explained better or explained at a different level (casual, technical, etc... (read more)
If improving your skills is your main goal, you should just write, regardless of whether better explanations already exist elsewhere. Actually, such explanations already existing could even be an advantage, as it provides you with feedback: after writing your own, you can look up existing ones and compare what you did better and what you did worse.
It is the Capitalism Day today. As every first Sunday in June.
I wish you all a nice profit!
It would be too costly to spoil another business day. Sunday is all right.
There are people studying the memetics of transhumanism academically. I am writing my Masters so I can't read it. But maybe someone else wants to... (sorry no easy link) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08949468.2013.754649#.UbhTvRUQ8gQ
I notice I am confused about Godel's theorem, and I'm hoping there are enough mathematically minded folks here to unconfuse me. :-)
My recollection from my undergraduate days is that Godel's theorem states that given any sufficiently powerful formal system (i.e. one powerful to encode Peano arithmetic) there are statements that can be made in that system that can neither be proven true nor proven false. I.e. the system is either incomplete or inconsistent, and generally incomplete is what seems to happen.
Here's what confused me: I've noticed several recent... (read more)
A bit of a long shot but I am a recent Psychology (BSc) Graduate who currently lives in London and is looking for a job. Does anyone know of any positions in the rationality sector (anywhere) or any science/research/anything else like that around London (or not) that I can look into? Or any other general advice, recommendations etc.
Does anyone know of a way to convert .anki files to .apkg files?
I recently started using anki, but most of the decks I downloaded are .anki, and can't be opened by ankidroid...
Naive evo-psych seems to imply that having a big family should make me more attractive, for two reasons: 1) it's evidence that my genes cause many surviving kids, 2) more people will share resources to help my kids survive. But that doesn't seem to work in real life. Why?
"Real life" doesn't even remotely resemble the ancestral environment. In the modern world, a big family is evidence about your cultural background, especially the relationship between your cultural background and contraception, and that might be a turn-off for some. This is the same kind of phenomenon that makes having extra fat evidence, in the ancestral environment, that you were good at acquiring food and other resources, but in the modern world it's evidence that you're poor or lack access to good food or lack self-control or whatever.
MoR and munchkining fans may enjoy this application to Railgun: http://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1fpome/just_a_fanart_of_railgun_characters/cacmewm
From If Many-Worlds had Come First:
... (read more)Note that you are using Eliezer!correct, not Physics!correct. The former is based on Bayesian reasoning among models with equivalent predictive power, the latter requires different predictive power to discriminate between theories. The problem with the former reasoning is that without experimental validation it is hard to agree on the priors and other assumptions going into the Bayesian calculation for MWI correctness. Additionally, proclaiming MWI "correct" is not instrumentally useful unless one can use it to advance physical knowledge.
It's worse than that, actually. In some frames it means not just FTL but also back in time. But given that this is unmeasurable, it matters not in the slightest if you adopt the Physics!correct definition.
Today I learned that there exist electromagnetic waves in vacuum with electric and magnetic fields parallel to each other. Freaky...
I'd like to put out a call for anecdata, if I may:
Lately I've been wondering how much of a causal connection there is between happiness/fulfillment and willpower (or, conversely, akrasia) levels. I feel like I'm not especially fulfilled or happy in my life right now, and I can't help but feel intuitively that this is one cause of the difficulty I seem to have in focusing, concentrating, and putting effort into what I want to. However, I've no idea whether there's actually anything in this.
So: I guess I wondered if anyone has any personal accounts of (medi... (read more)
I've started a blog, yesterday.
http://protokol2020.wordpress.com
I think I've noticed that I'm more willing to read long texts written in small font sizes than in large ones, and in sans-serif than in serif font.
I might try again to read A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations, but in a small, sans-serif typeface this time, to test this.
The future of humanity institue at Oxford University is having a onference on Philosophy & Theory of Artificial Intelligence
Anyone going?
Anyone have a good idea of where to park an "emergency fund" type account, and especially resources that talk about this? Most of my money is sitting in a checking account right now, which I have realized is not so good, but I want to keep most of it liquid (and the remainder might not be enough to start an index fund account with Vanguard).
You only need an emergency fund if you do not have access to credit at reasonable terms. Investments you don't touch outside of emergencies coupled with open lines of credit should outperform excessive "emergency" savings. After all, lines of credit are typically free when you don't use or need them, while not getting the best rate of return on your savings isn't.
EDIT: I was reminded of a relevant saying: If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.. Similarly, if you never have to borrow money for emergencies, your investments are too liquid.
It's been so long since I needed to use it that I've forgotten my Lesswrong password. Is there any password recovery function?
http://lesswrong.com/user/army1987/comments/ also shows the parents of comments now. Can I disable that? In my preferences there's an option whether to show them in http://lesswrong.com/comments which is unchecked.
Does anyone have anything to say or have any links regarding mortality salience, existentialism, or determinism as a source of motivation? Traditionally these are seen as a hindrance to motivation and may lead to fatalism and existential angst.
This previous post is the type of discussion I am looking for. Can confrontation of mortality and existential catharsis lead to motivation and hack akrasia?
I'm wondering if the following statement is true: The word "ought" means whatever we ought to believe that it means.
Now, certainly, that statement could be false. There could be a society whose code of ethics states that you must disagree with the code of ethics. But I'm asking whether or not it is false, for us actual humans. And it might be false if you take "we" to mean someone like Adolf Hitler: perhaps Hitler professed his actual beliefs about ethics, and people nowadays think Hitler was so horrible that if Hitler believed somethin... (read more)
I think this Noah Smith disquisition on "derp" might be a useful thing to refer people to when one gets tired of referring them to PITMK. It crystalizes for me why I find a lot of political commentary unbearable to read/listen to.
Of interest to folks close to Oxford only.
Max Tegmark will be giving a talk, "The future of life: a cosmic perspective”, on June 10 at 12:30pm. The event is open to the public and free of charge, and will take place on the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Department of Physics, 20 Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PU (Google maps). More details here.
For those who believe that the US is a democracy in the sense that public policy is an aggregate of public opinion, how do you deal with the fact that 42% of the US population don't know that Obamacare is actually law?
If the population doesn't even know about the easy facts, how do you expect a democracy in which public policy is driven by public discourse to work?
(Usual informational hazard warning to attract attention. Warning before compulsory dedicating your attention: it's only the usual hazard. (Collective disappointed sigh))
Interesting smackd..., ah, discussion, between XiXiDu and Aris Kats Aris. If the link doesn't work, it's the Google+ discussion also linked to from the top of this blog post.
I'd really like it if someone could explain to me what Aaronson is saying here:
... (read more)People who are nervous and unsure about learning a new skill are often advised to "fake it till you make it." That has never been very helpful for me; I think I concentrate on the "fake" part too much, which just makes me nervous that any moment the jig will be up.
Anyway, there's an older, simpler way to express the same idea, which works much better: I'm practicing. It's not fake, it's just practice. Thinking that way makes me want to get back to work, instead of worry about getting caught; after all, I'm not doing anything wrong.
Fairly banal once I write it down, but it's been helpful.
If I pay $1000 in rent, about how much does my landlord profit after accounting for taxes and the costs of property management?
I have a question. Assume that non-profit MIRI develops a fAGI (I like the acronym this way). They realise they can use the fAGI to generate profit. Taking for granted they only wish to make enough profit to sustain the institution free of donor-support, would they then be able to switch to a for-profit institution, despite having created the fAGI while non-profit?
Everyone has found a way around the question; I asked it poorly, so I'll be clearer: if a piece of technology is developed at an institution dependent upon donations from private individuals t... (read more)
If MIRI (or anyone else) create an AGI that is friendly to them they can do whatever they goddamn please.
The assumption is that fAGI would render any questions of profit moot.