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Comment author: CCC 25 September 2013 07:29:03AM 5 points [-]

Even if every self-reported IQ is exactly correct, the average of the self-reported IQ values can still be (and likely will still be) higher than the average of the readership's IQ values.

Consider two readers, Tom and Jim. Tom does an IQ test, and gets a result of 110. Jim does an IQ test, and gets a result of 90. Tom and Jim are both given the option to fill in a survey, which asks (among other questions) what their IQ is. Neither Tom nor Jim intend to lie.

However, Jim seems significantly more likely to decide not to participate; while Tom may decide to fill in the survey as a minor sort of showing off. This effect will skew the average upwards. Perhaps not 30 points upwards... but it's an additional source of bias, independent of any bias in individual reported values.

In response to comment by CCC on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 01 October 2013 09:03:51PM *  -1 points [-]

Ah! Good point! Karma for you! Now I will think about whether there is a way to figure out the truth despite this.

Ideas?

Comment author: private_messaging 23 September 2013 08:23:41AM *  0 points [-]

neither of which should be assumed to be likely to result in an average score that's 30 points too high, as mistakes like these could go in either direction

Look. People misremember (and remember the largest value, and so on) in the way most favourable to themselves. While mistakes can of course go in either direction, they don't actually go in either direction. If you ask men to report their penis size (quite literally), they over-estimate; if you ask them to measure, they still overestimate but not by as much. This sort of error is absolutely the norm in any surveys. More so here, as the calibration (on Bayes date of birth question at least) was comparatively very bad.

The situation is anything but symmetric, given that the results are rather far from the mean, on a Gaussian.

Furthermore, given the interest in self improvement, people here are likely to have tried to improve their test scores by practice, which would have considerably lower effect on iqtest.dk unless you practice specifically the Raven's matrices.

The low scores on iqtest.dk are particularly interesting in light that the scores on the latter are a result of better assignment of priors / processing of probabilities (as, fundamentally, one needs to pick the choice which results in simplest - highest probability - overall pattern. If one is overconfident about the pattern they see being the best, one's score is lowered, so poor calibration will hurt that test more).

Comment author: Epiphany 25 September 2013 05:05:49AM 0 points [-]

While mistakes can of course go in either direction, they don't actually go in either direction.

I intuit that this is likely to be a popular view among sceptics, but I do not recall ever being presented with research that supports this by anyone. To avoid the lure of "undiscriminating scepticism", I am requesting to see the evidence of this.

I agree that, for numerous reasons, self-reported IQ scores, SAT scores, ACT scores and any other scores are likely to have some amount of error, and I think it's likely for the room for error to be pretty big. On that we agree.

An average thirty points higher than normal seems to me to be quite a lot more than "pretty big". That's the difference between an IQ in the normal range and an IQ large enough to qualify for every definition of gifted. To use your metaphor, that's like having a 6-incher and saying it's 12. I can see guys unconsciously saying it's 7 if it's 6, or maybe even 8. But I have a hard time believing that most of these people have let their imaginations run so far away with them as to accidentally believe that they're Mensa level gifted when they're average. I'd bet that there was a significant amount of error, but not an average of 30 points.

If you agree with those two, then whether we agree over all just depends on what specific belief we're each supporting.

I think these beliefs are supported:

  • The SAT, ACT, self-reported IQ and / or iqtest.dk scores found on the survey are not likely to be highly accurate.

  • Despite inaccuracies, it's very likely that the average LessWrong member has an IQ above average - in other words, I don't think that the scores reported on the survey are so inaccurate that I should believe that most LessWrongers actually have just an average IQ.

  • LessWrong is (considering a variety of pieces of evidence, not just the survey) likely to have more gifted people than you'd find by random chance.

Do we agree on those three beliefs?

If not, then please phrase the belief(s) you want to support.

Comment author: ygert 10 September 2013 12:05:04PM 0 points [-]

You know, people do lie to themselves. It's a sad but true (and well known around here) fact about human psychology that humans have surprisingly bad models of themselves. It is simply true that if you asked a bunch of people selected at random about their (self-reported) IQ scores, you would get an average of more than 100. One would hope that LessWrongers are good enough at detecting bias in order to mostly dodge that bullet, but the evidence of whether or not we actually are that good at it is scarce at best.

In response to comment by ygert on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2013 01:30:14AM *  1 point [-]

Your unintentional lie explanation does not explain how the SAT scores ended up so closely synchronised to the IQ scores - as we know, one common sign of a lie is that the details do not add up. Synchronising one's SAT scores to the same level as one's IQ scores would most likely require conscious effort, making the discrepancy obvious to the LessWrong members who took the survey. If you would argue that they were likely to have chosen corresponding SAT scores in some way that did not require them to become consciously aware of discrepancies in order to synchronize the scores, how would you support the argument that they synched them on accident? If not, then would you support the argument that LessWrong members consciously lied about it?

Linda Silverman, a giftedness researcher, has observed that parents are actually pretty decent at assessing their child's intellectual abilities despite the obvious cause for bias.

"In this study, 84% of the children whose parents indicated that they fit three-fourths of the characteristics tested above 120 IQ. " (An unpublished study, unfortunately.)

http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/PDF_files/scalersrch.pdf

This isn't exactly the same as managing knowledge of one's own intellectual abilities, but if it would seem to you that parents would most likely be hideously biased when assessing their children's intellectual abilities even though, according to a giftedness researcher, this is probably not the case, then should you probably also consider that your concern that most LessWrong members are likely to subconsciously falsify their own IQ scores by a whopping 30 points (if that is your perception) may be far less likely to be a problem than you thought?

Comment author: private_messaging 10 September 2013 11:42:06AM *  1 point [-]

"Lie" is a strawman. One could report an estimate, mis-remember, report the other "IQ" (mental age / chronological age metric), or one may have took any one of entirely faulty online tests that report IQ as high to increase the referral rate (some are bad enough to produce >100 if the answers are filled in at random).

Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2013 01:11:12AM *  0 points [-]

This would be a good point in the event that we were not discussing IQ scores generated by an IQ test selected by Yvain, which many people took at the same time as filling out the survey. This method (and timing) rules out problems due to relying on estimates alone, most of the potential for mis-remembering, (neither of which should be assumed to be likely to result in an average score that's 30 points too high, as mistakes like these could go in either direction), and, assuming that the IQ test Yvain selected was pretty good, it also rules out the problem of the test being seriously skewed. If you would like to continue this line of argument, one effective method of producing doubt would be to go to the specific IQ test in question, fill out all of the answers randomly, and report the IQ that it produces. If you want to generate a full-on update regarding those particular test results, complete with Yvain being likely to refrain from recommending this source during his next survey, write a script that fills out the test randomly and reports the results so that multiple people can run it and see for themselves what average IQ the test produces after a large number of trials. You may want to check to see whether Yvain or Gwern or someone has already done this before going to the trouble.

Also, there really were people whose concern it was that people were lying on the survey. Your "lie is a strawman" perception appears to have been formed due to not having read the (admittedly massive number of) comments on this.

Comment author: gwern 21 August 2013 04:07:23PM 5 points [-]

The cobbler's children don't always go unshod. :)

Comment author: Epiphany 22 August 2013 02:34:27AM *  0 points [-]

I did not intend to imply that you failed to back up your own data. That was intended as an amusing compliment.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2013 08:29:43AM 5 points [-]

gwern.net

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2013 06:09:51AM -1 points [-]

What I suspect is going on is that Epiphany is statistically innumerate (as suggested by her rather hilarious statement about 25% of Africans being above average), but doesn't want to loose status by admitting she doesn't understand the arguments.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2013 08:21:07AM *  1 point [-]

Both of the citations I was given by you guys said clearly that they were uncertain about the connection between race and IQ. That is the reason I don't agree - because even your citations do not agree. I assume those are the best citations you have, so that your citations do not agree with you makes your belief look very bad indeed.

Also, by arguing that the reason I don't agree is because I am statistically innumerate and that the reason I don't agree is because I'm too inept to understand, you have made an ad hominem fallacy. Attacking the person does zilch to support your argument.

I can't believe I just saw an ad hominem attack on LessWrong. That is the the most obvious behavior that one avoids if one wants to have a rational debate.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 August 2013 01:29:47AM 1 point [-]

Conversely, I can't think of any applications for which tying IQ to race is useful. Would you name three examples?

Well, seeing an unknown man approaching you at night, granted this is more about criminality than IQ but the correlation is the same.

Also thinking about whether affirmative action and the desperate impact doctrine are reasonable ideas.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2013 04:30:17AM -2 points [-]

Well, seeing an unknown man approaching you at night

Actually, it is far more prudent to avoid a stranger approaching me at night, regardless of his race - depending on the environment I am in.

If he is approaching from a dark alley, I will head away from him, whatever his race. If he approaches me at a party full of friends, I will speak to him.

The crime statistics are not so incredibly different for blacks and whites that you can simply trust all of the whites.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 August 2013 04:12:17AM 2 points [-]

Sigh.

I don't believe you're listening and really have no inclination to play the "yes, but" game. Neither do I feel the need to prove anything to you.

You can believe whatever you want to believe, it's just that such an attitude looks strange here.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2013 04:22:19AM -1 points [-]

You can believe whatever you want to believe, it's just that such an attitude looks strange here.

That is not my attitude. I have been asking you for research. Did you see what I discovered about "The Bell Curve"? What do you say about that?

Comment author: Lumifer 20 August 2013 06:10:33PM *  6 points [-]

"most published research is wrong"

Yes, I've read Ioannidis. However you're using this quote here as a rather blatant aid to your confirmation bias. There have been many, many studies which all show the same thing. These are findings which have been confirmed, re-confirmed, and confirmed once again.

Precisely because these results are so controversial they have been the subject of very thorough checking, vetting, and multiple attempts to debunk them. The results survived all this. What, do you think that for the last 50 years no one really tried to find holes in the studies showing racial IQ differences? Many highly qualified people tried. The results still stand.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2013 03:55:36AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, I've read Ioannidis. However you're using this quote here as a rather blatant aid to your confirmation bias.

I think everyone should consider that published research findings are likely to be wrong each time they are seeking research findings. If you agree that we should be skeptical about research findings, why do you think that asking questions about whether the research controlled for multiple factors, was replicated etc. should be taken as evidence of confirmation bias? Maybe you disagree that we should be skeptical about research findings?

There have been many, many studies which all show the same thing.

Every single one? I would find that hard to believe for any topic, especially one as politically charged and controversial as this one, where both sides have a motive to bias research in their particular direction. If that is true, I would find it surprising. Assuming you were referring to the results of a meta-analysis, would you point to that meta-analysis please?

Precisely because these results are so controversial they have been the subject of very thorough checking, vetting, and multiple attempts to debunk them. The results survived all this. What, do you think that for the last 50 years no one really tried to find holes in the studies showing racial IQ differences? Many highly qualified people tried. The results still stand.

Are you saying that studies used for "The Bell Curve" did take into account the factors I mentioned, were replicated and / or may contain a meta-analysis that states that all the studies that could be found had similar findings?

If you aren't specific about what measures were taken to ensure quality in the information you're providing, I have no way to make the distinction between a matter of opinion and a matter of fact when you claim things like "The results survived all this." Please be specific about what particular quality features the data in The Bell Curve provides.

The Bell Curve

I started checking out this book because of your high praise and was surprised to find this:

On page 270, The Bell Curve clearly states: "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved"

Can you explain why you seem to be disagreeing with me, when both myself and The Bell Curve agree that we don't have a good way to tell whether IQ differences are nature or nurture? (Note: In addition to that, my view is also influenced by skepticism about research in general and an understanding that although IQ tests are correlated with various things, they have some limitations.)

Comment author: Lumifer 20 August 2013 04:24:18PM 4 points [-]

Also, I'm still interested in seeing the source that you believe is an accurate prior regarding race and IQ. Do you happen to have that information available?

The Bell Curve book is a standard source. Otherwise a quick look at Wikipedia provides this:

Rushton & Jensen (2005) write that, in the United States, self-identified blacks and whites have been the subjects of the greatest number of studies. They state that the black-white IQ difference is about 15 to 18 points or 1 to 1.1 standard deviations (SDs), which implies that between 11 and 16 percent of the black population have an IQ above 100 (the general population median). The black-white IQ difference is largest on those components of IQ tests that are claimed best to represent the general intelligence factor g.[11][non-primary source needed] The 1996 APA report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" and the 1994 editorial statement "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" gave more or less similar estimates.[42][43] Roth et al. (2001), in a review of the results of a total of 6,246,729 participants on other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, found a difference in mean IQ scores between blacks and whites of 1.1 SD. Consistent results were found for college and university application tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (N = 2.4 million) and Graduate Record Examination (N = 2.3 million), as well as for tests of job applicants in corporate sections (N = 0.5 million) and in the military (N = 0.4 million).[44]

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2013 05:39:03PM *  -1 points [-]

Ok thanks. However, I am aware that "most published research is wrong" (PLOS Medicine) and know that there are factors that need to be controlled for in studies on race and IQ (in the second numbered list). Do you also claim that these factors were controlled for, that the key study or studies have been replicated, and that this is quality data that generally avoids research pitfalls? That's what I am looking for.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 August 2013 06:23:10AM *  5 points [-]

I don't see a good way to tell the difference between a low IQ score due to actually being less intelligent versus a low IQ score due to nurture-related reasons such as the following:

As the saying goes, "Life is an IQ test." The predictive ability of IQ on income (and most other statistics of interest) is very similar for each race, which suggests that differences in measured IQ scores map onto differences in life outcomes. To the extent that a medical condition makes someone test poorly, it generally also makes them live poorly. (There are a handful of prominent exceptions to this- like dyslexia- which don't significantly impact the main point.)

Now, where those IQ differences come from in the first place is an interesting question. Many people have looked at it, and the consensus answer for individual IQ differences is "somewhere between 50% and 80% of it is genetic," and the extrapolation from that to group IQ differences is somewhat controversial but seems straightforward to me. A perhaps more interesting question is "what knobs do we have to adjust those IQ differences?"

However, it's hard to believe it exists without a citation. Do you have one?

Here's Jason Richwine explaining that all serious scientists have agreed on the basics of IQ for decades, and the media is completely mistaken on the state of reality and scientific consensus.

I still think the number is 25%, however I do not view this as a key point in our disagreement, so I will leave it at that.

It seems pretty relevant to me, because it looks like basic statistical innumeracy on your part, unless you think the IQ distribution of African Americans is tremendously skewed such that the mean intelligence is the 75th percentile of intelligence, rather than the 50th percentile like it would be in a symmetric distribution. (Or you think that the African average is higher than the African American average, which is very much not the case.)

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2013 07:45:11AM *  -2 points [-]

As the saying goes, "Life is an IQ test."

As a stand-alone statement, I would probably leave this alone. But as a response to "What about nurture", the first thing that comes to mind is:

Has Vaniver adequately corrected for the just world fallacy?

The predictive ability of IQ on income (and most other statistics of interest) is very similar for each race, which suggests that differences in measured IQ scores map onto differences in life outcomes.

Ok, that's interesting, but it does nothing to rule out nurture factors that would impact both IQ and income.

Many people have looked at it, and the consensus answer for individual IQ differences is "somewhere between 50% and 80% of it is genetic"

I agree that IQ is mostly genetic and that IQ does seem to correlate with a lot of factors. I'm not saying IQ does not exist. What I am saying is that, specifically when it comes to black people, there are other factors that are definitely influencing performance and IQ scores. Therefore I reject claims about IQ and race that haven't controlled for known factors.

Here's Jason Richwine explaining that all serious scientists have agreed on the basics of IQ for decades

Actually, when I read that section (it starts with "What scholars"), I parsed it like this:

Jason explicitly says that there's a scientific consensus on many issues that seem controversial to journalists.

Jason states that virtually all psychologists (not scientists) believe there is a general mental ability factor (That he's not saying is specifically connected to race).

Then, without qualifying these statements with anything along the lines of "most x believe", he states: "In terms of group differences, people of northeast Asian descent have higher average IQ scores than people of European lineage, who in turn have higher average scores than people of sub-Saharan African descent."

I will not assume that this sequence of claims means that the group differences statement is also something scientists have a consensus about. If I did, that would be a non-sequitur.

Also, below that, he writes:

"It is possible that genetic factors could influence IQ differences among ethnic groups, but many scientists are withholding judgment until DNA studies are able to link specific gene combinations with IQ."

This is where I stop reading the article because it is clear to me that it does not say "there's a scientific consensus that there's a link between race and IQ". If you have a credible source for that claim, I'll be curious about it. No more Politico articles please.

It seems pretty relevant to me

It might or might not have been an error. In any case, I'm not going to go digging for that right now because I still think knowing the percentage is irrelevant to the current point. Whether the figure is 50% or 25%, it is still true that a significant proportion of people will have an IQ above average and therefore it would be hasty generalization to assume that a person of a certain group was an idiot. That is one way in which the exact number is irrelevant. However, that point about hasty generalization is much more irrelevant at this particular moment because we haven't even decided on a prior, let alone have we got a decent posterior - so the step where we have a concern about making a hasty generalization based on our probabilities should be in this disagreement's future. If it becomes relevant, I will dig around, but not right now.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 August 2013 04:59:09AM 2 points [-]

I don't see a good way to tell the difference between a low IQ score due to actually being less intelligent versus a low IQ score due to nurture-related reasons such as the following:

If your point is that it's not clear to what extent the difference in intelligence is due to nature or nurture, I agree but would like to point out that for many applications it doesn't matter.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2013 06:00:05AM *  -2 points [-]

When you're deciding what to replace X with in the following statement, it most certainly does matter:

"X have a lower IQ on average."

You can choose "People of African descent" or you can choose "People from poor backgrounds" or "People with serious health conditions" or "People with drug addictions" or any number of other things.

When attempting to determine how best to help a school in a black ghetto that is failing, and you're choosing between spending money on remedial courses or on a school nutrition program, you will most certainly benefit from having this knowledge.

Conversely, I can't think of any applications for which tying IQ to race is useful. Would you name three examples?

Also, I'm still interested in seeing the source that you believe is an accurate prior regarding race and IQ. Do you happen to have that information available?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 August 2013 01:54:56AM 13 points [-]

Reasoning that Takes Relevant Data Into Account: "The IQ test(s) said African's IQs are lower than those of whites. However, there are known flaws with IQ tests such as cultural bias, so that figure might be wrong. Most published research findings are false (PLOS Medicine), so I should apply healthy skepticism to all the research I read. This is not likely to be an accurate piece of data to use as a Bayesian prior.

This reads like a classic case of motivated cognition. You don't want to believe the conclusion; therefore, you selectively look for potential flaws then declare that there's still a chance. The reason I believe the connection between race and intelligence is not just because of the tests but because more or less every relevant aspect of reality (e.g., the statistic on race and crime, the nearly complete lack of blacks in intelligence intensive fields, e.g., math, programing, the state of majority black countries) looks the way one would expect it to look if the connection existed.

Once I've decided on a prior to use, I should then adjust for other relevant data (things I know about the specific individual).

Who is claiming otherwise?

A. ...the fact my prior is likely to be inaccurate (there isn't an accurate one for this subject as far as I'm aware)...

Yes there is. You just don't want to believe it exists.

B. ...the fact that even if the IQ study is correct and the IQ test it used was accurate, there's a decent chance (25%) that this specific individual has an IQ above the African average - meaning I need to avoid the logical fallacy called hasty generalization...

Actually the chance of this particular black being above the African average is 50% (more if I condition on the fact that he is in the USA). The probability that he is above the white average is significantly less. The probability that he is above some high cutoff is can be even lower.

C. ...the risk of lost utility via damaging this individual's reputation, emotional health or opportunities for success by pre-judging them...

This is a general argument against using evidence of any kind.

D. ...the risk that this makes for bad social signaling and witnesses may retaliate against me with one or more forms of social rejection if I pre-emptively treat an African like an idiot...

This is potentially a problem, although here the problem is arguably with the witnesses behaving irrationally and/or participating in out of control signaling arms races than with the strategy itself.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2013 03:20:41AM *  1 point [-]

This reads like a classic case of motivated cognition.

Did you stop to make distinction between me being influenced by motivated cognition and alternate explanations like:

  1. Me seeing significant flaws in data that would otherwise support your conclusion. Part of this may be that I've spent a significant amount of time reading about IQ and giftedness and I have learned that there are a lot of pitfalls to doing IQ related research.

  2. Me simply being unaware of relevant data. (This might be the case in the event that the people who supplied my data were influenced by motivated cognition or confirmation bias.)

  3. You seeing motivated cognition in my words because of being influenced by motivated cognition yourself?

The reason I believe the connection between race and intelligence is not just because of the tests but because more or less every relevant aspect of reality (e.g., the statistic on race and crime, the nearly complete lack of blacks in intelligence intensive fields, e.g., math, programing, the state of majority black countries) looks the way one would expect it to look if the connection existed.

There is an alternate explanation for those which does not have the same issues that IQ tests and studies have: The effects of slavery and prejudice. We are certain that slavery and prejudice has influenced them, and that it has existed for a long time. To know this, one must only look at the KKK or investigate the history of black enslavement. Imagine a third world country. Imagine that an equal proportion of those inhabitants are removed and used as slaves. Imagine an equal proportion of them dying. Imagine that they're freed, but all of them - not some but all - are freed into a situation of extreme poverty where they don't even own a home or have the ability to read. Many still aren't being taught to read. Consider also that even though there have been advances in medicine, poverty means you can't afford health insurance or medical treatments. Don't think that disability and chronic illness are uncommon - they're not. Not even in America. They're probably especially common for the poor. Don't think that severe worker abuse ended with slavery, either - do some research on sweatshops in America sometime. Now take into account the effects of stress, and the human element - how those effects can compound into things like mental illnesses and drug addictions. Would you predict that the majority of these people who started out with literally nothing and without even the education to read would manage to avoid pitfalls like disability, mental illness, drug addiction and sweatshops and carve an opportunity to excel out of poverty and ignorance over the course of 150 years? I would not expect that. I would expect most of them to have fared poorly.

I don't see a good way to tell the difference between a low IQ score due to actually being less intelligent versus a low IQ score due to nurture-related reasons such as the following:

  1. Improper nutrition due to poverty.
  2. Lack of education.
  3. The effects of extreme stress (How are you supposed to focus on an IQ test when you've just been threatened by a gang?)
  4. Suffering from medical conditions (these can cause memory symptoms, brain fog, and fatigue), mental conditions or drug addictions.
  5. Having been parented by people that were mentally or physically ill, severely stressed, or addicted.
  6. Cultural differences that cause arbitrary communication issues during testing.
  7. The psychological effects of prejudice (may influence things like self-esteem and locus of control or result in learned helplessness, etc.)

If you want to attribute the IQ scores to race, not poverty or circumstances, then there needs to be a good way to distinguish between nurture and nature as a cause for low IQ scores. Do you have one?

Yes there is. You just don't want to believe it exists.

If it's true I want to believe it. However, it's hard to believe it exists without a citation. Do you have one?

Actually the chance of this particular black being above the African average is 50% (more if I condition on the fact that he is in the USA).

I respect you more for being able to say something that supports my view better than it does yours. +1 karma for that. I still think the number is 25%, however I do not view this as a key point in our disagreement, so I will leave it at that.

This is a general argument against using evidence of any kind.

You appear to have taken that statement as an argument regarding what to believe. It was not. I deliberately put that part after the section where I was discussing deciding what to believe, and put it under "if one wants to behave rationally".

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 August 2013 06:43:30PM 2 points [-]

We don't want to encourage ourselves and others to be prejudiced against people when, regardless of what the average African's IQ is, it is still both logically incorrect (hasty generalization) and ethically wrong to prejudge individual Africans.

So what you're saying is that it's ethically wrong to use Bayesian reasoning.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2013 01:02:00AM *  -1 points [-]

If you intend to use an African prejudgment heuristic like 1 (below) rather than reacting as if you've done an equation that takes into account other relevant data like 2 (below), then I think your probability equation needs an upgrade.

1) African prejudgment heuristic: "The IQ test(s) said African's IQs are lower than those of whites, therefore this specific African individual is likely to be relatively stupid compared to my white friends."

2) Reasoning that Takes Relevant Data Into Account: "The IQ test(s) said African's IQs are lower than those of whites. However, there are known flaws with IQ tests such as cultural bias, so that figure might be wrong. Most published research findings are false (PLOS Medicine), so I should apply healthy skepticism to all the research I read. This is not likely to be an accurate piece of data to use as a Bayesian prior. Once I've decided on a prior to use, I should then adjust for other relevant data (things I know about the specific individual).

Then, if one wants to behave rationally after one has decided what to believe, I think one must continue by thinking something like this:

"Considering things like...

A. ...the fact my prior is likely to be inaccurate (there isn't an accurate one for this subject as far as I'm aware)...

B. ...the fact that even if the IQ study is correct and the IQ test it used was accurate, there's a decent chance (25%) that this specific individual has an IQ above the African average - meaning I need to avoid the logical fallacy called hasty generalization...

C. ...the risk of lost utility via damaging this individual's reputation, emotional health or opportunities for success by pre-judging them...

D. ...the risk that this makes for bad social signaling and witnesses may retaliate against me with one or more forms of social rejection if I pre-emptively treat an African like an idiot...

...do I really want to treat this person as if they are less intelligent?"

I think you may have reacted to my "I hope it is false." statement or my "it's ethically wrong to prejudge individual Africans" statement - but that shouldn't matter to your probability calculation. What should matter is to get an accurate idea of reality. Along with saying other things, I also provided other factors which are relevant, as credible sources can confirm. If one wants to be a good Bayesian probabilist, after one specifies some prior probability, one must then update it in the light of new, relevant data. [1] This situation where you focused on one part of my comment and ignored the rest reminds me of those math problems where there's an irrelevant statement thrown in just to distract you. I of course did not intend to distract you, but since you seem to think that Bayesian reasoning in this case means ignoring all the other data I presented, it appears that you have skipped the parts of the process where you ensure an accurate prior and update your prior with new, relevant data.

Life is really, really complicated. I doubt it's ever wise to just grab a prior and run with it and I certainly hope that you do not reason this way.

  1. Paulos, John Allen. The Mathematics of Changing Your Mind, New York Times (US). August 5, 2011; retrieved 2011-08-06
Comment author: Jiro 05 August 2013 05:42:20PM *  1 point [-]

Saying you're proud of your Native American ancestry often won't be interpreted as a claim of superiority because such statements are saiid in a social context where everyone knows that Native Americans have suffered and saying you're proud of your ancestry is not asserting that you're superior, but rather than you're not inferior.

Furthermore, to the extent that it is a claim of superiority but objecting to it will be called racist, that's a problem with the ease of making accusations of racism, not a problem with the objection.

People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.

There isn't prejudice against people with a high IQ. There's prejudice against stating that you have a high IQ, unlike for minorities, where even minorities that try to "pass" for the majority will be the target of prejudice if found out.

And there's only prejudice against stating you have a high IQ because stating you have a high IQ is stating that you are superior based on flimsy reasons. (And no, you can't state your IQ without claiming you're superior, since you can't escape the social context.)

Comment author: Epiphany 06 August 2013 05:51:55PM *  -2 points [-]

There isn't prejudice against people with a high IQ.

Perhaps you intended that within a specific context from the comment above like "These introduction examples don't cause a problem because of prejudice, but because they sound like claims to superiority", in which case I'd agree with you. However, I disagree about whether there exists prejudice against people with high IQs in the broader context. If that's truly what you meant, I'd be happy to elaborate, but please specify so I am not accidentally arguing with a strawman.

And no, you can't state your IQ without claiming you're superior, since you can't escape the social context.

I am very interested in this concept of superiority, because "superiority" seems to be an important key here. What does it mean to you? If a person is superior, is it okay to treat them differently? What sort of differently and why? If someone makes a claim to superiority, how do you think people should react, and why?

Comment author: metastable 04 August 2013 01:58:54AM 5 points [-]

One of the more distinctive features of the US system is the the connection to youth sports. Other countries play sports, obviously, but the US model tends to locate competitive sports programs inside schools, from middle school on up through college.

That started in the mid-1800's, in the northeast, and it spread from there, both laterally to other colleges and vertically, down to high schools. But it took a long time for it to become as effort-intensive as it is now, and there was a pretty significant spike in intensity after World War II, when colleges grew quickly and families bought more televisions and radios and schools could afford to field more teams.

Pretty slim connection, obviously. But if you're looking for an effect that could plausibly rearrange social groups in age-segregated communities, sports fits the bill. And if you're looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits (NOT giftedness--but earnest, obsessive pursuits like we tend to identify with nerd subculture), you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 August 2013 03:44:03AM *  -1 points [-]

if you're looking for a another milieu that tends to brand and shun obsessive pursuits ... you might look to the concept of sprezzatura among the sporting aristocracy.

Hmm... that's an interesting idea - that the existence of a mainstream sporting culture which shuns one of the traits that nerds have in common might have scared off a larger proportion of the people who are not gifted from the nerd subculture? Thanks for this idea. +1 karma.

I have never heard of this "sporting aristrocracy" - is that a term you made up on the spot for this context, or am I just unaware of this term?

Comment author: Nornagest 03 August 2013 11:19:58PM *  8 points [-]

The nerd subculture certainly exists (with local variations) in Europe and East Asia, but the impression I get is that it's coupled less to childhood intelligence and more to that subculture's various touchstones: you're about as likely to identify as a nerd if you like, say, literary sci-fi, but being smarter than the average bear isn't as good a predictor of liking SF.

I don't know why this happens, but I suspect it has something to do with the American educational system. It's pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form. Still, I'm looking at this through American eyes, and people that've actually been through those systems might have a more accurate take on it.

I've also been reading some stuff lately that suggests the association was much weaker as late as the Fifties and early Sixties, even in the US, but I'm not sure how much I trust it.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 August 2013 03:24:13AM *  -1 points [-]

It's pretty uncommon among industrialized countries to keep education (more or less) unified as late as 12th grade, and under these circumstances I can see intellectuality coming to be associated with a subcultural alignment; whereas under something like the German system, classes would end up being fragmented along giftedness lines before strong subcultural cliques form.

That's an interesting factor, but I question whether it is a cause, or a symptom (which potentially has effects similar to the original cause). I ask "Why did America choose to deny gifted and talented children a chance to develop their abilities to the fullest for longer than any other country?" (I'd love to see a citation for that by the way!)

I think the root cause might actually be the "immortal declaration" of Thomas Jefferson, located in the opening of the United States Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...

When a country's most important concept is human rights, and the most prominent argument in support of human rights is the belief that you are created equal, you're essentially in a situation where your country was founded on the belief that giftedness does not exist.

It seems to me that when people reject gifted identity claims, their true objection is not that it's arrogant to claim high status* or that it's socially unacceptable to say good things about yourself* but that they're interpreting "created equal" to mean something similar to "equal abilities" or "mentally equal" and experience conflict(s) along the lines of:

  1. If I some people are not equal, does that mean human rights don't exist?

  2. If I agree that this person is unequal and they're the better one, do I have to give up my rights to them or give them special treatment?

  3. If this person is claiming to be unequal, are they also trying to demand the right to take my rights away or extract something extra from me so they can have unequal rights?

  4. If I let myself believe that people aren't equals, is that morally wrong?

Even though I think the problem runs deeper than the theory you presented, I am glad to have it. If America is denying children the chance to develop to the fullest for longer than other countries, that's certainly going to have some kind of an effect and it's good additional information to have. Thank you; +1 karma.

* There are plenty of other status claims and good things you can say about yourself that don't provoke negative reactions - see the thought experiments in this thread.

Comment author: Nornagest 03 August 2013 10:55:49PM 3 points [-]

Do you think giftedness or high IQ are likely to play a large role in influencing a person's personality, views or lifestyle?

I think this is probably more true in the US than in a lot of other places. Our cultural habit of steering intellectually (and especially mathematically) gifted kids into the "nerd" pigeonhole and concomitant subculture doesn't seem to be well reflected in the rest of the world.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 August 2013 11:05:26PM -1 points [-]

I am interested in finding out what the rest of the world does and how you found out about their reactions to intellectually gifted people. I'd also be interested in finding out why you think this happens in America but not everywhere else. Would you mind sharing?

Comment author: Jiro 03 August 2013 05:36:13PM *  2 points [-]

I'd suggest something that is related to what you're saying: the problem isn't that "I'm a genius" is an objective statement. The problem is that a statement made with more objectivity than is warranted.

The person saying this thinks it makes him objectively better. It doens't just apply to intelligence; consider "I'm a model" versus "I'm beautiful". The latter would get negative reactions. Stating that you're a secret agent is actually an objective statement; you either are or you're not. Stating that you're a genius is likely to be interpreted as a general claim of mental superiority that is somewhat based on objective characteristics, but not by as much as you're claiming it to be.

Even if the person claiming to be a genius says "I have high IQ" instead, I've observed that people on Less Wrong give much higher credence to IQ than people outside Less Wrong. Telling an average person that you have a high IQ is telling him "I believe I am objectively superior, but I'm basing my belief on this number that is very narrowly applicable, doesn't capture all of what we mean by intelligence, and many of whose past uses have been discredited."

Comment author: Epiphany 03 August 2013 10:46:29PM *  0 points [-]

... more objectivity than is warranted

Oh good point. Okay. I think that objectivity might be the problem with "Hi, I'm a genius." but I'm not sure that's the problem with "Hi, I'm gifted." I'll try another thought experiment on non-objective statements:

  1. "Hi, I'm nice."
  2. "Hi, I'm gifted."
  3. "Hi, I'm beautiful."
  4. "Hi, I'm awesome."
  5. "Hi, I'm wonderful."

Hmm, the problem with these is that nice, awesome, wonderful and beautiful all refer to traits that are too small in scope or too vague to make good identity claims. As such, my instinct is to question them with "Why are you saying this?" and the default motive that comes to mind is that the person is arrogant. However, being gifted is correlated with a lot of personality traits and neurological differences - so it is large enough in scope to be a key part of a person's identity. The reason I'm interested in this is because it appears to me that if a key part of your identity is that you are an artist, a dyslexic, or a Southerner, you can say so without being instantly rejected by most of the population for being "arrogant" while the closest you can get, it seems, to being able to make a claim having to do with a gifted identity (without being rejected for arrogance) is to say "Hi, I'm a nerd." - but that has the opposite problem. People reject it because nerdiness is automatically associated with being socially undesirable.

I want to try a different angle. Two questions:

  1. Do you think giftedness or high IQ are likely to play a large role in influencing a person's personality, views or lifestyle?

  2. Do you see any way to make a claim that giftedness or high IQ are a large part of one's identity without a high risk of rejection?

  3. If you do not see any way to make such a claim without a high risk, then why do you think that is?

I think what you're telling me in the last paragraph is "Making claims about your IQ makes you sound dodgy because people feel really skeptical about IQ scores." If that's it, that is a really good point, too. +1 Karma.

Comment author: rebellionkid 03 August 2013 08:38:10PM 7 points [-]

I hope it is false.

I think this is the most interesting sentence in the whole discussion.

Let's be clear. Racial groupings are really very significant pieces of evidence. There's huge amounts of genetics that correlates, huge amounts of culture that correlates, huge amounts of wider environment that correlates. It would be frankly astonishing if things like IQ, reaction time, hight, life expectancy, and rates of disease didn't also correlate.

So, we ought to expect to see a correlation, and in fact a whole bunch of studies say we do. ... And then those studies are put under far more than average pressure. See people below wanting to dismiss Raven's Progressive Matrices as culturally biased. Why on earth do we want there to be no such correlation with IQ.

We're very happy to say there's a correlation between race and hight, between race and life expectancy, between race and disease, between race and income. Why not race and IQ? Why do we want that to be false?

Comment author: Epiphany 03 August 2013 10:19:16PM *  1 point [-]

Let's be clear. Racial groupings are really very significant pieces of evidence. There's huge amounts of genetics that correlates, huge amounts of culture that correlates, huge amounts of wider environment that correlates. It would be frankly astonishing if things like IQ, reaction time, hight, life expectancy, and rates of disease didn't also correlate.

Culture and environment are not race. Therefore, if you're studying race, those influences should be taken out of your scientific experiment. It's extremely difficult to remove things like culture and environment from a study on IQ. The fact that so much is correlated with it doesn't mean the results of studies intended to determine racial differences are significant so much as it means they're a tangled mess of cause and effect which we likely haven't sorted out adequately.

Why on earth do we want there to be no such correlation with IQ.

A. We don't want black people to suffer needlessly.

B. We don't want to encourage ourselves and others to be prejudiced against people when, regardless of what the average African's IQ is, it is still both logically incorrect (hasty generalization) and ethically wrong to prejudge individual Africans. However, knowing how humans behave, we figure that if people believe Africans have lower IQs, that will result in an increase in prejudice.

We're very happy to say there's a correlation between race and hight, between race and life expectancy, between race and disease, between race and income. Why not race and IQ? Why do we want that to be false?

Actually, I bet some people are not happy saying that there are correlations there. This is one of those notions you might want to double check.

Comment author: Muhd 02 August 2013 11:44:04PM *  1 point [-]

This is an interesting point, but let's try a thought experiment to see if it holds up. Consider the following statements you could make about yourself

  1. You are an X-level black belt in a martial art.
  2. Your top bowling score is X.
  3. You can benchpress X amount of weight.
  4. You have an IQ of X.

Where X is some value that is impressive and/or noteworthy. How strong of a negative reaction do you think each of these would get?

Here's what my intuition says:

  1. Probably no negative reaction.
  2. Probably no negative reaction.
  3. Possibly somewhat negative, sounds like bragging.
  4. Strong negative reaction.

Looking for a pattern in the results, I have a theory: it seems like what is most unacceptable is making it sound that you are superior to the other people in the room in an objective sense. The reason martial arts and bowling are acceptable is that skill in those pursuits is not relevant to the other people in the room who do not engage in them. On the other hand, bragging about your weightlifting is somewhat more annoying since it seems like you are saying you are more healthy/fit/muscular than other people in the room--traits which are more broadly valuable.

Claiming high intelligence gets the worst response of all because it is the most absolute and broad claim of superiority one can make, since being intelligent generally makes you better at a broad range of tasks in the modern world, all else being equal. Also, IQ is associated with controversy and suffers from addtional negativity from that -- just like if you say you are for/against abortion. I think Andy may be right that the objective number makes it worse in some way. If you said "I am really smart" that wouldn't be quite as offensive, since it is less objective.

If someone can think of counterexamples to my theory, replies are welcome.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 August 2013 04:51:02AM *  -1 points [-]

I don't think it's superiority. A counterpoint in thought experiment form:

  1. "Hi, I'm the president of the United States"
  2. "Hi, I run my own business."
  3. "Hi, I'm a model."
  4. "Hi, I'm Albert, the guy who came up with E equals MC squared."
  5. "Hi, I'm a genius."

I think the numbers do make statements sound bad (I couldn't figure out a way to word the above using a number without making it sound like bragging) but that's irrelevant to the question I'm trying to answer, so it's essentially one of those factors that should be removed from an experiment. I added an additional statement in the same format (an introduction using an identity of some type) about intelligence which does not include a number so that we've got a comparable intelligence-related option.

Here's what my intuition says:

  1. No negative reaction (more likely a positive reaction like excitement).
  2. No negative reaction (admiration seems as likely as jealousy).
  3. Potentially some amount of negative feelings from jealous females, and some amount of excitement from males or lesbians.
  4. No negative reaction (more likely a positive reaction like excitement).
  5. Strong negative reaction.

What's interesting here is that 1 and 4 are not only some of the biggest claims of superiority that you can make, but have also referred to something verifiable, which should theoretically intensify the reaction. If making a claim of superiority was the problem, those should trigger much worse reactions.

I think the difference between the genius claim and the others in my thought experiment is that all the others are claiming to be doing something constructive. This makes the superiority less threatening. Another possibility is that the claims to genius and high IQ are not verifiable with LinkedIn or other research, so they're not as believable.

Here's a thought experiment on with some non-verifiable claims, where there are varying levels of superiority and threat:

  1. Hi, I'm a secret government agent.
  2. Hi, I'm very powerful.
  3. Hi, I'm an elite computer hacker.
  4. Hi, I'm highly gifted.

I think the reaction to 1-3 would be curiosity while the reaction to the fourth would be extreme dislike. I'm interested in other people's reactions because I think my own are too influenced by having thought about this previously. Interestingly:

  1. Secret agents are probably far less common than gifted people. If I remember right, the entire government is 3% of the population whereas gifted people are 2% and I doubt that 2/3 of the government consists of secret agents.

  2. Not all gifted people are powerful, as giftedness does not automatically lead to any type of success. Claiming to be gifted is not claiming as much power as "powerful" is.

My current idea is that if a person with a high IQ makes any type of claim to this, they are more likely to be accused of lying or regarded as a threat than is sensible, and that the negative reactions provoked are disproportionate when compared with reactions to other claims that are comparable but don't involve IQ / giftedness / genius.

I found your comment refreshing and thoughtful. +1 karma.

If you can think of any good counterpoints, I'd like to read them. (:

Comment author: Epiphany 03 August 2013 04:26:19AM *  1 point [-]

I'm looking for a reading recommendation on the topic of perverse incentives, especially incentives that cause people to do unethical things. Yes, I checked "The Best Textbooks on Every Subject" thread and have recorded all the economics recommendations of interest. However, as interested as I am in reading about economics in general, my specific focus is on perverse incentives, especially ones that cause people to do unethical things. I was wondering if anyone has explored this in depth or happens to know a term for "perverse incentives that cause people to do unethical things", (regardless of whether it's part of economics or some other subject), as I can't seem to find one.

Comment author: AndyCossyleon 02 August 2013 09:23:42PM 3 points [-]

I think an obvious difference between the last one and the first two is that the last one includes a number. There is no uncertainty when comparing numbers, no wriggle room for subjectivity. A real number is either smaller, bigger, or equal to another real number. Period. This rigidity does not mesh well with the flexibility that comfortable social interaction requires. I don't think this is the only reason why the third is so inappropriate, but it definitely contributes.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 August 2013 03:51:34AM 2 points [-]

An unexpected point. Thank you.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 01 July 2013 02:18:11AM 2 points [-]

Each of the P are vulnerable to the same objection: What is special about robots?

P1. Killer Robots should not be produced or used in a way that allows them to fall into the hands of people who will use them unethically.

Why does this not apply to rifles?

P2. Killer Robots should not be used for any mission which you would not be prepared to assign to a human soldier if a human soldier were capable of executing it.

Again, why isn't this isomorphic to "Human equipped with weapon X" versus "unarmed human"?

P3. Killer Robots should not be used for any mission in unpredictable circumstances or where the application of background understanding may be required.

Once more: Why are "Killer Robots" different from "machine guns" in this sentence?

P4. Killer Robots should not be equipped with capacities that go beyond the immediate mission; they should be subject to built-in time limits and capable of being shut down remotely.

s/Killer Robot/military unit.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 05:12:18PM *  -2 points [-]

Why does this not apply to rifles? / Again, why isn't this isomorphic to "Human equipped with weapon X" versus "unarmed human"?

Killer robots pose a threat to democracy that rifles do not. Please see "Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy" and the TED Talk link therein "Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot". You might also like to check out his book "Daemon" and it's sequel.

Once more: Why are "Killer Robots" different from "machine guns" in this sentence?

Machine guns are wielded by humans, the humans can make better ethical decisions than robots currently can.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 01 July 2013 01:04:47PM 0 points [-]

Do you know if anyone has written an article yet on obviousness as a meta semantic stop sign, or obviousness as a false supportive argument? If not, I'll do it.

Not that I could recall.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 05:02:22PM *  -1 points [-]

Ok, I'll post about this in the open thread to gauge interest / see if anyone else knows of a pre-existing LW post on these specific obviousness problems.

Comment author: Alicorn 01 July 2013 06:32:49AM 4 points [-]

Yvain has graduated medical school; he is concentrating in psychiatry but it's still an MD.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 06:45:40AM 0 points [-]

Ah, okay. I'll edit my comment then.

Comment author: fowlertm 01 July 2013 05:37:43AM 2 points [-]

Thanks for your comments, I'm inclined to basically agree with what you've said. Bans are almost never the answer and probably wouldn't work anyway. Which, if that's true, means machine ethics is even more important, because the only solution is to make these autonomous technologies as absolutely safe as possible.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 06:44:17AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for your comments, I'm inclined to basically agree with what you've said.

I am glad to know that my comments have made a difference and that they were welcome. I think LessWrong could benefit a lot from The Power of Reinforcement, so I am glad to see someone doing this.

the only solution is to make these autonomous technologies as absolutely safe as possible.

Actually, I don't think that approach will work in this scenario. When it comes to killer robots, the militaries will make them as dangerous as possible (but controllable, of course). However, the biggest problem isn't that they'll shoot innocent people - that's a problem, but there's a worse one. The worst one is that we may soon live in an age where anyone can decide to make themselves an army. Making killer robots safe is an oxymoron. There needs to be a solution that's really out of the box.

Comment author: Alicorn 01 July 2013 06:16:17AM 1 point [-]

As a non-medical doctor having a discussion with a fellow non-medical doctor to humor curiosities:

Are you talking to someone other than Yvain, about whom you wrote this remark?

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 06:26:55AM *  0 points [-]

It was written to Yvain. I was under the impression that Yvain was studying psychology, not medicine. Now that his website link has changed, I'm not sure there's a way for me to look this up.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 03:07:54AM *  2 points [-]

My purpose with this is not to argue, but to get people to really think about the measures he suggests because I think we can have a more realistic view than the one presented by Peter at the Conscious Entities blog.

P1 - Restricting killer robot production would come at great cost, would pose risks, and isn't likely to happen.

Great Cost:

To ban killer robots, you would also have to ban:

  • 3-D printers (If they can't make parts for killer robots now, they'll probably be able to make them later.)

  • Personal robots (If they can hold a gun then people could pull some Kevlar over them and make any modifications needed.)

  • Anything that can be controlled by a computer and also hold a deadly payload (toy and hobby items like airplanes and quad copters may be able to be fashioned into assassination tools with the addition of something like a spray bottle full of chemicals or dart shooter.)

  • Computer controlled vehicles. Seem unwieldy or expensive? Consider how many pounds of explosives they can conceal, how far they can go, and how much damage they could do for the price, and the possibility of choosing a cheap used vehicle to offset cost (and the used cars of the future may be computer capable).

The number of technologies that could potentially be used to make lethally autonomous "killer robot" weapons is limited only by our imaginations. Pretty much anything with the ability to see, process visual data, identify targets, and physically move could become deadly with modification. As technology progresses, it would become harder and harder to make anything new without it getting banned due to it's potential for lethal autonomy. The amount of future technologies we'd have to ban could become ridiculous.

Bans pose risks:

As is said about gun control: "If guns are illegal, only the criminals will have them" - Eliezer agrees with the spirit of this in the context of killer robots.

Consider these possibilities:

  1. People will be able to steal from these approved companies, they'll be able to bribe these companies, and organized crime groups like mafias and gangs will be able to use tactics like blackmail and intimidation to get 3-D printers and other technologies. Criminals will therefore still have access to those things.

  2. Anybody who wants to become a bloodthirsty dictator would only have to start the right kind of company. Then they'd have access to all the potential weapons they want, and assuming they could amass enough robots to take on an army (in some country, if not in their own)... they could fulfill that dream.

  3. If we did ban them for the average person but let companies have them, we'd be upgrading those companies to an empowered class of potential warlords. Imagine if companies today - the same ones that are pulling various forms of B.S. (like the banks and the recession) also had enough firepower to kill you.

Isn't likely to happen:

I don't think we're likely to ban all 3-D printers, personal robots, computer-controlled cars, computer-controlled toys / electronics and everything else that could possibly be used as a lethally autonomous weapon. Such widespread bans would have a major impact on economic growth. Consider how much we feel a need to compete with other countries - and other countries may not have bans. Especially consider the relationship between our economic growth and our military power - we can't defend ourselves against other countries without funding our military, and we can't fund our military without taxes, and without sufficient economic growth, we won't be able to collect sufficient taxes. If any other countries do not also have such bans, and any of those ban-less countries might in the future decide to make war against us, we'd be sitting ducks if we let such bans slow economic growth.

Even if we did ban possession of these items for the average person (which would seriously impact economic growth, seeing as how the average person's purchases are a large part of that, and those purchases can be taxed), we'd probably not ban them for manufacturers and other professionals else technological progress may be seriously crippled. If we do not ban them for companies, this means that the risk was not eliminated (see "bans pose risks" above).

If the people realize how these technologies could cause the power balances to shift - and Daniel Suarez is working on getting them to realize that - they may begin to demand to be allowed 3-D printers and personal robots and so on as an extension of their right to bear arms. They may realistically need to have defenses against the gangs, wayward companies and would-be dictators of the future, and if they're concerned about it, they'll be looking to get a hold of those weapons in whatever way possible. If the people believe that they have a right to, or a need for 3-D printers and robot body-guards, then a ban on these types of technologies would be about as effective as prohibition.

P2. - Ensuring hypothetical human soldiers will not protect democracy.

If sufficient killer robots exist to match or overpower human soldiers, then at that point, the government can do what it likes because nobody will be able to fight back. This means the checks and balances on the government's power are gone. No checks and balances means that the government does not even have to follow it's own rules - nobody is powerful enough to enforce them. (Imagine the supreme court screaming at the executive branch in front of the executive branch's killer robot army. Not practical.) If that happens, you'll be at the mercy of those in power and will just have to cross your fingers that every single president you elect until the end of time (don't forget the one in office at the time) chooses not to be a dictator for life. Game over. We fail.

P3. - Avoiding unpredictable circumstances is not possible.

A. If unpredictable circumstances are a killer robot army's weakness, the enemy of said killer robot army will most certainly realize that this can be exploited. If any types of unpredictable circumstances at all are useful, the enemy will likely be forced to exploit them in order to survive.

B. Since when is regular life predictable, let alone a situation as chaotic as war? Sorry, ensuring a predictable circumstance in the event of war is not possible.

P4. - Restricting killer robot abilities may prove anti-strategic and therefore deemed lame.

Since war is an unpredictable and chaotic situation in which your enemy - who is a conscious, thinking entity - will probably get creative and throw at you exactly what you did not plan for, versatility is a must. It may be that failing to arm the robot in every way possible makes it totally ineffective, meaning that if people choose to fight with them at all, they will view it as an absolute necessity to arm all killer robots to the teeth, and will justify that with "Well you want to survive the war, don't you?"

P4. - Adding remote shut down isn't practical.

A. Imagine how a remote shut down situation would actually play out in reality. Your robots are fighting. Oops there's a bug. There are enemies everywhere. You shut them down. The enemy goes "WOOT FREE KILLER ROBOTS!" takes them to their base, hacks them. and reverse engineers them. Not only did you just lose your killer robot army, your enemy just gained a killer robot army, and will be able to make better weapons from now on. When is remote shut down ever going to actually be used on a killer robot army during combat? I think the answer to that is: If the person controlling the robots has half a brain, never. They will never use this feature outside of a test environment, and if their computer security expert has half a brain, the remote shut down feature will be removed from them after they leave the test environment (See B).

B. Successful offense is easier than successful defense - this also applies to the computer hacking world. This is why there are so many police stations and government offices that do not connect computers with sensitive data to the internet or don't have the internet at all! They can't be certain of preventing their computers from being hacked. If you put remote shut down into the killer robot armies, that's just a super sweet target for your enemy's hackers. In order to be hacker-proof, they'll have to make these robots truly autonomous - meaning no remote control whatsoever, and no special button or voice command or sequence that shuts them down, period. If their computer security expert has half a brain, killer robots will not be made with the remote shutdown "feature". Well, okay, I suppose the government could put in a remote shut down feature they want to send them to shoot at people in developing countries with no hackers - but the remote shutdown feature would be a serious flaw against a technologically advanced enemy. Actually, scratch that. There are a lot of criminal hacking organizations out there and technology companies that may be interested in hacking the remote shutdown feature in order to usurp their very own robot army. Creating an army of killer robots with a shutdown feature in a world where there are multiple parties that may be interested in usurping this army could be an extremely poor decision, even if your original intention was to expose that robot army only to third-world combatants.

machine ethics is going to become especially important very soon

Thank you very much for taking time to talk about this issue. I'm very glad to see that people are taking it seriously and are talking about it. I hope you do not take offense at my comment, as my purpose with this is not to make you feel argued with but to encourage people to think realistically about these dangers.

Comment author: coffeespoons 30 June 2013 10:53:33PM *  2 points [-]

Replacing condoms doesn't work for people who aren't currently in monogamous relationships. We need them to protect against STIs. Encouraging people to entirely replace condoms would I should think lead to an increase in STIs.

I've used condoms every single time I've had sex, and they've only failed twice. Both of the times they failed I took emergency contraception. I've never had a pregnancy scare. Of course I could be infertile, but many of my friends use the same method, and they find it effective. Others use a combination of hormonal contraception and condoms.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 01:36:45AM *  0 points [-]

I'm torn here. Do I tell you that's a good point because combination strategies can be much more effective at preventing pregnancy, or do I let you know that the efficacy rate for STIs are subject to the same forces as the efficacy rates for pregnancy?

I guess I can do both. You'll decide what risk to take in any case.

The amount of protection that you can get from a condom against STIs is not as good as the amount of protection you get against pregnancy. Not everyone can give you an STI (about 20% of the population) whereas most straight couplings can lead to pregnancy (about 90% of people of childbearing age are fertile). So that increases your odds of a good outcome. Some people are honest about their STI status, and that also increases your odds of a good outcome - but don't forget that some people do not even know that they have an STI, and others may be in denial or crazy or sociopathic - and if you're having casual sex, you really can't be sure about a person's moral character and sanity level.

Your chance of getting an STI while using a condom would be a lot higher than 50% if you had a partner with a disease for the rest of your life. If you have random partners, and 1/20 people has an STI and some of them don't know it, and some of them aren't honest... I'm not sure what your chances are, but if you're successful with finding partners, it could be substantially worse than a 2% lifetime risk.

You may want to try looking up rates of STI among people who have non-relationship sex.

Another possibility is to find a special friend and get tested together.

If that won't work, a combination strategy (like condoms with spermicide) could be a significant improvement. You may want to research nonoxynol-9 before using it. I've heard that it increases the chance of disease transmission.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 29 June 2013 09:55:16PM 0 points [-]

That seems like just a wrong use of obvious. When I say "obvious" I usually mean I cannot explain something because my understanding is subconscious and opaque to introspection.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 12:46:24AM *  1 point [-]

I'm glad you seem to be aware of this problem. Unfortunately, I don't think the rest of the world is aware of this. The dictionary currently defines obvious as meaning "easily seen" and "evident", unfortunately.

Comment author: Skeeve 29 June 2013 11:23:11AM 2 points [-]

For this reason, I've found it's very important to be careful not to assume that the world is doing sensible things or giving me all the information.

Yeah, this is good advice in general, and it's definitely what I was doing wrong this time.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 12:37:48AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for taking a moment to let me know that my comment is appreciated and that this information makes a difference for you. I find that, like Luke says in The Power of Reinforcement, knowing that a behavior of mine has made a difference and is wanted "increases the probability that the behavior will occur again".

I think LessWrong could really use more positive reinforcement, so I hereby positively reinforce you for showing the humility to positively reinforce.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 June 2013 06:41:47AM 2 points [-]

Well, in mathematics papers it tends to mean, "I'm certain this is true, but now that I can't think of an argument at the moment".

Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 12:19:40AM 0 points [-]

Hahahah! Oh, that's terrible. Now I just realized that my meaning was not entirely explicit. I edited my statement to add the part about not supporting points.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 29 June 2013 05:36:27AM 3 points [-]
Comment author: Epiphany 01 July 2013 12:13:57AM *  0 points [-]

Good link. I like that Grognor mentions that obviousness is just a matter of perception and people's ideas about what's obvious will vary, so we shouldn't assume other people know "obvious" things. However, I think that it's really important for us to be aware that if you think something is obvious, you stop questioning, and you're then left with what is essentially a first impression - but I don't see Grognor mention that semantic stop sign like effect in the post, nor do I see anything about people using obviousness as a way to falsely support points.

Do you think Grognor would be interested in updating the article to include additional negative effects of obviousness? Then again putting too many points into an article makes articles confusing and less fun to read. Maybe I should write one. Do you know if anyone has written an article yet on obviousness as a meta semantic stop sign, or obviousness as a false supportive argument? If not, I'll do it.

Comment author: Yvain 29 June 2013 03:21:15PM *  15 points [-]

This is okay science, and unlike most times people link to these kinds of things on here I'm not going to throw a fit. But a few caveats:

First of all, my totally unfounded opinion is that the guy you're linking to seems sketchy as hell. His site implies he is a doctor a bunch of times, including his biography talking about when he entered medical school, but the only degree listed is one from a college of "naturopathic medicine". He founded a sketchy online pharmacy that sells (among other things) homeopathic solutions. He believes that vaccinations cause autism, at least in MTHFR babies (aka 1/4 of the population). And he fits a very worrying stereotype of the doctor who prescribes the same cure for almost every disease, and recommends that if it doesn't work you just need to "optimize" his cure a little more carefully, as opposed to consider that other factors may be involved.

I don't actually know anything about the research on this subject, but because of the red flags raised above I've tried to investigate it very briefly and see what it looks like. You should probably ignore everything below, but just out of curiosity:

Dr. Lynch seems to think that if you have MTHFR, taking more folic acid will be harmful to you. The way I've heard it is that taking more folic acid compensates for the lowered activity of MTHFR (see for example Linus Pauling Institute. Studies have also shown that low blood folate raises homocysteine levels.

If that's correct, then supplementing with MTHF would have similar effects to supplementing with normal folate - ie a mixed bag that seems to include higher risk of many cancers.

And although conventional wisdom is that homocysteine is a harmful amino acid that causes cardiovascular disease, this has been confirmed in correlational studies only and interventional studies have failed to show that decreasing homocysteine lowers heart attack risk.

My guess is that most of the disease associations Dr. Lynch mentions as linked to MTHFR are actually linked to folate in general, and people with MTHFR are more likely to have low folate and therefore disease. For example, Dr. Lynch mentions that MTHFR affects autism risk, Down Syndrome risk, neural tube defect risk, etc, but folic acid in general also affects all of these things. Likewise, this study shows that babies with mutant MTHFR have more autism, but that this effect only holds true in countries without folic acid supplementation - the implication being that in countries with folic acid supplementation, pregnant women have enough folic acid whether they have a gene that decreases their levels slightly or not.

I admit I have tried to read the important parts of his site but I haven't gotten to all of it, so maybe it explains his unconventional views on folate levels vs. MHTF levels somewhere.

Although Dr. Lynch recommends spending $150+ to get yourself genetically tested, my suggestion if you're worried about this or any other gene is to sign up for 23andMe and get all your common mutations sequenced in one go for $99. If you already have 23andMe data, you can find your version of the gene Dr. Lynch is talking about by clicking in the gear in the upper left hand corner, going to "Browse Raw Data", and then searching for SNP rs1801133. 23andMe uses opposite notation from most other sites, so the homozygous normal will be listed as GG, heterozygous as GA, and mutant as AA.

(I seem to be part of the lucky 25% who has the AA version. Maybe this explains my constant addictive infectious depressed demented diabetic cancerous heart attacks)

Your doctor can test you for folate deficiency. If you're really concerned about your health it's not a terrible idea, though it's no more important than about thirty other tests you could also get. If you have the mutant gene, maybe have a slightly more stringent standard than normal for what counts as deficiency? I don't know. In any case, you can supplement with MTHF if you want, but as mentioned before it will probably have about the same effect as normal folate supplementation - great for people with deficiencies and for pregnant women, probably just a little more cancer in everyone else. You can read more here.

The only exception is that if your psychiatrist recommends it for depression, you will need the MTHF version since the normal version can't directly enter the brain. Your doctor will recommend an expensive Official Medical Version of it. As far as I know, the MTHF you can get off Amazon for $15 works exactly as well.

I would be really interested in hearing from anyone who knows more about biochemistry or has studied these areas in more depth.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 June 2013 11:51:04PM *  2 points [-]

The guy you're linking to seems sketchy as hell.

I agree. The reason I chose that specific page is because I did not find an adequate alternative list. I tried Googling site:.gov "symptoms of MTHFR" and site:.edu "symptoms of MTHFR" and only one result comes up - but it's specifically for homocysteinemia. That one result is reputable (nih.gov) but I know that it does not contain a full list of symptoms. It has left out important symptoms like depression and fatigue, which I know to be associated with MTHFR because I know people with the condition whose medical professionals have said that those symptoms can be caused by MTHFR and whose fatigue and/or depression symptoms were helped immensely by MTHFR treatment, and because I saw research on PubMed (searched it again since I have no idea where it is) linking MTHFR with depression and finding that using methyfolate as part of the treatment has an effect on depression. I could go with the shorter symptom list for homocysteinemia, but since I know that it is inadequate, I figured the longer symptom list would likely result in more people getting MTHFR tests and useful treatment.

There's an elephant in the room here: why doesn't there seem to be a good symptom list? If the fact that there are 5073 results for MTHFR on PubMed means anything at all, MTHFR is probably a real mutation with the potential to cause health effects. I suspect that it's because we discovered MTHFR fairly recently and research results can be confusing because most of them are wrong, so perhaps the credible sources don't want to take the chance on listing symptoms that they're not completely certain are associated with MTHFR. This of course would not mean that people are not sick. It would just mean that the only people who have the guts to try to give people some idea of what MTHFR does to you are people who don't have that kind of credibility to lose.

Perhaps your point here is to give me a heads-up along the lines of "people might get confused and think you are recommending the this guy". That would be a good heads-up if so. Since it has occurred to me, I decided to add a disclaimer to my P/S/A comment.

if you have MTHFR, taking more folic acid...

As a non-medical doctor having a discussion with a psychiatrist to humor curiosities:

My understanding is that if you have MTHFR, you've got a reduced ability to process folic acid into methylfolate, and methylfolate is the usable version. Therefore taking additional folic acid isn't necessarilly going to result in you utilizing the folic acid. Additionally, if you cannot process the folic acid, it sits around in your system waiting for you to clean it out. If your folic acid is synthetic as opposed to food-based, there can be issues with the synthetic folic acid sitting around not being utilized. The claim I heard was that it's this unutilized synthetic folic acid that causes autism.

the implication being that in countries with folic acid supplementation

That's interesting. Have you taken an interest in MTHFR or were your perspectives formed based on research you did after reading this PSA? I'm asking you because if it turns out that you've got a significant interest in MTHFR, I'd be interested in hearing what else you know about it. If not, I should probably regard your forays into MTHFR research as being about as useful as mine since, without reading a ton of research, any perspectives we build are going to be suceptible to the "most published research findings are false" problem.

sign up for 23andMe and get all your common mutations sequenced in one go for $99

I chose not to recommend that for the following reasons:

A. (As a non-lawyer) I believe that it is now illegal for U.S. health insurance companies to discriminate against you based on the results of genetic testing, but there may be no protection in other countries that LessWrong readers are from (and 50% of them visit from outside the U.S.).

B. (As a non-lawyer) I believe that it is still legal for U.S. life insurance and disability insurance companies to discriminate against you on the basis of genetic testing.

C. If I remember correctly, the 23 and me test is is not an official medical test. I was told by a doctor that when comparing the 23 and me results to a different test that uses blood instead of saliva and does qualify as a medical test, that the results are very close. I was also told a lot of things about it by a person with a biology degree that made me realize how complicated genetic testing is. I'm not sure whether 23 and me should be recommended in place of a medical test.

D. I was initially very squicked by 23 and me because the only PDF of theirs that I could find that has an accuracy citation produces a 404 error when you click it. I have since gotten citations from them, after bugging the heck out of customer service and explaining what "real citation" means. Upon reviewing the citations, I realized that I was in over my head because I didn't know a lot of the terms they were using. I am no longer squicked, but it's mostly because a few people I think are probably trustworthy told me that 23 and me is useful. I still wonder whether I should consider them dodgy due to the failure to provide a real accuracy citation in their PDF.

In any case, you can supplement with MTHF if you want

Self-treating with methylfolate may not be a good idea. Here's why.

The only exception is that if your psychiatrist recommends it for depression, you will need the MTHF version since the normal version can't directly enter the brain.

I see now that MTHFR.net actually did not list depression as a symptom by itself. They've got depression in post-menopausal women and "Infant depression via epigenetic processes caused by maternal depression" but not plain "depression". Is your take on it that MTHFR can cause depression and/or that methylfolate can be useful for treating depression?

As far as I know, the MTHF you can get off Amazon for $15 works exactly as well.

I have checked out dozens and dozens of supplement review results on consumerlab.com, perhaps over a hundred. My findings are that many of the brands tested were shown to offer one or more supplements that contain lead, spoiled ingredients, or they did not contain the amount of the substance(s) advertized. I would not go get a random cheap one on Amazon.com. Instead, I would find one of these brands:

Brands with 30 reviews each and a perfect record on consumerlab as of June 2013:

  • Solgar

  • Puritan's Pride

  • Vitamin World

  • Nature's Bounty

Brands with an acceptable record as of June 2013:

  • Jarrow (17 reviews, all passed except one with a labeling issue)

Note: Puritan's Pride, Vitamin World and Nature's Bounty are all related. I think they're all owned by the same company.

I plan to start a blog containing my supplement research and other life optimizing research at some point in the future (or perhaps find a relevant one to post on, since LessWrong is about rationality, not optimizing one's life). I can update you when my supplement data is posted if you'd like.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Public Service Announcement Collection
Comment author: Skeeve 28 June 2013 12:18:43PM 0 points [-]

That's what I assumed as well, that it was 2% per incident, but I'm having a little trouble parsing those differently:

How is 2% per incident different than 2% per year? I'd interpret both of those statements as 'on average, given perfect use, a condom will be ineffective at preventing pregnancy in one use out of fifty'.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 07:50:08PM *  1 point [-]

Here's how 2% per incident is different:

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that the average number of uses per year is 100.

A 2% per incident risk will add up to a yearly 50% risk for the average user.*

A 2% per year risk already included 100 uses, so it is still 2% per year.

A 2% per year risk would add up to a 70% chance over the 35 or so years women are fertile and active and a 2% per incident risk would add up to a much, much higher risk, likely resulting in multiple pregnancies.*

* This is only if pure math reflects reality, which it probably doesn't because there are other factors here like people forgetting important parts of the instructions over time, people getting better at using them over time, or people becoming sloppy about applying them because they're tired of them or have developed a sense of over-confidence.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Public Service Announcement Collection
Comment author: Skeeve 28 June 2013 05:53:35PM 3 points [-]

Well, yes, but what does 2% failure rate per year even mean when it's presented independent of a number of uses per year? I mean, without knowing what number of average uses were used to calculate "2% failure rate per year", it seems like somewhat of a misleading statement, as I'm reasonably certain (let's say at least 90%) that it's not intended to reflect that condoms become more protective the more chances you have to use them.

I feel like I'm missing something basic here that would let me see why it's a useful piece of information on its own.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 07:39:36PM *  1 point [-]

what does 2% failure rate per year even mean when it's presented independent of a number of uses per year

This is a good observation. You can look up what the average number of uses per year is. If I remember right, I've seen some condom efficacy studies include that information.

I feel like I'm missing something basic here that would let me see why it's a useful piece of information on its own.

You're not missing anything basic, you're correctly perceiving ambiguity where ambiguity does exist. Even when information is really important, I've found that it's often been omitted simply because products are marketed to the average person, not to nerdy people like me, and most people don't want to think as much as I do. For this reason, I've found it's very important to be careful not to assume that the world is doing sensible things or giving me all the information. They're not just leaving information out, they're also not being held accountable by a world full of people who think as much as I do. Therefore, they can get away with slapping various nonsense marketing claims and out-of-context data on their boxes without people questioning them.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2013 11:48:34AM 6 points [-]

The condom boxes say there's a 2% failure rate. That's 2% per year. Considering that most people are sexually active for far more than one year, that 2% rate is completely meaningless.

Do people actually interpret that 2% to mean 2% per lifetime? If I didn't know what it meant, I'd interpret it as 2% per intercourse.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Public Service Announcement Collection
Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 07:29:52PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, unfortunately, a large number of the people I've talked to do interpret it as 2% per lifetime.

Comment author: David_Gerard 28 June 2013 09:27:06AM 0 points [-]

Please cite your sources for those numbers, they look like the ridiculously fudged one Catholic sources come up with.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 10:45:13AM *  1 point [-]

Okay, I understand your alarm - you're probably thinking something along the lines of WTF, you're saying condoms aren't effective, why are you contradicting sex ed? If you want one quick reference to show you why you should be concerned about this, the Journal of Family Practice published a research survey that revealed the aftermath of these condom myths. I added it to the comment you were responding to. As for why I said what I said in the last comment: I tried finding a condom study that ran for longer than a year. I couldn't find one anywhere. The one year studies gave failure rates that ranged between 2% and 15%. Those figures can be found at Pubmed if you search for condom efficacy.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 28 June 2013 09:24:28AM *  1 point [-]

WHOAH, this is amazing! Thank you for the summary and link.

I'm curious why you say caution is warranted given that supplemental B12 and folate are highly innocuous with doses 10x the RDA still not showing any toxicity.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 10:20:20AM *  6 points [-]

Caution is warranted for a few reasons:

  1. I've been told that the liver uses methylfolate for detoxification. If you take too much too soon, or ramp up too quickly, you will end up really feeling like hell because of the detoxification process. This may be more of a problem for people who have toxins built up in their system due to inefficient detoxification.

  2. I've been told that methylfolate can increase your blood pressure. Your doctor may need to be monitoring this.

  3. I've been told that if you do need all three of methylfolate, methylcobalamin and a homocysteine regulator but do not get all three, or if you get them in the wrong amounts, treatment can be ineffective (the risk here is that you will become disheartened and give up on a treatment that could have changed your life).

  4. I've been told that if your digestive system is a mess, you may need to fix it up before the treatment will work. Once again, the risk is becoming disheartened and missing out on a useful treatment.

  5. Other reasons I may not know about because I am not a medical professional.

You have to remember, everything is connected - your body is a system. A very, very complicated system. Change one thing over here, and there can be unforeseen consequences over there.

Unfortunately, doctors are tasked with the unrealistic expectation of learning about thousands of diseases and thousands of symptoms and trying to match each disease to each symptom... and, on top of that, all of them are complicated to treat... to be really honest, I don't think it is possible for any human to do a good job of diagnosing every disease, or treating every problem. From what I've seen, when people use the "throw a doctor at it" approach, it can fail pretty hard pretty often. What you want is the "find the exact right doctor for this specific problem" approach. Don't expect a GP to solve everything you bring to them. Instead, find someone who specializes in your set of symptoms or diagnosis and has lots of experience with it. That's much more likely to get you a functional treatment plan.

Comment author: klkblake 28 June 2013 09:19:43AM 3 points [-]

Do you know if this issue would show up on a standard vitamin panel?

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 10:11:41AM *  2 points [-]

Hmm. Good question. I think they'd have to test for the methylated versions, not the regular versions, and I do not know whether the standard procedure is to test for the methylated versions - but this is just me reasoning it out, not medical advice. To my knowledge, if MTHFR is suspected, they generally test for the MTHFR mutation itself.

Comment author: shminux 28 June 2013 12:09:15AM 2 points [-]

Not sure why the parent is so highly upvoted. Coding aptitude clearly exists, just like aptitude for math, music and writing. You can teach most people the basic of any of those, but without aptitude they will never be any good at it.

Disclaimer: I'm of the opinion that coding should be treated as a literacy skill — like reading, writing, and arithmetic.

No idea what makes you think that. Coding is a highly specialized skill not useful to most people in everyday life.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 09:27:52AM *  3 points [-]

There are a lot of people who want to believe that anyone can do anything, that we're all equals in every way. One can sometimes run into really nasty attitudes when talking about intellectual differences, clear examples of fluff like "we're all gifted" and myths like "giftedness goes away when children grow up". Granted, it would be kind of weird to see that on LessWrong because these guys seem pretty in touch with reality when it comes to acknowledging that intellectual differences exist. Perhaps it is, instead, mind projection fallacy. Most of these guys can program, so maybe they figure most other people can learn to program the same way they did. I've noticed that a lot of gifted people have this problem - they have an ability, think of it as normal, and they assume average people will be able to do it.

Comment author: Protagoras 28 June 2013 08:51:56AM 2 points [-]

The 15% "typical use" failure rate is the failure rate for people who use condoms most of the time. I'm disinclined to call it a failure of condoms myself that they don't work when people don't use them, though perhaps it could be considered a defect in the method that people apparently have such trouble using them all the time. Do note that birth control research does not involve researchers observing people in their bedrooms to see how and how consistently they are using their methods. The research is based on people's reported use, so since those reports are obviously not perfectly reliable, the 2% "perfect use" failure rate almost certainly is also partly (perhaps mostly) due to occasional failures to use the condoms.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 09:06:11AM *  1 point [-]

In IT, if people don't use your software correctly, it's called "Bad user interface design." In business, if people don't like your product enough to actually use it, it's considered your responsibility to make a better product next time. Most people are blaming the condom users, but I think we can take the outside perspective instead. Instead of "shoulding" the condom users, let's criticize the product:

  • You have to remember the product when? This is kinda bad timing to remember stuff, you know?

  • They have to carefully concentrate and use agile finger motions at that time? Maybe they are so excited that fine motor skills like putting on a condom become really hard due to shaking fingers, or concentration becomes a problem due to distraction, and they put it on wrong.

  • They have to use impulse control then? Maybe their neuro-chemistry is all bent out of shape and impulse control is low. This is kinda a bad time to expect excellent impulse control, seriously.

  • Maybe they spent a lot of time getting themselves or their partners ready to go, and they know that a delay can deflate the mood, so they feel conflicted about doing things like reading the instructions, taking their time putting it on, or just getting the thing out.

Please do not confuse this message for "don't use condoms". My message is actually "We need something better than just condoms." (Even if condoms were a joy to use, their effectiveness is still too low.) More importantly:

Please consider also that if there's any trait at all that makes using condoms less likely to succeed (lower impulse control, less agile fingers, memory issues) those traits may have a genetic advantage for as long as condoms are a primary method of contraception. Example: If you keep forgetting to use your condoms, you're more likely to get someone pregnant, and if the memory issue is genetic, you've just put one more copy of that gene into the world.

To prevent their companies from having a negative impact on the gene pool, and because the consequences for their customers can be so dire (moreso for a pro-life couple who isn't ready for a baby), I think contraceptive makers should take more responsibility here.

IT people do it. Other business people do it. They can do it, too.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 June 2013 05:39:29AM 3 points [-]
Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 08:31:55AM *  0 points [-]

That's not quite what I meant, but that's a good article.

What I meant is more along the lines of... two people are trying to figure out the same thing together, one jumps to a conclusion and the other one does not. It's that distance between the first observation and the truth I am referring to, not the distance between one person's perspective and another's.

Reads that article again. I think this is my third time.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 28 June 2013 01:55:06AM *  3 points [-]

Continuing: Other substances whose deficiency is common and seem to have large effects for a subset of the population. By that I mean they see immediate relief after supplementing.

  • Magnesium: issues with muscle tension, cramps, poor sleep quality.
  • Potassium: immediate strong nootropic effects for some people. Coconut water is the most popular method of fixing this.
  • B12: absorption seems to be poor enough that deficiency is common even among people who eat b12 rich foods. Especially important for older folks as absorption declines with age. Responsible for many things people chalk up to age: aches, nervous tension, poor sleep, anxiety, depression, lethargy etc.
  • Saturated fat: immediate strong nootropic effects for some people.
Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 08:21:39AM 0 points [-]

Re: B12 - Actually, new PSA.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 08:17:36AM *  3 points [-]

Why isn't Reddit singing? Several possible reasons:

  1. Most published research findings are false. - this sort of problem makes people wary of new research.

  2. Preventing and curing diseases is bad for business if you're in the medical industry. However, average people look to doctors to tell them what's real and what's not. It may be that doctors aren't spreading the word very fast, or are downplaying the message because of perverse incentives.

  3. They may be prone to overconfident pessimism.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 08:07:30AM *  2 points [-]

and it's not even dangerous (at least compared to the alternatives, as far as I am aware of

Actually, I've heard that low-carb diets are criticized for increasing the risk of colon cancer, however the problem (from what I, a non medical professional understand) might have been too little fiber (which you can just add to your diet...).

Also, there's a state called "Atkin's attitude" which basically means your blood sugar can get too low making you really grouchy (hazardous socially, obviously).

Also, a low-carb diet can throw off your ph balance, evidently. I am on a low-carb paleo diet and was told by a doctor to use a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar daily to stop the joint aches I was having that were caused by ph imbalance.

Doing anything with your health is going to be complicated and might be tricky. It's good to get as much knowledge as possible.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 07:58:53AM *  3 points [-]

P/S/A: There's a treatable genetic mutation that half the population has which has more or less recently begun to be treated called MTHFR that causes several vitamin deficiencies (due to you not processing them into the usable forms - and it's treatable because you can take the usable form as a supplement) and homocysteine issues, and it's symptoms can range between none to raging horrible problems with depression, anxiety, IBS, fatigue, and a list of other things.

Specifics:

It reduces the body's ability to convert folic acid into the usable form, methyl folate and reduces the body's ability to convert vitamin B12 into the usable form (called methylcobalamin). This same mutation also tends to cause homocysteine levels to be too high or too low.

Caution:

Knowledge about this is kind of new, because we only mapped the genome so long ago (and figured out what this gene does, and figured out how to treat it, and began producing the supplements to treat it, etc). It can be tricky to treat. If you pursue this, you should seek a medical professional who has significant experience treating people with MTHFR.

What are the symptoms:

"Research is still pending on which medical conditions are caused by, or at least partially attributed to, the MTHFR gene mutations. From the partial list I recently went through on Medline, these are the current symptoms, syndromes and medical conditions relating to the MTHFR gene mutations" - www.mthfr.net This site lists 64 different conditions and symptoms ranging from miscarriages to schizophrenia. See Also: Disclaimer.

Disclaimer:

There's a reason I chose the symptom link above, but you should know that it is not a perfect list of symptoms. For an alternative list and an explanation about why I chose this symptom list, please see my response to Yvain about that under "the guy you're linking to".

Comment author: Technoguyrob 27 June 2013 08:37:29PM 7 points [-]

p/s/a: Going up to a girl pretty much anywhere in public and saying something like "I thought you looked cute and wanted to meet you" actually works if your body language is in order. If this seems too scary, going on Chatroulette or Omegle and being vaguely interesting also works, and I know people who have gotten married from meeting this way.

p/s/a: Vitamin D supplements can take you from depressed zombie to functioning human being in one week.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 07:15:08AM *  1 point [-]

At times when I was low on iodine or B vitamins, I've had the zombie one day functioning the next experience as well. There are other things that are supposed to have an effect like omega 3. Then there are other things like the "Atkin's attitude" which is reported to happen to some who reduce their carb levels enough to make their blood sugar too low. It might be possible to eat a weird enough diet that you consume too little tryptophan to make serotonin. It might make more sense to consider the full spectrum of relevant substances instead of trying this and that.

Also, not all vitamin supplement brands are equal. Some are far, far better than others. On consumerlab.com Solgar, Jarrow, Puritan's Pride, Vitamin World and Nature's Bounty were tested in lots of different reviews and have a very good track record, whereas there are a lot of other brands that, after only a few tests, showed problems with things as shocking as lead contamination and spoilage - not to mention the problem of simply not providing as much of the substances as they claimed to.

If you need supplements to stay happy, I hope you have a high-quality one.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 02:55:12AM *  14 points [-]

Bad Concept: Obviousness

Consider this - what distinguishes obviousness from a first impression? Like some kind of meta semantic stop sign, "it's obvious!" can be used as an excuse to stop thinking about a question. It can be shouted out as an argument with an implication to the effect of "If you don't agree with me instantly, you're an idiot." which can sometimes convince people that an idea is correct without the person actually supporting their points. I sometimes wonder if obviousness is just an insidious rationalization that we cling to when what we really want is to avoid thinking or gain instant agreement.

I wonder how much damage obviousness has done?

Comment author: Kawoomba 27 June 2013 08:46:51PM 0 points [-]

Yes, True and False have to be omniscient to be able to answer consistently correctly or incorrectly, for any arbitrary binary question. There's a version of the answer which (spoiler) relies on asking unanswerable questions, which only Random would answer. There's also solution that doesn't rely on such gimmicks, however.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 02:23:48AM 0 points [-]

There's nothing in your wording that suggests random is not able to refuse an unanswerable question as one of it's potential random responses.

Comment author: maia 28 June 2013 12:08:55AM 15 points [-]

PSA: If you are female, live in the US, and have health insurance, you can get 5 years of birth control for the cost (in copays) of one or two doctor's visits. The new health care mandates that IUDs be paid for, and in exchange for making it 3-5 years instead of 5-10 (taking the hormonal version instead of nonhormonal), you get a 20% chance of not menstruating at all while on it. It's also 99.5% effective over a year, which is quite good.

Not the perfect, side-effect free treatment for unwanted fertility and menses that I hope the future holds, but it's pretty good.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 01:54:17AM *  2 points [-]

Considering the widespread misconceptions about condom efficacy rates, that they've made a decently effective alternative more affordable is excellent news!

If you are not familiar with the misconceptions, I will briefly explain:

The condom boxes say there's a 2% failure rate. That's 2% per year. Considering that most people are sexually active for far more than one year, that 2% rate is completely meaningless.

Furthermore, that's for perfect use. The actual way people use condoms, the rate of failure can be (an average of) 15% per year.

I tried finding studies on condoms that ran longer than one year, but couldn't find any. However, a survey was done that gives us an idea of the aftermath of this:

“Three hundred four women (78%) had used condoms for an aggregate total of 1178 years (average=3.9 years per woman; range=1 month-25 years). Seventy-eight women (25.6%) reported becoming pregnant while using condoms”

In not even four years, more than one in four of them became pregnant.

http://www.jfponline.com/Pages.asp?AID=2603

Unfortunately, this information is likely to cause anyone reading it to be at an evolutionary disadvantage, therefore it may make sense to spread the word as much as possible and remember to tell people who are dissimilar to yourself.

Comment author: Technoguyrob 27 June 2013 08:37:29PM 7 points [-]

p/s/a: Going up to a girl pretty much anywhere in public and saying something like "I thought you looked cute and wanted to meet you" actually works if your body language is in order. If this seems too scary, going on Chatroulette or Omegle and being vaguely interesting also works, and I know people who have gotten married from meeting this way.

p/s/a: Vitamin D supplements can take you from depressed zombie to functioning human being in one week.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 01:46:31AM *  7 points [-]

Word to the wise: If you substitute "hot" for "cute" you may get unanticipated negative results. I would not interpret "hot" in anywhere near the same way as "cute". Here's how that would translate for me:

"I thought you looked cute..." = "I am likely to be interested in things like emotional intimacy and cuddling."

"I thought you looked hot..." = "I am likely to be one of those guys who is going to be so persistent in making attempts to get casual sex out of you tonight that it is going to drive you up a wall."

I have nothing against sex, but like many people, I am annoyed by persistent attempts to get things from me.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 27 June 2013 06:47:15PM *  24 points [-]

P/S/A: You are probably spending too much time looking for yet another possible solution to a problem you want to solve, and too little time making an effort to actually try the possible solutions you are already familiar with. As an example, if you are depressed, stop reading about Seth Roberts' latest pet theory of circadian oscillators if you haven't even bothered to seek professional medical advice.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 01:31:43AM *  -2 points [-]

If you neither assume that all cases of depression are due to chemical imbalance, or that nobody ever encounters a real problem in life that causes them genuine suffering, then why do you say that depressed people should stop looking for solutions? If it is considered unacceptable for an AGI to "solve" humanity's problems by wireheading us all with drugs to provide us with counterfeit utility then why should it not at least be considered acceptable for depressed people to seek a solution that is not an SSRI? Depressed people are conscious beings who have a need for meaning just like you do.

Also, if you weren't aware of this, anti-depressant drugs are frequently ineffective. It's common for people to have to try a whole bunch of them, and some never find a drug that works.

Please consider being nicer to people who are having a miserable time.

Comment author: aelephant 28 June 2013 12:53:39AM *  7 points [-]

Potentially dangerous advice. See a medical professional that is willing to discuss the potential risks & benefits of treatment with you before you go in asking your PCP for some Prozac. Some studies show SSRIs are only slightly more effective than placebo & they have a whole slew of side effects. They might be appropriate for some people. For other people, safer approaches like getting some counseling, fixing your diet, exercising, & socializing might be better.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 01:15:10AM *  0 points [-]

Actually, if you're reading this forum, you have a high chance of being misdiagnosed with a mental disorder and there's a book you should read - so in addition to the prescriptions being risky, they might have been unnecessary in the first place. If you really are suffering from depression, consider checking out the book referenced in my misdiagnosis link, and looking up "existential depression" in it's pages.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 June 2013 12:51:22AM *  5 points [-]

P/S/A: About half of our country's gifted students are never identified (USA), internet / Mensa IQ scores can be too low*, a lot of things are correlated with having a high IQ (for the tip of the iceberg: A 25% chance of being misdiagnosed by a psychologist (1) due, partly, to having super-sensitivities / over-excitability), so if you feel weird or crazy, have been diagnosed with a mental disorder or ADD/ADHD, or want to find out what other differences you have (perhaps in order to counter mind projection fallacy, which I've observed many unidentified gifted adults having problems with), check out Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults, especially since there's reason to suspect that the average LessWrong lurker/participant is gifted.

If anyone wants more info, you are invited to contact me. I've done a lot of research on gifted adults and am willing to share.

* About 1 in 6 gifted people have a learning disorder (1) and a ballpark 1 in 3 have creativity, both of which can significantly and unfairly reduce an IQ score provided by places like Mensa or online tests. A professional developmental psychologist is where you go if you want to take learning disorders and creativity into account when getting an IQ score.

Note: Do not confuse this for a 25% chance of misdiagnosis after walking into the psychologists office - it's a 25% chance for the entire gifted population.

  1. Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults (It was given great reviews by two former presidents of the APA and various experts on gifted adults.)
Comment author: Randaly 16 June 2013 06:05:28AM *  -2 points [-]

It seems to me like you're outlining four different scenarios:

1) The United States, or another major power, converts from manned to unmanned weapons of war. A military coup is impossible today because soldiers won't be willing to launch one; were soldiers to be replaced by robots, they could be ordered to.

2) Another state develops unmanned weapons systems which enable it to defeat the United States.

3) A private individual develops unmanned weapons systems which enable them to defeat the United States.

4) Another state which is already a dictatorship develops unmanned weapons systems which alow the dictator to remain in power.

My interpretation of your original comment was that you were arguing for #3; that is the only context in which hiring sociopaths would be relevant, as normal weapons development clearly doesn't require hiring a swarm of sociopathic engineers. The claim that dictatorships exclusively or primarily rely on sociopaths is factually wrong. e.g. according to data from Order Police Battalion 101, 97% of an arbitrary sample of Germans under Hitler were willing to take guns and mow down civilians. Certainly, close to 100% of an arbitrary sample of people would be willing to work on developing robots for either the US or any other state- we can easily see this today.

If you were arguing for #2, then my response would be that the presence of unmanned weapons systems wouldn't make a different one way or another- if we're positing another state able to outdevelop, then defeat, the US, it would presumably be able to do so anyways. The only difference would be if it had an enormous GDP but low population; but such a state would be unlikely to be an aggressive military dictatorship, and, anyways, clearly doesn't exist.

For #4, current dictatorships are too far behind in terms of technological development for unmanned weapons systems to have a significant impact- what we see today is that the most complex weapons systems are produced in a few. mostly stable and democratic nations, and there's good reason to think that democracy is caused by economic and technological development, such that the states that are most able to produce unmanned weapons are also the most likely to already be democratic. (More precisely, are the most likely to be democratic by the time they build enough unmanned weapons, which seems to be decades off at a minimum.) Worst case, there are 1-3 states (Iran, Russia, China[*]) likely to achieve the capacity to build their own unmanned weapons systems without being democracies; and even then, it's questionable whether unmanned weapons systems would be able to do all that much. (It depends on the exact implementation, of course; but in general, no robots can assure the safety of a dictator, and they cannot stop the only way recent Great Power dictatorships have loosened up, by choice of their leaders.)

[*] This is a list of every country that is a dictatorship or quasi-dictatorship that's built it's own fighters, bombers, or tanks, minus Pakistan. I'm very confident that China's government already has enough stability/legitimacy concerns and movement towards democracy that they would implement safeguards. Iran and Russia I give ~50% chances each of doing so.

If you were arguing for #1, then a) the US has well-established procedures for oversight of dangerous weapons (i.e. WMD) which have never failed, b) it would be much easier for the President and a small cabal to gain control using nukes than robots, c) the President doesn't actually have direct control of the military- the ability to create military plans and respond to circumstances for large groups of military robots almost certainly requires AGI, d) as noted separately, there never be a point, pre-AGI, where robots are actually independent of people, e) conspiracies as a general rule are very rarely workable, and this hypothetical conspiracy seems even less workable than most, because it requires many people working together over at least several decades, each person ascending to an elite position.

How long do you think it would take for the US government to build 100 million killer robots?

I don't believe that it ever will. If the US spends 6,000 USD in maintenance per robot, that would eat up the entire US military budget. 6,000$ is almost certainly a severe underestimate of the cost of operating them, by roughly 3 orders of magnitude, and anyways, that neglects a huge number of relevant factors: the cost of purchasing an MQ-1, amortized over a 30-year operating period, is roughly the same per year as the operating cost; money also needs to be spent doing R&D; non-robot fixed costs total at least 6% of the US military budget; much of US military spending is on things like carriers or aerial refueling or transports whose robot equivalents wouldn't be 'killer robots'; etc. (The military budget may go up over time, but the cost per plane has risen faster than the military budget since WWII, so if anything this also argues against large numbers of robots.)

An alternative date: I would expect the USAF to be majority unmanned by 2040 +- 5 years (50% bounds, most uncertainty above); this is roughly one lifecycle of planes forward from today. (Technically it's a fair bit less; but I'd expect development to speed up somewhat.)

I would expect the US Army to deploy unmanned ground combat units in serious numbers by 2035 +- 5 years.

I would expect the USAF to remove humans from the decision making loop on an individual plane's flights in 2045 +- 5 years; on a squadron, including maintenance, command, etc, 2065 +- 5 years; above that, never.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 June 2013 12:36:29AM *  1 point [-]

How long do you think it would take for the US government to build 100 million killer robots?

I don't believe that it ever will.

Technologies become less expensive over time, and as we progress, our wealth grows. If we don't have the money to produce it at the current cost, that doesn't mean they'll never be able to afford to do it.

If the US spends 6,000 USD in maintenance per robot, that would eat up the entire US military budget. 6,000$ is almost certainly a severe underestimate of the cost of operating them, by roughly 3 orders of magnitude

You didn't specify a time period - should I assume that's yearly? Also, do they have to pay $6,000 in maintenance costs while the units are in storage?

and anyways, that neglects a huge number of relevant factors: the cost of purchasing an MQ-1, amortized over a 30-year operating period, is roughly the same per year as the operating cost; money also needs to be spent doing R&D; non-robot fixed costs total at least 6% of the US military budget; much of US military spending is on things like carriers or aerial refueling or transports whose robot equivalents wouldn't be 'killer robots'; etc. (The military budget may go up over time, but the cost per plane has risen faster than the military budget since WWII, so if anything this also argues against large numbers of robots.)

Okay, so an MQ-1 is really, really expensive. Thank you.

An alternative date: I would expect the USAF to be majority unmanned by 2040 +- 5 years (50% bounds, most uncertainty above); this is roughly one lifecycle of planes forward from today. (Technically it's a fair bit less; but I'd expect development to speed up somewhat.) I would expect the US Army to deploy unmanned ground combat units in serious numbers by 2035 +- 5 years.

What is "serious numbers"?

I would expect the USAF to remove humans from the decision making loop on an individual plane's flights in 2045 +- 5 years; on a squadron, including maintenance, command, etc, 2065 +- 5 years; above that, never.

What do you mean by "above that, never"?

Sorry I didn't get to your other points today. I don't have enough time.

P.S. How did you get these estimates for when unmanned weapons will come out?

Comment author: wedrifid 16 June 2013 05:26:01AM *  0 points [-]

Ok, so it's not the killer robots you envision killing off humanity, it's the other technologies that would likely be around at that time, and/or the whole mixture of insanity put together?

In particular the technologies being used to create killer robots and so necessarily around at the time. Sufficiently general small scale but highly complex manufacturing capability combined with advanced mobile automation. The combination is already notorious.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 June 2013 12:10:07AM *  -1 points [-]

You know, we've invented quite a few weapons over time and have survived quite a few "replicators" (the black death will be my #1 example)... we're not dead yet and I'm wondering if there are some principles keeping us alive which you and I have overlooked.

For a shot at what those could be:

1) Regarding self-replicators:

  • Self-replicators make near perfect copies of themselves and so they are optimized to work in most, but not all situations. This means that there's a very good chance that at least some of a given species will survive whatever the self-replicators are doing.

  • Predators strike prey as terrifying, but their weakness is that they depend on the prey. Predators of all kinds die when they run out of prey. Some prey probably always hides, so unless the predator is really intelligent, it is likely that some prey will survive and will get a break from the predators, which they can use to develop strategies.

2) Regarding weapons:

  • For this discussion, we've been talking almost exclusively about offensive weapons. However, governments create defenses as well - probably, they often do this with the intent of countering their own offensive weapons. I don't know much about what sorts of defensive weapons there could be in the future, do you? If not, this lack of info about defensive weapons might be causing us to exaggerate the risk of offensive weapons.

  • Governments must value defense, or else they would not invest in it and would instead take those resources and put them into offense. Looking at it this way, I realize that offense is slowed down by defense, and/or there may be a certain ratio of defensive power to offensive power that is constantly maintained due to the fact that it's an intelligent agent that's creating these and they're motivated to have both offense and defense. If defense keeps pace with offense for this or any other reason (maybe reasons having to do with the insights that technological advancement provides) then there may be far less risk than we're perceiving.

  • If we reach maximum useful offense (I'll roughly define this as the ability to destroy every person or autonomous weapon who is threat in the world instantly and with specific targeting capabilities) there will be no point in focusing on offensive weapons anymore. If maximum useful offense is reached, (or perhaps an even earlier point... maybe one where the offensive capabilities of the enemy are too harrowing and your own are overkill) then this would be the point at which that balance in what we focus on would likely shift. By focusing primarily or solely on defense, we could enter an era where war is infeasible. Though after all the factors that would have a lasting effect on whether it was easier to make progress in defense or offense faded (such as factories to build defensive items or laborers trained in defense) we'd be back to square one. But a "defense era" might give us time to solve the problem - after we have all woken up to how critical it is, and also have specifics on the situation.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 June 2013 06:05:39AM 0 points [-]

Looking at it that way, does my behavior make sense?

I suggested that Eliezer's analysis of economic growth and FAI is more relevant to Eliezer (in terms of his expertise, influence and comparative advantage) than military robot politics is to all of us (on each of the same metrics). To resolve the ambiguity there, I do not take the position that talk of robot killers is completely worthless. Instead I take the position that Eliezer spending a day or so analysing economic growth impacts on his life's work is entirely sensible. So instead of criticising your behavior I am criticising your criticism of another behaviour that is somewhat similar.

Ok. I feel like you should be saying that to yourself - you're the one who said you thought the 3-D printer idea would result in everyone dying.

I perceive a difference between the social consequences of replying with a criticism of a "right to bear automated-killer-robot arms" proposal in a comment and the social consequences of spreading the word to people I know (on facebook, etc.) about some issue of choice.

I think the worst thing I said is that killer robots are a threat to democracy.

Yes. My use of 'doomsday' to describe that scenario is lax. Please imagine that I found a more precise term and expressed approximately the same point.

After considering the amount of time I spent on this and the clear statement of my intentions (or lack of intentions), do you agree that I was never trying to champion this cause and was simply doing my part, wedrifid?

Please note that the quote that mentions 'championing a cause' was explicitly about myself. It was not made as a criticism of your behavior. It was made as a direct, quote denoted reply to your call for readers (made in response to myself) to evangelise to people we know on 'facebook, twitter and other forums'. I was explaining why I do not choose to do as you request even though by my judgement I do, in fact, "get it".

Taking a stance and expressing concern about something that isn't a mainstream issue comes with a cost. Someone who is mainstream in all ways but one tends to be more influential when it comes to that one issue than someone who has eccentric beliefs in all areas.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 11:31:19PM *  0 points [-]

So instead of criticising your behavior I am criticising your criticism of another behaviour that is somewhat similar.

Oh okay.

I perceive a difference between the social consequences of replying ...

I see. I thought you were making some different comparison.

Yes. My use of 'doomsday' to describe that scenario is lax. Please imagine that I found a more precise term and expressed approximately the same point.

Okay. (:

Please note that the quote that mentions 'championing a cause' was explicitly about myself.

Okay, noted.

I was explaining why I do not choose to do as you request even though by my judgement I do, in fact, "get it".

I'm glad that you get it enough to see the potential benefit of spreading the word even though you choose not to because you anticipate unwanted social consequences instead.

Taking a stance and expressing concern about something that isn't a mainstream issue comes with a cost. Someone who is mainstream in all ways but one tends to be more influential when it comes to that one issue than someone who has eccentric beliefs in all areas.

Hahaha! Yeah, I can see that. Though this really depends on who your friends are or which friend group one chose to spread the idea to.

At this stage, it is probably best to spread the word only to those who Seth Godin calls "early adopters" (defined as: people who want to know everything about their subject of interest aka nerds).

This would be why I told LessWrong as opposed to some other group.

Comment author: GeraldMonroe 16 June 2013 03:13:54PM *  4 points [-]

Let's talk actual hardware.

Here's a practical, autonomous kill system that is possibly feasible with current technology. A network of drone helicopters armed with rifles and sensors that can detect the muzzle flashes, sound, and in some cases projectiles of an AK-47 being fired.

Sort of this aircraft : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Rotorcraft_Sniper_System

Combined with sensors based on this patent : http://www.google.com/patents/US5686889

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

and this one http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1396471&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F9608%2F30354%2F01396471

The hardware and software would be optimized for detecting AK-47 fire, though it would be able to detect most firearms. Some of these sensors work best if multiple platforms armed with the same sensor are spread out in space, so there would need to be several of these drones hovering overhead for maximum effectiveness.

How would this system be used? Whenever a group of soldiers leaves the post, they would all have to wear blue force trackers that clearly mark them as friendly. When they are at risk for attack, a swarm of drones follows them overhead. If someone fires at them, the following autonomous kill decision is made

if( SystemIsArmed && EventSmallArmsFire && NearestBlueForceTracker > X meters && ProbableError < Y meters) ShootBack();

Sure, a system like this might make mistakes. However, here's the state of the art method used today :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL75DEC9EEB25A0DF0&feature=player_detailpage&v=uZ2SWWDt8Wg

This same youtube channel has dozens of similar combat videos. An autonomous killing drone system would save soldier's lives and kill fewer civilians. (drawbacks include high cost to develop and maintain)

Other, more advanced systems are also at least conceivable. Ground robots that could storm a building, killing anyone carrying a weapon or matching specific faces? The current method is to blow the entire building to pieces. Even if the robots made frequent errors, they might be more effective than bombing the building.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 11:22:08PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for the hardware info.

An autonomous killing drone system would save soldier's lives and kill fewer civilians.

In the short-term... What do you think about the threat they pose to democracy?

drawbacks include high cost to develop and maintain

Do you happen to know how many humans need to be employed for a given quantity of these weapons to be produced?

Comment author: wedrifid 16 June 2013 06:37:42AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I got that, and I think that his statement is easy to understand so I'm not sure why you're explaining that to me.

  • You wrote a comment explaining what Eliezer meant.
  • You were wrong about what Eliezer meant.
  • You explicitly asked to be told whether you were right.
  • I told you you were not right.
  • I made my own comment explaining what Eliezer's words mean.

Maybe you already understood the first sentence of Eliezer's comment and only misunderstood the later sentences. That's great! By all means ignore the parts of my explanation that are redundant.

Note that when you make comments like this, including the request for feedback, then getting a reply like mine is close to the best case scenario. Alternatives would be finding you difficult to speak to and just ignoring you and dismissing what you have to say in the entire thread because this particular comment is a straw man.

The problem that you have with with my reply seems to be caused by part of it being redundant for the purpose of facilitating your understanding. But in cases where there is obvious and verifiable failures of communication a little redundancy is a good thing. I cannot realistically be expected to perfectly model which parts of Eliezer's comment you interpreted correctly and which parts you did not. After all that task is (strictly) more difficult than the task of interpreting Eliezer's comment correctly. The best I can do is explain Eliezer's comment in my own words and you can take or leave each part of it.

I wrote them first and was evidently ignored (by karma clickers if not by you).

It is frustrating not being rewarded for one's contributions when others are.

I didn't say that he was saying that either.

Let me rephrase. The following quote is not something Eliezer said:

If we're going to have killer drones, there needs to be something to check their power. Example: counter-drones.


I agree that a formal agreement would be meaningless here, but that people will make a cost-benefit analysis when choosing whether to fight is so obvious I didn't think he was talking about that - it doesn't seem like a thing that needs saying.

Eliezer didn't say it. He assumed it (and/or various loosely related considerations) when he made his claim. I needed to say it because rather than assuming a meaning like this 'obvious' one, you assumed that it was a proposal:

Decide who wins wars based on who has more drones and drone defenses instead of actually physically battling?


What if that's not the case, though? What if having a proliferation of deadly technologies makes it damned near impossible to figure out who is going to win? That could result in a lot more wars...

Yes. That would be bad. Eliezer is making the observation that if technology evolves in such a way (and it seems likely) then it would be less desirable than if for some (somewhat surprising technical reason) the new dynamic did not facilitate asymmetric warfare.

Now "the great filter" comes to mind again.

Yes. Good point.

Do you know of anyone who has written about:

A. Whether it is likely for technological advancement to make it significantly more difficult to figure out who will win wars. B. Whether it's more likely for people to initiate wars when there's a lot of uncertainty.

I do not know, but am interested.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 11:18:08PM *  1 point [-]

What if having a proliferation of deadly technologies makes it damned near impossible to figure out who is going to win? That could result in a lot more wars.

Yes. That would be bad.

Now "the great filter" comes to mind again.

Yes. Good point.

Do you know of anyone who has written about: A. Whether it is likely for technological advancement to make it significantly more difficult to figure out who will win wars. B. Whether it's more likely for people to initiate wars when there's a lot of uncertainty.

I do not know, but am interested.

Hmm. I wonder if this situation is comparable to any of the situations we know about.

  1. Clarifies my questions:

    • When humans feel confused about whether they're likely to win a deadly conflict that they would hypothetically initiate, are they more likely to react to that confusion by acknowledging it and avoiding conflict, or by being overconfident / denying the risk / going irrational and taking the gamble?

    • If humans are normally more likely to acknowledge the confusion, what circumstances may make them take a gamble on initiating war?

    • When humans feel confused about whether a competitor has enough power to destroy them, do they react by staying peaceful? The "obvious" answer to this is yes, but it's not good to feel certain about things immediately before even thinking about them. For an example: if animals are backed into a corner by a human, they fight, even despite the obvious size difference. There might be certain situations where a power imbalance triggers the "backed into a corner" instinct. For some ideas about what those situations might be, I'd wonder about situations in which people over-react to confusion by "erring on the side of caution" (deciding that the opponent is a threat) and then initiating war to take advantage of the element of surprise as part of an effort at self-preservation. I would guess that whether people initiate war in this scenario probably has a lot to do with how big the element of surprise advantage is and how quickly they can kill their opponent.

    • Does the imbalance between defense and offense grow over time? If so, would people be more or less likely to initiate conflict if defense essentially didn't exist?

Now I'm thinking about whether we have data that answers these or similar questions.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 June 2013 06:37:42AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I got that, and I think that his statement is easy to understand so I'm not sure why you're explaining that to me.

  • You wrote a comment explaining what Eliezer meant.
  • You were wrong about what Eliezer meant.
  • You explicitly asked to be told whether you were right.
  • I told you you were not right.
  • I made my own comment explaining what Eliezer's words mean.

Maybe you already understood the first sentence of Eliezer's comment and only misunderstood the later sentences. That's great! By all means ignore the parts of my explanation that are redundant.

Note that when you make comments like this, including the request for feedback, then getting a reply like mine is close to the best case scenario. Alternatives would be finding you difficult to speak to and just ignoring you and dismissing what you have to say in the entire thread because this particular comment is a straw man.

The problem that you have with with my reply seems to be caused by part of it being redundant for the purpose of facilitating your understanding. But in cases where there is obvious and verifiable failures of communication a little redundancy is a good thing. I cannot realistically be expected to perfectly model which parts of Eliezer's comment you interpreted correctly and which parts you did not. After all that task is (strictly) more difficult than the task of interpreting Eliezer's comment correctly. The best I can do is explain Eliezer's comment in my own words and you can take or leave each part of it.

I wrote them first and was evidently ignored (by karma clickers if not by you).

It is frustrating not being rewarded for one's contributions when others are.

I didn't say that he was saying that either.

Let me rephrase. The following quote is not something Eliezer said:

If we're going to have killer drones, there needs to be something to check their power. Example: counter-drones.


I agree that a formal agreement would be meaningless here, but that people will make a cost-benefit analysis when choosing whether to fight is so obvious I didn't think he was talking about that - it doesn't seem like a thing that needs saying.

Eliezer didn't say it. He assumed it (and/or various loosely related considerations) when he made his claim. I needed to say it because rather than assuming a meaning like this 'obvious' one, you assumed that it was a proposal:

Decide who wins wars based on who has more drones and drone defenses instead of actually physically battling?


What if that's not the case, though? What if having a proliferation of deadly technologies makes it damned near impossible to figure out who is going to win? That could result in a lot more wars...

Yes. That would be bad. Eliezer is making the observation that if technology evolves in such a way (and it seems likely) then it would be less desirable than if for some (somewhat surprising technical reason) the new dynamic did not facilitate asymmetric warfare.

Now "the great filter" comes to mind again.

Yes. Good point.

Do you know of anyone who has written about:

A. Whether it is likely for technological advancement to make it significantly more difficult to figure out who will win wars. B. Whether it's more likely for people to initiate wars when there's a lot of uncertainty.

I do not know, but am interested.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 10:42:06PM -1 points [-]

But in cases where there is obvious and verifiable failures of communication a little redundancy is a good thing.

Sorry for not seeing this intention. Thanks for your efforts.

because this particular comment is a straw man

Do you mean to say that I intentionally attacked someone with a (either an intentional or unintentional) misinterpretation of their words? Since my intention with the comment referenced just prior to your statement here was an attempt to clarify and in no way an attack, I'm am not sure what comment you're referring to.

Comment author: Randaly 15 June 2013 11:06:15PM -2 points [-]

This is implausible. There is no conceivable motive for people to support the hypothetical robot army; there is not a chance in hell that 1.5 million people would voluntarily build a robot army for a tyrant, who doesn't have the many trillions of dollars needed to pay them (since nobody has that much money) [1], who is unable to keep secret the millions of people building illegal weaponry for him, and who almost no chance at succeeding even with the robot army, since the US military outspends everybody.

[1]: 1/200* US population * average microsoft salary = 150 billion USD. This would require many, many years of work- given how long the military has worked on predators, probably decades. So it would require trillions of dollars.

Also, I don't think you understand sociopathy. The 1/20 figure you cited should be 1/25, which refers to the DSM's "antisocial personality disorder;" sociopathy is a deficit in moral reasoning, which is very different from being a person who's just waiting to become a minion to some dictator.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 01:59:24AM *  0 points [-]

there is not a chance in hell that 1.5 million people would voluntarily build a robot army for a tyrant

There are so many ways that a tyrant could end up with a robot army. Don't let's pretend that that's the only way. Here are a few:

  1. A country is in turmoil and a leader comes along who makes people feel hope. The people are open to "lesser evil" propositions and risk-taking because they are desperate. They make irrational decisions and empower the wrong person. Hitler is a real life actual example of this happening.

  2. A leader who is thought of as "good" builds a killer robot army. Then, realizing that they have total power over their people corrupts them and they behave like a tyrant, effectively turning into an oppressive dictator.

  3. Hypothetical scenario: The setting is a country with presidential elections (I choose America for this one). Hypothetically, in this scenario we'll say the technology to do this was completely ready to be exploited. So the government begins to build a killer robot army. Hypothetically, a good president happens to be in office, so people think it's okay. We'll say that president gets a second term. Eight years pass, and a significant killer robot army is created. It's powerful enough to kill every American. Now, it's time to change the president. Maybe the American people choose somebody with their best interests in mind. Maybe they choose a wolf in sheep's clothing, or a moron who doesn't understand the dangers. It's not like we haven't elected morons before and it isn't as if entire countries full of people have never empowered anyone dangerous. I think it's reasonable to say that there's at least a 5% chance that each election will yield either a fatally moronic person, an otherwise good person who is susceptible to being seriously corrupted if given too much power, someone with a tyrant's values/personality, or a sociopath. If you're thinking to yourself "how many times in American history have we seen a president go corrupt by power" consider that there have been checks and balances in place to prevent them from having enough power to be corrupted by. In my opinion, it's likely that most of them would be corrupted by the kind of absolute power that a killer robot army would give them, and 5% is actually quite a low estimate compared with my model of how reality works. But for hypothetical purposes, we'll pretend it's only as high as 5%. We roll the dice on that 5% chance every four years because we hold elections again. If we added those 5% chances up over the course of the rest of my life, we'd end up with it being more likely than not (62.5%) that the wrong person will end up having total control over the country I live in.

Do you see now how a tyrant or other undesirable leader could very conceivably end up heading a killer robot army?

[1]: 1/200* US population * average microsoft salary = 150 billion USD. This would require many, many years of work- given how long the military has worked on predators, probably decades. So it would require trillions of dollars.

Thank you. I am very glad for these figures. How long do you think it would take for the US government to build 100 million killer robots?

Also, I don't think you understand sociopathy. The 1/20 figure you cited should be 1/25, which refers to the DSM's "antisocial personality disorder;"

Not sure why we have different numbers but: The statistics for America are different from the statistics for other countries (so, depending on whether your source is aiming for a global figure or local figure, this can vary), the statistic probably changes over time, the DSM changes over time, there are multiple sources on this that probably do not agree, and the 1/20 figure is based on research I did ten years ago, so something in there probably explains it. A 1% difference in prevalence is irrelevant here since (in my extremely amateurish, shoot-from-the-hip estimate "just to get some perspective") if 1 in 200 people are willing to work on the robot army, that's enough -- and 1/25 is obviously significantly larger.

sociopathy is a deficit in moral reasoning, which is very different from being a person who's just waiting to become a minion to some dictator.

Ah, but if you want to be a tyrant you don't need minions who have been dreaming of becoming a minion. Consider this - most people who are employed at a job didn't dream of becoming what they are. There are a lot of people working as cashiers, grocery baggers, doing boring work in a factory, working in telemarketing, etc who dislike and even despise their jobs. Why do they do them? Money, obviously.

Why don't those people turn into drug dealers? They'd make more money that way.

Ethics!

Those people have a sense of right and wrong, or at least are successfully coerced by laws.

People with antisocial personality disorder, the way the DSM defines it, have neither of these properties.

You said yourself above that most people wouldn't want to build a robot army for a tyrant. I agree. But a sociopath doesn't give a rat's behind how they get their money. That is why they are more likely to work for a tyrant - they don't have a conscience and they don't care about the law. If they can make more money assembling killer robots than flipping burgers, there's nothing to stop them from taking the killer robot job.

Taking this into consideration, do you think sociopaths could end up building killer robots?

Comment author: wedrifid 15 June 2013 03:29:01PM 0 points [-]

If you "get it" and you care about this risk, I urge you to do the same thing. Post about this on Facebook, on Twitter, on other forums - wherever you have the ability to get a group of people to think about this. The couple of minutes it takes to tell 20 people now could mean that hundreds of people find out sooner. If any of you decide to spread the word, comment. I'd like to know.

I perceive plenty of risks regarding future military technology that are likely to result in the loss of life and liberty. People with power no longer requiring the approval (or insufficient disapproval) of other human participants to maintain their power is among the dangers. Increased ease of creating extremely destructive weapons (including killer robots) without large scale enterprise (eg. with 3D printers you mentioned) is another.

This issue is not one I expect to have any influence over. This is a high stakes game. A national security issue and an individual 'right to bear arms' issue rolled into one. It is also the kind of of game where belief in doomsday predictions is enough to make people (or even a cause) lose credibility. To whatever extent my actions could have an influence at all I have no particular confidence that it would be in a desirable direction.

Evangelism is not my thing. Even if it was, this wouldn't be the cause I chose to champion.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 01:11:27AM *  0 points [-]

This issue is not one I expect to have any influence over.

I don't expect to have a large influence over it, but for a small investment, I make a small difference. You said once yourself that if your life could make even a miniscule difference to the probability that humanity survives, it would be worth it. And if a 1/4,204,800 sized fraction of my life makes a 0.000000001% difference in the chance that humanity doesn't lose democracy, that's worth it to me. Looking at it that way, does my behavior make sense?

It is also the kind of of game where belief in doomsday predictions is enough to make people (or even a cause) lose credibility.

Ok. I feel like you should be saying that to yourself - you're the one who said you thought the 3-D printer idea would result in everyone dying. I think the worst thing I said is that killer robots are a threat to democracy. Did you find something in my writing that you pattern matched to "doomsday prediction"? If so, I will need an example.

Evangelism is not my thing. Even if it was, this wouldn't be the cause I chose to champion.

Spending 1/4,204,800 of my life to spread the word about something is best categorized as "doing my part" not "championing a cause". Like I said in my last comment:

"I have no intentions of dedicating my life to this issue."

After considering the amount of time I spent on this and the clear statement of my intentions (or lack of intentions), do you agree that I was never trying to champion this cause and was simply doing my part, wedrifid?

Comment author: wedrifid 15 June 2013 04:30:04PM 3 points [-]

(I want everyone to understand, so I'm writing it all out - let me know if I'm right.)

This isn't quite what Eliezer said. In particular Eliezer wasn't considering proposals or 'what we need' but instead making observations about scenarios and the implications they could have. The key point is the opening sentence:

When killer robots are outlawed, only rogue nations will have massive drone armies.

This amounts to dismissing Suarez's proposal to make autonomous killer robots illegal as absurd. Unilaterally disarming oneself without first preventing potential threats from having those same weapons is crazy for all the reasons it usually is. Of course there is the possibility of using the threat of nuclear strike against anyone who creates killer robots but that is best considered a separate proposal and discussed on its own terms.

An ideal outcome here would be if counter-drones have an advantage over drones, but it's hard to see how this could obtain when counter-counter-drones should be in a symmetrical position over counter-drones.

This isn't saying we need drones (or counter or counter-counter drones). It rather saying:

  • We don't (yet) know the details of the relevant technology will develop or the relative strengths and weaknesses thereof.
  • It would great if we discovered that for some reason it is easier to create drones that kill drones than drones that hurt people. That would mean that defence has an advantage when it comes to drone wars. That will result in less attacking (with drones) and so the drone risk would be much, much lower. (And a few other desirable implications...)
  • The above doesn't seem likely. Bugger.

Decide who wins wars based on who has more drones and drone defenses instead of actually physically battling?

This wouldn't be any form of formal agreement. Instead, people who are certain to lose tend to be less likely to get into fights. It amounts to the same thing.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 01:01:25AM *  1 point [-]

This amounts to dismissing Suarez's proposal to make autonomous killer robots illegal as absurd.

Yeah, I got that, and I think that his statement is easy to understand so I'm not sure why you're explaining that to me. If you hadn't noticed this, I wrote out various cons for the legislation idea which were either identical in meaning to his statement or along the same lines as "making them illegal is absurd". He got several points for that and his comment put at the top of the page. I wrote them first and was evidently ignored (by karma clickers if not by you).

This isn't saying we need drones (or counter or counter-counter drones). It rather saying:

I didn't say that he was saying that either.

This wouldn't be any form of formal agreement. Instead, people who are certain to lose tend to be less likely to get into fights.

I agree that a formal agreement would be meaningless here, but that people will make a cost-benefit analysis when choosing whether to fight is so obvious I didn't think he was talking about that - it doesn't seem like a thing that needs saying. Maybe what he meant was not "people will decide whether to fight based on whether it's likely to succeed" or "people will make formal agreements" but something more like "using killer robots would increase the amount or quality of data we have in a significant way and this will encourage that kind of decision-making".

What if that's not the case, though? What if having a proliferation of deadly technologies makes it damned near impossible to figure out who is going to win? That could result in a lot more wars...

Now "the great filter" comes to mind again. :|

Do you know of anyone who has written about:

A. Whether it is likely for technological advancement to make it significantly more difficult to figure out who will win wars. B. Whether it's more likely for people to initiate wars when there's a lot of uncertainty.

We might be lucky - maybe people are far less likely to initiate wars if it isn't clear who will win... I'd like to read about this topic if there's information on it.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 June 2013 03:43:11PM 0 points [-]

I agree that it's possible that in this scenario everyone will die but I am not sure why you seem to think it is the most likely outcome.

We are considering a scenario where technology has been developed and disseminated sufficiently to allow Joe Citizen to produce autonomous killer robots with his home based general purpose automated manufacturing device. People more intelligent, educated, resourceful and motivated than Joe Citizen are going to be producing things even more dangerous. And produce things that produce things that... I just assume that kind of environment is not stable.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 12:56:06AM *  0 points [-]

Ok, so it's not the killer robots you envision killing off humanity, it's the other technologies that would likely be around at that time, and/or the whole mixture of insanity put together?

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 June 2013 04:38:33AM 2 points [-]

I dunno. I'm just a compulsive nitpicker.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 June 2013 12:52:48AM 0 points [-]

Lol. Well thank you for admitting this.

Comment author: CronoDAS 15 June 2013 01:25:34AM *  1 point [-]

::points to exhibit of plucked chicken wearing "I'm a human!" sign::

Well, yeah, it's a far cry from killer robots, but once a mine is planted, who dies and when is pretty much entirely out of the hands of the person who planted it. And there are indeed political movements to ban the use of land mines, specifically because of this lack of control; land mines have a tendency to go on killing people long after the original conflict is over. So land mines and autonomous killer robots do share at least a few problematic aspects; could a clever lawyer make a case that a ban on "lethal autonomy" should encompass land mines as well?

A less silly argument could also be directed at already-banned biological weapons; pathogens reproduce and kill people all the time without any human intervention at all. Should we say that anthrax bacteria lack the kind of autonomy that we imagine war-fighting robots would have?

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 04:35:19AM 0 points [-]

Now I'm not sure whether you were (originally) trying to start a discussion about how the term "lethal autonomy" should be used, or if you intended to imply something to the effect of "lethal autonomy isn't a new threat, therefore we shouldn't be concerned about it".

Even if I was wrong in my interpretation of your message, I'm still glad I responded the way I did - this is one of those topic where it's best if nobody finds excuses to go into denial, default to optimism bias, or otherwise fail to see the risk.

Do you view lethally autonomous robots as a potential threat to freedom and democracy?

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 14 June 2013 09:59:08PM 2 points [-]

The USA has 120,022,084 people fit for military service according to Wikipedia. (...) That's 0.22% of the number of soldiers.

Excuse me? You are taking the number of military-age males and using it as the number of soldiers! The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate. This aside, you are ignoring that "lethal autonomy" is nowhere near the same thing as "operational autonomy". A Predator drone requires more people to run it - fuelling, arming, polishing the paint - than a fighter aircraft does.

Of course, once the killer robots are made, then they can just use them to coerce the maintenance and logistics people.

How? "Do as I say, or else I'll order you to fire up the drones on your base and have them shoot you!" And while you might credibly threaten to instead order the people on the next base over to fire up their drones, well, now you've started a civil war in your own armed forces. Why will that work better with drones than with rifles?

Again, you are confusing lethal with operational autonomy. A lethally-autonomous robot is just a weapon whose operator is well out of range at the moment of killing. It still has to be pointed in the general direction of the enemy, loaded, fuelled, and launched; and you still have to convince the people doing the work that it needs to be done.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 04:29:16AM 0 points [-]

Would you happen to be able to provide these figures:

The ratio of human resources-to-firepower on the current generation of weapons.

The ratio of human resources-to-firepower on the weapons used during eras where oppression was common.

I'd like to compare them.

Hmm, "firepower" is vague. I think the relevant number here would be something along the lines of how many people can be killed or subdued in a conflict situation.

Comment author: gwern 15 June 2013 03:30:29AM 1 point [-]

I have no idea; as I said, my expectations are just guesses based on broad principles (slow planes are cheaper than ultra-fast planes; clunk planes are cheaper than ultra-maneuverable ones; machines whose failure do not immediately kill humans are cheaper to make than machines whose failure do entail human death; the cheapest, lightest, and easiest to maintain machine parts are the ones that aren't there). You should ask Rolf, since apparently he's knowledgeable in the topic.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 04:28:58AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. I will ask Rolf.

Comment author: atucker 15 June 2013 01:41:10AM 2 points [-]

Almost certainly, but the point that stationary counter-drones wouldn't necessarily be in a symmetric situation to counter-counter-drones holds. Just swap in a different attack/defense method.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 01:49:02AM *  0 points [-]

I see. The existence of the specific example caused me to interpret your post as being about a specific method, not a general strategy.

To the strategy, I say:

I've heard that defense is more difficult than offense. If the strategy you have defined is basically:

Original drones are offensive and counter-drones are defensive (to prevent them from attacking, presumably).

Then if what I heard was correct, this would fail. If not at first, then likely over time as technology advanced and new offensive strategies are used with the drones.

I'm not sure how to check to see if what I heard was true but if defense worked that well, we wouldn't have war.

Comment author: atucker 14 June 2013 11:15:07PM -1 points [-]

I think that if you used an EMP as a stationary counter-drone you would have an advantage over drones in that most drones need some sort of power/control in order to keep on flying, and so counter-drones would be less portable, but more durable than drones.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 01:33:36AM 2 points [-]

Is there not a way to shield combat drones from EMP weapons? I wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing that.

Comment author: gwern 14 June 2013 11:14:20PM 5 points [-]

A Predator drone requires more people to run it - fuelling, arming, polishing the paint - than a fighter aircraft does.

It does? I would've guessed the exact opposite and that the difference would be by a large margin: drones are smaller, eliminate all the equipment necessary to support a human, don't have to be man-rated, and are expected to have drastically less performance in terms of going supersonic or executing high-g maneuvers.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 01:24:31AM *  -2 points [-]

Would you happen to be able to provide these figures:

The ratio of human resources-to-firepower on the current generation of weapons.

The ratio of human resources-to-firepower on the weapons used during eras where oppression was common.

I'd like to compare them.

Hmm, "firepower" is vague. I think the relevant number here would be something along the lines of how many people can be killed or subdued in a conflict situation.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 14 June 2013 09:59:08PM 2 points [-]

The USA has 120,022,084 people fit for military service according to Wikipedia. (...) That's 0.22% of the number of soldiers.

Excuse me? You are taking the number of military-age males and using it as the number of soldiers! The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate. This aside, you are ignoring that "lethal autonomy" is nowhere near the same thing as "operational autonomy". A Predator drone requires more people to run it - fuelling, arming, polishing the paint - than a fighter aircraft does.

Of course, once the killer robots are made, then they can just use them to coerce the maintenance and logistics people.

How? "Do as I say, or else I'll order you to fire up the drones on your base and have them shoot you!" And while you might credibly threaten to instead order the people on the next base over to fire up their drones, well, now you've started a civil war in your own armed forces. Why will that work better with drones than with rifles?

Again, you are confusing lethal with operational autonomy. A lethally-autonomous robot is just a weapon whose operator is well out of range at the moment of killing. It still has to be pointed in the general direction of the enemy, loaded, fuelled, and launched; and you still have to convince the people doing the work that it needs to be done.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 01:03:22AM *  -1 points [-]

Excuse me? You are taking the number of military-age males and using it as the number of soldiers!

Yes!

The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate.

If the question here is "How many people are currently in the military" my figure is wrong. However, that's not the question. The question is "In the event that a robot army tries to take over the American population, how many American soldiers might there be to defend America?" You're estimating in a different context than the one in my comment.

This aside, you are ignoring that "lethal autonomy" is nowhere near the same thing as "operational autonomy"

Actually, if you're defining "operational autonomy" as "how many people it takes to run weapons", I did address that when I said "I'm not sure how many maintenance people and logistics people it would require, but even if we double that .22%, we still have only .44%." If you have better estimates, would you share them?

How? "Do as I say, or else I'll order you to fire up the drones on your base and have them shoot you!"

Method A. They could wait until the country is in turmoil and prey on people's irrationality like Hitler did.

Method B. They could get those people to operate the drones under the guise of fighting for a good cause. Then they could threaten to use the army to kill anyone who opposes them. This doesn't have to be sudden - it could happen quite gradually, as a series of small and oppressive steps and rules wrapped in doublespeak that eventually lead up to complete tyranny. If people don't realize that most other people disagree with the tyrant, they will feel threatened and probably comply in order to survive.

Method C. Check out the Milgram experiment. Those people didn't even need to be coerced to apply lethal force. It's a lot easier than you think.

Method D. If they can get just a small group to operate a small number of drones, they can coerce a larger group of people to operate more drones. With the larger group of people operating drones, they can coerce even more people, and so on.

Why will that work better with drones than with rifles?

This all depends on the ratio of people it takes to operate the weapons vs. number of people the weapons can subdue. Your perception appears to be that predator drones require more people to run them than a fighter aircraft. My perception is that it doesn't matter how many people it takes to operate a predator drone because war technology is likely to be optimized further than it is today, and if it is possible to decrease the number of people it requires to build/maintain/run/etc. the killer robots significantly below the number of people it would take to get the same amount of firepower otherwise, then of course they can take over a population more easily.

A high firepower to human resource ratio means takeovers would work better.

A lethally-autonomous robot is just a weapon whose operator is well out of range at the moment of killing.

That's not what Suarez says. Even if he's wrong do you deny that it's likely that technology will advance to the point where people can make robots capable of killing without a human making the decision? That's what this conversation is about. Don't let us get all mixed up like Eliezer warns us about in 37 ways words can be wrong. If we're talking about robots that can kill without a human's decision, those are a threat, and could potentially reduce the human resources-to-firepower ratio enough to threaten democracy. If you want to disagree with me about what words I should use to speak about this, that's great. In that case, though, I'd like to know where your credible sources are so that I can read authoritative definitions please.

and you still have to convince the people doing the work that it needs to be done.

Hitler.

Milgram experiment.

Number of sociopaths: 1 in 20.

Is rationality taught in school?: No.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 June 2013 05:52:52PM 4 points [-]

When killer robots are outlawed, only rogue nations will have massive drone armies.

An ideal outcome here would be if counter-drones have an advantage over drones, but it's hard to see how this could obtain when counter-counter-drones should be in a symmetrical position over counter-drones. A second-best outcome would be no asymmetrical advantage of guerilla drone warfare, where the wealthiest nation clearly wins via numerical drone superiority combined with excellent enemy drone detection.

...you know, at some point the U.S. military is going to pay someone $10 million to conclude what I just wrote and they're going to get it half-wrong. Sigh.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 12:23:50AM *  -1 points [-]

This took effort to parse. I think what you're saying is:

  • If we're going to have killer drones, there needs to be something to check their power. Example: counter-drones.

  • If we're going to have counter-drones, we need to check the power of the counter-drones. Example: counter-counter-drones.

  • If counter-counter-drones can dominate the original drones, then counter-drones probably aren't strong enough to check and balance the original drones. (Either because the counter-counter-drones will become the new original drones or because the counter-drones would be intentionally less powerful than the original drones so that the counter-counter-drones could counter them, making the counter-drones useless.)

(I want everyone to understand, so I'm writing it all out - let me know if I'm right.)

And you propose "no asymmetrical advantage of guerilla drone warfare... etc" which isn't clear to me because I can interpret multiple meanings:

  • Trash the drones vs. counter-drones vs. counter-counter-drones idea?

  • Make sure drones don't have an advantage at guerilla drone warfare?

  • Decide who wins wars based on who has more drones and drone defenses instead of actually physically battling?

What did your statement mean?

I think if we're going to check the power of killing drones, we need to start with defining the sides using a completely different distinction unlike "drone / counter-drone". Reading this gave me a different idea for checking and balancing killer robots and advanced weapons. I can see some potential cons to it, but I think it might be better than the alternatives. I'm curious about what pros and cons you would think of.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 14 June 2013 09:51:18PM 1 point [-]

(Trigger warning for atrocities of war.)

Human soldiers can revolt against their orders, but human soldiers can also decide to commit atrocities beyond their orders. Many of the atrocities of war are specifically human behaviors. A drone may bomb you or shoot you — very effectively — but it is not going to decide to torture you out of boredom, rape you in front of your kids, or cut off your ears for trophies. Some of the worst atrocities of recent wars — Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq — have been things that a killer robot simply isn't going to do outside of anthropomorphized science-fantasy fiction.

The orders given to an autonomous drone, and all of the major steps of its decision-making, can be logged and retained indefinitely. Rather than advocating against autonomous drone warfare, it would be better to advocate for accountable drone warfare.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 June 2013 12:19:43AM *  0 points [-]

I agree that the killer robots on the horizon won't have a will to commit atrocities (though I'm not sure what an AGI killer robot might do), however, I must note that this is a tangent.

The meaning of the term "atrocity" in my statement was more to indicate things like genocide and oppression. I was basically saying "humans are capable of revolting in the event that a tyrant wants to gain power whereas robots are not".

I think I'll replace the word atrocities for clarity.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 09:50:46PM *  -1 points [-]

Possible Solution:

This sounds hard to implement because it would require co-operation from a lot of people, but if the alternative is that our technological progress means we are facing possible extinction (with the 3-D printer solution) or oppression (with the legislation "solution"), that might get most of the world interested in putting the effort into it.

Here's how I imagine it could work:

  1. First, everyone concerned forms an alliance. This would have to be a very big alliance all over the world.

  2. The alliance makes distinctions between weapons likely to threaten humanity and weapons likely to protect humanity from itself. For an over-simplified definition (to give you the gist):

    Weapons that are likely to protect humanity from itself: These are not useful for dominating a population unless a very, very large number of people use them. Example: Guns.

    Weapons that threaten humanity: Any weapon that could be used by a few to dominate many. (And there are more kinds.)

  3. The alliance makes a law saying that anyone found building humanity-threatening weapons will be stopped by the alliance. (We're kind of doing this already, but the next part is different).

  4. In order to make such a policy enforceable, somebody will need to have some weapons with which to control those who break the weapon law the way that we have police with guns. Selecting a small number of people to police the illegal weapon makers and giving the police weapons powerful enough to stop them would make the problem far, far worse. That would be adopting the same failure mode as Russian communism: Give all the power to a few and expect them to distribute their power to the many? Distribution is not the outcome we should anticipate. See the next point for how I think we could do this.

  5. Design only weapons meant to protect humanity from itself, and ensure that a very large percentage of the world's populations have these weapons (so that they aren't in the hands of the few). The reason they can overwhelm the potentially superior weapons is because there are so many more weapons being wielded. Essentially, everybody becomes the police.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 June 2013 03:05:31PM 4 points [-]

It has recently been suggested (by yourself) that:

Perhaps a better question would be "If my mission is to save the world from UFAI, should I expend time and resources attempting to determine what stance to take on other causes?" No matter your level of potential to learn multiple subjects, investing that time and energy into FAI would, in theory, result in a better outcome with FAI - though I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that there are limits to how good I can be with subjects I haven't specialized in and if you think about it, you may realize that you have limitations as well.

It seems to me that the relevance of economic growth to FAI chances is closer to Eliezer's area of expertise, influence and comparative advantage than the determination of laws controlling military technology is to anyone here. Why is it worth evaluating and expressing opinions on this subject?

(Personally I am happy to spend some time talking about such things for the same reason that I spend some time talking about the details and implications of time travel in HPMoR fanfiction.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 07:59:23PM *  1 point [-]

I do make that mistake sometimes, however, this is not one of those times:

  • A. Whether I am knowledgeable here isn't very important (as opposed to the context in which I wrote that comment).

    I am not even advising people to agree on a particular strategy, I am spreading the word and getting them to think about it. Even if I tried to advise them, I don't expect LessWrong would take my ideas at face value and blindly follow them. In this case, evaluating and expressing opinions on this subject serves the purpose of getting people to think. Getting people to think is important in this case because this particular problem is likely to require that a large number of people get involved in their own fate. They're the ones that currently provide the checks and balances on government power. If they simply let the powerful decide amongst themselves, they may find that the powerful choose to maximize their power. Unfortunately, I don't currently know of anyone who is qualified and trustworthy enough to advise them on what's likely to happen and which method is likely to succeed, but at least stirring up debate and discussion will get them thinking about this. The more people think about it now, the more likely they are to have a decently well informed opinion and make functional choices later on. My knowledge level is adequate for this particular purpose.

  • B. Why should I specifically do this? Several reasons, actually:

    • Nobody else is currently doing it for us:

      There are no parties of sufficient size that I know of who are taking responsibility for spreading the word on this to make sure that a critical mass is reached. I've scoured the internet and not found a group dedicated to this. The closest we have, to my knowledge, is Suarez. Suarez is an author, and he seems bright and dedicated to spreading the word. I'm sure he's done research and put thought into this, and he is getting attention, but he's not enough. This cause needs an effort much larger and much more well-researched than one guy can pull off.

    • I "get it", but not everyone does.

      My areas of knowledge are definitely not optimal for this and I have no intentions of dedicating my life to this issue, but as a person who "gets it", I can perhaps convince a small group of relevant people (people who are likely to be interested in the subject) to seriously consider the issue. As we have seen, I have a greater understanding of this issue than some of the posters - I am explaining things like how land mines are not even comparable to killer robots in terms of their potential to win wars / wreck democracy. Somebody who "gets it" needs to be around to explain these kinds of things, or there may not be enough people in the group who "get it". I am mildly special because I "get it" and am willing to discuss this so other people "get it".

    • I am aware of this risk sooner than they are.

      Perhaps most important: I am aware of this risk sooner. (Explained in my next point.)

  • C. What I am doing is actually much bigger than it looks.

    I've seen the LessWrong Google Analytics. Some posts have accumulated 200,000+ visits over time. As I understand it, word spreads in an exponential fashion. Therefore, the more people that know about this in the beginning, the more people will know about it later. Even if this post got only 1,000 reads, entering those 1,000 reads into the beginning of the exponential growth curve is likely to result in many, many times as many people knowing about this. My post could, over the years, result in millions of people finding out about this sooner.

    It only takes a relatively small investment for me to help spread the word about this and I view the benefits as being worth that investment.

Conclusion:

If you "get it" and you care about this risk, I urge you to do the same thing. Post about this on Facebook, on Twitter, on other forums - wherever you have the ability to get a group of people to think about this. The couple of minutes it takes to tell 20 people now could mean that hundreds of people find out sooner. If any of you decide to spread the word, comment. I'd like to know.

Comment author: hylleddin 14 June 2013 07:08:26PM *  0 points [-]

It seems like a well publicized notarious event where a lethally autonomous robot killed a lot of innocent people would significantly broaden the appeal of friendliness research, and even could lead to disapproval of AI technology, similar to how Chernobyl had a significant impact on the current widespread disapproval of nuclear power.

For people primarily interested in existential UFAI risk, the likeliness of such an event may be a significant factor. Other significant factors are:

  • National instability leading to a difficult environment in which to do research

  • National instability leading to reckless AGI research by a group in attempt to gain an advantage over other groups.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 07:39:53PM *  0 points [-]

I sincerely hope that the people have time to think this out before such an event occurs. Otherwise, their reaction may trigger the "cons" posted in the legislation suggestion.

Comment author: CarlShulman 14 June 2013 06:32:53PM 2 points [-]

Consider this - it's unthinkable that today's American soldiers might suddenly decide this evening to follow a tyrannical leader whose goal is to have total power and murder all who oppose. It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risking a mutiny.

Yes, this is a problem.

As far as I know, no organization, not even MIRI (I checked), is dedicated to preventing the potential political disasters caused by near-term tool AI

This is the sort of thing that machine ethics people spend their time on (although they spend more time on law-of-war issues that arise with existing technology than on internal checks-and-balances).

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 07:33:42PM *  1 point [-]

I absolutely scoured the internet about 6 months ago looking for any mention of checks and balances, democracy, power balances and killing robots, AI soldiers, etc. (I used all the search terms I could think of to do this) and didn't find them. Is this because they're miniscule in size, don't publish much, use special jargon or for some other reason?

Do you know whether any of them are launching significant public education campaigns? (I assume not, based on what I have seen, but I could be wrong.)

I would very much like links to all relevant web pages you know of that talk specifically about the power imbalances caused by using machines for warfare. Please provide at least a few of the best ones if it is not too much to ask.

Thanks for letting me know about this. I have asked others and gotten no leads!

Comment author: wedrifid 14 June 2013 02:48:23PM 5 points [-]

Con: Everybody will probably die. This solution magnifies instability in the system. One person being any one of insane, evil or careless could potentially create an extinction event. At the very least they could cause mass destruction within a country that takes huge efforts to crush.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 05:55:36PM *  -1 points [-]

I agree that it's possible that in this scenario everyone will die but I am not sure why you seem to think it is the most likely outcome. Considering the fact that governments will probably have large numbers of these, or comparable weapons before the people do, or that they will create comparable weapons in the event that they observe their populace building weapons using 3-D printers, I think it's more likely that the power that the people wield via killer robots (including criminal organizations) will be kept in check than that any of these groups will be able to rove around and kill everyone. Perhaps you envision a more complex chain of events unfolding? Do you expect a clusterfuck? Or is there some other course that you think things would take? What and why?

Comment author: wedrifid 14 June 2013 02:42:57PM 1 point [-]

Calling this "AI risk" seems like a slight abuse of the term. The term "AI risk" as I understand it refers to risks coming from smarter-than-human AI.

I was about to voice my agreement and suggest that if people want to refer of this kind of thing (killer robots, etc) "AI risk" in an environment where AI risk refers more typically to strong AGI then it worth at least including a qualifier such as "(weak) AI risk" to prevent confusion. However looking at the original post it seems the author already talks about "near-term tool AI" as well as explicitly explaining the difference between that and the kind of thing MIRI warns about.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 05:51:31PM *  0 points [-]

I originally had "AI risk" in there, but removed it. True that I think we should seriously consider that stupid AIs can pose a major threat, and that the term "AI risk" shouldn't leave that out, but if people might ignore my message for that reason, it makes more sense to change the wording, so I did.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 14 June 2013 08:37:39AM 2 points [-]

Calling this "AI risk" seems like a slight abuse of the term. The term "AI risk" as I understand it refers to risks coming from smarter-than-human AI. The risk here isn't that the drones are too smart, it's that they've been given too much power. Even a dumb AI can be dangerous if it's hooked up to nuclear warheads.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 09:03:02AM *  0 points [-]

The risk here isn't that the drones are too smart, it's that they've been given too much power.

No. Actually. That is not the risk I'm discussing here. I would not argue that it isn't dangerous to give them the ability to kill. It is. But I do argue that my point here is that lethal autonomy could give people too much power - that is to say, to redistribute power unevenly, undoing all the checks and balances and threatening democracy.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 14 June 2013 08:37:39AM 2 points [-]

Calling this "AI risk" seems like a slight abuse of the term. The term "AI risk" as I understand it refers to risks coming from smarter-than-human AI. The risk here isn't that the drones are too smart, it's that they've been given too much power. Even a dumb AI can be dangerous if it's hooked up to nuclear warheads.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 09:01:02AM *  -1 points [-]

According to this Wikipedia page, the Computer History Museum appears to think Deep Blue, the chess playing software, belongs in the "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics" gallery. It's not smarter than a human - all it can do is play a game and beating humans at a game does not qualify as being smarter than a human.

The dictionary doesn't define it that way, apparently all it needs to do is something like perceive and recognize shapes.

And what about the term "tool AI"?

Why should I agree that AI always means "smarter than human"? I thought we had the term AGI to make that distinction.

Maybe your point here is not that AI always means "smarter than human" but that "AI risk" for some reason necessarily means the AI has to be smarter than humans for it to qualify as an AI risk. I would argue that perhaps we misunderstand risks posed by AI - that software can certainly be quite dangerous because of it's intelligence even if it is not as intelligent as humans.

Comment author: Emile 14 June 2013 08:24:37AM *  2 points [-]

it would allow a small number of people to concentrate a very large amount of power

Possibly a smaller number than with soldiers, but not that small - you still need to deal with logistics, maintenance, programming...

it's unthinkable today that American soldiers might suddenly decide to follow a tyrannical leader tomorrow whose goal is to have total power and murder all opponents. It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risk of mutiny.

It might me a bit more likely, but it stills seems like a very unlikely scenario (0.3% instead of 0.1%?), still staying less likely than other disaster scenarios (breakdown of infrastructure/economy leading in food shortages and panic and riots; a big war starting on one of the less stable parts of the world (ex-Yugoslavia, China//Taiwan, Middle east) and spilling over; an ideological movement motivating a big part of the population into violent action; UFAI; etc.)

EDIT: to expand a bit on this, I don't think replacing soldiers by drones increases risk much all else being equal because the kind of things soldiers would refuse to do are also the kind of things the (current) command structure is unlikely to want to do anyway.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:44:09AM *  -1 points [-]

Ok let's get some numbers.

I highly doubt that either one of us would be able to accurately estimate how many employees it would require to make a robot army large enough to take over a population, but looking at some numbers will at least give us some perspective. I'll use the USA as an example.

The USA has 120,022,084 people fit for military service according to Wikipedia. (The current military is much smaller, but if there were a takeover in progress, that's the maximum number of hypothetical America soldiers we could have defending the country.)

We'll say that making a robot army takes as many programmers as Microsoft and as many engineers and factory workers as Boeing:

Microsoft employees: 97,811 Boeing employees: 171,700

That's 0.22% of the number of soldiers.

I'm not sure how many maintenance people and logistics people it would require, but even if we double that .22%, we still have only .44%.

Is it possible that 1 in 200 people or so are crazy enough to build and maintain a robot army for a tyrant?

Number of sociopaths: 1 in 20.

And you wouldn't even have to be a sociopath to follow a new Hitler.

I like that you brought up the point that it would take a significant number of employees to make a robot army happen, but I'm not convinced that this makes us safe. This is especially because they could do something like build military robots that are very close to lethal autonomy but not quite, tell people they're making something else, make software to run the basic functions like walking and seeing, and then have a very small number of people make modifications to the hardware and/or software to turn them into autonomous killers.

Of course, once the killer robots are made, then they can just use them to coerce the maintenance and logistics people.

How many employees would have to be aware of their true ambitions? That might be the key question.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:30:21AM 0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Using 3-D printers to create self-defense technologies that check and balance power.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:26:45AM *  0 points [-]

Pro: Checking and balancing power is a solution we've used in the past. We know that it can work.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:11:22AM *  0 points [-]

Pro: Passing a law would probably generate news stories and may make the public more aware of the problem, increasing the chances that someone solves the problem.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:11:16AM *  0 points [-]

Pro: Passing a law is likely to spread the word to the people in the military, some of whom may then have key ideas for preventing issues.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:11:09AM *  0 points [-]

Pro: Passing a law would make it more likely that the legislative branch of the government is aware of the peril it's in.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:11:05AM 0 points [-]

Pro: This might delay disaster long enough for better solutions to come along.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:11:01AM *  0 points [-]

Con: If the executive branch of the government has the ability to make these weapons, the legislative branch will no longer pose a threat to them. Legally, they'll be forbidden, but practically speaking, they will not be prevented. Laws don't prevent people from behaving badly, nor do they guarantee that bad behavior will be punished, they just specify consequences and define the bad behavior. The consequences are contingent upon whether the person is caught and whether the authorities have enough power to dole out a punishment. In the event that the lawbreaker gains so much power that the authorities can't stop them, the threat of punishment is N/A. A law can't solve the checks and balances issue.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:10:56AM *  2 points [-]
Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 08:10:48AM *  1 point [-]

Con: They say about banning guns that it doesn't keep the bad people from having weapons, it just keeps good people unarmed. I'm concerned that the same may be true of laws that intentionally reduce the effectiveness of one's warfare technology.

Comment author: Kawoomba 14 June 2013 07:17:29AM 0 points [-]

Is this like a one-woman topic, complete with discussion? A finished product?

I think 3-D printers that counterbalance death from above are ... a ways off.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 07:22:07AM 0 points [-]

No. It just looks that way because I just started it. Please contribute your thoughts.

Comment author: CronoDAS 14 June 2013 07:00:23AM 0 points [-]

Don't there exist weapons that already exhibit the property of "lethal autonomy" - namely, land mines?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 07:08:53AM *  6 points [-]

That's not even comparable. Consider this:

  • Land mines don't distinguish between your allies and your enemies.
  • Land mines don't move and people can avoid them.

Unless your enemy is extremely small and/or really terrible at strategy, you can't win a war with land mines. On the other hand, these killer robots can identify targets, could hunt people down by tracking various bits of data (transactions, cell phone signals, etc), could follow people around using surveillance systems, and can distinguish between enemies and allies. With killer robots, you could conceivably win a war.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:30:21AM 0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Using 3-D printers to create self-defense technologies that check and balance power.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:48:15AM *  0 points [-]

Con: If power were checked and balanced perfectly, right from the beginning, then stasis would be maintained. However, this may not be what's likely. We may see a period full of power struggles where large numbers of people are unprotected and factions like organized crime groups, oppressive governments or citizens with tyrannical ambitions rise up and behave as feudal lords.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:42:15AM *  1 point [-]

Con: If militaries come to believe that having killer robots is critical to national defense (either because their enemies are posing a major threat, or because they're more effective than other strategies or required as a part of an effective strategy) then they will likely oppose this law or refuse to follow it. Even if they manage to resist the temptation to build them as a contingency plan against risks, if they're ever put into a position where there's an immediate threat (for instance: choosing between death and lethal autonomy), they are likely to choose lethal autonomy. It may be impossible to keep them from using these as a weapon in that case, making the ban on lethal autonomy just another ineffectual rule.

If the consequences of breaking a rule are not as grave as the consequences of following it, then the rule isn't likely to be followed.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:30:21AM 0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Using 3-D printers to create self-defense technologies that check and balance power.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:29:20AM *  0 points [-]

Possible Solution: Legislation to ban lethal autonomy. (Suggested by Daniel Suarez, please do not confuse his opinion of whether it is likely to work with mine. I am simply listing it here to encourage discussion and debate.)

Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy

10 Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:28AM

A new TED talk video just came out by Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon, explaining how autonomous combat drones with a capability called "lethal autonomy" pose a threat to democracy.  Lethal autonomy is what it sounds like - the ability of a robot to kill a human without requiring a human to make the decision.

He explains that a human decision-maker is not a necessity for combat drones to function.  This has potentially catastrophic consequences, as it would allow a small number of people to concentrate a very large amount of power, ruining the checks and balances of power between governments and their people and the checks and balances of power between different branches of government.  According to Suarez, about 70 countries have begun developing remotely piloted drones (like predator drones), the precursor to killer robots with lethal autonomy.

Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot

One thing he didn't mention in this video is that there's a difference in obedience levels between human soldiers and combat drones.  Drones are completely obedient but humans can throw a revolt.  Because they can rebel, human soldiers provide some obstacles to limit the power that would-be tyrants could otherwise obtain.  Drones won't provide this type of protection whatsoever.  Obviously, relying on human decision making is not perfect.  Someone like Hitler can manage to convince people to make poor ethical choices - but still, they need to be convinced, and that requirement may play a major role in protecting us.  Consider this - it's unthinkable that today's American soldiers might suddenly decide this evening to follow a tyrannical leader whose goal is to have total power and murder all who oppose.  It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risking a mutiny.  The amount and variety of power grabs a tyrant with a robot army of sufficient power can get away with is unlimited.

Something else he didn't mention is that because we can optimize technologies more easily than we can optimize humans, it may be possible to produce killer robots in less time than it takes to build armies of human soldiers and with less expense than training and paying those soldiers.  Considering the salaries and benefits paid to soldiers and the 18 year wait time on human development, it is possible that an overwhelmingly large army of killer robots could be built more quickly than human armies and with fewer resources.

Suarez's solution is to push for legislation that makes producing robots with lethal autonomy illegal.  There are, obviously, pros and cons to this method.  Another method (explored in Daemon) is that if the people have 3-D printers, then the people may be able to produce comparable weapons which will then check and balance their government's power.  This method has pros and cons as well. I came up with a third method which is here.  I think it's better than the alternatives but I would like more feedback.

As far as I know, no organization, not even MIRI (I checked), is dedicated to preventing the potential political disasters caused by near-term tool AI (MIRI is interested in the existential risks posed by AGI).  That means it's up to us - the people - to develop our understanding of this subject and spread the word to others.  Of all the forums on the internet, LessWrong is one of the most knowledgeable when it comes to artificial intelligence, so it's a logical place to fire up a discussion on this.  I searched LessWrong for terms like "checks and balances" and "Daemon" and I just don't see evidence that we've done a group discussion on this issue.  I'm starting by proposing and exploring some possible solutions to this problem and some pros and cons of each.

To keep things organized, let's put each potential solution, pro and con into a separate comment.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 June 2013 04:01:51AM 0 points [-]

This dovetails nicely with some of the other things I've found out about recently like PLOS Medicine's "Why most published research findings are false" and Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science". I am really glad to have gotten this additional insight from you. Upvotes and notes to self to read you again.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 June 2013 09:28:23PM 4 points [-]

To be clear, the question is not whether we should divert resources from FAI research to trying to slow world economic growth, that seems risky and ineffectual. The question is whether, as a good and ethical person, I should avoid any opportunities to join in ensembles trying to increase world economic growth.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 June 2013 03:19:27AM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps a better question would be "If my mission is to save the world from UFAI, should I expend time and resources attempting to determine what stance to take on other causes?" No matter your level of potential to learn multiple subjects, investing that time and energy into FAI would, in theory, result in a better outcome with FAI - though I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that there are limits to how good I can be with subjects I haven't specialized in and if you think about it, you may realize that you have limitations as well. One of the most intelligent people I've ever met said to me (on a different subject):

"I don't know enough to do it right. I just know enough to get myself in trouble."

If you can do anything with the time and effort this ensemble requires of you to make a quality decision and participate in activities, what would make the biggest difference?

Comment author: Epiphany 13 June 2013 02:58:44AM *  1 point [-]

I'm not convinced that slowing economic growth would result in FAI developing faster than UFAI and I think your main point of leverage for getting an advantage lies elsewhere (explained). The key is obviously the proportion between the two, not just slowing down the one or speeding up the other, so I suggest a brainstorm to consider all of the possible ways that slow economic growth could also slow FAI. For one thought: do non-profit organizations do disproportionately poorly during recessions?

The major point of leverage, I think, is people, not the economy. How that would work:

  • Selfish people have a goal that divides them. If your goal is to be an AI trillionaire, you have to start your own AI company. If your goal is to save the world from AI, your goal benefits if you co-operate with like-minded people as much as possible. The aspiring trillionaire's goals will not be furthered by co-operating with competitors, and the world-saver's goals will not be furthered by competing with potential allies. This means that even if UFAI workers outnumber FAI workers 10 to 1, it's possible for the FAI effort to unite that 10% and conquer the 90% with sheer numbers, assuming that the 90% is divided into fragments smaller than 10% each.

  • An organization made up of altruistic people might be stronger and more efficient than an organization made up of selfish people. If FAI workers are more honest or less greedy, this could yield practical benefits like a reduction in efficiency-draining office politics games, a lower risk of being stolen from or betrayed by those within the organization, and being able to put more money toward research because paychecks may not need to be as large. Also, people who are passionate about their goal derive meaning from their work. They might work harder or have more moments of creative inspiration than people who are working simply to get more money.

  • The FAI movement is likely to attract people who are forward-thinking and/or more sensible, realistic or rational. These people may be more likely to succeed at what they do than those attracted to UFAI projects.

  • People look down on those who hurt others for profit. Right now, the average person probably does not know about the UFAI risk and how important it is that people should not work on such projects. UFAI is a problem that would affect everyone, so it's likely that the average person will eventually take interest in it and shun those who work on UFAI. If they're accurately informed about which projects should be considered UFAI, I think it would seriously deter AI workers from choosing UFAI jobs.

  • It has been said by people knowledgeable about geniuses that they typically don't prioritize money as highly as others. Unfortunately, there isn't enough solid research on the gifted population (let alone geniuses) but if it's true that money is not the most important thing to a genius, you may find that a disproportionate number of geniuses would prioritize working on FAI over taking the biggest possible paycheck.

Unlike the economy, all of these are things that MIRI can take action on. If the FAI movement can take advantage of any of these to get more workers, more good minds, or more good people than the UFAI projects, I want to see it happen.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 April 2013 01:53:47AM 1 point [-]

I searched ANKI for "Cognitive Biases" but do not see a deck named "Cognitive Biases and Related Terms".

The two decks that are available are described so similarly that I can't figure out which one is supposed to be the improved version, or whether your deck even still exists.

Would you mind fixing this?

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 19 March 2013 07:30:49PM 13 points [-]

Total, abject failure. Mental illness. Sometimes leading to suicide. Having the most talented of their peer group switch to something they are less likely to waste their whole life on with nothing to show, and the next most talented switch to something else because they are frustrated with the incompetence of the people who remain. Turning into cranks with a 24/7 vanity google alert so that they can instantly show up to spam time cube esque nonsense whenever someone makes the mistake of mentioning them by name. Mail bombs from anarchoprimitivist math PhDs.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 March 2013 08:05:08AM 0 points [-]

Wow. Okay. That's not what I expected, but it does sound like a plausible depiction of reality.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 March 2013 03:48:05AM 2 points [-]

What are the common problems that GAI programmers run into?

Comment author: Costanza 04 March 2013 05:35:40PM 0 points [-]

Personally, I'm desperately hoping for a near-term Gattaca solution, by which ordinary or defective parents can, by genetic engineering, cheaply optimize their children's tendencies towards all good things, at least as determined by genotype, including ethical behavior and competence, in one generation. Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense.

I know the movie presented this as a dystopia, in which the elite were apparently chosen mostly to be tall and good-looking. Ethan Hawke's character, born naturally, was short and was supposedly ugly. Only in the movies, Ethan. But he had gumption and grit and character, which (in the movie) had no genetic component, enabling him to beat out all his supposed superiors. I call shenanigans on that philosophy. I suspect that gumption and grit and character do have a genetic component, which I would wish my own descendants to have.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 March 2013 09:01:25PM *  1 point [-]

I am also hoping that all parents in the future have the ability to make intentional genetic improvements to their children, and I also agree with you that this would not necessarily result in some horrible dystopia. It might actually result in more diversity because you wouldn't have to wait for a mutation in order to add something new. I wonder if anyone has considered that. I doubt that this would solve all the problems in one generation. Some people would be against genetic enhancement and we'd have to wait for their children to grow up and decide for themselves whether to enhance themselves or their offspring. Some sociopaths would probably see sociopath genes as beneficial and refuse to remove them from their offspring... which means we may have to wait multiple generations before those genes would disappear (or they may never completely vanish). We also have to consider that we'd be introducing this change into a population with x number of irresponsible people who may do things like give the child a certain eye color but fail to consider things like morality or intelligence. Then we will also have the opposite problem - some people will be responsible enough to want to change the child's intelligence, but may lack the wisdom to endow the child with an appropriate intelligence level. Jacking the kid's IQ up to 300 or would result in something along the lines of:

The parents become horrified when they realize that the child has surpassed them at age three. As the child begins providing them adult level guidance on how to live and observing that their suggestions are actually better than their parents could come up with, the child has a mental breakdown and identity crisis - because they are no longer a child but are stuck in a toddler's body, and because they no longer have a relationship with anyone that can realistically be considered to play the role of a parent.

If the parents are really unwise they'll continue to treat that person as a toddler, discourage them from doing independent thinking, and stifle all of their adult-like qualities until they're over 18 - because what they really wanted was to raise a baby, not a super-intelligent adult-like entity in a tiny body.

There must be many other enhancements that could backfire as well. An immoral parent trying to raise a moral child may also cause mutual horror and psychological issues (ex: the child turns in the parents for a crime and becomes an orphan).

I don't think it would be quite as efficient and clean as you're imagining, but I think the problem we'd run into (assuming everyone has access) would not be that we'd suddenly have too much conformity or that the elites would overpower everyone... but that people would do really stupid things due to not understanding the children they created and not having any clue what they were getting themselves into before hand. It could take multiple generations before we'd wake up and go "Ohhh! It needs to be illegal for parents to increase their child's IQ to three times their own!"

I agree with the spirit of "Screw this grossly inefficient and natural selection nonsense." but it's possible that even if genetic engineering can be made accessible to everyone, that people will simply refuse to legalize it for religious reasons or due to paranoia or that they'll have other irrational reasons... and it's possible that if it were legal and widely accessible, that humanity will do really unwise things with it and create big problems (especially if traits like responsibility are being lost). It's also possible that we simply won't perfect the technology anytime soon. It is pretty complicated to combine psychological traits in a functional way... give one kid LLI and they become a genius... do it with another kid and they become a schizophrenic. The scientists know it's complicated -- but who will they test it on? It's not ethical to test it on humans, but testing psychological trait engineering on mice wouldn't do... That's a real obstacle.

So there are many reasons I'm still interested in thinking about less efficient methods.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 02 March 2013 08:34:54AM 7 points [-]

The 10,000 Year Explosion discusses the effects that civilization has had on human evolution in the last 10,000 years. (There's also this QA with its authors.) Not sure whether you'd count that as "recent".

Comment author: Epiphany 02 March 2013 06:57:13PM *  0 points [-]

Wow. The article was fascinating. I devoured the whole thing. Thanks, Kaj. Do you know of additional information sources on the neurological changes?

Comment author: CellBioGuy 02 March 2013 03:58:34PM *  2 points [-]

Not only is the timescale too short (human societies change drastically over single-digit generation times, far too short for strong evolution) but all these traits are horrifically polygenic and dependant upon the exact combination of thousands of loci all around your genome that interact. There is also the extremly strong case against genetic determinism in most human behavior.

The traits that I am aware of that show strong evolution all have had thousands of years to be selected for, like lactose tolerance in people descended from herders, resistance to high altitude with a hemoglobin change in Tibet, apparent sexual selection for blue eyes in Europeans and thick hair in East Asians, smaller stature in basically all long-term agriculturalist populations... I think I read about a particular immune system polymorphism in Europe that was selected for a few hundred years ago though because it conveyed partial resistance to the black death.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 March 2013 06:06:48PM *  0 points [-]

far too short for strong evolution

This really depends on your concept of "strong evolution". If that is jargon meant to refer to a conglomeration of changes that makes the organism different all over, I would agree. If we're just talking about this in terms of "Is it possible that something of critical importance could significantly change in a few generations?" then I say "Yes, it is possible."

I assume you consider responsibility to be an important trait. Even if a change to the trait of responsibility alone may not qualify as "strong evolution" to you, would you say that it would be of critical importance to prevent humanity from losing the genes required for responsibility in even half it's population?

In a world where 40% of the people get here by accident, and we can tell that a lot of their parents failed to use their contraceptives consistently, are you unconcerned that there could be a relationship between irresponsible use of birth control and irresponsible genes being reproduced more rapidly than responsible genes?

The traits that I am aware of that show strong evolution all have had thousands of years

But today's situation is not the same. We have technologies now that could result in much more powerful unintended consequences just as it results in powerful intended ones. Birth control pills, for instance, didn't exist thousands of years ago. Our lives and environments are so different now (and are continuing to change rapidly) that we should not assume that our present and future selection pressures will match the potency of the selection pressures in the past. To do so would be to make an appeal to history.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 02 March 2013 07:29:06AM 1 point [-]

Well the first thing that comes to mind is the incredibly horrible failure rate of common contraceptives, and the unplanned pregnancy rate and birth rate that goes with them.

By "evidence" I mean evidence that allele frequencies have noticeably changed. These are all hypotheses about things that might be affecting allele frequencies but, again, my standing assumption is that the timescales are too short.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 March 2013 05:42:08PM *  1 point [-]

I haven't found any evidence that allele frequencies have changed - I just started to look into this, and didn't even have a search term when I started. Due to that, I thought it was obvious that I didn't have anything on micro-evolution, so I gave you the evidence I do have which, even though does not do anything to support the idea that allele frequencies are being influenced, does support the idea that there's potential for a lot of influence.

Hmm. A contraceptive and unplanned pregnancy survey by 23andme would be so interesting... I wonder if they do things like that... If I get a useful response to my request for a credible source on their accuracy, I will investigate this. (I want to get their service anyway but am demanding a credible source first.)

Comment author: maia 02 March 2013 07:10:16AM 0 points [-]

Depending on how recent you want... I recalled hearing that a major evolutionary shift in the past few thousand years was lactose tolerance; a quick Google search turned up this: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/science/10cnd-evolve.html?_r=0

Also, maybe a selection for particular types of earwax, which could be related to body odor: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/10/east-asians-dry-earwax-and-adaptation/#.UTGlU9H2QgQ

Comment author: Epiphany 02 March 2013 05:37:30PM 0 points [-]

Thanks, Maia, but my interest in this is from the perspective of an altruist who wants to know whether humanity will improve or disintegrate. I am interested in things that might create selection pressures that affect things like ethical behavior and competence. It seems like you've read about this subject so I'm wondering if you know of any research on micro-evolution affecting traits that are important to humanity having a good future.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 02 March 2013 05:07:31AM *  3 points [-]

Wild guess: try "human microevolution"?

I'm not a domain expert, but my standing assumption is that even the last few hundred years of human history were just too short to have a noticeable effect on allele frequencies. I would be very interested to hear evidence to the contrary, though.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 March 2013 07:00:03AM *  0 points [-]

Human microevolution, ooh. That sounds like a good guess. Google is showing me some results... it will take a while to parse them.

I would be very interested to hear evidence to the contrary, though.

Well the first thing that comes to mind is the incredibly horrible failure rate of common contraceptives, and the unplanned pregnancy rate and birth rate that goes with them.

Evidence:

In not even four years, about 25% of people using condoms became pregnant. Birth control pills were similar. http://www.jfponline.com/Pages.asp?AID=2603

"49% of pregnancies in the United States were unintended" http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/UnintendedPregnancy/index.htm

"These pregnancies result in 42 million induced abortions and 34 million unintended births" (world population growth was 78 million for contrast) http://www.arhp.org/publications-and-resources/contraception-journal/september-2008

If there's any trait at all that's connected with this - inability to afford more expensive methods, not caring about reliability enough to get an IUD or something more effective, dexterity level too low to correctly apply the product, impulse control issues / inability to think under pressure or when excited, forgetfulness, inability to resist temptation, etc. those traits are likely to reproduce faster than their counterparts. Considering that half our population growth is unintended, I'm pretty concerned about it.

The situation could be that (if a genetic irresponsibility trait exists and is responsible for a large portion of unintended pregnancies that go full term) even if the responsible portion of the population is larger, that the irresponsible portion begins it's generations sooner, and it's growth outstrips that of the responsible portion of the population, overpowering it in a short time.

We're also doing things like removing sociopaths out of the population and putting them into jails. This probably reduces the rate at which they reproduce, though I'd expect far slower evolution there, if any, than I would with something that influences contraceptive failure.

We select certain types of people (or they select themselves) for the military. When they go off to war, they're more likely to die before reproducing. Since Americans tend to send their soldiers away, they're also a lot less likely to reproduce before dying in a war than soldiers defending a home territory where they have access to lovers.

If welfare creates a perverse incentive to have more children, any trait that might make welfare appealing to a person could end up being reproduced.

People who get a 2 or 4 year degree have more free evenings in which to find a lover and take care of a child. Contrast that with people who get a higher level degree. They have to wait longer before they'll be ready.

People in certain industries work very long hours. They might not get a chance to meet someone or might decide they can't have kids working as many hours as they do.

For these last two groups, if they're determined to have kids, they'll probably find a way to do it -- but they may be significantly delayed compared with someone who gets a 4-year degree, works a 40 hour week and can start having kids when they're still in their early 20's. The delay of a few years probably wouldn't make much of a difference one or two generations away, but if there are any traits that result in one getting a higher level degree or working longer hours, those people probably won't reproduce as fast as others.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 March 2013 05:00:51AM *  1 point [-]

Can anyone tell me the name of this subject or direct me to information on it:

Basically, I'm wondering if anyone has studied recent human evolution - the influence of our own civilized lifestyle on human traits. For example: For birth control pills to be effective, you have to take one every day. Responsible people succeed at this. Irresponsible people may not. Therefore, if the types of contraceptives that one can forget to use are popular enough methods of birth control, the irresponsible people might outnumber responsible people in a very short period of time. (Currently about half the pregnancies in the USA are unintended, and probably 40% of those pregnancies go full term and result in a child being born. As you can imagine, it really wouldn't take very long for the people with genes that can cause irresponsibility to outnumber the others this way...)

Any search terms? Anyone know the name of this topic or recall book titles or other sources about it?

Comment author: shminux 27 February 2013 08:14:37PM 1 point [-]

Not an advice, just wanted to mention that if you are so worried offline, so to speak, some of it is bound to eventually leak through into the together time, and few people like it when the other person comes across as desperate or clingy. Also note that in most cases people get dumped in person, or sometimes over the phone, not by email/text/facebook status update, so the most dangerous time is probably the first few minutes after you meet up. Hope none of that happens to you.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 February 2013 02:59:11AM *  1 point [-]

If he was anxious and likely to experience a self-fulfilling-prophecy-failure before, he's probably twice as anxious now...

Comment author: satt 24 February 2013 09:04:45PM 0 points [-]

Posting that checklist as a poll in each new post would likely end up irritating people.

A simpler approach, with the twin advantages of being simpler and being something one can do unilaterally, would be to just count the proportion of recent, non-meetup-related Discussion posts with positive karma. Then you could give potential post authors an encouraging reference class forecast like "85% of non-meetup Discussion posts get positive karma".

Comment author: Epiphany 24 February 2013 09:51:32PM 1 point [-]

You know what? That is simple and elegant. I like that about it... but in the worst case scenario, that will encourage people to post stuff without thinking about it because they'll make the hasty generalization that "All non-meetup posts have an 85% chance of getting some karma" and even in the best case scenario, a lot of people will probably be thinking something along the lines of "Just because Yvain and Gwern and people who are really good at this get positive karma doesn't mean that I will."

Unfortunately, I think it would be ineffective.

Comment author: Nornagest 23 February 2013 09:40:05AM *  1 point [-]

It's not that I want to tell them whether they're "really living", it's that I think they don't think spending so much of their free time on TV is "really living".

I think I might actually expect people to endorse different activities in this context at different levels of abstraction.

That is, if you asked J. Random TV Consumer to rank (say) TV and socialization, or study, or some other venue for self-improvement, I wouldn't be too surprised if they consistently picked the latter. But if you broke down these categories into specific tasks, I'd expect individual shows to rate more highly -- in some cases much more highly -- than implied by the category rating.

I'm not sure what this implies about true preferences.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 February 2013 10:17:04AM 0 points [-]

I think I need an example of this to understand your point here.

Comment author: Bugmaster 23 February 2013 08:05:10AM 0 points [-]

The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. ... My problem with that is not that they aren't exercising ... or that they aren't being productive ... but that they aren't living.

What does "living" mean, exactly ? I understand that you find your personal creative projects highly enjoyable, and that's great. But you aren't merely saying, "I enjoy X", you're saying, "enjoying Y instead of X is objectively wrong" (if I understand you correctly).

Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?

I address this point below, but I'd like to also point out that some people people's goals are different from yours. They consume entertainment because it is enjoyable, or because it facilitates social contact (which they in turn find enjoyable), not because they believe it will make them more efficient (though see below).

So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text.

Many people -- yourself not among them, admittedly -- find that they are able to internalize new ideas much more thoroughly if these ideas are tied into a narrative. Similarly, other people find it easier to communicate their ideas in the form of narratives; this is why Eliezer writes things like Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR instead of simply writing out the equations. This is also why he employs several tropes from fiction even in his non-fiction writing.

I'm not saying that this is the "right" way to learn, or anything; I am merely describing the situation that, as I believe, exists.

The statement "entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods" seems true to me.

I am just not convinced that this statement applies to anything like a majority of "person+idea" combinations.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 February 2013 09:20:52AM *  1 point [-]

What does "living" mean, exactly ?

"Living" the way I used it means "living to the fullest" or, a little more specifically "feeling really engaged in life" or "feeling fulfilled".

I understand that you find your personal creative projects highly enjoyable, and that's great. But you aren't merely saying, "I enjoy X", you're saying, "enjoying Y instead of X is objectively wrong" (if I understand you correctly).

I used "living" to refer to a subjective state. There's nothing objective about it, and IMO, there's nothing objectively right or wrong about having a subjective state that is (even in your own opinion) not as good as the ideal.

I feel like your real challenge here is more similar to Kawoomba's concern. Am I right?

They consume entertainment because it is enjoyable,

Do you find it more enjoyable to passively watch entertainment than to do your own projects? Do you think most people do? If so, might that be because the fun was taken out of learning, or people's creativity was reduced to the point where doing your own project is too challenging, or people's self-confidence was made too dependent on others such that they don't feel comfortable pursuing that fulfilling sense of having done something on their own?

or because it facilitates social contact (which they in turn find enjoyable), not because they believe it will make them more efficient (though see below).

I puzzle at how you classify watching something together as "social contact". To me, being in the same room is not a social life. Watching the same entertainment is not quality time. The social contact I yearn for involves emotional intimacy - contact with the actual person inside, not just a sense of being in the same room watching the same thing. I don't understand how that can be called social contact.

Many people -- yourself not among them, admittedly -- find that they are able to internalize new ideas much more thoroughly if these ideas are tied into a narrative.

I've been thinking about this and I think what might be happening is that I make my own narratives.

Similarly, other people find it easier to communicate their ideas in the form of narratives

This, I can believe about Eliezer. There are places where he could have been more incisive but is instead gets wordy to compensate. That's an interesting point.

I am just not convinced that this statement applies to anything like a majority of "person+idea" combinations.

Okay, so to clarify, your position is that entertainment is a more efficient way to learn?

Comment author: wedrifid 23 February 2013 06:36:23AM *  3 points [-]

I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they're so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible.

I wonder if the author would agree that that is the most important information. I suspect he would not. (So naturally if you learning goals are different to the teaching goals of the author then their material will not be optimized for your intentions.)

Comment author: Epiphany 23 February 2013 09:07:01AM -1 points [-]

It seems to me that the problem is what intention one has when one begins learning and whether one can deal with accepting the fact that they're biased, not how they go about learning them. Though, maybe Eliezer has put various protections in that get people questioning their intention and sells them on learning with the right intention. I would agree that if it did not occur to a person to use their knowledge of biases to look for their own mistakes, learning them could be really bad, but I do not think that learning a list of biases will all by itself turn me into an argument-wielding brain-dead zombie.

If it makes you feel any better to know this, I've been seeking a checklist of errors against which I can test my ideas.

Comment author: Kawoomba 23 February 2013 06:13:08AM 0 points [-]

The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (...) Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I'm too motivated to DO something) and I don't seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming.

What's wrong with live and let live (for their notion of 'living'). You can value "DO"ing something (apparently not counting daydreaming) over other activities for yourself, that's your prerogative, but why do you get to say who is and isn't "living"?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 February 2013 08:57:07AM *  2 points [-]

That was addressed here:

I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter - and that's sad.

It's not that I want to tell them whether they're "really living", it's that I think they don't think spending so much of their free time on TV is "really living".

Now, if you want to disagree with me on whether they think they are "really living", that might be really interesting. I acknowledge that mind projection fallacy might be causing me to think they want what I want.

Comment author: Bugmaster 22 February 2013 07:39:37PM 2 points [-]

I felt the need to explain why the problems would reduce because I wasn't sure you saw the connections.

I see the connections, but I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix -- f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants -- are even problems at all. Sure, TV has a lot of terrible content, and some restaurants have terrible food, but that's not the same thing as saying that the very concept of these services is hopelessly broken.

I have to wonder if having a really well-developed intellect might offer some amount of protection against this

It probably would, but not to any great extent. I'm not a psychiatrist or a neurobiologist though, so I could be widely off the mark. In general, however, I think that Gatto is falling prey to the Dunning–Kruger effect when he talks about mental illness, economics, and many other things for that matter.

For example, the biggest tool in his school-fixing toolbox is the free market; he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly.

When I am fully motivated, I can spend all my evenings doing altruistic work for years, reading absolutely no fiction and watching absolutely no TV shows.

That's fair, and your preferences are consistent. However, many other people see a great deal of value in fiction; some even choose to use it as a vehicle for transmitting their ideas (f.ex. HPMOR). I do admit that, in terms of raw productivity, I cannot justify spending one's time on reading fiction; if a person wanted to live a maximally efficient life, he would probably avoid any kind of entertainment altogether, fiction literature included. That said, many people find the act of reading fiction literature immensely useful (scientists and engineers included), and the same is true for other forms of entertainment such as music. I am fairly convinced that any person who says "entertainment is a waste of time" is committing a fallacy of false generalization.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 February 2013 05:41:53AM 0 points [-]

I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix -- f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants -- are even problems at all.

The existence of television technology isn't, in my opinion, a problem. Nor is the fact that some shows are low quality. Even if all of them were low quality, I wouldn't necessarily see that as a problem - it would still be a way of relaxing. The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (Can't remember where I got that study, sorry.) My problem with that is not that they aren't exercising (they'd still have an hour a day which is plenty of exercise, if they want it) or that they aren't being productive (you can only be so productive before you run out of mental stamina anyway, and the 40 hour work week was designed to use the entirety of the average person's stamina) but that they aren't living.

It could be argued that people need to spend hours every day imagining a fantasy. I was told by an elderly person once that before television, people would sit on a hill and daydream. I've also read that imagining doing a task correctly is more effective at making you better at it than practice. If that's true, daydreaming might be a necessity for maximum effectiveness and television might provide some kind of similar benefit. So it's possible that putting one's brain into fantasy mode for a few hours of day really is that beneficial.

Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I'm too motivated to DO something) and I don't seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming. I would find it very hard to deal with if I had spent that much of my free time in fantasy. I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter - and that's sad.

he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly.

I think that people would also have to have read the seven lessons speech for the problems he sees to be solved. Maybe eventually things would evolve to the point where schools would not behave this way anymore without them reading it, because it's probably not the most effective way of teaching, but I don't see that change happening quickly without people pressuring schools to make those specific changes.

However, I'm surprised that you say "In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly." Do you mean that the free market doesn't do much to improve quality, or do you just mean that when people want specific changes and expect the free market to implement them, the free market doesn't tend to implement those specific changes?

I'm also very interested in where you got the information to support the idea, either way.

a vehicle for transmitting their ideas

After reading Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead, my feeling was that even though much of the writing was brilliant and enjoyable, I could have gotten the key ideas much faster if she had only published a few lines from one of the last chapters. I'm having the same reaction to the sequences and HPMOR. I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they're so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible. So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text. I could walk all the way to Florida, but flying would be faster. People realize this so if they want to take vacations, they fly. Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?

It makes sense from the writer's point of view. I have said before that I was very glad that Eliezer decided to popularize rationality as much as possible, as I had been thinking that somebody needed to do that for a very long time. His writing is interesting and his style is brilliant and his method has worked to attract almost twelve million hits to his site. I think that's great. But the fact that people probably would not have flocked to the site if he had posted an efficient dissemination of cognitive biases and whatnot is curious. Maybe the way I learn is different.

I am fairly convinced that any person who says "entertainment is a waste of time" is committing a fallacy of false generalization.

I think it depends on whether you use "waste of time" to mean "absolutely no benefit whatsoever" or "nowhere near the most efficient way of getting the benefit".

The statement "entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods" seems true to me.

Comment author: Bugmaster 22 February 2013 06:35:21AM 4 points [-]

I mostly agree with the things you say, but these are not the things that Gatto says. Your position is a great deal milder than his.

In a single sentence, he claims that if only we could set up our schools the way he wants them to be set up, then social services would utterly disappear, the number of "psychic invalids" would drop to zero, "commercial entertainment of all sorts" would "vanish", and restaurants would be "drastically down-sized".

This is going beyound hyperbole; this borders on drastic ignorance.

For example, not all mental illnesses are caused by a lack of gumption. Many, such as clinical depression and schizophrenia, are genetic in nature, and will strike their victims regardless of how awesomely rational they are. Others, such as PTSD, are caused by psychological trauma and would fell even the mighty Gatto, should he be unfortunate enough to experience it.

While it's true that most of the "commercial entertainment of all sorts" is junk, some of it is art; we know this because a lot of it has survived since ancient times, despite the proclamations of people who thought just like Gatto (only referring to oil paintings, phonograph records, and plain old-fashioned writing instead of electronic media). As an English teacher, it seems like Gatto should know this.

And what's his beef with restaurants, anyway ? That's just... weird.

If you had the kind of motivation it causes to feel like you're in the process of building an amazing life, would you be able to still your mind and focus on sitcoms?

Do you feel the same way about fiction books, out of curiosity ?

If you don't agree with this, then do you also criticize Eliezer's method of raising the sanity waterline by encouraging people to refine their rationality?

If Eliezer claimed that raising the sanity waterline is the one magic bullet that would usher us into a new Golden Age, as we reclaim the faded glory of our ancestors, then yes, I would disagree with him too. But, AFAIK, he doesn't claim this -- unlike Gatto.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 February 2013 06:47:58PM 1 point [-]

I agree that saying "all these problems will disappear" is not the same as saying that "these problems will reduce". I felt the need to explain why the problems would reduce because I wasn't sure you saw the connections.

Others, such as PTSD, are caused by psychological trauma and would fell even the mighty Gatto, should he be unfortunate enough to experience it.

I have to wonder if having a really well-developed intellect might offer some amount of protection against this. Whether Gatto's intellect is sufficiently well-developed for this is another topic.

And what's his beef with restaurants, anyway ? That's just... weird.

I don't know. I love not cooking.

Do you feel the same way about fiction books, out of curiosity ?

Actually, yes. When I am fully motivated, I can spend all my evenings doing altruistic work for years, reading absolutely no fiction and watching absolutely no TV shows. That level of motivation is where I'm happiest, so I prefer to live that way.

I do occasionally watch movies during those periods, perhaps once a month, because rest is important (and because movies take less time to watch than a book takes to read, but are higher quality than television, assuming you choose them well).

Comment author: Bugmaster 21 February 2013 05:21:11AM 4 points [-]

I should also point out that, while Gatto makes some good points, his overall thesis is hopelessly lost in all the hyperbole, melodrama, and outright conspiracy theorizing. He does his own ideas a disservice by presenting them the way he does. For example, I highly doubt that mental illnesses, television broadcasts, and restaurants would all magically disappear (as Gatto claims on pg. 8) if only we could teach our children some critical thinking skills.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 February 2013 03:56:19AM *  0 points [-]

Connection between education and sanity

Check out Ed DeBono's CORT thinking system. His research (I haven't thoroughly reviewed it, just reciting from memory) shows that by increasing people's lateral thinking / creativity, it decreases things like their suicide rate. If you have been taught to see more options, you're less likely to choose to behave desperately and destructively. If you're able to reason things out, you're less likely to feel stuck and need help. If you're able to analyze, you're less likely to believe something batty. Would mental illness completely disappear? I don't think so. Sometimes conditions are mostly due to genes or health issues. But there are connections, definitely, between one's ability to think and one's sanity.

If you don't agree with this, then do you also criticize Eliezer's method of raising the sanity waterline by encouraging people to refine their rationality?

Connection between education and indulging in passive entertainment

As for television, I think he's got a point. When I was 17, I realized that I was spending most of my free time watching someone else's life. I wasn't spending my time making my own life. If the school system makes you dependent like he says (and I believe it does) then you'll be a heck of a lot less likely to take initiative and do something. If your self-confidence depends on other expert's approval, it becomes hard to take a risk and go do your own project. If your creativity and analytical abilities are reduced, so too will be your ability to imagine projects for yourself to do and guide yourself while doing them. If your love for learning and working is destroyed, why would you want to do self-directed projects in the first place? And if you aren't doing your own projects your own way, that sucks a lot of the life and pleasure out of them. Fortunately, for me, a significant amount of my creativity, analytical abilities, and a significant amount of my passion for learning and working survived school. That gave me the perspective I needed to make the choice between living an idle life of passive entertainment, and making my own life. Making my own life is more engaging than passive entertainment because it's tailored to my interests exactly, more fulfilling than accomplishing nothing could ever be, more exciting than fantasy can be because it is real, and more beneficial and rewarding in both emotional and practical ways than entertainment can be due to the fact that learning and working opens up new social and career opportunities.

If the choice you are making is between "watch TV" and "not watch TV" you're probably going to watch it.

But if you have a busy mind full of ideas and thoughts and passions, that's not the choice you're perceiving. You've got the choice between "watch character's lives" and "make my own life awesome and watch that". If you felt strongly that you could make your own life awesome, is there anything that could convince you to watch TV instead?

Gatto doesn't do a good job of giving you perspective so you can understand his point of view here. He didn't explain how incredible it can feel to have a mind that is on, how engaging it can be to learn something you're interested in, how satisfying it is to do your own d* project your own d* way and see it actually work! He doesn't do a good job of helping you imagine how much more motivation you would experience if your creativity and analytical abilities were jacked up way beyond what they are. If your life was packed full of thoughts and ideas and self-confidence, could you spend half your free time in front of a show? If you had the kind of motivation it causes to feel like you're in the process of building an amazing life, would you be able to still your mind and focus on sitcoms?

I wouldn't. I can't. It is as if I am possessed by this supernova sized drive to DO THINGS.

Restaurants and education

I honestly don't know anything about whether these are connected. My best guess is that Gatto loves to cook, but had found not being taught how to cook to be a rather large obstacle in the way of enjoying it.

Comment author: Bugmaster 21 February 2013 02:59:15AM 0 points [-]

The school system is broken in a serious way. The problem is with the fundamental system, so it's not something teachers can compensate for.

See also Lockhart's Lament (PDF link) . That said, in my own case, competent teachers (such as Lockhart appears to be) did indeed make a difference. Though my IQ is much closer to the population than the IQ of an average LWer's, so maybe my anecdotal evidence does not apply (not that it ever does, what with being anecdotal and all).

Comment author: Epiphany 21 February 2013 03:18:26AM *  0 points [-]

That said, in my own case, competent teachers (such as Lockhart appears to be) did indeed make a difference.

I can't fathom that you'd say that if you had read Gatto's speech.

I am very interested in the reaction you have to the speech (It's called The Seven Lesson School Teacher, and it's in the beginning of chapter 1).

Would you indulge me?

Also:

Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.

Comment author: Vaniver 20 February 2013 11:48:41PM 0 points [-]

The ability to invite people to see drafts would be an interesting one, that would make this sort of writing group much easier to do. (Basically, posting a draft to discussion without posting a draft to discussion.)

Comment author: Epiphany 21 February 2013 01:35:41AM 1 point [-]

Yes, but then we'd also need a place to discuss them... and the discussions wouldn't be appropriate because not only do people hate meta threads but it would also give away the content of the post and defeat the purpose of limiting exposure to refine the piece first. Also, from what I gather, it's relatively hard to get changes made to the website. The best route is apparently to just make them and then hope that Luke or somebody likes them enough to implement.

What would be much easier in this case is to simply throw a private open source message board and hidden Wordpress install onto some web space specifically for the writer's group to discuss various things, both related to their specific pieces, and to writing in general.

Then, if LessWrong ever does create a framework for the group, the database can be imported. Until then, progress does not have to be hindered.

I am seriously dying to start this writer's group, but I have major projects to finish right now. Making the site would be easy (and I could do it myself). It's leading the group that I don't have time for - they need somebody who is willing to read and give feedback on each piece, organize, and advertise for the group.

Comment author: olibain 20 February 2013 08:34:42PM 8 points [-]

I'm Robby Oliphant. I started a few months ago reading HP:MoR, which led me to the Sequences, which led me here about two weeks ago. So far I have read comments and discussions solely as a spectator. But finally, after developing my understanding and beginning on the path set forth by the sequences, I remain silent no more.

I am fresh out of high school, excited about life and plan to become a teacher, eventually. My short-term plans involve going out and doing missionary work for my church for the next two years. When I came head on against the problem of being a rationalist and a missionary for a theology, I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.

I find some of this difficult, some of this intuitive and some of this neither difficult or intuitive, which is extremely frustrating, how something can appears simple but defy my efforts to intuitively work it. I will continue to work at it because rationality seems to be praiseworthy and useful. I hope to find the best evidence about theology here. I don't mean evidence for or against, just the evidence about the subject.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 February 2013 01:24:33AM *  1 point [-]

I appreciate your altruistic spirit and your goal of gathering objective evidence regarding your religion. I'm glad to see you beginning on the path of improving your rationality! If you haven't encountered the term "effective altruist" yet or have not yet investigated the effective altruist organizations, I very much encourage you to investigate them! As a fellow altruistic rationalist, I can say that they've been inspiring to me and hope they're inspiring to you as well.

I feel it necessary to inform you of something important yet unfortunate about your goal of becoming a teacher. I'm not happy to have to tell you this, but I am quite glad that somebody told you about it at the beginning of your adulthood:

The school system is broken in a serious way. The problem is with the fundamental system, so it's not something teachers can compensate for.

If you wish to investigate alternatives to becoming a standard school teacher, I would highly recommend considering becoming involved with effective altruists. An organization like THINK or 80,000 hours may be very helpful to you in determining what sorts of effective and altruistic things you might do with your skills. THINK does training for effective altruists and helps them figure out what to do with themselves. 80,000 hours helps people figure out how to make the most altruistic contribution with careers they already have.

For information regarding religion, I recommend the blog of a former Christian (Luke Muehlhauser) as an addition to your reading list. That is here: Common Sense Atheism. I recommend this in particular because he completed the process you've started - the process of reviewing Christian beliefs - so Luke's writing may be able to save you significant time and provide you with information you may not encounter in other sources. Also, due to the fact that he began as a Christian, I'm guessing that his reasoning was not unnecessarily harsh toward Christian ideas like they might have been otherwise. The sampling of his blog that I've read is of good quality. He's a rationalist, so that might be part of why.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 February 2013 05:28:34AM 1 point [-]

I'd be interested, although this should possibly be done in a different thread.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 February 2013 11:04:19AM 0 points [-]

Alright. Choose a location.

Comment author: shminux 18 February 2013 05:59:41PM *  27 points [-]

Documenting my mental processes after reading this post (disclaimer: human introspection sucks, and mine is probably no exception):

  1. Huh, this is one of the better versions of the Devil's advocate game I've ever encountered... Immediate upvote.

  2. Huh, the poster analyzed their mistakes, learned from them and improved the challenge. Too bad I only have one upvote.

  3. Clicking on the links... WTF, this is the girl who converted to Christianity (Catholicism? Really? Out of all the options available?) from Atheism a year or so ago... Anything she posts deserves a downvote...

  4. Stop! What the hell am I doing? This is, like, falling prey to several biases at once. At least I should notice that I am confused. Unable to reconcile the "obviously dumb" conversion move with this quite clever post.

  5. Wait, this is the substance of her post, to begin with!

  6. Deciding to definitely keep the upvote and reserve judgment until after looking through the linked posts.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 February 2013 02:31:46AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for being so real. That was refreshing.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 February 2013 02:28:23AM 0 points [-]

I've read this three times now and am still not sure how to interpret:

I may be correct in this particular argument, but the odds are good that I share the rationalist weak-point that is keeping them from noticing the error.

I have concluded that it's vague, for the following reasons:

A. I don't know if "this particular argument" refers to your argument for atheism, for Christianity, or your arguments to convince the opponents that you are an atheist or a Christian.

B. Your phrase "the rationalist weak-point" is unspecified. At first, I thought you were referring to the fact that the atheists did less well at detecting the fakes, but you admitted yourself in the paragraph about that that the problem was the questions you wrote.

C. Your phrase "the error" is unspecified.

Also, it's unclear whether the following statement:

(Think of this as the shift from "How the hell can you be so dumb?!" to "How the hell can you be so dumb?").

...should be interpreted to mean "how can my opponents be so dumb?" or "how can myself and my side be so dumb?" I originally interpreted the latter but now am wondering if the correct interpretation should be the former.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 February 2013 08:43:15PM *  2 points [-]

Would you agree or disagree that no matter what anybody had proposed as a potential way of gauging moral progress, you most likely would have disagreed with it

I disagree with that hypothesis. I further note that I evaluate claims about value metrics "if taken to the extreme" differently to proposals advocating a metric to be used for a given purpose. In the latter case I consider whether it will be useful, in the former case I actually consider the extremes. In a forum where issues like lost purpose and the complexity and fragility of value are taken seriously and the consequences of taking simple value systems to the extremes are often considered this should come as little surprise.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 February 2013 01:42:30AM *  0 points [-]

I disagree with that hypothesis.

Can you propose an ideal that would work for this purpose?

In a forum where...

Alright, next time I want to talk about something that might involve this kind of ethical statement, if I'm not interested in posting a 400 page essay to clarify my every phoneme and account for every possible contingency, I will say something like "[insert perfect ethical statement here]".

Edits the comment that started this to prevent further conversation derailment.

I actually consider the extremes...

I haven't exactly dedicated my existence to composing an ideal useful for gauging human progress against or anything, I just started thinking about this yesterday, but I did consider the extremes.

I still don't see anything wrong with this one and you didn't give me a specific objection. I only got a vague "the same problems as..." From my point of view, it's a bit prickly to imply that I haven't considered the extremes. Have I considered them as much as you have? Probably not. But if you want me to see why this particular statement is wrong, I hope you realize that you'll have to give me some specific refutation that reveals it's uselessness or destructiveness.

I would earnestly like to know whether humanity has made progress. If you want to have that discussion with me, would you mind contributing to the continuation of the conversation instead of merely kicking the conversation down?

This was not responded to at all, and that's frustrating.

It's great that you care about this, and I know you have an interest in (and possibly a passion for?) this sort of reasoning, but I've been wondering since the comment where you disagreed with me about this in the first place what purpose you are hoping to serve. Lacking direct knowledge of that, all I have is this feeling of being sniped by a "Somebody on the internet is wrong!" reflex.

Regardless of motives, I feel negatively affected by this approach. I'm feeling all existentially angsty now, wondering whether there is any way at all to have any clue whether humanity is moving forward or backward and tracing the cause back to this conversation here where I am the only one trying to build ideas about this and my respondents seem intent on tearing them down.

What I really wanted to get out of this was to get some ideas about how to gather data on ethics progress. Maybe somebody has already constructed an analysis. In that case, a book recommendation or something would have been great. If not, I was looking for additional ideas for going through the available information to get a gist of this. You've obviously thought about this, so I figure you must have something worthwhile to contribute toward constructive action here.

I mention this because it does not appear to have occurred to you that maybe I was doing an initial scouting mission, not setting out to solve a philosophical problem once and for all: I don't need a perfect way to gauge this right this instant - a gist of things and a casual exploration of the scope involved is all that I'm realistically willing to invest time into at the present moment, so that would be satisfactory. I may dive into it later, but, as they say: "baby steps".

If you have some idea of what ideal could be used to gauge progress against, I would appreciate it if you'd tell me what it is. If not, then is there some way in which you're interested in continuing the exploration in a constructive manner that does not consist of me building ideas and you tearing them down?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 February 2013 12:50:24AM 2 points [-]

Then, I began exploring some of the complexities, hoping that you'd expand on them and you instead chose to view my limited engagement in the topic as a sign that doing these kinds of calculations is harder than I realize.

Sorry about that, your examples pattern matched to what someone who wanted to question contemporary practices without actually questioning contemporary ethics would write.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 February 2013 01:12:40AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks, Eugine. I can see in hindsight why I would look like that to you, but before hand, I didn't expect anyone to jump on examples that weren't elaborated upon to the degree you appear to have been expecting. I'm interested in continuing this discussion for reasons unrelated to the comment that originally spurred this off, as I've been thinking a lot lately about how to measure the ethical behavior of humans. I'm still wondering if you're interested in talking about this. Are you?

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 10:36:54PM *  2 points [-]

The more I think about this the more I realize I need a term that means "Even though the people who are now jumping all over me about some philosophical subject are talking about a memetic war that's currently raging, and even though they're not mindless zombies saying completely useless things in support of their points, they've chosen to hyper-focus on some piece of my conversation not essential to the main point, and have derailed the conversation."

I want to use "philosophical landmines" for that, but now that I re-read your article, I realize I can't. This is because the implication you created is that the person who steps on the landmine has temporarily turned into an argument-shooting NPC.

I'm not sure what should be done about this, if that means I should seek a different term (ideas?), or suggest that a new article for that variation be developed (seems redundant) or request an edit to this one to include current memetic wars and lucid combatants who, though not straw-manning you, have chosen to completely derail your conversation because you triggered them with your special ignorant wording.

Do you feel that an edit to include triggering non-zombies who pursue current wars in irrelevant places would be a good idea? If not, then what do you suggest?

Also important: As a continuation of my interest in beginning a communal list of philosophical landmines, I've been thinking about various philosophical landmines that I've accidentally laid, looking for good examples. In each case, I've considered that it might be a bad idea to post them because this may insult other people due to the implication of mindlessness, or because the person responding was not mindless, so it's actually inappropriate as an example. Also, we'd probably be more constructive if we could talk openly about philosophical landmines when they arise, which would require removing the insulting insinuations. I think the concept of the philosophical landmine would be far more useful and way easier to create a collection of examples for if the insulting insinuation was taken out. So, an edit would be my preference.

Note: I am delayed in producing this communal list until I somehow resolve the insulting insinuations obstacle.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 February 2013 10:46:50AM 1 point [-]

I used the wording "cause less" which means the people enacting the ideal would not be able to kill people in order to prevent people from dying.

The wording doesn't prevent that, but your elaboration here does. You've (roughly speaking) replaced a simple consequentlialist moral with a rather complex deontological one. The problems and potential failure modes change accordingly. Neither are an ideal against which I would gauge moral progress.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 06:11:13PM *  0 points [-]

I'm glad we're now in the same context.

Would you agree or disagree that no matter what anybody had proposed as a potential way of gauging moral progress, you most likely would have disagreed with it, and there most likely would have been the potential for practically endless debate?

What would be most constructive is to be told "Here is this other ideal against which to gauge progress that would be a better choice." What I feel like I'm being told, instead, is "This is not perfect." That is a given, and it's not useful.

I would earnestly like to know whether humanity has made progress. If you want to have that discussion with me, would you mind contributing to the continuation of the conversation instead of merely kicking the conversation down?

Comment author: wedrifid 18 February 2013 10:16:28AM *  3 points [-]

Um if you didn't happen to notice, killing everyone qualifies as "death" and is therefore out of bounds for reaching that particular ideal.

Out of bounds? The ideal in question ("Causing less suffering and death is good") doesn't seem to have specified any bounds. That's precisely the problem with this and indeed most forms of naive idealism. If you go and actually implement the ideal and throw away the far more complex and pragmatic restraints humans actually operate under you end up with something horrible. While all else being equal causing less suffering and death is good, actually optimizing for less suffering and death is a lost purpose.

Almost any optimizer with the goal "cause less suffering and death" that is capable of killing everyone (comparatively) painlesslessly will in fact choose to do so. (Because preventing death forever and is hard and not necessarily possible, depending on the details of physics.)

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 10:20:48AM 1 point [-]

I was not talking about this in the context of building an optimizer. I was talking about this as a simple way to as humans gauge whether we had made ethical progress or not. I still think your specific concern about my specific ideal was not warranted:

Since killing everyone qualifies as "death" I don't see how it could possibly qualify as in-bounds as a method for reaching this particular ideal. Phrased differently, for instance as "Suffering and death are bad, let's eliminate them." the ideal could certainly lead to that. But I phrased it as "Causing less suffering and death is good."

I used the wording "cause less" which means the people enacting the ideal would not be able to kill people in order to prevent people from dying. You could argue that if they kill someone that might have had four children, that four deaths were saved - however, I'd argue that the four future deaths were not originally caused by the particular idealist in question, so killing the potential parent of those potential four children would not be a way for that particular person to cause less deaths. They would instead be increasing the number of deaths that they personally caused by one, while reducing the number of deaths that they personally caused by absolutely nothing.

It does not use the word "eliminate" which is important because "eliminate" and "lessen" would result in two totally different strategies. Total elimination practically requires the death of all, as the only way for it to be perfect is for there to be nobody to experience suffering or death. "Lessen" gives you more leeway, by allowing the sort of "as good as possible" type implementation that leaves living things surviving in order to experience the lessened suffering and death.

Can you think of a way for the idealist to kill everyone in order to personally cause less death, without personally causing more death, or a reason why lessening suffering would force the idealist to go to the extreme of total elimination?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 18 February 2013 09:59:42AM *  6 points [-]

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Some people will dislike LW for various reasons. For example, they don't like talking about superintelligent machines and Singularity, because it feels cultish. Or they thing that rational talking is cold; or that the LW environment is hostile to women. Or whatever else. So these people will ignore LW and everything that is here. So it would be nice if the good ideas are also available somewhere else.

(For similar reasons I think separating SI/MIRI and CFAR was a good idea. It you want to convince people about usefulness of rational thinking, starting with singularity is often not a good strategy.)

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 10:01:38AM *  1 point [-]

I agree, but make a distinction between thinking it's bad that too few people are posting on LessWrong while many are posting in a billion other places instead versus thinking that there should not be multiple groups of rationalists.

I am all for multiple groups of rationalists. What I am not for is this community scattering across 100 different blogs.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 February 2013 08:25:24AM *  2 points [-]

One ideal against which we could gauge moral progress without it being useless or self-defeating if taken to the extreme would be "Causing less suffering and death is good."

Well, the most straightforward way to judge success along this metric is to compare the amount of suffering. The problem with this metric is that the contribution of technological progress will dominate any contribution from ethical progress.

Might we be causing harm in new ways as well as ceasing to cause harm in other ways, moving backward overall? Even though Americans can't keep slaves, they do get a lot of their goods from sweatshops. The prejudice against gays may be lessening, but has the prejudice against Middle Easterners increased to the point where it cancels out that progress? Women got the right to vote, but shortly before that, children were forced into the school system.

Furthermore, it's not a priori obvious that the contribution to less suffering is what you think it is any of the examples you listed. It's possible that the people working in "sweatshops" are better off there than wherever they were before, this in fact seems likely since they chose to work there. It's possible that our modern attitude towards gender roles and sexuality is causing more unhappy marriages and children growing up in bad homes and thus increases suffering; conversely, maybe our attitudes towards gender are correct and our prejudice towards (Muslim) Middle Easterners is encouraging them to adopt it and thus our prejudice is reducing suffering on net. As for the right to vote, well there's a slight positive effect from making the women feel empowered, but the main effect is who wins elections, and whether they make better or worse decisions, which seems hard to measure.

My point is that doing these types of calculations is much harder than you seem to realize.

Edit: Also, what wedrifid said.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 09:44:37AM *  0 points [-]

My point is that doing these types of calculations is much harder than you seem to realize.

I do realize that making these calculations is difficult. To be fair, when I first brought this up, I was talking about a completely different subject, in a comment that was already long enough and absolutely did not need a long tangent about the complexities of this added in. Then, I began exploring some of the complexities, hoping that you'd expand on them and you instead chose to view my limited engagement in the topic as a sign that doing these kinds of calculations is harder than I realize. This is frustrating for two reasons. The first reason is that no matter what I said, it would not be possible for me to cover the topic in entirety, especially not in a single message board comment. The second reason is that instead of continuing my discussion and adding to it, you changed the direction of the conversation each of the last two times you replied to me.

It might be that you'd make an excellent conversation partner to explore this with, but I am not certain you are interested in that. Are you interested in exploring this topic or were you just hoping to convince me that I don't realize how complicated this is?

Comment author: wedrifid 18 February 2013 08:17:19AM 2 points [-]

One ideal against which we could gauge moral progress without it being useless or self-defeating if taken to the extreme would be "Causing less suffering and death is good."

I'm afraid once you take even that ideal to the extreme you will get something horrific. An effective way to minimize suffering and death is to minimize things that can experience suffering and death. ie. Taking this ideal to the extreme kills everyone!

Watching what happens when a demigod of "Misguided Good" alignment actually implements this ideal forms the basis of the plot for Summer Knight, where Harry Dresden goes head to head against a powerful Fey who is just too damn sensitive and proactively altruistic for the world's good.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 09:37:55AM *  -1 points [-]

An effective way to minimize suffering and death is to minimize things that can experience suffering and death. ie. Taking this ideal to the extreme kills everyone!

Um if you didn't happen to notice, killing everyone qualifies as "death" and is therefore out of bounds for reaching that particular ideal.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 February 2013 06:22:51AM 1 point [-]

Re: ethics.

The problem with judging ethical progress, is that we have no independent way of verifying we're progressing rather than regressing.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 07:31:27AM *  1 point [-]

My interpretation of the article is not that he's saying that gauging moral progress is impossible, but that you can't gauge it by comparing the past with the present. It has to be gauged against an ideal, but the ideal has to be carefully chosen or else the ideal may be useless or self-defeating. I'm sure such an ideal can be constructed (maybe someone has already constructed one that's widely considered to be acceptable - in that case I'd be interested in finding out about it) but since I'm not aware of a widely accepted ideal against which progress can be gauged at the moment, I'd like to focus on other parts of this. [Edited last statement to remove a source of potential conversational derailment.]

This does inspire me to bring up interesting questions, though, like:

Do I know enough about our past history to know whether it was previously better or worse? What if most native American tribes respected women and gays and abhorred slavery before they were killed off by the settlers? Not to mention the thousands of civilizations that existed prior to these in so many places all over the world.

Might we be causing harm in new ways as well as ceasing to cause harm in other ways, moving backward overall? Even though Americans can't keep slaves, they do get a lot of their goods from sweatshops. The prejudice against gays may be lessening, but has the prejudice against Middle Easterners increased to the point where it cancels out that progress? Women got the right to vote, but shortly before that, children were forced into the school system. The reason I view this school system as unethical are touched on (in order) here and here.

I wonder if anyone has done thorough research to determine whether we're moving forward or backward. I would earnestly like to know. It's a topic I am very interested in. If you have a detailed perspective on this, I'd be interested in reading it.

  • For archival purposes, the source of potential conversational derailment was:

One ideal against which we could gauge moral progress without it being useless or self-defeating if taken to the extreme would be "Causing less suffering and death is good."

Comment author: Tripe 17 February 2013 04:26:24AM 0 points [-]

Is community cohesion something to aim for? Ideally, rationality should be the baseline, not the marker of our particular community. As recent threads on gender have suggested, there's room for quite a few different communities which share core principles. Ideally, lesswrong would be one of many places where rationalists of different stripes feel comfortable. Of course, the question is whether it's better off huddling together for the moment in hopes of reaching critical mass or if we're already past that phase.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 February 2013 01:28:23AM *  0 points [-]

Community cohesion may be critical to the success of the rationalist movement.

That was a good question. The reason cohesion is important is because one wants to avoid a "divide and conquer" circumstance. If nobody feels comfortable posting on LessWrong and goes and posts on 100 other blogs instead, it's possible that the movement will simply die out.

Of course it is also possible for that to have a benefit, too: If 100 blog authors successfully advertise their blogs, it's possible that they'd get a lot more readers than if they were to post solely on LessWrong.

I also have a deeper point to make about community cohesion which I think will be hard to see due to two kinds of bias. To make the point easier to see, I will briefly mention those biases. The first is optimism bias. The second is mind projection fallacy.

Why optimism bias is relevant here:

Not only are people known to believe more optimistic things than they should, they also find it hard to adjust their perspective when their optimism is confronted, especially when it would be emotionally devastating to do so. This may be one of those ideas with the potential for devastation. Therefore, it might be especially hard to overcome optimism bias in this case and view the following point objectively.

Why mind projection fallacy is relevant here:

If you, yourself, have X ability level with something, you are likely to assume that most others have X ability as well, and may even find it hard to imagine or believe that most others do not have X ability level. Most people have not thoroughly researched the abilities of the average person, and have no idea what those are. I've met countless gifted people who, for instance, upon encountering someone with less ability than themselves in some area, frequently mistake that ignorance for laziness or malice or simply assume that the specific person was unusually stupid. This happens frequently, with gifted people, at times when the person in question actually has normal abilities. It's likely that the average LessWronger is gifted. It's also likely that something like half of them do not even realize they are gifted.

For those two reasons, a lot of people in this movement are likely to be vastly overestimating the average person's ability to become rational and their interest level in doing so. To some extent, interest in rationality and ability to wield it are things that can be increased. However, it would be illogical to assume that just because interest level and ability can be increased that they'll be able to be increased adequately in a large enough section of the population for rational thought to become the norm. The stated goal of "raising the sanity waterline" is, of course, both feasible and worthwhile - but part of that is because the phrasing implies no specific amount. Making rationality the norm is a completely different goal. It is extremely worthwhile, but is many times more difficult.

I am not aware of any studies that have been done to specifically determine the average person's capacity for developing rationality. Nor am I aware of any studies on methods to teach rationality that are designed to determine how much difference the best teaching strategies make to one's capacity for and interest in rationality. I doubt anybody knows where the average person's limits are. I think it would be hard for most members of LessWrong to imagine having a brain that hurts when you try to think rationally because it is too hard, having no interest in rationality whatsoever, or being too irrational to even understand why rationality is good, but (as a person who has read a lot about psychology) I'm sure that all of those things do happen and that they're fairly common. It would be folly, in my opinion, to assume that the average human:

1.) Has a brain capable of thinking rationally.

2.) Has a brain that learns rationality easily enough that the benefits outweigh the costs.

3.) Has a brain that rewards them for rational thought. (Mine rewards me for rational thought, but it seems to punish me for doing math, and it took about a decade for me to get to the point where it quit hurting when I attempted to spell correctly.)

4.) Has adequate time, energy, resources, discipline, sanity, opportunity, etc. to put themselves through the rigorous mental training it requires to achieve adequate results.

5.) Has the mental stamina capacity to reach a state of constant performance. I bet most are able to do things like detect a bias a single time, when asked, just like most can lift a five pound dumbbell, a single time, when asked. But to be rational requires detecting most biases most of the time, and that is quite another matter. It may be that it takes the mental equivalent of an Olympic champion to be able to develop the stamina to lift those weights all the time.

The reason I bring this up is not because I'm a cantankerous misanthrope. It's because of what I know about human abilities due to the developmental psychology research I've done. For a quick glimpse into my perspective:

Learning language is not a trivial task, but we have been doing that since before civilization without schooling or a movement. Humans are prodigious among animal species when it comes to language development. Almost all of us gets to enjoy a huge vocabulary with many thousands of words. It's just natural for our brains to learn a language. Language is a great example of what happens with humans when our brains are designed to do a particular task. We say things like "Humans are different because they're capable of rational thought." Then why don't we learn to be rational as readily as we learn language? If it's natural for all of us, why didn't we learn to be rational most of the time thousands of years ago?

Some abilities are attributed to "humanity" because we don't see any, or many, examples of them in other species... but that's different from saying that they're common to humans. Rocket science, for instance, is an ability that no animals have, but that most humans do not have, either. We say that humans are different because of things like rational thought, but rationality may still be similar to rocket science in that many humans are not able to do it.

[Edited to remove a certain paragraph.]

I don't know whether this obstacle is best identified as "lack of interest" or "it's unnatural to learn because a lot of people's brains aren't designed for it", but there is obviously some obstacle that has been holding humanity back the entire time we've existed. There may be lots of different obstacles. It is quite possible, in my view, that the average human will find the obstacles insurmountable without something like brain augmentation or genetic engineering.

In the event that there are a limited number of people who will be both interested in and successful at attaining a rational state, the last thing we want to do is have them divided up all over the place. To have the greatest possible impact, we need to stick together.

That's why community cohesion is likely to be critical to the rationalist movement.

  • For archival purposes, the paragraph was:

Even with ethics - which is something that most people can learn - it has taken thousands of years of civilized living just to get to the point where slavery is abolished, women can vote and gay people have begun making progress on getting rights. I am not even sure that thinking rationally most of the time is a state that is attainable to most people, but even if it is, it's possible that establishing a norm of rational thought among humans would require a time period similar to that of mass ethical behavior...

Comment author: Elithrion 17 February 2013 04:33:27AM *  0 points [-]

Ideally, the benefit would be receiving feedback at multiple stages of the writing process.

At idea conception, I'd like good feedback on whether an idea is interesting and worth pursuing further or obviously flawed or already covered (there are way too many posts for someone who's not been here for years to be aware of all of them, and search is only sometimes helpful). After that, it may be good to get quick comments on an outline or choice of style (e.g. "you should try to make it less dry" or "you need to spend more time explaining the importance"). Once the post is completed, it would be valuable to know whether the end result is good/salvageable/how it can be improved (e.g. I have one post up, and I recall that after posting it, there was instantly a comment at like +10 saying "this pair of sentences is stupid" and then I realised that it was indeed stupid and I shouldn't have included them - having someone point that out before I posted would've helped). All of this preferably without even potential karma losses to avoid creating ugh fields or even general worries.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 February 2013 11:18:39PM 0 points [-]

I agree that it would be nice to have feedback on whether a concept has already been written about. Searching isn't perfect. I have some friends that I've asked for feedback a few times, and that has stopped me from posting topics that were already covered. I also desire to have someone read my post to find any communication glitches I may not have noticed.

Comment author: Elithrion 17 February 2013 04:23:55AM *  4 points [-]

Not especially - while it removes the disincentives to posting, it also removes the incentives. If I write something, half my motivation is to increase my status and be appreciated (the other half being altruistic - and I'm not sure it's actually "half"). Unless, of course, the writer's group was exclusive in membership and belonging to it were already high-status, but that's probably not the ideal direction to go.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 February 2013 11:14:37PM 0 points [-]

I figured you'd probably say that, but I didn't want to assume my guess was correct. I don't have much inhibition about posting, myself, so I am not entirely sure I understand other's inhibitions.

Comment author: Elithrion 16 February 2013 09:42:37PM 1 point [-]

Relevant data: I actually have completed 70% of a post that's fairly suitable to front page and I'm sure would go positive (my expectation is 10-40 karma, but high uncertainty), and 90% of a post suitable to discussion (expected karma ~3-10), and then after having them close to done I thought about the prospect of posting them and realised that I'm not sure whether they're "valuable enough" and whether actually posting them is worth the potential stressfulness (I really dislike losing even slightly). As you can see, a karma prediction tool wouldn't really do anything for me, while a writer's group might be helpful.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 February 2013 03:30:00AM *  0 points [-]

"I really dislike losing even slightly"

I wonder if a way to post anonymously or as part of a group would help with this. Example: Say you submitted a piece to the writer's group, instructing them to post it anonymously for you, and they reviewed it and posted it under the account "Writer's Group" - then there would be no risk of you losing karma. Would an arrangement like that be desirable?

Comment author: Elithrion 16 February 2013 09:42:37PM 1 point [-]

Relevant data: I actually have completed 70% of a post that's fairly suitable to front page and I'm sure would go positive (my expectation is 10-40 karma, but high uncertainty), and 90% of a post suitable to discussion (expected karma ~3-10), and then after having them close to done I thought about the prospect of posting them and realised that I'm not sure whether they're "valuable enough" and whether actually posting them is worth the potential stressfulness (I really dislike losing even slightly). As you can see, a karma prediction tool wouldn't really do anything for me, while a writer's group might be helpful.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 February 2013 03:25:22AM *  0 points [-]

What exactly is it about the writer's group that would do the trick? Maybe it's having other people read it first and confirm that it's good?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 16 February 2013 09:57:32PM *  3 points [-]

If two days is too long (and it probably is), then let's make it one day, or 12 hours, or 6 hours, or whatever value will work best. I didn't want to make "separate but equal" thread, but to use the time bonus for ladies as a way to approximate how LW would look like if we had more balanced gender ratio. (An artificial tool to amplify the "women's voice".) So the best value would be the one which on average results in equal number of comments by men and women when the discussion is over.

And I am not interested which specific comments are written by whom. (So I would ignore the timestamps while reading. Also, women are allowed to write later, too.) I just want to know how the whole discussion would feel like if it was gender-balanced.

If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away.

Then those women would probably be also inhibited from saying those things in a gender-balanced environment.

If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women's comfort.

I would prefer an environment where everyone is as comfortable as possible, not an environment optimized for one gender's comfort only. (More technically, a cooperate/cooperate solution, not male-cooperate/female-defect solution.)

Comment author: Epiphany 17 February 2013 03:18:44AM *  2 points [-]

Reducing the amount of time the women have to comment may mean that no women comment at all. Considering that only a little over a third of the posts on page two of discussions have enough comments to (statistically speaking) contain at least one comment from two different women (the post would need to have 20 comments, as LW is about 10% female), if you don't absolutely maximize the number of comments from women in your experiment post, you're likely to see no discussions between females. It would probably have the best chance of working if you asked the women to agree to comment on the thread before hand. If you ask, also, for male volunteers, you'll then be able to control the male to female ratio by asking non-volunteers not to respond at all because it is an experimental thread.

Also, what conversational differences will you look for and how will you know that you found them?

Comment author: [deleted] 16 February 2013 03:38:55PM 6 points [-]

Counterpoint: I don't think gender segregation of posts will break down any communication barriers; if anything it will cause divisiveness as in an 'us-versus-them' mentality.

In response to comment by [deleted] on LW Women: LW Online
Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 08:19:27PM 0 points [-]

That would be a hypothesis for which we'd have to complete an experiment.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 15 February 2013 04:05:40PM *  10 points [-]

My opinions on these three topics:

1) There are two important aspects of talking about "getting women"; I guess one of them is more obvious for men and one for women, so I will write both explicitly.

a) For a typical heterosexual man, "getting women" is an important part of his utility function; perhaps so important that talking about instrumental rationality without mentioning this feels dishonest. There are tons of low-hanging fruit here (the whole PUA industry is about that); ignoring this topic would be like ignoring the topic of finding a good job or developing social skills. Seen from this perspective, I would say we speak relatively little about the topic; we already have kind of a taboo, it's just not absolute.

b) Discussing women as objects sends a strong message to women: "you do not belong here". We speak about you, but not with you. -- Ladies can describe their feelings better, I can only recommend imagining a reversed situation; a "rationalist website" with women discussing how to get handsome millionaires (or whatever would be the nearest equivalent), creating a feeling that if you are not a millionaire, you have no worth as a human being, and even if you are a millionare, your worth is exactly the money you have, nothing more. Your personal utility function is not important; the only important thing is how much utilities the discussing women can get from you.

Is there a good solution which would not ignore either of these aspects? In my opinion, there is: having both discussions about "getting women" and "getting men" on the website. And having them only in articles on a given topic, not randomly anywhere else. But even if this would be acceptable to others (which I doubt), the problem remains how to get from here to there.

I propose an experiment on how to balance the gender imbalance here. Once in a time create a "ladies first" topic, where only women would be allowed to comment during the first two days; after this time, the discussion is open to everyone. (During the two days, the announcement would be visible in the top and bottom of the article; and then it would be removed.) It could give us an idea of how the discussion would look if we had more women here. And if a man wants to contribute, waiting two days is not so difficult. The obvious disadvantage: women members who don't want to make their gender publicly known would have to avoid the discussion or create another account. -- The topics could be women-specific (getting the handsome millionaire), or even, for the sake of experiment, completely neutral, for example "ladies first" Open Thread (which after two days becomes a normal Open Thread, but the different initial dynamics could be interesting).

2) With regards to unsupported theories, I just want to note that even "politically correct" theories can be unsupported or incorrect. (Yes, that includes even feminist theories.) I would like having the same rule for both of them. If it is forbidden to write "men are statistically better than women in math", it should be equally forbidden to write "men are statistically exactly the same as women in math", if in both cases the same level of evidence is provided. Or perhaps we should have the same reaction for both of them, something like "[citation needed]" in Wikipedia.

3) I would enjoy having a more friendly discussion environment, but I don't want to make it a duty. I mean, offenses are bad, but mere "lack of warmth" is normal, although it is nice to do better than this. Among men, this is often the normal mode of speech; among women it's usually otherwise... I think it would be nice to let everyone speak in their preferred voice. We should encourage men to display more warmth (and it would be an interesting topic on how to do it without feeling awkward), but not criticize them for failing to reach the level convenient for women.

Maybe we could have in comments small icons indicating how we want to communicate (how we want other people to respond to us). Something like Crocker's rules, but with three options: nice / impersonal / Crocker's rules. (Graphically: a heart, a square, a crosshair.) A user would select an icon when making a comment, and would select the default icon in user preferences dialog. New users would automatically get the "nice" icon as a default (as a trivial incentive for more people to have this option). Of course the "nice" icon means that also the comment is nice, not only the reactions are expected to be.

Submitting...

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 09:18:22AM 1 point [-]

After two days, a discussion will die down to the point where it barely gets any responses. If you're going to make it ladies only, make it ladies only permanently. Make an identical male only counterpart. That would solve the problem "Where will the men post?" and give you a nice undiluted control for your observations about the women. It will also help keep things organized (Otherwise can you imagine the overhead in going through the thread trying to figure out who was male and who was female, and reading each time stamp to determine who was who? It's much much easier to make two threads.) If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away. If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women's comfort.

In response to LW Women: LW Online
Comment author: NancyLebovitz 15 February 2013 09:04:38AM 34 points [-]

I'm ok with the general emotional tone (lack of tone?) here. I think I read the style of discussion as "we're all here to be smart at each other, and we respect each other for being able to play".

However, the gender issues have been beyond tiresome. My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar. LW has been the first place which has given me the impression that men and women are opposed groups. I still think they're pretty similar. The will to power is a shared trait even if it leads to conflict between opposed interests.

LW was the first place I've been where women caring about their own interests is viewed as a weird inimical trait which it's only reasonable to subvert, and I'm talking about PUA.

I wish I could find the link, but I remember telling someone he'd left women out of his utilitarian calculations. He took it well, but I wish it hadn't been my job to figure it out and find a polite way to say it.

Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was "If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone." I can't imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making use of the go for it and ignore your own pain slogans-- but I'm still shocked and angry that it's possible to not notice something like that. It's all a matter of who you identify with. Truth is truth, but I didn't want to find out that the culture had become that degraded.

And going around and around with HughRustik about PUA.... I think of him as polite and intelligent, and it took me a long time to realize that I kept saying that what I knew about PUA was what I'd read at LW, and he kept saying that it wasn't all like Roissy, who I kept saying I hadn't read. I grant that this is well within the normal range of human pigheadedness, and I'm sure I've done such myself because it can be hard to register that people hate what you love, but it was pretty grating to be on the receiving end of it.

There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they're bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper. No thought about the unfairness or the possible loss of information. I think it finally occurred to someone to give a second test rather than just assuming it was a good day or good luck.

Unfortunately, I don't have an efficient way of finding these discussions I remember-- I'll grateful if anyone finds links, and then we can see how accurate my memories were.

All this being said, I think LW has also become Less Awful so far as gender issues are concerned. I'm not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view (partly my fault because I haven't been tracking individuals) since there are still the complaints about what one is not allowed to say.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 08:47:35AM 1 point [-]

Commenting to state a disagreement with a LW narrative (you're okay with the emotional tone / lack thereof) on a LW narratives thread will chip away at anonymity. If enough LW women were to do that, then people may figure out who wrote which narratives by process of elimination. I acknowledge that it would be way infeasible for all of us to memorize all the narratives and never say something that disagrees, and that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm saying that adding a comment on the LW narratives thread itself that's in clear disagreement with one of the narratives is poor anonymity strategy.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 08:45:00AM 2 points [-]

Have you considered trying to locate a Canadian cryonicist that has already had similar legal documents drafted? Perhaps the relevant cryo providers would be happy to ask around for a Canadian volunteer who already has such an agreement to discuss this with you. After all, being able to obtain this agreement is a prerequisite for you to become a customer, and so it is in the cryo provider's best interest to assist. Once the person is found, you could either ask whether you can use a copy of their agreement, or if it belongs to the lawyers, you could ask the lawyers to give you a better deal since they already drafted one of these and can make changes to the existing copy.

Also, if you choose to lead the construction of a public domain contract for this, then stating that this is your intention may draw more interested people to pool money, and would also result in making a much bigger difference to the world when you overcome this obstacle. You might also find additional resources this way like lawyers who have experience with these.

I don't know enough about law to tell you whether it's likely to be useful to consult an IP lawyer to ask whether a contract, once bought, can be placed into the public domain, but I know enough about human nature to know that if lawyers have a way to prevent their contracts from being released into the public domain, they will want to use it.

Or you could make temporary arrangements like the Alcor website recommends. They say not to delay because you might find yourself in a situation where it's too late. If you get something adequate set up now, you can improve the setup and make it ideal later.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 08:39:42AM 7 points [-]

Note to Luke: If you suggest that the readers of this post invite the authors of blog entries they enjoyed to post them on LessWrong, the positive reinforcement may motivate more of them to post here.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 16 February 2013 06:52:10AM *  32 points [-]

Why don't these writers post or at least cross-post on LW? I would really prefer that they did, for these reasons

  • It would give their posts more visibility and hence more comments and discussions. (I often learn more from the comments sections of a LW post than the post itself.)
  • I don't have to learn a new commenting system (get a new login and learn the markup/formatting, threading, and voting schemes).
  • I think the LW commenting system is generally better than that of any other blog I've seen.
  • If I comment on their posts, my comments can be backed up and searched along with all of my other LW comments.
  • I'm more motivated to comment (and to spend more effort on my comments) since my comments will be seen by more people, and I'm less worried about my comments disappearing when their blogs stop getting maintained.

Does it also have something to do with identity and affiliation? If so, maybe that's another reason to try to make people think of LW in less identity-related ways, or perhaps make the LW identity smaller / more inclusive somehow? (I don't know and I'd very much like to hear from one or more of these writers.)

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 08:25:09AM 0 points [-]

It's also better for community cohesion if we all post in the same place.

Due to the fact that they could easily post here and receive all the benefits you listed and more, my perception of the problem is not that they do not realize that there are multiple benefits in posting on LessWrong rather than their own blogs, but that there's something about LessWrong that makes it an undesirable place to post.

My top guess on that, based on the talk that I've seen going on around the place, is fear of criticism / rejection / negative karma. See also.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 08:04:53AM *  3 points [-]

It seems to me that there are lots and lots of people who want to post on LessWrong but they're concerned about whether those posts will be received well. I keep seeing people saying things along those lines. I've read, also, that when surveyed about their worst fear, more people respond with "public speaking" than "death". I don't know if that's true, but I can't help but wonder if fear of rejection is a major inhibiting factor at LessWrong. I have three ideas for this:

Karma Prediction Tool

If people could get at least a rough prediction of how much karma their post would get (for instance, if it was at least able to tell you whether the karma was likely to be positive or negative) that may assuage their fears and get them posting. I previously wrote an outline for this idea:

Karma Prediction Tool Idea

A LessWrong Writer's Group

I also had another idea: What if we started a LessWrong writer's group where members could ask each other for feedback on topic ideas, get friendly advice and constructive critiques before being exposed to the karma-monster, trade skills, collaborate, co-author, and generally be supportive and inspiring to one another?

I'd seriously consider doing these myself except that I'm in the middle of some other major projects at the moment. For now:

Do you think a writer's group would help you post more?

Petition writers to re-post specific entries on LessWrong

With some compliments and encouragement, I bet a lot of the writers in Luke's list would warm up to the idea of posting more frequently here. There may be a need for more positive reinforcement.

Submitting...

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 05:14:26AM 0 points [-]

This would be a fun puzzle except for that what I'd do would greatly depend on how long we were given to write the program. Optimizing for a ten minute program would be totally different from optimizing for a program that I've got a week to complete. And were I given no deadline, my strategy may simply be to opt to work on it so slowly that he could never kill anybody for losing.

Comment author: juliawise 16 February 2013 03:28:37AM *  3 points [-]

It means committed to a mental hospital. E.g. in Massachusetts the relevant law is in Section 12 of the chapter, so to "section 12" someone or just "section" them is to commit them to a hospital against their will.

Presumably he meant he can't go to a cryonics org or a regular hospital and just ask to be cryopreserved, because that would be suicidal, and voicing suicidalality would get him sectioned to a psych hospital.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 February 2013 04:23:10AM 1 point [-]

Hmm. Good alternate explanation. Thanks.

Comment author: gwern 11 February 2013 07:33:25PM *  3 points [-]

which implies that people who die of some other cause are not usually dissected?

Relatively few disease or old-age related deaths result in autopsy (even though they're a good idea since they routinely reveal wrong diagnoses).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopsy#Forensic_autopsy The reason why suicides would be mandated to be autopsied in some states is pretty obvious: murders can look a lot like a suicide. As well, the close proximity of a suicide to preservation can raise questions about whether the cryonics people hurried it up and committed murder - ALCOR had a close call in the Dora Kent incident.

These requirements and dangers are why cryonics groups don't handle suicidees except, AFAIK, in rare cases where there is no suspicion of foul play and autopsy can be avoided like Kim Suozzi avoiding food & drink while terminal. Some links: http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq06.html#death http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport9304.html

Comment author: Epiphany 14 February 2013 07:03:28PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for this. That's really too bad. In my view, there really needs to be some sort of protocol that terminally ill patients can follow that guarantees they'll be frozen in the event that they choose to exercise their right to die. Maybe there is one implied by "in rare cases" and I am not aware of it?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2013 07:26:38PM *  0 points [-]

If you want to discuss how we may determine the probability of a consistent and continuing downward trend, that would be constructive and I'd be very interested. Please do not waste my time by pointing out the obvious.

(First of all, as I might have already mentioned, I don't think that the average of (IQ - 132) over all readers is a terribly interesting metric; the total number of active contributors with IQ above 132 or something like that might be better.)

I'd guess that the decline in average IQ is mostly due to lower-IQ people arriving rather than to higher-IQ people leaving (EDIT: applying the intraocular trauma test to this graph appears to confirm that), and the population growth appears to have tapered off (there were fewer respondents in the 2012 survey than in the 2011 one, even though the 2011 one was open for longer). I'd guess the average IQ of readers is decreasing with time as a reversed logistic function, but we'd have to fit a four-parameter curve to three data points to test that.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 February 2013 03:57:06AM *  0 points [-]

the total number of active contributors with IQ above 132 or something like that might be better

Actually, a similar concern was brought up in response to my IQ Accuracy comment and Vaniver discovered that the average IQs of the active members and lurkers was almost exactly the same:

165 out of 549 responses without reported positive karma (30%) self-reported an IQ score; the average response was 138.44.

181 out of 518 responses with reported positive karma (34%) self-reported an IQ score; the average response was 138.25.

We could separate the lurkers from the active members and do the analysis again, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort as it looks to me like active members and lurkers are giving similar answers. If you'd like to do that, I'd certainly be interested in any surprises you uncover, but I don't expect it to be worthwhile enough to do it myself.

I'd guess that the decline in average IQ is mostly due to lower-IQ people arriving rather than to higher-IQ people leaving (EDIT: applying the intraocular trauma test to this graph appears to confirm that)

The sample set for the highest IQ groups is, of course, rather small, but what's been happening with the highest IQ groups is not encouraging. The specific graph in question (although I very much doubt that Gwern would intend to make that graph misleading in any way) is just not designed to clearly illustrate that particular aspect of the results visually.

Here are a few things you wouldn't guess without looking at the numbers:

Exceptionally gifted people used to be 18% of the IQ respondents. Now they are 6%.

The total number of highly and exceptionally gifted respondents decreased in 2012, while normal and moderately gifted respondents increased.

I did some analysis here

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 02:19:06AM *  22 points [-]

On IQ Accuracy:

As Yvain says, "people have been pretty quick to ridicule this survey's intelligence numbers as completely useless and impossible and so on" because if they're true, it means that the average LessWronger is gifted. Yvain added a few questions to the 2012 survey, including the ACT and SAT questions and the Myers-Briggs personality type question that I requested (I'll explain why this is interesting), and that give us a few other things to check against, which has made the figures more believable. The ridicule may be an example of the "virtuous doubt" that Luke warns about in Overconfident Pessimism, so it makes sense to "consider the opposite":

The distribution of Myers-Briggs personality types on LessWrong replicates the Mensa pattern. This is remarkable since the patterns of personality types here are, in many significant ways, the exact opposite of what you'd find in the regular population. For instance, the introverted rationalists and idealists are each about 1% of the population. Here, they are the majority and it's the artisans and guardians who are relegated to 1% or less of our population.

Mensa's personality test results were published in the December 1993 Mensa Bulletin. Their numbers.

So, if you believe that most of the people who took the survey lied about their IQ, you also need to believe all of the following:

  • That most of these people also realized they needed to do IQ correlation research and fudge their SAT and ACT scores in order for their IQ lie to be believable.

  • Some explanation as to why the average of lurker's IQ scores would come out so close to the average of poster's IQ scores. The lurkers don't have karma to show off, and there's no known incentive good enough to get so many lurkers to lie about their IQ score. Vaniver's figures.

  • Some explanation for why the personality type pattern at LessWrong is radically different from the norm and yet very similar to the personality type pattern Mensa published and also matched my predictions. Even if they had knowledge of the Mensa personality test results and decided to fudge their personality type responses, too, they somehow managed to fudge them in such a way that their personality types accidentally matched my predictions.

  • That they decided not to cheat when answering the Bayes birthday question even though they were dishonest enough to lie on the IQ question, motivated to look intelligent, and it takes a lot less effort to fudge the Bayes question than the intelligence and personality questions. (This was suggested by ArisKatsaris).

  • That both posters and lurkers had some motive strong enough to justify spending 20+ minutes doing the IQ correlation research and fudging personality test questions while probably bored of ticking options after filling out most of a very long survey.

It's easier just to put the real number in the IQ box than do all that work to make it believable, and it's not like the liars are likely to get anything out of boasting anonymously, so the cost-benefit ratio is just not working in favor of the liar explanation.

If you think about it in terms of Occam's razor, what is the better explanation? That most people lied about their IQ, and fudged their SAT, ACT and personality type data to match, or that they're telling the truth?


Summary of criticism:

Possible Motive to Lie: The desire to be associated with a "gifted" group:

In re to this post, it was argued by NonComposMentis that a potential motive to lie is that if the outside world perceives LessWrong as gifted, then anyone having an account on LessWrong will look high-status. In rebuttal:

  • I figure that lurkers would not be motivated to fudge their results because they don't have a bunch of karma on their account to show off and anybody can claim to read LessWrong, so fudging your IQ just to claim that the site you read is full of gifted people isn't likely to be motivating. I suggested that we compare the average IQs of lurkers and others. Vaniver did the math and they are very, very close..

  • I argued, among other things, that it would be falling for a Pascal's mugging to believe that investing the extra time (probably at least $5 worth of time for most of us) into fudging the various different survey questions is likely to contribute to a secret conspiracy to inflate LessWrong's average IQ.

Did the majority avoid filling out intelligence related questions, letting the gifted skew the results?

Short answer: 74% of people answered at least one intelligence related question and since most people filled out only one or two, the fact that the self-report, ACT and SAT score averages are so similar is remarkable.

I realized, while reading Vaniver's post that if only 1/3 of the survey participants filled out the IQ score, this may have been due to something which could have skewed the results toward the gifted range, for instance, if more gifted people had been given IQ tests for schooling placement (and the others didn't post their IQ score because they did not know it) or if the amount of pride one has in their IQ score has a significant influence on whether one reported it.

So I went through the data and realized that most of the people who filled out the IQ test question did not fill out all the others. That means that 804 people (74% not 33%) answered at least one intelligence related question. As we have seen, the IQ correlations for the IQ, SAT and ACT questions were very close to each other (unsurprisingly, it looks like something's up with the internet test... removing those, it's 63% of survey participants that answered an intelligence related question). It's remarkable in and of itself that each category of test scores generated an average IQ so similar to the others considering that different people filled them out. I mean if 1/3 of the population filled out all of the questions, and the other 2/3 filled out none, we could say "maybe the 1/3 did IQ correlation research and fudged these" but if most of the population fills out one or two, and the averages for each category come out close to the averages for the other categories, why is that? How would that happen if they were fudging?

It does look to me like people gave whatever test scores they had and that not all the people had test scores to give but it does not look to me like a greater proportion of the gifted people provided an intelligence related survey answer. Instead it looks like most people provided an intelligence related survey answer and the average LessWronger is gifted.

Exploration of personality test fudging:

Erratio and I explored how likely it is that people could successfully fudge their personality tests and why they might do that.

  • There are a lot of questions on the personality test that have an obvious intelligence component, so it's possible that people chose the answer they thought was most intelligent.

  • There are also intelligence related questions where it's not clear which answer is most intelligent. I listed those.

  • The intelligence questions would mostly influence the sensing/intuition dichotomy and the thinking/feeling dichotomy. This does not explain why the extraversion/introversion and perceiving/judging results were similar to Mensa's.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 February 2013 03:51:46AM *  0 points [-]

Looking at Groups of IQs:

I acknowledge that the sample set for the highest IQ groups are, of course, rather small, but that's all we've got. What's been happening with the numbers for the highest IQ groups, if indicative of what's really happening, is not encouraging. The highest two groups have decreased in numbers while the lowest two have increased. Also, it looks like the prominence of each group has shifted over time such that the highest group went from being 1/5 to 1/20 and the moderately gifted and normal groups have grown substantially.

Exceptionally Gifted Respondents (Self-Reported IQ)

(Defined as having an IQ of 160 or more)

2009: 11 (7%)

2011: 27 (3%)

2012: 22 (2%) (Decreased)

Highly Gifted Respondents (Self-Reported IQ)

(Defined as having an IQ between 145-159)

2009: 17 (11%)

2011: 88 (9%)

2012: 81 (7%) (Decreased)

Moderately Gifted Respondents (Self-Reported IQ)

(Defined as having an IQ between 132-144)

2009: 22 (14%)

2011: 125 (13%)

2012: 149 (11%) (Increased)

Normal Respondents (Self-Reported IQ)

(Defined as having an IQ between 100-131)

2009: 11 (7%)

2011: 91 (10%)

2012: 94 (9%) (Increased)


Each Group as a Percentage of Total IQ Respondents, by Year:

2009 Group IQ Distribution (As a percentage of 61 total IQ respondents)

18% Exceptionally Gifted

28% Highly Gifted

36% Moderately Gifted

18% Normal IQ

2011 Group IQ Distribution (As a percentage of 331 total IQ respondents)

8% Exceptionally Gifted

27% Highly Gifted

38% Moderately Gifted

28% Normal IQ

2012 Group IQ Distribution (As a percentage of 346 total IQ respondents)

6% Exceptionally Gifted

23% Highly Gifted

43% Moderately Gifted

27% Normal IQ

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2013 01:26:17PM 1 point [-]

About one in three are creative.

Isn't creativity a continuum? Such a sentence sounds as weird as “about one in three is tall” to me.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 06:22:27PM *  -2 points [-]

You have written me several comments today. One that was fairly constructive, one that was admittedly a "sorry could not resist" and now this. This comment makes me feel nit-picked at.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2013 01:22:38PM 0 points [-]

The reason why a few points of difference is important in this context is because the loss appears to be continuing. If we lose a few points each year, then over time, LessWrong would trend toward the mean and the culture here may die as a result.

http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/1007/

(SCNR.)

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 06:19:38PM *  -1 points [-]

Ok, FYI, if you see the words "appears to be" and "if" in my sentences, it means I am acknowledging the ambiguity. If you do not want to annoy me, please wait until I'm using words like "definitely" and "when" or direct your "could not resist" comments at someone else.

If you want to discuss how we may determine the probability of a consistent and continuing downward trend, that would be constructive and I'd be very interested. Please do not waste my time by pointing out the obvious.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2013 01:21:10PM 1 point [-]

or mistakenly interpret malice when only ignorance is present (because they're assuming the other person is as smart as they are and would therefore never make such an ignorant mistake)

I'm under the impression that a substantial part of Hanson's Homo hypocritus observations fall prey to this failure mode.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 06:15:10PM 1 point [-]

Is there a name for this failure mode? For clarity: The one where people use themselves as a map of other people and are frequently incorrect. That would be good to have.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 February 2013 03:16:18AM 3 points [-]

First off, it's in main, not discussion. That would be why it's not in the discussion list.

Secondly, do-ocracy. If you do it, I will accept your legitimacy as supreme dictator of it, and contribute what I can. I'm working on the next one (and enjoying some quality 4chan time), so you're not stepping on my toes.

Also, step on more toes. It's not like anyone can fire you.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Philosophical Landmines
Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 06:06:36PM *  2 points [-]

First off...

Oh. Fixed. Grumbles something about getting more sleep.

Secondly, do-ocracy...

You are informing me that this is the social norm at LW, or is this your personal idea of the way we should behave?

Also, step on more toes. It's not like anyone can fire you.

Oh, I do, but I usually choose my battles. Thanks though.

starts to consider the best way to structure this list

Comment author: Creutzer 13 February 2013 06:55:43AM 0 points [-]

You're quite right that it'd be very hard to demonstrate a causal effect (and without having read the study itself - don't have access -, I suspect the researchers didn't even want to try).

Actually, I have no idea how that could be done in practice. For voluntary hospitalization, it would be helpful if one couldn't be hospitalized against one's will, but I'm not aware of a time and place where that would be the case, and don't expect there to be any. So one can study that only outside the realm of "hospitalization-worthy" suicidality, by using patients who have been offered hospitalization, but declined it, as a control. My quick search turned up no indication of even that having been done.

And for forced hospitalization, it seems sort of impossible in principle to find a control group...

I also just found this, again I don't have access, and unfortunately it doesn't even have an abstract. Might be relevant, though, judging by the title.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 07:59:08AM *  0 points [-]

Check for that first link on Pubmed. I was able to access the article that way.

I'm not finding this new article anywhere. The text in a Google book search where the study had been mentioned suggests that it's probably not the type of study I'm looking for though.

I doubt this type of study exists. About the best we could do is to compare the suicide rate in an area with no legal method for hospitalizing suicidal people against their will (if that exists and the country is developed enough to keep such statistics reasonably well) with the suicide rate of a comparable area.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 February 2013 01:02:59PM *  1 point [-]

I really don't see why Epiphany is so obsessed with IQ. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is not much of a correlation between IQ and intellect beyond the first two standard deviations above the mean anyway. I have come across more than a handful of people who don't excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights. Does it matter to me that their IQ is 132 instead of 139? No. Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?

It is also possible to inflate your IQ score by taking tests repeatedly. "One meta-analysis reports that a person who scores in the 50th percentile on their first test will be to the 80th by their third", according to this page: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/High_IQ_society. If you are vain and think that doing well on an IQ test is a really important way of signalling intellect, then go ahead and keep doing exercises in Mensa practice books, though that would not make you more capable of critical thinking or logical argumentation.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 02:35:07AM *  0 points [-]

I have come across more than a handful of people who don't excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights. Does it matter to me that their IQ is 132 instead of 139? No. Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?

Another possibility here is that your perceptions of intelligence levels are really off. This isn't too unlikely as I see it:

I've heard reports that people with super high IQs have trouble making distinctions between normal and bright, or even between moderately gifted and mentally challenged. I frequently observe that the gifted people I've met experience their own intelligence level as normal, and accidentally mistake normal people for stupid ones, or mistakenly interpret malice when only ignorance is present (because they're assuming the other person is as smart as they are and would therefore never make such an ignorant mistake).

If the intelligence difference you experience every day is 70 points wide, your perceptions are probably more geared to find some way to make sense of conflicting information, not geared to be sensitive to ten point differences.

As a person who has spent a lot of time learning about intelligence differences, I'd say it's fairly hard to perceive intelligence differences smaller than 15 points anyway. The 30 point differences are fairly easy to spot. A large part of this may be because of the wide gaps in abilities that gifted people tend to have between their different areas of intelligence. So, you've got to figure that IQ 130 might be an average of four abilities that are quite different from each other, and so the person's abilities will likely overlap with some of the abilities of a person with IQ 120 or IQ 140. However, a person with an IQ of 160 will most likely have their abilities spread out across a higher up range of ability levels, so they're more likely to seem to have completely different abilities from people who have IQs around 130.

The reason why a few points of difference is important in this context is because the loss appears to be continuing. If we lose a few points each year, then over time, LessWrong would trend toward the mean and the culture here may die as a result.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 02:09:45AM *  2 points [-]

I wish we had a communal list of specific phrases that cause a problem with verbiage substitutes that appear to work. I have been struggling to avoid phrasing with landmine-speak for... I don't know how long. It's extremely difficult. I would be happy to contribute my lang-mines and replacements to a communal list if you were to create it. I'd go make the post right now, but I don't want to steal karma away from you, Nyan, so I leave you with the opportunity to choose to do it first and structure it the way you see fit.

Comment author: Creutzer 12 February 2013 09:18:30PM 1 point [-]

It's enough to make me think that someone should do a study to determine whether fatalities might increase after a visit to a mental hospital.

There is one study I'm aware of.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 February 2013 01:38:55AM *  1 point [-]

Ooh... click

It is interesting that the suicide rate for people who have just left a mental ward is over twice that of those who have just started anti-depressants, but:

A. Those who end up in the mental ward are more likely to be in that group because they actually attempted to kill themselves, or because they have a plan, whereas the anti-depressant patients and other groups of people might be experiencing suicidal ideation without an attempt or plan, or simply just depression without suicidal ideation.

B. People who plan or attempt to kill themselves are probably a lot more likely to attempt to kill themselves in the future than people who have never attempted and may not even be thinking about it.

In order to know whether admitting a suicidal person into a mental ward does more harm or more good, we'd need a study where they compare outpatient suicide rates with suicide rates in a control group. A good control group would need to consist of equally suicidal people who were not admitted into a mental ward. In order to ensure they were comparable, they'd need to track things like whether a suicide attempt was made, whether the person was on anti-depressants, etc. Also, if nobody had hospitalized the hypothetical control group, there'd be a reason for that. This reason would have to be the sort of thing that wouldn't impact the suicide rate itself. For instance, if those people are living in a place with no legal way to hospitalize a person against their will, it might produce a great control group. On the other hand, if the control group mostly consisted of people who were not hospitalized because they are alone and have no family members or friends who care enough to call 911, this would not be a great control group.

Now I wonder if there are any places where you cannot legally be admitted to a mental ward against your will... or whether there might have been a point in the past when there was a place like this.

It's hard to imagine that there would ever have been a place like this, but you never know.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 February 2013 08:20:56PM *  3 points [-]

You haven't met someone with an IQ like 160 or 180. Those people tend to be very, very different so maybe you are only comparing people with much smaller IQ differences with each other.

To the extent that IQ tests are reliable, my IQ is actually measured to be 170 (no re-takes or prior training; assessed by a psychometrician). (Just supplying information here; please don't construe this as an act of defensiveness or showing off, because that is not my intention.) I was also not only comparing people with smaller IQ differences -- I have encountered people with 10+ points of IQ difference and yet who are not significantly different in terms of their abilities to contribute meaningfully to dialogues. But, of course, my sample size is not huge.

Was your intent to insult me?

No, but I am sorry that you feel that way. I can be socially inept.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 February 2013 08:47:23PM *  0 points [-]

To the extent that IQ tests are reliable, my IQ is actually measured to be 170 (no re-takes or prior training). (Just supplying information here; please don't construe this as an act of defensiveness.)

Well that was unexpected. I'm open-minded enough to consider that this is possibly the case.

FYI: Claims like this are likely to trigger a fit of "overconfident pessimism" (referring to Luke's article) in some of the members. IQ appears to be a consistent pessimism trigger.

Was your intent to insult me? No, but I am sorry that you feel that way. I can be socially inept.

Admitting that is big of you. Thanks for that. My subjective faith in humanity indicator has been incremented a tick in the upward direction.

I see you're new, so I'll inform you: There are a lot of people like us here, meaning, people who know better than to game an IQ test and then delude themselves with the "results".

I won't say there are no status games, but that you will find a lot of people that frown on them as much as you appear to in your last comment. I don't even believe in status.

It's really hard to leave the outside world outside. I keep perceiving irrational B.S. everywhere, even though I've been participating here since August. Not going to say that there's no irrational B.S. here or that I haven't adjusted at all but that my perceptions still haven't entirely adjusted.

It appears that you may have a similar issue of perceiving B.S. in comments where no such B.S. exists.

It's best to be aware of such a tendency if you have it, as this kind of response is, for obvious reasons, kind of alienating to others. Not blaming you for it (I have the same problem). Just trying to help.

Now that we've established that there was a misunderstanding here, would you like to start over by choosing and clarifying a point you want to make, or telling me that you've reinterpreted things? That would tie up this loose end of a conversation.

Out of curiosity, do you feel significantly different from those in the IQ 130 range?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 February 2013 01:02:59PM *  1 point [-]

I really don't see why Epiphany is so obsessed with IQ. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is not much of a correlation between IQ and intellect beyond the first two standard deviations above the mean anyway. I have come across more than a handful of people who don't excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights. Does it matter to me that their IQ is 132 instead of 139? No. Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?

It is also possible to inflate your IQ score by taking tests repeatedly. "One meta-analysis reports that a person who scores in the 50th percentile on their first test will be to the 80th by their third", according to this page: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/High_IQ_society. If you are vain and think that doing well on an IQ test is a really important way of signalling intellect, then go ahead and keep doing exercises in Mensa practice books, though that would not make you more capable of critical thinking or logical argumentation.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 February 2013 08:09:49PM *  0 points [-]

I really don't see why Epiphany is so obsessed with IQ. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is not much of a correlation between IQ and intellect beyond the first two standard deviations above the mean anyway.

Try reading this response to Slade's suicidal post and you will begin to understand why giftedness is relevant, in a general sense. Gifted people, especially highly gifted people, are very different from most. If you haven't seen that for yourself, then perhaps:

A. You haven't met someone with an IQ like 160 or 180. Those people tend to be very, very different so maybe you are only comparing people with much smaller IQ differences with each other.

B. The people you've met with super high IQs behave in a way that blends in when they're with you and minimize social contact so that you don't notice the differences. The ones that I know tend to do that. They don't just barge into a room and solve unsolvable science problems for all to see. They tend to be quiet, or away hiding in their caves.

C. You never asked the IQs of the smartest people you know and therefore haven't seen the difference.

D. You feel strongly that we should express egalitarianism by treating everyone as if they are all intellectually exactly the same. There's a movement of people who want to believe everyone is gifted, that giftedness does not exist, that it goes away, or that gifted people have some horrible flaw that "balances" them out, that they should be stifled in schooling environments in order to destroy their giftedness so that they're intellectually equal to everybody else, and all kinds of other things. Many people hate inequality and cannot deal with the scientifically proven fact that intellectual inequalities do exist. Wanting to solve inequalities is great, but it's important that we don't deny that intellectual inequalities exist, and it's absolutely, undeniably wrong to stifle a person, especially a child, in the name of "equality". I care a lot about this cause. I hope you read this PDF by developmental psychologist Linda Silverman (I want everyone to read it):

Myths about the Gifted

I have come across more than a handful of people who don't excel in traditional IQ tests, but who are nevertheless very capable of presenting coherent, well-argued insights.

One in six gifted people has a learning disorder. About one in three are creative. Some of them have mental disorders or physical conditions. All three of these can reduce one's IQ score and should be compensated for on an IQ test. Unfortunately, a lot of the IQ tests that are administered (by Mensa for instance) do not include any sort of evaluation for multiple exceptionalities (jargon for when you've got multiple differences that affect learning).

Who cares about the average IQ among members of the LW community as long as we continue demonstrating the ability to engage in thoughtful discussions and generate valuable conclusions?

You missed my point. My point was: "LessWrong may be headed toward cultural collapse so we need some way to determine whether this is a real threat. Do we have numbers? Yes we do. We have IQ numbers." The IQ blurb was a data point for an ongoing discussion on the controversial yet critical topic of whether LessWrong's subculture is dying. My point was not "Oh no, we cannot lose IQ points!"

Let me ask you this: If you were attempting to determine whether LessWrong is headed for cultural collapse, and you knew that the average IQ at LessWrong was decreasing, and you knew that you needed to supply the group with all related data, would you justify omitting that? You would have to include it if you want to be thorough, as it was related. That point is at the top because it's new - most of the other points have been presented before. I couldn't present the IQ data until it had been thoroughly analyzed.

I'm a psychology enthusiast with a special interest in developmental psychology, specifically in gifted adults. When I go to the trouble of thoroughly analyzing some data and sharing information that I gathered while pursuing a main interest of mine, I very much prefer respectful comments in return such as "I don't see the relevance of IQ in this context, would you mind explaining?" as opposed to being called "obsessed". I prefer it even more if the person double checks their own perceptions to clear up any confusion on their own before responding to me.

I have a passion for learning which is not pathological. The term "obsessed" is inappropriate and offensive. Try this: Gwern, one of LessWrong's most prominent and most appreciated members, also has a passion for learning. Check out his website. If you do not appreciate the thoroughness with which he pursues truth - a major element of LessWrong culture - then perhaps it's time to consider whether this is a compatible hang out spot.

If you are vain and think that doing well on an IQ test is a really important way of signalling intellect, then go ahead and keep doing exercises in Mensa practice books, though that would not make you more capable of critical thinking or logical argumentation.

Was your intent to insult me?

Comment author: shminux 11 February 2013 07:54:30PM 2 points [-]

That's the second time I've heard that piece of advice.

Oops, sorry. I should have realized. My thought process was "If I were Luke, what kind of volunteer help with the site would I prefer?" And the answer is invariably "minimum hassle".

Comment author: Epiphany 12 February 2013 04:31:19AM 0 points [-]

Oops, sorry. I should have realized.

The other person told me elsewhere. There's no way you would have known about it. The intended meaning of "That's the second time..." was "When more than one person tells me something, that makes it seem more likely to be useful."

My thought process was "If I were Luke, what kind of volunteer help with the site would I prefer?" And the answer is invariably "minimum hassle".

Heh. You're probably right.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 11 February 2013 08:14:22AM *  1 point [-]

dissected edit: looks like I was wrong

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 10:49:15AM *  0 points [-]

Thank you. Okay, so he's saying here that people who kill themselves are dissected... which implies that people who die of some other cause are not usually dissected?

If people who kill themselves are dissected more frequently than others, then what is the reason for that? My guess is that they suspect foul play more often, but for all I know it has to do with looking for specific brain diseases that cause depression or it's some vestigial behavior left over from the days when they used leeches.

Comment author: shminux 11 February 2013 08:03:38AM *  1 point [-]

If you really want to volunteer, install and configure the LW code from github, make the changes, test them and present a working fork to EY to poke at and give you feedback. If he likes the result, he'll probably ask Trike to review and integrate your changes. Or something along these lines.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 10:46:41AM *  0 points [-]

That's the second time I've heard that piece of advice.

If I desire to make a change that is most likely wanted, not too large a time investment (as I am risking that the change is ignored or rejected), and also the sort of change that can be made by editing the open source (as opposed to, say, an SEO change specific to the text in an article or something), I will consider doing just that.

Comment author: Slade 10 February 2013 03:44:30AM *  14 points [-]

So... this is a really personal issue and I'm not sure I have any business bringing it up here, but I'm going to anyway:

I've been on and off suicidal for the past 8 or so years (I'm 18, btw), but I've been especially depressed for the last couple of months. My exact emotions are pretty complicated and the motivations behind my death wish differ from moment to moment. 2 days ago I decided to commit to killing myself and I've spent the time between then and now readying myself for suicide. In the past 10 minutes I've had a change of heart brought on by guilt.

Help.

I imagine the wise thing to do would be to seek professional assistance, but I don't want to for various reasons. I've told several friends that I want to die, but they don't really believe me because of the casual way I bring it up and my disposition towards seeking attention. There was a case of suicide by someone in this community awhile ago and I believe some of the commenters on that thread offered to talk to anyone who was feeling self destructive, but that was some time ago, so I'd like to inquire as to whether the offer still stands.

I think I'm likely to have more in common with the average Lesswronger than with any volunteer I could talk to, which is why I'm leaving this post on this site. My depression all but disappeared for over 2 years after finding this place, so naturally it's the first place I turn to. I'm not exactly sure if I have anything to say about my problems or if talking will even help, but I need to do something to fend off the desire to kill myself, and this is my way of committing. I'd appreciate anything anyone here has to offer in the way of advice.

Again, I'm truly sorry if this issue is inappropriate here and I swear I'm not trolling. I normally use a different account here, but I didn't want to associate anything rationality-based I have to say in the future with this problem, so I re-registered under this name.

Thank you.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 09:49:49AM *  3 points [-]

Hi. I'm a psychology enthusiast (not a licensed psychologist) and I have a few bits of information that I think might be useful to you. I've read all of the replies to this, and your replies to those, to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious about your situation. Additionally, I defended your decision to post here. Three bits of information that may help you:

1.) If you haven't found psychologists useful, this might be an explanation

If you haven't found psychologists helpful, it might be because you are gifted. Here's my reasoning for why I think you might be gifted, why this matters to your psychological health, and some ideas for getting services and doing further reading:

  • A large proportion of people at LessWrong are probably gifted. If you feel a sense of understanding here, that may be a sign that you are gifted, too.
  • About 50% of the (American) gifted population doesn't know they are gifted.
  • Gifted people can need a psychologist who has experience with gifted clients. Taking a gifted mind to a psychologist who is trained to work with normal minds can be like taking a space ship to a car mechanic. It can be frustrating or unhelpful.
  • About 25% of gifted people are misdiagnosed by psychologists. If you were diagnosed with any mental or learning disorders, do consult a book called Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults (I got the 25% figure from that book as well.). You are obviously upset, but there's a good chance that there's far less wrong than they think there is.
  • If you're depressed and gifted, you aught to know about something called "existential depression". The misdiagnosis book above does have a blurb on that in the depression section. I am not sure what to recommend for more extensive reading on existential depression, as it's not an officially recognized form of depression. (There isn't nearly enough research on gifted adults.) However, now that you have the term "existential depression" this may enable you to find services or books that are more helpful.

    Consider phone counseling, especially if you're seeking a psychologist who has experience with gifted people. Psychologists who have experience with gifted people are not very common. You may or may not find one in your area. If you increase the range you're looking in to the size of your country, you're likely to have much better luck.

2.) My method for finding useful health professionals:

When I was sick with a medical condition, I discovered that a lot of doctors did not have any idea what to do with me. They'd spend lots of money on tests and come up with nothing, or they'd treat symptoms without getting at the root cause. The only reason I got better was because I found someone who had the same problems that I was having, who had gotten better and she referred me to a doctor that:

A.) Understood my specific problem (There are wayyyyy too many problems out there for any doctor to produce quality results in diagnosing or solving them all. Better to locate someone more specialized.)

B.) Is focused on getting to the root cause. A lot of doctors who are focused on actually finding the cause call themselves "naturopathic" (the Wikipedia entry on naturopathy has this frou-frou introduction about "energy" which I find quite annoying because the most important connection between the different definitions of naturopathy I've seen on professional organization's websites is the focus on getting to the root cause).

I recommend a similar approach when seeking a psychologist. Find someone with similar problems who got better and ask for their doctor (may not be as useful for psychological problems if, as my memory is regurgitating right now, studies show that 1/3 of psychology patients get better without treatment). Barring that, find someone who has tons of experience with your specific problem(s) as opposed to somebody who hasn't specialized very much. Prioritize professionals that are focused on getting to root causes. Also, do your own research (or ask someone with research skills to assist, if you're not feeling up to it.). Some psychologists don't use the most effective methods according to scientific evidence. If you know which methods are the most well-supported, you can find the professionals with the most experience using those.

There are lots of pitfalls when seeking good health professionals. The approach I just described will help you sidestep many of the common ones.

3.) It might be a doctor you need, not a psychologist.

Also, a lot of psychological symptoms are caused by medical problems - and I'm not talking about the vague and ominous "chemical imbalance" (often just used as a semantic stop sign). For instance, if you look at the correlation between irritable bowel syndrome, depression and anxiety, the overlap is incredible. As it turns out, these can be related in more than one way. Getting at the root medical cause of some diseases can stop the mental symptom of depression.

Invitation

If you would like to elaborate on your medical, emotional or life problems, you are invited to do so either here or in PM. I will let you know if I have information that is relevant to them. If you respond publicly there is, of course, a better chance that other people will have additional useful things to say.

Comment author: gwern 10 February 2013 05:03:21PM 2 points [-]

so removing one is a big cost

I wasn't suggesting banning users contemplating suicide. (Do any sites do that? Is it a good idea?)

Lots of reports suggests that suicide hotlines aren't actually much better than random like-minded people, though it's possible that callers underestimate how helpful they were. And contacting locals is among the most likely strategies to backfire.

Are these claims research-based?

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 09:00:56AM *  5 points [-]

I want research, too, but in lieu of that, I second "lots of reports". Also, consider this reality:

Imagine you tell someone that you're thinking about killing yourself. Say this person decided to call 911, and you end up admitted into the mental ward of a hospital.

Unless you have very good insurance (or something has changed), they're likely to let you out in a week. I've heard of this happening to countless people. It is simply too expensive to keep them in there very long.

So, a week later, you've:

  • Missed a week worth of pay (from work).
  • Racked up tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills (most likely your insurance won't pay for it all.)
  • Missed a week of work. Some workplaces will find a reason to fire you after that. (Not all managers care that this is illegal.)
  • You had to live in a place full of crazy people every day for a week.
  • You had to sleep in a place full of crazy people, perhaps sharing a room with one, every night, for a week.
  • You've been treated like a crazy person for a week. (Barely allowed any possessions, unable to go anywhere, living apart from friends and family, having your life scheduled by the staff, etc.)
  • Your new prescription may not even kick in for several weeks!

Is your situation and mood:

A. Better

B. Worse

The last suicidal person I called 911 for was not provided any services, but was charged hundreds of dollars. Apparently, they stopped by, asked him a pile of questions, he managed to avoid being taken to the mental ward, and then they charged him out the ears for the visit.

He was quite upset with me. Quite. Moral of that story: Don't IM about suicidal thoughts while the internet connection is flaking out and then say something like "I can't go on" and then also fail to answer the now very concerned friend's phone call right after.

It's enough to make me think that someone should do a study to determine whether fatalities might increase after a visit to a mental hospital.

And as for the suicide hotlines - a lot of the operators are volunteers. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of operators who are volunteers is like 90%+. I'm sure you have to be pretty special to be a suicide hotline volunteer (nerves of steel + screening) but I doubt that most of the operators are psychologists. This could probably be verified if you were willing to look up the largest suicide hotlines and see how they source their operators. For now, a quick example of operator sourcing:

Crisis Clinic Volunteering Page:

"Crisis Line phone workers come from all walks of life and educational backgrounds." (All educational backgrounds means lots of people who are not licensed psychologists).

http://crisisclinic.org/get-involved/volunteer/#24hour

Comment author: MixedNuts 10 February 2013 04:51:18PM 6 points [-]

OTOH, suicidal people often have very few options, so removing one is a big cost. Lots of reports suggests that suicide hotlines aren't actually much better than random like-minded people, though it's possible that callers underestimate how helpful they were. And contacting locals is among the most likely strategies to backfire.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 09:00:04AM *  1 point [-]

Ooh. Ooh. I totally want these studies. If there is research. Is there? eager to get that research

Comment author: gwern 10 February 2013 03:59:00PM *  10 points [-]

It is ok and not at all inappropriate to seek help here.

I think it is. We are not suicide experts, we know nothing about how to help, and our attempts to help can easily backfire. And this is assuming that we are not being trolled, attacked, or drama queened (anyone can say that they have contributions under another account). Let us recall that pdf23ds asked for LW help with his sleep problems which did nothing, and LWers attempting to follow up on his posted suicide note apparently did not solve the problem.

The big sites like Wikipedia generally have a policy of:

  1. not encouraging amateurs to engage in therapy-over-the-internet and other-optimization
  2. having the admins escalate to looking up IP addresses and contacting locals
  3. providing the concerned user with a suicide hotline number

I don't see any reason that this should not be implemented on LW as well.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 08:22:08AM *  2 points [-]

These are good points, Gwern, but the psychology industry and suicide hotlines fail a lot more often than you'd think (support for this point is included). If Slade has not tried them, they may still be useful for Slade. It is also possible that Slade has tried a few different psychologists, a few different prescriptions, and a few different hotlines without relief. Here are a few problems that one may run into when attempting to utilize the standard forms of help:

Note to Slade: You may not want to read this. This is for people who don't have a clue why anybody would be asking here. It consists of a list of problems. It's useful for the purpose it's serving, but not particularly uplifting for a person in your situation. I'm writing you a separate response.

  1. Psychologists failing to practice science. I'm sure you, Gwern, are aware how common this is but I'll include a link for others.
  2. Prescription drugs to treat moods not working. (See "A link for others".)
  3. Prescription drugs to treat moods causing intolerable side effects. (The FDA doesn't approve drugs based on them being safe. It approves them based on whether the problem caused by the drugs is better or worse than the original affliction. I will use tardive dyskinesia, a neurological disorder resulting in involuntary body movements like repeatedly sticking one's tongue out, as my example. Anti-psychotics can cause it.)
  4. If Slade is gifted (not unlikely according to these numbers and Slade may have a 50% chance of not knowing ("about half of our country's (America) gifted students are never identified")) then they may find themselves being misdianosed with disorders they don't have (happens to 25% of the gifted population (Citation: Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults) let alone the portion of the gifted population which actually shows up in a psychologist's office).
  5. If Slade is gifted, they might find that getting help from a psychologist who does not specialize in gifted clients is useless, frustrating or harmful. This can feel like taking a space ship to a car mechanic. Gifted people may need psychologists who have experience with gifted clients.
  6. Suicide hotlines are non-profit organizations. As such they can end up understaffed. The following scenario does happen: Can you imagine how it would feel to call a suicide hotline and be told "Hold on a minute, I'm getting another call." What if it kept happening over and over again throughout the call? If you look past the obvious annoyance that this is likely cause during your important conversation about this life or death matter, you'll also see that you may begin to wonder how many other people are killing themselves while you receive the help. Total survivor's guilt.

It is quite possible that Slade has attempted to get help using the stereotypical options and has run into one or all of these issues.

I don't blame Slade for asking here. In the event that Slade's main problem is that the psychologists don't seem to get it - that Slade is gifted and they're targeting their help to non-gifted clients, or that Slade is receiving unscientific advice from psychologists - one of the places where Slade would have a decent probability of finding these things out is by asking here.

If Slade has been failed by the ordinary methods, would you agree that the situation is important enough to "throw spaghetti at the wall" by posting on the internet asking for help, and that LessWrong would have a significantly better chance of producing a useful response than most websites?

Personally, I think the best approach when dealing with a problem this big is to talk to as many different people as possible about it - including both professionals and laymen that are either knowledgeable about the subject or generally smart. Nobody is infallible, and the more information you have, the better.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 08:02:29AM 0 points [-]

What does "sectioned" mean?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 11 February 2013 07:46:19AM 0 points [-]

It's a very vague recollection, I just remember him complaining about the lack of Python volunteers.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 07:57:21AM 0 points [-]

I wonder if they're choosy about what language the person normally uses. The code I work with at my job is not written in Python, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be willing to put in the extra effort to work with new syntax and get into Python reference documentation.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 11 February 2013 01:20:55AM 0 points [-]

IIRC, a while after posting this years ago, EY complained that no one responded to it.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 February 2013 07:36:38AM *  0 points [-]

I'm seeing one "yes" and one "maybe" response on the volunteers wanted thread you referenced. Any idea why he said "no one" responded?

Also, that was posted about four years ago. The site has grown massively since then. There were (looks at my spreadsheet from Trike Apps full of registration dates) 373 members on 3-11-09. They hadn't even added Overcoming Bias yet. (That happened on 5-28-09). If the number of volunteers has increased proportionately to the number of members, then one or two volunteers four years ago could be a team today, as there are over one hundred times as many registered users now (13,726 as of 8-24-2012).

If they asked again, they might get dozens of volunteers.

It looks to me like all they need is a strategy to predict which ones are worth the overhead, and someone to manage them. Then, if they posted a "volunteers wanted" thread again, they might succeed.

Comment author: maia 07 February 2013 04:29:28AM 15 points [-]

LessWrong has a lot of threads that go like:

Someone: "Gee, it would sure be nice if we had this cool new feature on LessWrong!" <gets upvoted and comments agreeing />

EY/similar person: "Gee, it sure would. Too bad we don't have any development resources."

How would one go about volunteering to do this sort of thing?

I assume that if volunteer work is accepted, it would require testing to prove that it is a quality and non-malicious change before they actually run it on the servers.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 February 2013 11:16:49PM *  0 points [-]

(Nevermind. I see now that Luke has responded, making this irrelevant.)

Comment author: maia 07 February 2013 04:29:28AM 15 points [-]

LessWrong has a lot of threads that go like:

Someone: "Gee, it would sure be nice if we had this cool new feature on LessWrong!" <gets upvoted and comments agreeing />

EY/similar person: "Gee, it sure would. Too bad we don't have any development resources."

How would one go about volunteering to do this sort of thing?

I assume that if volunteer work is accepted, it would require testing to prove that it is a quality and non-malicious change before they actually run it on the servers.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 February 2013 05:46:33AM *  8 points [-]

I attempted to volunteer (I'm a web developer) but that didn't go anywhere. First, I wanted to help LW grow (in my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread). Then I realized that LW was at serious risk for eternal September and growing it would risk hastening progress toward cultural collapse. So, I did several more threads on that to see if anyone had good arguments about us not being at risk, or good suggestions on how to stop it. I compiled a list of suggestions and held a vote asking people whether they think there is a significant risk and which solution, if any, they wanted. The result was that the majority of respondents think there is a significant risk, and this was presented to Luke, but he said he doesn't want to do anything at this time.

That was, to put it mildly, a bit of a buzz kill in regards to my volunteering energy level.

My advice to you is to make sure of the following things:

  1. That you and Luke (yes, Luke seems to be the contact person) both agree on a project that is to be done. Luke liked the idea of growing LW, but he didn't like the idea of preventing cultural collapse. I can't, in good conscience, grow LW if there is a significant risk of it contributing to cultural collapse, and the group thinks that there is a significant risk. So, we unfortunately appear to be at a stalemate.

  2. That Luke is cool with you specifically making changes. (Luke will need to go to some trouble to verify that you're a good developer. This will take time, and he may or may not be willing to invest it.)

There are multiple people who are interested in doing volunteer work. Myself, you, and at least one other have expressed interest, and I could have swore there were more. Considering that, and the fact that this website is basically full of programmers up to the eyebrows, and the fact that they could ask for volunteers at any time, I really think lack of development resources is not an obstacle. If you attempt to explore and/or tackle the following obstacles you may get somewhere:

Obstacle 1: Luke and Eliezer may be unaware of how many potential developer volunteers they have.

Solution 1: Survey the group asking how many people would be willing to volunteer their web development skills, and which specific skills they can offer. Ask them to describe what type of time commitment they're willing to provide in the comments. (I don't think there's an easy way to organize a bunch of responses that will range from "an hour a week" to "I'll commit, but on a per project basis, depending on the project." I know that one of the research volunteers does the former, and that there is a potential volunteer web development manager who is interested in the latter arrangement.)

Obstacle 2: Managing volunteers has a cost - overhead. Luke and EY are busy, and they're "pivoting away from" community building (see the recent fundraiser post). Although Luke and EY still want to lead the LessWrong community, they must be very short on time. Luke and EY probably do not realistically have the time to manage web development volunteers.

Solution 2: When surveying the group to get an idea of the development resources potential, be sure to ask whether the respondents have experience managing web developers and would be willing to provide this service. Obviously Luke will have to decide whether to trust the volunteer manager, but making a decision about that one person is easier than managing a whole bunch of them, and double-checking the projects when they're finished is a heck of a lot faster than doing all the hand-holding that may otherwise be anticipated without such a manager in place.

If enough people volunteer, this will wake everybody (including them) up to the developer resources that they already have. If their true rejection has not been uncovered, broaching the subject of having a volunteer manager might be the hammer that hits that nail on the head.

Luke explains here

Comment author: Epiphany 04 February 2013 06:24:11AM 2 points [-]

If I hear about "fun flying games" being implemented in workplaces, I will know why.

In response to [Meta] Server Slow
Comment author: Epiphany 04 February 2013 05:28:22AM 3 points [-]

Me, too.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 December 2012 10:57:19PM 0 points [-]

Well, I apologize for any offense. Your response (i.e. suspecting a scam) was, even if in jest, both not uncommon and not what I expected. There is just no possibility this is any kind of scam, and it simply didn't occur to me that anyone would think otherwise.

In response to comment by [deleted] on A cure for akrasia
Comment author: Epiphany 30 December 2012 01:32:21AM *  0 points [-]

I apologize

This does make me feel better. Thanks.

There is just no possibility

I've had countless experiences where high-level professionals like doctors, the president of a company, leading businesses and even a college have done destructively incompetent things and/or outright intentionally attempted to take advantage of me and often for less money than $1,000. At this point, I would not allow the president of the United States to borrow $1,000 without a credit score and a contract.

Be careful. Seriously.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 December 2012 09:22:01PM 0 points [-]

You get that this is a philosophy article that appeared in a journal right? Its not an actual ad. The point is to present a paradox.

In response to comment by [deleted] on A cure for akrasia
Comment author: Epiphany 29 December 2012 09:46:49PM *  2 points [-]

A. It was posted on the internet (I assume you pasted it in as opposed to typing it off of paper). The internet poses various interesting security risks such as the possibility for spammers / hackers / con artists to post things where they shouldn't be.

B. That it appeared in a journal is no reason to trust a person you don't know with $1,000. Consider this: the bank doesn't lend money based on whether you post in a journal, they lend money based on your credit score. Why trust anybody with $1,000 without at least knowing their credit score?

All I wanted to do was make a funny comment. Responses that nit pick a simple joke and simultaneously make me feel like the other person thinks I am clueless make me not want to participate here. I am not going to continue this conversation further.

Comment author: Desrtopa 29 December 2012 03:28:03PM 0 points [-]

It took me a while to get it, but Esar is right. The point of the "solution" isn't that it's useful. You behave in the same way you did before, only now it's not akrasia anymore because you get a thousand dollars back so you're not acting against your own interests. It doesn't modify your behavior, it just redefines it.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 December 2012 07:54:58PM 0 points [-]

I "got it". I am not missing the point. I'm just saying "If you send $1000 to somebody over the internet, you're not likely to get it back later." Therefore, that doing this would curb impulse buying by making you broke seems more likely to me.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 December 2012 02:35:09AM -1 points [-]

Well, it would work for anything, if there's enough money (it doesn't matter if the money comes from you): the point is that an akratic action is an action where you evaluate a pair of options (say) such that the utility of A is higher than the utility of B, but nevertheless you do B.

Sorensen's solution is to refund your money if ever you choose B. But knowing that you'll be refunded, B now has a higher utility, so the action isn't akratic. It's like a paradox.

In response to comment by [deleted] on A cure for akrasia
Comment author: Epiphany 29 December 2012 04:58:22AM 0 points [-]

Assuming it makes sense to trust such an ad. I wouldn't. I'd be more likely to trust such an ad for preventing impulse buying via monetary depletion.

In response to A cure for akrasia
Comment author: Epiphany 29 December 2012 02:10:19AM *  1 point [-]

Just send $1000 to the address below and you will never again succumb to temptation.

If he's talking about impulse buying, this might actually work. You can't spend money if you don't have any left.

Before you respond: I do "get it" (the idea is to reward you for bad behaviors thereby changing your perspective on your bad behaviors) and I know this was posted in a journal (Some may trust people that they don't know posting in online journals with lots of money, but it's not impossible for spammers / hackers / con artists to post things in online journals that shouldn't be there, and also, you really should think twice before lending a person $1,000 even if they do legitimately post in a journal. For instance: The bank would check their credit score, not whether they publish articles in a journal. That's common sense.)

Additional responses that suggest the author may think that I am clueless or picks apart my simple joke will be ignored. Laugh or downvote as desired and move on!

Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 December 2012 01:45:39AM 1 point [-]

I added a disclaimer to my comment. I had to write my own since neither of yours correctly describes my current beliefs. I'll also try to remember to be a bit more careful about my FAI-related comments in the future, and keep in mind that not all the readers will be familiar with my other writings.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 December 2012 02:04:18AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for listening to me. I feel better about this now.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 28 December 2012 11:35:19AM *  1 point [-]

I do not often feel that, but sometimes I do. It might be due to my young age (early 20s, although I suspect that's the lesswrong median) or because I happen to have an unusually happy disposition. And though both are just an accident of biology, I take pride in having a happy disposition, much as I take pride in being intelligent.

But I recently had what I believe was an adverse reaction to a medication which triggered a period of depression for a couple months. I'm still in the recovery phase from that, but I'm getting much better.

During that period, I found it much more difficult to put up with the company of ordinary people ... the only thing that would cheer me up was intellectual conversation with an intellectual equal. I didn't realize what immense reserves of emotional energy a happy disposition gives you until I was robbed of it.

Depleted of emotional energy, it was much harder to maintain a conversation with ordinary people, and I would burn out and retreat to my room after a while. Before my period of depression, when my emotional reserves were virtually unlimited, I actually enjoyed talking to almost everyone...at worst, I'd get bored and move on to talk to someone else.

What you are describing sounds a lot like the "need for cognition" which I was talking about earlier, but it goes a step deeper because you also want to be understood by others.

It also sounds like your emotional reserves are generally at the low end of the spectrum, which makes it hard for you to find enjoyment among dull company - although I may be extrapolating too much from my own case.

For me, what drove the "burnout" for me was an immense feeling of cynicism. I'd talk to people, and every word would show me the weakness, laziness, and foolishness that makes up the nature of most ordinary people. And because I was depressed at the time, I saw a lot of that weakness in myself as well, which troubled me.

The happy, high emotional reserve me cared about understanding how other people worked, and doing my best to make their lives better. Even if they had dull intellects, I could make them happy through my actions and I could help them move forward, and that would make me happy as well. When my friends had problems, I put my intelligence to use in understanding and solving those problems.

The depressed, anxious, low emotional reserve me needed someone to understand me, to make my life better. But a complicated person often has complicated problems, and no one was really able to help me. A well meaning gesture of caring goes a long way and means a lot to me, but it can only go so far in helping me. I have to spend hours explaining "Today I am sad because person A did X, which reveals Y about the person's nature, and I feel like everyone I know has Y as part of their nature" or "today I feel lonely because I care passionately about Z and no one else including you even knows what Z is" in order to get coherent help from anyone, and the response is usually something I've thought of before. Fighting hard to be understood didn't necessarily improve my mood.

By the way, I've checked the data. Contrary to stereotype, there is no correlation between IQ and depression, even at the very high end. Sad people with low IQ, sad people with high IQ ... they may attribute the sadness to different sources (and they may or may not be attributing correctly), but at the end of the day the overall rate of depression is the same.

So...to answer your question, yeah, I feel different. Sometimes it is lonely. I wish more people were like me, that would make life much more interesting. I'm glad I am intelligent in the absolute sense, but in the relative sense I wish that everyone around me was smarter than me.

At the same time, when I am in a healthy frame of mind, I do not feel burdened by having to associate with dull people. It's only when I am in an unhealthy frame of mind to begin with that this is an issue. Healthy me has a need for cognition which is fulfilled by like-minded people, but healthy me does not have a need to be understood by others. We all go through life fundamentally alone, that's a lesson I learned early on - and not just those of us who are intellectually gifted. Everyone.

And in truth, though my intelligent friend understands my intellectual thought process, he doesn't always understand my emotions ... it takes more than just IQ to understand that. You've also got to learn to read faces too. As you said, I've given up on the prospect of someone understanding me completely... there are some people who understand my intellect, there are some people who understand my emotions, but it's too much to expect one person to fulfill all those requirements at once. This isn't a cause for unhappiness, by the way - it's just how reality is. One might as well be sad about the fact that their is no heaven, as long as one is going to be sad about the imaginary visions that reality doesn't live up to. I'd rather appreciate what people are, rather than hanker after the gaudy vision of what I imagine they could be.

And when I'm under-stimulated...I do my science. I read articles, write articles. I think every smart person needs a hobby or job or some other creative outlet that they are passionate about in order to be happy. That way you don't have to depend on another person - plus, you often meet interesting people this way.

Sorry if this is nonsensical...it's late.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 December 2012 10:05:40PM *  -1 points [-]

Thanks for making the effort to try and understand. You've thrown one more variable into the equation - emotional energy. I don't know if you've considered how these other variables would affect things, but:

Other Variables Involved in Gifted Alienation

Ability to communicate is something that will increase or decrease frustration / alienation / misunderstanding, depending on whether it's low or high. Unfortunately, not all gifted people get the gift of communication, and gifts come in different sizes so they may not get enough of a gift in communication to compensate for the difficulty of communicating ideas and feelings that are as different as theirs.

Age of the person matters a lot. Supposedly, the speed at which you learn doesn't change, but if you're learning at say, twice the average speed, you'll be much further ahead of your age peers at 30 than at 20, and so on. The gap seems to have grown as I have aged (I'm in the ballpark of 30 myself). It has become harder and harder to find stimulating intelligent conversation. Make sure to value your sources of intelligent conversation, you may need them more later on.

Amount of intelligence. If your IQ is 130, you'll notice a difference between yourself and others but if it is over 160, you may feel like a complete alien. One interesting characteristic of the people I've met who have IQs in the profoundly gifted range is that they feel so very different that it's like being stranded on a planet full of aliens. It can be very stressful for them. I don't know what your IQ is, but it sounds to me like you can understand a little bit what this sort of problem would be like for them. You keep saying "need for cognition" but firstly, that's a trait that's more common to gifted people (it fuels the gift!) and not as common to non-gifted people. Secondly, have you ever been asked a lot of "why" questions by a little child and gotten burned out on answering them? Or can you imagine going a year without having a conversation that wasn't one-sided? These are the experiences that some of the very gifted people might have with "need for cognition". It's better if the person wants to know what you have to say, and compensates a little for the difficulty of communication, but it's not a substitute for having a conversation with an intellectual equal.

Also, understanding people's feelings is a lot more complicated than reading faces. If I make a sad face, why did I make a sad face? Is it because someone said something that hurt my ego, and I need a compliment, or is it that the person was trying to hurt my ego, which kicked me in a deeper place - the part of me that questions why I bother to make a difference when the world can be so nasty. I get this kind of misunderstanding a lot. They read my face right, if I show emotion at all (I frequently don't) but they interpret the wrong reasoning into it. People can be particularly stubborn in their interpretations. I can tell them "It's not my ego" and they will insist that it and ignore the real problem. I'm different enough that my explanations sometimes seem unlikely to people, and they disagree with me about my own feelings. I find it intolerable.

If you imagine for a moment that there's a wild variety of people here, all with different amounts of emotional energy, communication ability, different mental age gaps and different IQ gaps. Some of those people will be lucky, like yourself, and have a gap that's not too difficult to overcome considering the communication and emotional resources they have. Others will either have gaps that are much larger than yours, or won't have the same resources to compensate, or both.

Are gifted people more frequently depressed?

As far as whether gifted people are more frequently depressed, this really depends on the source that you read. A lot of things about gifted adults are not well-established. There's not nearly enough research on them, and a lot of published research findings are false. One source of confusion is that there are a lot of prejudiced myths about gifted adults (before Terman did his research, apparently people thought that gifted people were ugly, unhealthy and all kinds of things) so there are studies that refute these myths and do not tell the whole story, and some of the sources disagree on important things. I've read a lot of stuff about gifted adults (I'm a psychology enthusiast and that's my main psychology interest), and here's my take:

For people with IQs under 145, I'd bet that they do have pretty normal rates of depression. For people with IQs over 145, from what I've read, I'd bet that they have elevated rates of existential depression. Whether or not existential depression was lumped in with depression, or did not qualify as depression might be something that influenced the studies you read. For a citation, I will select "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults". Here is an excerpt:

"There is relatively little inherent in being a gifted child or adult that makes them more prone to depression than others. Most often, it is a poor fit between the gifted person and the environment that creates the problems. A lack of understanding and support from teachers, peers, or family can precipitate very real problems of various kinds, including depression. Existential depression is an exception; it seems to emerge in most environments, though some circumstances prompt it more than others. Existential depression is particularly likely among the highly gifted, even though it is not a category of depression that is recognized in the DSM-IV-TR." (Page 133)

Can anything (like intellectual activities) compensate for unmet social needs?

No. If you want a source, I will refer to Mazlow. His hierarchy of needs clearly includes various social needs. Further, his take is that you need to have social needs met before you can actualize your potential. Trying to channel your potential into intellectual activities without having your social needs met is likely to be frustrating. A lot of people (possibly everyone who is not a sociopath?) experience purpose in relation to other humans. This post by Academian explains that experience. The gist of it is: When asking "What is the purpose of life" this question implies a "who" so you need to have agents to have purposes to in order to have a sense of purpose. I experience this need, myself. I need someone to be close to, to have a purpose to. Random strangers and donations are not enough. I am a social organism. I need to bond emotionally with others, to need others, and to be needed by them.

Someone I know with a very high IQ said one key reason he hasn't made anything of his potential is that he has to spend so much time trying to get his social needs met. This is a lot of work - it can be like rebuilding your social life after a move, except imagine that the social life you build never sticks. You'll be constantly rebuilding your social life over and over again. Some people in that range are lucky and meet someone that fulfills their social needs. Others rarely ever find an intellectual equal, let alone one who is compatible with them (even friendship requires a certain amount of compatibility - though this may not be very obvious to people who aren't really different). Some of them try marrying someone that's not an intellectual equal, but the people I know who have tried this struggle with severe depression due to it.

There unfortunately appears to be no substitute for having your social needs met. Therefore, I regard it as important for people who are significantly different (any meaning of different, including different due to having a high IQ) to be able to participate in a haven where they can interact with like minded others without being made to put up with alienation.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 24 December 2012 11:44:42PM *  2 points [-]

Perhaps the reason you approach it this way is because you don't think it's possible for humans to determine whether virtualizing everyone is ethical?

I think it may not be possible for humans to determine this, in the time available before someone builds a UFAI or some other existential risk occurs. Still, I have been trying to determine this, for example just recently in Beware Selective Nihilism. Did you see that post?

Were you serious about having Eliezer censor my comment? If so, now that you have a better understanding of my ideas and relationship with SIAI, would you perhaps settle for me editing that comment with some additional clarifications?

Comment author: Epiphany 28 December 2012 09:53:04PM *  -2 points [-]

Sorry for not responding sooner. The tab explosion triggered by the links in your article and related items was pretty big. I was trying to figure out how to deal with the large amount of information that was provided.

If you want to consider my take on it uniformed, fine. I haven't read all of the relevant information in the tab explosion (this would take a long time). Here is my take and my opinion on the situation:

If a person is copied, the physical original will not experience what the copy experiences. Therefore, if you remove the physical original, the physical original's experiences will end. This isn't perfectly comparable to death seeing as how the person's experiences, personality, knowledge, and interaction with the world will continue. However, the physical original's experiences will end. That, for many, would be an unacceptable result of being virtualized.

I believe in the right to die, so regardless of whether I think being virtualized should be called "death", I believe that people have the right to choose to do it to themselves. I do not believe that an AGI has the right to make that decision for them. To decide to end someone else's experiences without first gaining their consent qualifies as violence to me and it is alarming to see someone as prominent as you advocating this.

My opinion is that it's better for PR for you to edit your comment. Even if, for some reason, reading the entire tab explosion would somehow reveal to me that yes, the physical original would experience what the copy experiences even after being destroyed, I think it is likely that people who have not read all of that information will interpret it the way that I did and may become alarmed especially after realizing that it was you who wrote this.

I would be really happy to see you edit your own "virtualize everyone" comments. I do think something needs to be done. My suggestion would be to either:

A. Clearly state that you believe the physical original will experience the copy's experiences even after being removed if that's your view.

B. In the event that you agree that the physical original's experiences would end, to refrain from talking about virtualizing everyone without their consent.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 28 December 2012 01:32:22PM *  -1 points [-]

Trolls are generally people who post with the hope of invoking a negative reaction (e.g. negative responses, flames, downvotes, censorship, bans). Identifying trolls is often a harder job than defining them.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 December 2012 08:11:25PM 0 points [-]

Thanks. That looks like the stereotypical definition of troll to me. Is it that you're saying LessWrong does not use the word "troll" differently, and the ambiguity is just due to people having a hard time figuring out who is a troll?

Comment author: Emile 28 December 2012 09:41:49AM 1 point [-]

I agree with most of what you say here, there are probably some places where "troll" could have been replaced by something more precise in a way that would be more useful.

I agree that it's important to help "borderline problematic users" to mend their ways, but I don't think the deletion policy is the best place to do that; a precise and detailed deletion policy risks increasing the amount of nitpicking over whether such-and-such moderator action was really justified by the rules (even if those "rules" are actually just said moderator trying to explain by what principles he acts, not a binding legal document!), or nitpicking about whether such-and-such hypothetical case should be banned or not; neither of those two conversations are things I'm particularly interested in reading.

So I think it may be more efficient to help good faith users by improving welcome pages, or talking to them in welcome threads, etc.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 December 2012 08:05:27PM *  0 points [-]

The not wanting to nitpick is a good point. I don't know whether a more specific definition of troll would necessarily result in more nitpicking. If readers take "troll" by the stereotypical definition (like what ArisKatsaris provided over here and then somebody gets deemed a troll and censored for saying idiotic things without an intent to annoy (or for some other reason not typically associated with the stereotypical troll), then this could spark controversy, and you still get the nitpicking conversation. Verbiage like "anybody who trolls, but not limited to that" or "we think trolls are this that and the other, but not limited to that" may make any nitpicking conversations rather short. "We said it wasn't limited to that. End of conversation."

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 28 December 2012 04:23:08AM *  2 points [-]

So, IRL I have exactly one good friend that I'd consider extremely intelligent. That's not to say that my other friends are stupid...but, they aren't like me, and that's a peculiar kind of loneliness.

Before I met my friend, most of my intellectual conversations were, as you say, one sided. It was almost like I was trying to provoke people into intellectual conversation, gently steering them into a frame of mind where they could engage me. People thought that I was argumentative and enjoyed debate - but I wasn't really, it's just that taking a stance that someone disagrees on is one of the best ways to force them into an intellectual conversation.

This is really not a healthy way to interact with people, since it often triggers emotional outbursts and leaves hard feelings behind...but I did it anyway for my own amusement. What was the point of having friends, I reasoned, if you couldn't talk to them? As I grew older and discovered better outlets for my intelligence, I stopped feeling the need to do this to people.

Even when people were willing and happy to engage intellectually however... after knowing them long enough I felt like a cat batting around a piece of string...or perhaps untying a knot. I was often able to predict what they would say and they rarely came up with arguments I hadn't already considered. Imagine playing the same game with an NPC, over and over again. It was amusing, but not fulfilling. I can't improve myself this way. (Although, every once in a while, these conversations help them...and when that happens it is pretty fulfilling, actually.)

Though I'm an extrovert and have many friends, I've gradually became socially withdrawn because most people cannot hold my interest. On the other hand, I need companionship to be happy. And my friends do provide most of the important facets of interaction ... they care for me and will look out for me, they are willing to listen to me even if they can't understand... and more importantly I can care for them. Being smart means you can solve other people's problems to some extent, simply by virtue of heightened empathy.

Anyway, when my "intelligent" friend and I have conversations, we don't leave anyone else out on purpose. Usually they just roll their eyes and say something like "there they go again, those two" and just go on to do other activities or talk amongst themselves. Once in a while they'll get interested and say something, and we usually give them an earnest answer, rather than a dismissal.

I describe these personal experiences to you to demonstrate that I do understand why gifted people might want an environment all their own.

The crux of the matter is, there are real differences between an intellectually gifted person and the average person...but the average person may not be capable (or more often, not interested) in understanding these differences. These differences are as insurmountable as the difference between an adult and a child.

The primary difference is what psychologists call "need for cognition". Even if someone isn't particularly smart, if they have a high need for cognition you can still have an interesting conversation with them because they share your interest in having meaningful conversation. These conversations can be fun and can spur you to develop new ideas.

The secondary difference is "metacognition". A gifted person is extremely self aware. what exactly am I doing, what are the reasons that I am doing it, what will be the results of what I am doing etc. This practice leads them to develop extremely good empathetic abilities, so they are acutely aware of the context of each situation, and of how their actions appear to others.

Ordinary people often act in ways that they themselves feel are "wrong", that they can regret or feel guilty about later. They often are incapable of understanding their own emotions, and therefore are unable to regulate them appropriately. They are susceptible to conformity and authority, primarily because they either do not recognize or do not care when conformity/authority is acting on them.

It is the difference in meta-cognitive ability which makes the ordinary person ...childlike? senile?... in comparison to the intellectually gifted person.

There are other quantitative differences, but I think I've hit on most of the qualitative ones.

By analogy, imagine people were interested in football (need for cognition). But only a subset of these people are physically fit (high IQ), and of these an even smaller subset have natural athleticism (meta cognition). Of these, an even smaller number of people are experienced in playing football (knowledge of the topic at hand).

Back to our question of elitism. I agree with you that it is totally understandable that people who enjoy football (high need for cognition) do not want to be disturbed by those who are uninterested in football (low need for cognition). But, i do not believe that is where the charge of elitism comes from.

If someone makes an on-topic and earnest comment on lesswrong, but the comment is judged as stupid, it is downvoted to oblivion. Often times, someone will write "this is not the website for you, sorry" or something equally insulting.

The person who made the comment probably has a high need for cognition. In other words, they want to play football with us, and we are being the mean kids who aren't letting them because they are physically weak (low IQ), klutzy (low metacognition) or out of practice (low topic knowledge).

I know that when I was a weak, klutzy, non-sporty kid, I didn't mind getting picked last at recess. I understood that I was not particularly good at the game, and I didn't begrudge that other players chose players accordingly. But if my friends had told me that I couldn't play at all or insulted me for trying... well, then I think I would have just cause to be angry with them. It's not like I had asked to play for the NFL (get a PhD?)...all I wanted was to play (discuss) with some buddies at recess (internet forum).

The difference between associating with people with similar interests and elitism, is that in the former case you allow anyone who shares that interest to join you, whereas in the latter case you only allow people above a certain threshold to join you. That's why Mensa is considered (and probably considers themselves) an elitist organization. Joining Mensa is seen as an act of snobbery, while doing the Putnam exam isn't...and the reason for this is that anyone has the option to try the Putnam, but only an elite group can go to Mensa meetups. It's not fun to be excluded from something you earnestly wanted to participate in.

For all that, the fact remains that it is also not particularly fun to play with someone who isn't an equal.

I don't have a solution to this issue, but I do empathize with what it's like to be on the other side of the elite/non-elite coin. For my part...yes, I would rather play with equals. But I don't desire to play with equals so strongly that I'm willing to hurt the feelings of someone who doesn't measure up by excluding them.

If, say, lesswrong gets over-run by the lowest common denominator of the internet...then it will be regrettable, but not more regrettable than the harm that is done to an individual's self esteem when they are told that they are too stupid to play. If it happens, there is not much we can do about it anyway, and there will be other forums.

Edit: Uh, this may be hard to read because it's a bit drawn out... but at least this way you can see my thought process in its entirety, which I think is what you wanted from this conversation.

Oversimplified TL:DR - it's only elitist if someone earnestly wants to participate in the conversation, but is excluded because they are too inept to make meaningful contributions.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 December 2012 04:45:00AM *  1 point [-]

Have you ever experienced alienation? I'm not talking about feeling a little bit annoyed. I'm talking about:

Half the time when you express your feelings, people misunderstand you. Half the time when you explain an idea, it's too complicated and they either stop listening or misunderstand. You start to learn not to express certain thoughts and feelings. After a while, these add up, until you're barely expressing yourself at all. Then you start to feel like life itself is boring, something very important is missing. Your friends say they care, but you can't escape the fact that they have no idea who they care about. You try and try to find people who can understand, with any amount of explaining, and they never do. You feel like you're from a different planet.

For some people, the amount of loneliness or alienation they experience due to being gifted is very small, or they don't notice it at all. I've noticed, however, that a lot of people with very high IQs are frequently alienated, settle for a social life that isn't satisfying, or give up on ever finding anyone.

It's not just that they feel that social enjoyment could be improved, it's that they feel exhausted from being different.

I'm talking about burnout.

Some people are different enough that they literally burn out from having to interact with people who misunderstand them, who they can't explain things to without frustrating themselves, who can't truly care about them because they never understand their feelings, who don't share their interests, etc.

Maybe you have never experienced this burnout. My whole life is that burnout.

Some people really do have a need to get away and be with people who are like minded. It's not about power, it's not about ego, it's not a game. The need is real and I'm sick and tired of it being misunderstood and politicized.

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 28 December 2012 01:00:10AM *  -1 points [-]

Elite - a group of people who are considered the best in a certain category. It's a descriptive term.

Usage - Power elite are the most powerful. Intellectual elite are the smartest. The Navy SEALS are an elite team of soldiers - they are the best at what they do.

Elitism - the view that their exists an elite class which aught to be given some privilege or consideration which is not given to non-elite members. This is a normative term - note the word "aught".

Usage - Obama is an elitist because he doesn't think the opinions of people like Joe the Plumber are important. He is dismissive of them because they cling to guns and religion.

So, putting this in context:

The users of lesswrong (rightly or wrongly) believe themselves to constitute an intellectual elite. Thanks to the lesswrong polls, they reason to believe that the average user has an IQ that is two to three standard deviations above the mean.

A self described intellectual elitist may believe that this group (as defined by education, high IQ, and rationality skills) is best suited to make decisions for the rest of society. An ideal political system in the view of such a person would be one that brings these intellectual elite to power. There are in fact quite a few people on lesswrong who hold this opinion - that politicians aught to be high IQ individuals with a scientific and "rational" approach to life. Additionally, people who come to lesswrong and write comments that fall short of what the users judge to be intelligent are generally not welcomed - letting non-elites participate in the discussion makes it more difficult for the elites to interact and make each other smarter. The common theme here is that those who are not part of the elite need to get out of the way so that the elite can carry out their tasks/discussions more effectively.

The charge of elitism against lesswrong implies that these individuals believe that the opinions of other people (in particular the religious, the conservative, other demographics which correlate negatively with low IQ) are not worthy of consideration. It also carries the insinuation that the self perception of lesswrongers as an elite intellectual group is unfounded ... that the users are just a bunch of smart-mouthed kids suffering from dunning-kruger. Or, going further, a group of genuinely intelligent people who have gotten carried away with their intelligence and are trapped in a loop of self congratulating themselves for being so smart. I believe this is called an "affective death spiral" around these parts.

Note that I'm describing end-of-spectrum views here in both instances, not expressing them. I can express them in another post if you feel it will be helpful.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 December 2012 02:14:01AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on these ideas. I agree that people use the word in the ways that you describe, but I have a specific issue with one of these definitions. I am not sure whether you hold the following view or mine or some other one, but since you are offering to express your views, I decided to accept your offer and to share mine as well:

View I disagree with: "When intellectuals / gifted people / nerds hang out with each other and don't want non-intellectuals / non-gifted people / non-nerds around, they're elitists."

If you've ever talked to a vegetarian, you'll know that they prefer to eat with other vegetarians. If you've talked to a hunter, you can guess that they would not appreciate a vegetarian coming along on a hunting trip. If you know everything about basketball, it's going to be really boring to have a basketball conversation with someone who hates sports. If you've ever talked to a single mom, she'll probably tell you that sometimes she just needs to be with the adults for an evening - the children can't talk about the same topics and there are a lot of things you can't say around them.

Gifted adults often have different views that mix with mainstream views about as well as hunters and vegetarians. They're not able to talk about all of their ideas with everyone, just like people from different religions or political groups often can't. They tend to accumulate an unusual amount of knowledge in areas they're interested in, making conversations pretty one-sided. Everybody wants to talk to people at their own level - it's not spite, that's a phenomenon called "flow" - put simply, the brain rewards you for doing things that are challenging but not frustrating. For many gifted adults, especially in the upper ranges, having conversations with dissimilar people is either frustrating (because they can't get their ideas across or are misunderstood) or tedious (because all the work involved in explaining everything and presenting it just right is tiring). Many of them simply cannot experience flow in conversations with most people.

It's no wonder that gifted people like to gather in groups and talk to each other. Everybody from sports fans to Twilight fans needs the company of like-minded people. Everybody else does it. This is considered normal.

But when gifted people do it, they're called elitists.

Trying to play football at a bingo game or sing in a classroom will get you booted from those locations - because like-minded people are all trying to do the same thing, and here you are disrupting what they are doing. Kicking them out is perceived as good.

Boot someone for side-tracking an intelligent conversation, and you get called a name that inspires hatred in many.

I think it's unfair that people are politicizing the social needs of gifted people with the term "elitism" and instead of putting up with this or calling ourselves elitists we should say "No. You have your football buddies, your shopping buddies, your bingo buddies. These are my like minded buddies. I'm fulfilling my social needs the same way you are. Bug off."

Comment author: Emile 27 December 2012 12:03:44PM 1 point [-]

I don't think a formal definition of the word "troll" would be useful; the term is used somewhat informally to the general blob of "problematic users" - trolls, idiots, cranks, aggressive and self-centered users, people who won't shut up about their pet topic, etc. - the borders are somewhat fuzzy, and any attempt to try to formalize them is likely to be too broad or too narrow. Would you be able to properly formalize the kind of behavior you don't want on a website you run, without being too broad or too narrow?

"Troll" is a bit like an unambiguous example of the class of behaviors to be discouraged, but if the policies hit a broader target and also discourage non-trolling obnoxious cranks and idiots, that's a feature, not a bug.

Incidentally, I agree that using 'trolling" to describe any downvoted comments (like the "troll toll") is somewhat unfortunate, meany downvoted comments are from users who sincerely want to convince everybody that if they would stop being blinded by politically correct groupthink they would recognize that lizard-men are controlling the government. But then, "troll toll" has a nice ring to it.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 06:26:12PM *  -1 points [-]

term is used somewhat informally to the general blob of "problematic users"

I can see how this would be more useful from the perspective of the person doing the banning, but I don't see why it would be useful from the perspective of the person who is attempting to avoid being banned. Flexible for one purpose, too vague for the other.

Would you be able to properly formalize the kind of behavior you don't want on a website you run, without being too broad or too narrow?

Somebody has probably already done so. Not perfectly, of course. But they've probably already done so. There might even be a description of undesired behavior in an open source context, either as part of a free legal terms of service agreement, or as part of a piece of open source software. It is quite possible that a good free description has already been written and just needs editing. It's also possible to do better than be flexible/vague and provide a list of behaviors (such as the one you created above) that briefly describes the main concerns, without it being perfect, and simply aim to make an improvement on flexible/vague.

if the policies hit a broader target and also discourage non-trolling obnoxious cranks and idiots

The problem is that people with idiotic ideas do not know they are being idiotic, and I think that although some cranks do know that they're wrong and are content trying to scam people, other cranks are just as clueless as their customers, and have no idea that what they're selling is a ripoff. For instance: I'm not religious, but do I consider a priest a crank? No. I consider a priest somebody who genuinely believes the ideas they're selling, not somebody intentionally deceiving people in order to collect donation money. For this reason, using the words "cranks" and "idiots" is probably not likely to work - something like "If you don't bother to support your points with rational arguments and don't update and keep bothering us, we'll boot you." would be more likely to help them realize it's targeted at them.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 December 2012 06:07:24AM 0 points [-]

That would be incredibly difficult on the moderators. Thankfully, being smart enough to think of that and dumb enough to be a troll isn't a very plausible interval for human intellect.

In response to comment by [deleted] on META: Deletion policy
Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 08:07:19AM 5 points [-]

Unfortunately, sometimes gifted people are trolls.

Comment author: pleeppleep 27 December 2012 03:19:22AM 3 points [-]

I think you mean the Litany of Gendlin, and I believe some of these rules are being newly implemented, but I could be wrong about that.

He can run his site anyway he wants, and most of the ideas here are reasonable precautions given his values. That doesn't change the fact that I intuitively don't like them when I read them, and that gut reaction (or possibly it's opposite) is probably shared with others here who probably allow it to color their arguments one way or the other. Just something to keep in mind, is all.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 03:40:33AM -2 points [-]

Oh thank you. I kept wondering what that quote was.

others here who probably allow it to color their arguments one way or the other.

Oh, that is a good point.

I was trying to make you feel better.

Comment author: pleeppleep 26 December 2012 09:33:42PM 4 points [-]

Intuitive gut reaction. If I had an argument to make I would have said so. Any case I make would have been formed from backtracking from my initial feeling, and I'm probably not the only commenter here arguing based on an "ick" or "yay" gut reaction to the idea of censorship. I thought it was worth pointing out.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 02:49:03AM 1 point [-]

As I see it, this is sort of like that quote on truth that goes something like "You may as well acknowledge the truth - you're already dealing with it."

Censorship was already happening on LessWrong. Now that Eliezer is making an effort to share some of his decision-making process, there is less to fear in a way since you get to have that additional info for guessing what he's likely to do.

Fear of the unknown can feel a lot worse than fear of the known.

In response to comment by [deleted] on META: Deletion policy
Comment author: [deleted] 26 December 2012 07:10:06PM 1 point [-]

Indeed, and we (the LW community) have to learn to tell the difference between deliberate trolls and misguided rationalists for our moderation to be effective. In the same way that replying to a troll is a mistake in that it feeds their attention craving, not replying to a wrong non-troll can be a mistake in that they don't notice their error. Maybe a lower downvote limit (4xkarma) would help break aforementioned habit.

In response to comment by [deleted] on META: Deletion policy
Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 02:43:39AM 3 points [-]

Then there's the possibility that someone enjoys intentionally pretending to be clueless as a means of trolling and further enjoys that it disrupts people's instinct to provide guidance to misguided rationalists.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 02:35:54AM 2 points [-]

I see no definition for the word troll. It seems like a thing that should be obvious, but I've seen people using the word "troll" to describe people who are simply ignorant. I think I'm also picking up on a trend where, if a comment is downvoted, it is considered trolling regardless of the fact that it was simply an unpopular comment by an otherwise likable user. LessWrong seems to use a broader definition of the word "trolling" than I am used to. If you guys have your own twist on "trolling" it would be good to add LessWrong's definition to the wiki.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 December 2012 01:22:37AM *  0 points [-]

It has occurred to me to wonder whether the poll might be biased. I wanted to add a summary of things that protect LessWrong against endless September when I wrote this post. However, I couldn't think of even one. I figured my thread to debate whether we should have better protection would have turned up any compelling reasons to think LessWrong is protected but it didn't.

I became curious about this just now wondering whether there really isn't a single reason to think that LessWrong is protected, and I re-read all of the comments (though not the replies to the comments) to see if I had forgotten any. This comment by AndrewHickey was the closest thing I found to an argument that there is something protecting LessWrong:

If anything, LW is far more at risk of becoming an echo chamber than of an eternal September. Fora can also die just by becoming a closed group and not being open to new members, and given that there's a fairly steep learning curve before someone is accepted here ("read the Sequences!") it would, if anything, make more sense to be reducing barriers to entry rather than adding more.

  1. The registration numbers showed that LessWrong is gaining members fast, so the echo chamber idea does not appear to be supported.

  2. As for the "steep learning curve" idea, the 2012 Survey Results show that only 1/4 of the survey respondents have read the Sequences, and that 60% of those who have participated either have not read them or have not finished them. Considering that the majority of participants haven't finished the sequences, I think LessWrong's steep learning curve is more likely to add to the risk than to have any protective benefits because if most people are going "Your culture is TLDR, I'm commenting anyway." then they're going to be participating without all the cultural knowledge.

One reflex is to think that the current karma system will protect LessWrong against endless September but thinking about that strategy further, one realizes that there is a limit to how many new posts older users can read and vote on, so this would not help if there were enough new users or users closer to the mean to overwhelm their voting capacity.

As far as I can tell, there's currently nothing that is likely to protect LessWrong from eternal September.

Comment author: handoflixue 26 December 2012 03:02:30AM 0 points [-]

"Ranking people by status"

My first reaction is "people DO that?"

I can evaluate status in a very crude sense, but the algorithm seems to be a combination of HasAuthority and FriendsWithAuthority. So Co-Worker A, who is friends with the CEO, can probably make higher-status requests than I can. And my boss can obviously do that. But the idea that Co-Worker A could have more status than my boss is a concept I can't evaluate; as far as I can tell it just can't be true.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 December 2012 03:58:58AM *  2 points [-]

My first reaction is "people DO that?"

I think so? I mean, if status can be high or low, that does imply a ranking. I don't know how detailed they get about it, but I think the idea is to have a hierarchy when you're finished.

can probably make higher-status requests than I can

I don't even have that. I just do whatever makes sense for the situation and then when people behave in a way that makes what I'm doing dysfunctional, I go "What the heck?" Then, I look at it in hindsight and go "Oh, yeah. Status games exist. Right."

This is probably not good, but considering my level of motivation, it's going to take a while for me to learn to think of these things in advance...

Comment author: Epiphany 25 December 2012 11:51:12PM *  4 points [-]

Status perceptions are tricksy things

It seems to me that a lot of people read status moves into just about every action. The way that a lot of people define it is not to define it at all - everything becomes connected with status. If you behave in just about any way at all, it will be perceived as desired or undesired, and that gets added into the status evaluation. The way some people use it, it's like they're trying to create the ultimate hasty generalization.

Considering the all-encompassing nature of status perceptions, I don't see a way to invalidate them, so I hope that anyone reading status into this discussion post is thinking "If I can't think of a way to invalidate my perceptions through testing, might my perceptions of status-seeking work exactly like the Barnum effect - I paint status seeking perceptions with such a wide brush that everybody qualifies as status-seeking by my definition?"

If you claim not to be motivated by status, you will have difficulty finding anything to say or do that escapes other's status evaluations for that reason.

There are incentives, as well, for others to read status moves into your actions. If most of the group is evaluating your status, and someone is competing with you for status, this someone has to alter the group's opinions of their own status relative to yours. Failing to evaluate your status would leave them at a disadvantage. More importantly, not believing that you're actively seeking status would put them at a further disadvantage by preventing them from trying to predict what status moves you will make next.

How should status be defined?

Pitfalls of status perceptions:

I see a lot of people making the kinds of mistakes that are described in 37 ways words can be wrong:

5 The act of labeling something with a word, disguises a challengable inductive inference you are making.

8 Your verbal definition doesn't capture more than a tiny fraction of the category's shared characteristics, but you try to reason as if it does.

11 You ask whether something "is" or "is not" a category member but can't name the question you really want answered.

12 You treat intuitively perceived hierarchical categories like the only correct way to parse the world, without realizing that other forms of statistical inference are possible even though your brain doesn't use them.

13 You talk about categories as if they are manna fallen from the Platonic Realm

23 The existence of a neat little word prevents you from seeing the details of the thing you're trying to think about.

24 You have only one word, but there are two or more different things-in-reality, so that all the facts about them get dumped into a single undifferentiated mental bucket.

I do not see a way to create and use status perceptions that doesn't qualify as a logical fallacy, bias or "way that words can be wrong". This is the reason why I say "I don't believe in status." It's not that I don't think other people are creating status perceptions. It's that I think the status perceptions they create are irrational.

How I evaluate others without status perceptions:

I think an easier question to address in public than "Do I care about my own status?" is "Do I make status evaluations of others?" and this is relevant because if you don't care about status, you theoretically shouldn't evaluate others that way, either. Here is how I evaluate people without using status:

People are systems and they're out there interacting in a system. They are not just little bundles of traits, so it makes no sense to me to lump all of these traits together into a status evaluation (committing mistakes #5, #8 and/or #24) and rank everyone in a hierarchical organization scheme (committing mistake #12). If I want a person in my life for some purpose (lover, friend, etc.) my question is not "Which options are high status?" but "What interactions do I want to have with the chosen person and which specific traits are necessary for that?" (Avoiding mistake #11).

Essentially, I create specific questions to answer, break my perceptions down into component parts and consider how the traits of the person will play out in context in terms of cause and effect. This is the only way to get the specifics of my social needs fulfilled and it helps me avoid the halo effect.

Ranking people by status looks about as useful to me as guessing the teacher's password is for answering questions about how things work.

Understanding the cause and effect is also how I go about understanding myself. Other people's perceptions of me have little to no influence on my ideas about myself because my ideas about myself are far more complex and detailed than theirs are. This is how I ended up caring so little about what others think of me.

Comment author: hyporational 24 December 2012 10:44:54PM 12 points [-]

How do you gain knowledge of other people's terminal values, or even your own?

I don't believe status is my terminal value. I don't think it's a value at all. I think it's a useful umbrella term for all the lower level optimization processes that the blind idiot god decided to throw in.

Do you not value praise or criticism? Do you not care if you're useful to others? Do you not care if you get to delegate instead of DIY? Do you not care if you get to choose your sexual partners? Etc...

I cautiously suggest some of these hint at the actual terminal values under the umbrella.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 December 2012 09:46:01PM *  0 points [-]

How do you gain knowledge of other people's terminal values, or even your own?

Be in an extreme situation that involves a devastating turn of events like a serious illness or losing everything in a disaster. As examples, Victor Frankl had some great insights into his own and other's terminal values after experiencing a concentration camp (that people seek meaning and get meaning from ideals, not power or survival or pleasure) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had a deep insight into what makes people happy (flow state).

In my case, I have experienced a devastating turn of events, so I am pretty sure of what my terminal values are: closeness, and changing the world to make it more ideal.

I am not sure why I want them, but they are what I live for - I'm completely sure of that.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 December 2012 06:45:40AM *  0 points [-]

This is the best example I've seen so far:

I actually intend to fix the universe (or at least throw some padding atop my local region of it, as disclaimed above)

The padding version seems more reasonable next to the original statement, but neither of these are very realistic goals for a person to accomplish. There is probably not a way to present grandiosity such as this without it coming across as arrogance or worse.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uk/beyond_the_reach_of_god/nsh

Comment author: Epiphany 25 December 2012 06:18:55AM 0 points [-]

Thank you, Eliezer. I will cherish this article. People build their entire world views to run from this and here you are depicting the profound brutality - not obscured with fluff, but stripped naked by your words.

a world beyond the reach of God, an utterly unprotected world where anything at all can happen. ... Someone who wants to dance the deadly dance with Nature, does need to understand what they're up against: Absolute, utter, exceptionless neutrality. ... challenges are not calibrated to your skills

I feel a great relief reading these simple and profound insights: somebody else gets it. Somebody who others pay attention to is warning the rest and I now have a new way to communicate this to others.

I don't say that every rationalist should meditate on neutrality.

I have experienced the neutrality. There's no turning back. I know that there is nothing to trust.

I didn't expect to find any solace that would lighten the harrowing effect of this realization. Your communication gave me that solace. Thank you.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 24 December 2012 08:46:43PM *  0 points [-]

As I clarified in a subsequent comment in that thread, "if the FAI concludes that replacing a physical person with a software copy isn't a harmless operation, it could instead keep physical humans around and place them into virtual environments Matrix-style."

We could argue about whether to build an FAI that can make this kind of decision on its own, but I had no intention of doing anyone any harm. Yes the attempted-FAI may reach this conclusion erroneously and end up killing everyone, but then any method of building an FAI has the possibility of something going wrong and everyone ending up dead.

What's most alarming is that you've done work for SIAI.

I've never received any money from them and am not even a Research Associate. I have independently done work that may be useful for SIAI, but I don't think that's the same thing from a PR perspective.

The whole point of SIAI is not to go "Let's let the AGI decide what is ethical" but "Let's iron out all the ethical problems before making an AGI!"

Actually I think SIAI's official position is something like "Let's work out all the problems involved in letting the AGI decide what is ethical." If you disagree with this, let's argue about it, but could you please stop saying that I advocate killing people?

Comment author: Epiphany 24 December 2012 10:18:04PM *  -1 points [-]

I had no intention of doing anyone any harm.

I know.

could you please stop saying that I advocate killing people?

reviews my wording very carefully

"If virtualizing people is violence ... Wei_Dai ... seems to be advocating "

"Advocating for an AGI that will kill all of humanity (in the context of this is not what you said) vs. advocating for an AGI that could kill all of humanity (context: this is what you said)"

My understanding is that it's your perspective that copying people and removing the physical original might not be killing them, so my statements reflect that but maybe it would make you feel better if I did this:

"If virtualizing people is violence ... Wei_Dai ... seems to be advocating ... kill the entire population of earth (though he isn't convinced that they would die)"

And likewise with the other statement.

Sorry for the upset that has probably caused. It wasn't my intent to accuse you of actually wanting to kill everyone. I just disagree with you and am very concerned about how your statement looks to others with my perspective. More importantly, I feel concerned about the existential risk if people such as yourself (who are prominent here and connected with SIAI) are willing to have an AGI that could (in my view) potentially kill the entire human race. My feeling is not that you are violent or intend any harm, but that you appear to be confused in a way that I deem dangerous. Someone I'm close to holds a view similar to yours and although I find this disturbing, I accept him anyway. My disagreement with you is not personal, it's not a judgment about your moral character, it's an intellectual disagreement with your viewpoint.

As I clarified in a subsequent comment in that thread, "if the FAI concludes that replacing a physical person with a software copy isn't a harmless operation, it could instead keep physical humans around and place them into virtual environments Matrix-style."

I think the purpose of this part is to support your statement that you have no intention to harm anyone, but if it's an argument against some specific part of my comment, would you mind matching them up because I don't see how this refutes any of my points.

I've never received any money from them and am not even a Research Associate. I have independently done work that may be useful for SIAI, but I don't think that's the same thing from a PR perspective.

It's not easy for me to determine your level of involvement from the website. This here suggests that you've done important work for SIAI:

Vladimir Nesov, a decision theory researcher, holds an M.S. in applied mathematics and physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He has worked on Wei Dai’s updateless decision theory, in pursuit of one of the Singularity Institute’s core research goals: that of developing a “reflective decision theory.”

http://singularity.org/blog/2011/07/22/announcing-the-research-associates-program/

If one is informed of the exact relationship between you and SIAI, it is not as bad, but:

A. If someone very prominent on LessWrong (a top contributor) who has been contributing to SIAI's decision theory ideas (independently) does something that looks bad, it still makes them look bad.

B. The PR effect for SIAI could be much worse considering that there are probably lots of people who read the site and see a connection there but do not know the specifics of the relationship.

"Let's work out all the problems involved in letting the AGI decide what is ethical."

Okay but how will you know it's making the right decision if you do not even know what the right decision is for yourself? If you do not think it is safe to simply give the AGI an algorithm that looks good without testing to see whether running the algorithm outputs choices that we want it to make, then how do you test it? How do you even reason about the algorithm? How do you make those beliefs "pay rent", as the sequence post puts it?

I see now that the statement could be interpreted in one of two ways:

"Let's work out all the problems involved in letting the AGI define ethics."

"Let's work out all the problems involved in letting the AGI make decisions on it's own without doing any of the things that are wrong by our definition of what's ethical."

Do you not think it better to determine for ourselves whether virtualizing everyone means killing them, and then ensure that the AGI makes the correct decision? Perhaps the reason you approach it this way is because you don't think it's possible for humans to determine whether virtualizing everyone is ethical?

I do think it is possible, so if you don't think it is possible, let's debate that.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 24 December 2012 02:39:52PM *  1 point [-]

My hypothetical scenario was that replacing a physical person with a software copy is a harmless operation and the FAI correctly comes to this conclusion. It doesn't constitute hypothetically (or euphemistically) killing, since in the scenario, "virtualizing" doesn't constitute "killing".

Comment author: Epiphany 24 December 2012 07:57:40PM *  -1 points [-]

An FAI would have some security advantages. It can achieve physical security by taking over the world and virtualizing everyone else

That is your exact wording. Not "In the event that the AGI determines that it's safe to [euphemism for doing something that could mean killing the entire human race] because there are software copies." or "if virtualizing is safe..."

Even if your wording was that, I'd still disagree with it.

I thought the most important reason to do friendliness research was to give the AGI what it needs to avoid making decisions that could kill all of humanity. It is humanity's responsibility to dictate what should happen in this case and ensure that the AGI understands enough to choose the option we dictate. If you aren't in favor of micromanaging the millions of tiny ethical decisions it will have to make like exactly how many months to put a lawbreaker in jail, that's one thing. If you aren't in favor of making sure it decides correctly on issues that could kill all of humanity, that's negligent beyond imagining. If you are aware of a decision that an AGI could make that could kill all of humanity, and you are in favor of creating an AGI that hasn't been given guidance on that issue, then you're in favor of creating a very dangerous AGI.

Advocating for an AGI that will kill all of humanity vs. advocating for an AGI that could kill all of humanity is a variation on "advocating violence" (it's advocating possible violence) but, to me, it's no different from saying: "I'm going to put one bullet in my gun, aim at so-and-so, and pull the trigger!" - Just because the likelihood of killing so-and-so is reduced to 1 in 6 from what's more or less a certainty does not mean it's not a murder threat.

Likewise, adding the word "possibly" into a sentence that would otherwise break the censorship policy is a cheap way of trying to get through the filter. That should not work. "We should possibly go on a killing rampage." - no.

What's most alarming is that you've done work for SIAI.

The whole point of SIAI is not to go "Let's let the AGI decide what is ethical" but "Let's iron out all the ethical problems before making an AGI!"

If Eliezer doesn't want to look bad, he should consider this.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 December 2012 02:40:47AM 5 points [-]

it was in discussion too.

Comment author: Epiphany 24 December 2012 09:08:33AM *  -2 points [-]

If you're talking about his Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It it's not there anymore.

I didn't thoroughly read the new version on his site, so there's a chance that there is now a link to an article that will still be confused for a pro-terrorism piece (that's the problem the previous version had) or sounds like it's advocating the idea of governments attacking chip fabs.

Comment author: Epiphany 24 December 2012 06:56:00AM *  -1 points [-]

If virtualizing people is violence (since it does imply copying their brains and, uh, removing the physical original) you may want to censor Wei_Dai over here, as he seems to be advocating that the FAI could hypothetically (and euphemistically) kill the entire population of earth:

Wei Dai's Ironic Security Idea

Comment author: Curiouskid 19 December 2012 03:22:19AM *  1 point [-]

I think you meant to use a different hyperlink?

Comment author: Epiphany 19 December 2012 04:12:56AM 1 point [-]

It has been fixed. Thanks, Curiouskid!

Comment author: drethelin 10 December 2012 08:14:54AM 1 point [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/efv/elitism_isnt_necessary_for_refining_rationality/

This is the first one that comes to mind. I might post others as I find them, but to be honest I'm too lazy to go through your logs or my IRC logs to find the examples

Comment author: Epiphany 16 December 2012 03:31:18AM *  0 points [-]

That is an example of me not being aware of how others use a word, not an example of me believing I am correct when others disagree with me and then being wrong. In fact, I think that LessWrong and I agree for the most part on that subject. We're just using the word elitism differently.

Do you have even a single example of me continuing to think I am correct about something where a matter of truth (not wording) is concerned even after compelling evidence to the contrary is presented?

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 16 December 2012 12:36:13AM *  1 point [-]

How many of us are there:

A couple of months ago, I asked Trike, the company that manages the website, for a complete list of LessWrong registration dates in order to make a growth chart. I received it on 08-23-2012. The data shows that LessWrong has 13,727 total users, not including spammers and accounts that were deleted.

See also: LessWrong Growth Bar Graph (in the thread "Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx.")

Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2012 06:26:18PM 2 points [-]

I really like this nice, clear, direct observation.

Thank you. I will try to do more of that.

Here Eliezer is in a world full of Christians who believe that dreaded Satan is going to reincarnate soon, claim to be a God, promise to solve all the problems, and take over earth. Religious people have been known to become violent for religious reasons. Surely building an incarnation of Satan would, if that were their interpretation of it, qualify as more or less the ultimate reason to launch a religious war. These Christians outnumber Eliezer by a lot. And Eliezer, according to you, is talking about building WHAT?

Interesting. Religious people seem a lot less scary to me than this. My impression is that the teeth have been taken out of traditional christianity. There are a few christian terrorists left in north america, but they seem like holdouts raging bitterly against the death of their religion. They are still in the majority in some places, though, and can persecute people there.

I don't think that the remains of theistic christianity could reach an effective military/propoganda arm all the way to Berkely even if they did somehow misinterpret FAI as an assault on God.

Nontheistic christianity, which is the ruling religion right now could flex enough military might to shut down SI, but I can't think of any way to make them care.

I live in Vancouver, where as far as I can tell, most people are either non-religious, or very tolerant. This may affect my perceptions.

My take on the "build a God-like AI" idea is that it is pretty crazy. I might like this idea less than the Christians probably do seeing as how I don't have any sense that Jesus is going to come back and reconstruct us after it does it's optimization...

This is a good reaction. It is good to take seriously the threat that an AI could pose. However, the point of Friendly AI is to prevent all that and make sure it that if it happens, it is something we would want.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 December 2012 11:26:19PM 1 point [-]

Thank you. I will try to do more of that.

:) You can be as direct as you want to with me. (Normal smilie to prevent the tiny sad moments.)

Interesting. Religious people seem a lot less scary to me than this. My impression is that the teeth have been taken out of traditional christianity. There are a few christian terrorists left in north america, but they seem like holdouts raging bitterly against the death of their religion. They are still in the majority in some places, though, and can persecute people there.

Okay, good point. I agree that religion is losing ground. However, I've witnessed some pretty creepy stuff coming out of the churches. Some of them are saying the end is near and doing things like having events to educate about it. Now, that experience was one that I had in a particular location which happens to be very religious. I'm not sure that it was representative of what the churches are up to in general. I admit ignorance when it comes to what average churches are doing. But if there's enough end-times kindling being thrown into the pit here, people who were previously losing faith may flare up into zealous Christians with the right spark. Trying to build what might be interpreted as an Antichrist would be quite the spark. The imminent arrival of an Antichrist may be seen as a fulfillment of the end times prophecies and be seen as a sign that the Christian religion really is true after all.

A lot is at stake here in the mind of the Christian. If it's not the end of the world, opposing a machine "God" is still going to look like a good idea - it's dangerous. If it is the end of the world, they'd better get their s--- in gear and become all super-religious and go to battle against Satan because judgment day is coming and if they don't, they're going to be condemned. Being grateful to God and following a bunch of rules is pretty hard, especially when you can't actually SEE the God in question. How people are responding to the mundane religious stuff shouldn't be seen as a sign of how they'll react when something exceptional happens.

Being terrified out of your mind that someone is building a super-intelligent mind is easy. This takes no effort at all. Heck, at least half of LessWrong would probably be terrified in this case. Being extra terrified because of end times prophecies doesn't take any thought or effort. And fear will kill their minds, perhaps making religious feelings more likely. That, to me, seems to be a likely possibility in the event that someone attempts to build a machine "God". You're seeing a decline in religion and appear to be thinking that it's going to continue decreasing. I see a decline in religion and I think it may decrease but also see the potential for the right kinds of things to trigger a conflagration of religious fervor.

There are other memes that add an interesting twist: The bible told them that a lot of people would lose faith before the Antichrist comes. Their own lack of faith might be taken as evidence that the bible is correct.

And I have to wonder how Christianity survived things like the plagues that wiped out half of Europe. They must have been pretty disenchanted with God - unless they interpreted it as the end of the world and became too terrified of eternal condemnation to question why God would allow such horrible things to happen.

Perhaps one of the ways the Christianity meme defends itself is to flood the minds of the religious with fear at the exact moments in history when they would have the most reason to question their faith.

Last year's Gallup poll says that 78% of Americans are Christan. Even if they've lost some steam, if the majority still uses that word to self-identify, we should really acknowledge the possibility that some event could trigger zealous reactions.

I have been told that before Hitler came to power, the intelligentsia of Germany was laughing at him thinking it would never happen. It's a common flaw of nerds to underestimate the violence and irrationality that the average person is capable of. I think this is because we use ourselves as a model and think they'll behave, feel and think a lot more like we do than they actually will. I try to compensate for this bias as much as possible.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 December 2012 02:46:54PM *  5 points [-]

I went out looking for myself and I just watched the bloggingheads video (6:42) where Robert Wright says to Eliezer "It sounds like what you're saying is we need to build a God" and Eliezer is like "Why don't we call it a very powerful optimizing agent?" and grins like he's just fooled someone

Like he's just fooled someone? I see him talking like he's patiently humoring an ignorant child who is struggling to distinguish between "Any person who gives presents at Christmas time" and "The literal freaking Santa Claus, complete with magical flying reindeer". He isn't acting like he has 'fooled' anyone or acting in any way 'sneaky'.

and Robert Wright thinks and he's like "Why don't we call that a euphemism for God?" which destroys Eliezer's grin.

While I wouldn't have been grinning previously whatever my expression had been it would change in response to that question in the direction of irritation and impatience. The answer to "Why don't we call that a euphemism for God?" is "Because that'd be wrong and totally muddled thinking". When your mission is to create an actual very powerful optimization agent and that---and not gods---is actually what you spend your time researching then a very powerful optimization agent isn't a 'euphemism' for anything. It's the actual core goal. Maybe, at a stretch, "God" can be used as a euphemism for "very powerful optimizing agent" but never the reverse.

I'm not commenting here on the question of whether there is a legitimate PR concern regarding people pattern matching to religious themes having dire, hysterical and murderous reactions. Let's even assume that kind of PR concern legitimate for the purpose of this comment. Even then there is a distinct difference between "failure to successfully fool people" and "failure to educate fools". It would be the latter task that Eliezer has failed at here and the former charge would be invalid. (I felt the paragraph I quoted to be unfair on Eliezer with respect to blurring that distinction.)

Comment author: Epiphany 15 December 2012 10:45:22PM *  0 points [-]

I don't think that an AI that goes FOOM would be exactly the same as any of the "Gods" humanity has been envisioning and may not even resemble such a God (especially because, if it were a success, it would theoretically not behave in self-contradictory ways like making sinful people, knowing exactly what they're going to do, making them to do just that, telling them not to act like what they are and then punishing them for behaving the way it designed them to). I don't see a reason to believe that it is possible for any intellect to be omniscient, omnipotent or perfect. That includes an AI. These, to me, would be the main differences.

Robert Wright appears to be aware of this, as his specific wording was "It seems to me that in some sense what you're saying is that we need to build a God."

If you are taking this as a question about what to CALL the thing, then I agree completely that the AI should not be called a God. But he said "in some sense" which means that his question is about something deeper than choosing a word. The wording he's using is asking something more like "Do you think we should build something similar to a God?"

The way that I interpret this question is not "What do we call this thing?" but more "You think we should build a WHAT?" with the connotations of "What are you thinking?" because the salient thing is that building something even remotely similar to a God would be very, very dangerous.

The reason I interpreted it this way is partly because instead of interpreting everything I hear literally, I will often interpret wording based on what's salient about it in the context of the situation. For instance, if I saw a scene where someone was running toward someone else with a knife and I asked "Are you about to commit murder?" I would NOT accept "Why don't we call it knife relocation?" as an acceptable answer.

Afterward, Robert Wright says that Eliezer is being euphemistic. This perception that Eliezer's answer was an attempt to substitute nice sounding wording for something awful confirms, to me, that Robert's intent was not to ask "What word should we use for this?" but was intended more like "You think we should build a WHAT? What are you thinking?"

Now, it could be argued that Eliezer accidentally failed to detect the salient connotation. It could be argued, and probably fairly effectively (against me anyway) that the reason for Eliezer's mistake is that he was having one of his arrogant moments and he genuinely thought that, because of a gigantic intelligence difference between Robert and himself, that Robert was asking a moronic question based on the stupid perception that a super powerful AI would be exactly the same as a real God (whatever that means). In this case, I would classify that as a "social skills / character flaw induced faux pas".

In my personal interpretation of Eliezer's behavior, I'm giving him more credit than that - I am assuming that he has previously encountered people by that point (2010) who have flipped out about the possibility that he wants to build a God and have voiced valid and poignant concerns like "Why do you believe it is possible to succeed at controlling something a bazillion times smarter than you?" or "Why would you want us imperfect humans to make something so insanely powerful if it's more or less guaranteed to be flawed?" I'm assuming that Eliezer interpreted correctly when the salient part of someone's question is not in it's literal wording but in connotations relating to the situation.

This is why it looks, to me, like Eliezer's intent was to brush him off by choosing to answer this question as if it were a question about what word to use and hoping that Robert didn't have the nerve to go for the throat with valid and poignant questions like the examples above.

The topic of whether this was an unintentional faux pas or an intentional brush-off isn't the most important thing here.

The most important questions, in my opinion, are:

"Does Eliezer intend to build something this powerful?"

"Does Eliezer really think that something a bazillion times as intelligent as himself can be controlled?"

"Do you and I agree/disagree that it's a good idea to build something this powerful / that it can be controlled?"

Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2012 07:12:05AM *  1 point [-]

Okay. There's a peculiar habit in this place where people say things that can easily be interpreted as something that will draw persecution. Then I point it out, and nobody cares.

This is concerning. My intuitions suggest that it's not a big deal. I infer that you think it's a big deal. Someone is miscalibrated.

Do you have a history with persecution that makes you more attuned to it? I am blissfully ignorant.

Okay. It probably seems kind of stupid that I failed to realize that. Is there a post that I should read?

I don't know if there's an explicit post about it. I picked it up from everything on Friendly AI, the terrible uncaringness of the universe, etc. It is most likely not explicitly represented as replacing a negligent god anywhere outside my own musings, unless I've forgotten.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 December 2012 08:43:42AM *  2 points [-]

This is concerning. My intuitions suggest that it's not a big deal. I infer that you think it's a big deal. Someone is miscalibrated.

I really like this nice, clear, direct observation.

Do you have a history with persecution that makes you more attuned to it? I am blissfully ignorant.

Yes, but more relevantly, humanity has a history with persecution - lots of intelligent people and people who want to change the world from Socrates to Gandhi have been persecuted.

Here Eliezer is in a world full of Christians who believe that dreaded Satan is going to reincarnate soon, claim to be a God, promise to solve all the problems, and take over earth. Religious people have been known to become violent for religious reasons. Surely building an incarnation of Satan would, if that were their interpretation of it, qualify as more or less the ultimate reason to launch a religious war. These Christians outnumber Eliezer by a lot. And Eliezer, according to you, is talking about building WHAT?

My take on the "build a God-like AI" idea is that it is pretty crazy. I might like this idea less than the Christians probably do seeing as how I don't have any sense that Jesus is going to come back and reconstruct us after it does it's optimization...

I don't know if there's an explicit post about it. I picked it up from everything on Friendly AI, the terrible uncaringness of the universe, etc. It is most likely not explicitly represented as replacing a negligent god anywhere outside my own musings, unless I've forgotten.

I went out looking for myself and I just watched the bloggingheads video (6:42) where Robert Wright says to Eliezer "It sounds like what you're saying is we need to build a God" and Eliezer is like "Why don't we call it a very powerful optimizing agent?" and grins like he's just fooled someone and Robert Wright thinks and he's like "Why don't we call that a euphemism for God?" which destroys Eliezer's grin.

If Eliezer's intentions are to build a God, then he's far less risk-averse than the type of person who would simply try to avoid being burned at the stake. In that case the problem isn't that he makes himself look bad...

Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2012 05:12:02AM *  0 points [-]

srsly, brah. I think you misunderstood me.

you're enjoying a comment that implies that either the commenter, or the people the commenter is addressing perceive you as a god?

I was drawing an analogy to Epicurus on this issue because the structure of the situation is the same, not because anyone perceives (our glorious leader) EY as a god.

And not only that, but this might even imply that you endorse the solution that is "always the same" of "building a new one (god-emperor)".

I bet he does endorse it. His life's work is all about building a new god to replace the negligent or nonexistent one that let the world go to shit. I got the idea from him.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 December 2012 06:28:52AM *  1 point [-]

srsly, brah. I think you misunderstood me.

My response was more about what interpretations are possible than what interpretation I took.

I was drawing an analogy to Epicurus on this issue because the structure of the situation is the same, not because anyone perceives (our glorious leader) EY as a god.

Okay. There's a peculiar habit in this place where people say things that can easily be interpreted as something that will draw persecution. Then I point it out, and nobody cares.

I bet he does endorse it. His life's work is all about building a new god to replace the negligent or nonexistent one that let the world go to shit. I got the idea from him.

Okay. It probably seems kind of stupid that I failed to realize that. Is there a post that I should read?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 December 2012 07:51:00AM *  5 points [-]

It has occurred to me that LessWrong is divided against itself with two conflicting directives:

  1. Spread rationality.
  2. Be a well-kept garden.

Spreading rationality implies helping as many new people as possible develop improved rational thinking abilities but being a well-kept garden specifically demands censorship and/or bans of "fools" and people who are not "fun".

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." (Lincoln)

I think this fundamental conflict must be solved in some way. If not, then the risk is that LessWrong's discussion area will produce neither of those outcomes. If it fills with irrational people, the rational ones will go elsewhere and the irrational people won't spread rationality to themselves. They will instead most likely adopt some superficial version of it reminiscent of Feynman's descriptions of cargo cult science or Eliezer's descriptions of undiscriminating skeptics.

Perhaps there's some article from Eliezer I'm unaware of that says something to the effect of "The discussion is supposed to be where the rational people produce rational thought and everyone else can lurk and that's how rationality can be spread." If so, I hope that this is pointed out to me.

Without some clear explanation of how LessWrong is supposed to both spread rationality and be a well-kept garden, we're likely to respond to these directives inadequately.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 14 December 2012 02:06:31AM 0 points [-]

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, problem solved.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 December 2012 07:24:29AM 2 points [-]

If you're suggesting that duplicated discussions can be solved with paste, then you are also suggesting that we not make separate areas.

Think about it.

I suppose you might be suggesting that we copy the OP and not the comments. Often the comments have more content than the OP, and often that content is useful, informative and relevant. So, in the comments we'd then have duplicated information that varied between the two OP copies.

So, we could copy the comments over to the other area... but then they're not separate...

Not seeing how this is a solution. If you have some different clever way to apply Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V then please let me know.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 14 December 2012 02:13:09AM 3 points [-]

I am among those absolutely hardest to save, having an actual mental illness. Yet this place is the only thing saving me from utter oblivion and madness. Here is where I have met my only real friends ever. Here is the only thing that gives me any sense of meaning, reason to survive, or glimmer of hope. I care fanatically about it.

Many of the rules that have been proposed. Or for that matter even the amount of degradation that has ALREADY occurred... If that had been the case a few years ago, I wouldn't exist, this body would either be rotting in the ground, or literally occupied by an inhuman monster bent on the destruction of all living things.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 December 2012 06:59:04AM *  6 points [-]

I'm fascinated. (I'm a psychology enthusiast who refuses to get a psychology degree because I find many of the flaws with the psychology industry unacceptable). I am very interested in knowing how LessWrong has been saving you from utter oblivion and madness. Would you mind explaining it? Would it be alright with you if I ask you which mental illness?

Would you please also describe the degradation that has occurred at LW?

Comment author: wedrifid 13 December 2012 10:49:09PM *  1 point [-]

The best alternative to this as far as I'm aware is to send the users who are disruptively bad at rational thinking skills to CFAR training.

That seems like an inefficient use of CFAR training (and so an inefficient use of whatever resources that would have to be used to pay CFAR for such training). I'd prefer to just cull those disruptively bad at rational thinking entirely. Some people just cannot be saved (in a way that gives an acceptable cost/benefit ratio). I'd prefer to save whatever attention or resources I was willing to allocate to people-improvement for those that already show clear signs of having thinking potential.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 December 2012 06:55:29AM *  0 points [-]

I have to admit I am not sure whether to be more persuaded by you or Armok. I suppose what it would come down to is a cost/benefit calculation that takes into account the amount of destruction saved by the worst as well as the amount of benefit produced by the best. Brilliant people can have quite an impact indeed, but they are rare and it is easier to destroy than to create, so it is not readily apparent to me which group it would be more beneficial to focus on, or if both, in what amount.

Practically speaking, though, CFAR has stated that they have plans to make web apps to help with rationality training and training materials for high schoolers. It seems to me that they have an interest in targeting the mainstream, not just the best thinkers.

I'm glad that someone is doing this, but I also have to wonder if that will mean more forum referrals to LW from the mainstream...

Comment author: Armok_GoB 13 December 2012 12:39:02AM 0 points [-]

Proposed solution: add lots of subdivisions with different requirements.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 December 2012 10:25:53PM *  2 points [-]

I had a couple of ideas like this myself and I chose to cull them before doing this poll for these reasons:

The problem with splitting the discussions is that then we'd end up with people having the same discussions in multiple different places. The different posts would not have all the information, so you'd have to read several times as much in if you wanted to get it all. That would reduce the efficiency of the LessWrong discussions to a point where most would probably find it maddening and unacceptable.

We could demand that users stick to a limited number of subjects within their subdivision, but then discussion would be so limited that user experience would not resemble participation in a subculture. Or, more likely, it just wouldn't be enforced thoroughly enough to stop people from talking about what they want, and the dreaded plethora of duplicated discussions would still result.

The best alternative to this as far as I'm aware is to send the users who are disruptively bad at rational thinking skills to CFAR training.

Comment author: Larks 13 December 2012 05:21:49AM 1 point [-]

It might be still be more of a problem than the poll suggests. Maybe all the old-timers voted very concerned, and are being diluted by the newcomers.

(To clarify, I appreciate that you've done this. I just think it's important to bear in mind that things are probably even worse than they look)

Comment author: Epiphany 13 December 2012 08:57:31PM *  1 point [-]

Do you mean because of normalcy bias / optimism bias? I am concerned about that, too. But in reality, I don't think there's an accurate way to measure the endless September threat. I doubt anyone has done the sort of research that would produce reliable indicators (like following numerous forums, watching for certain signs, determining which traits do have predictive power, testing ideas, etc.).

My POV is basically that if there's a group, and it becomes popular, it will eventually trend toward the mainstream far enough for me personally to be unhappy about it (I have always been very different but were I a mainstream person, I'd probably be cheering for endless September, and were I less different, I would be less concerned about it because my threshold for how much trending I would deem a problem would be higher, so it does seem relevant to acknowledge that my perspective on what would constitute ES is relative to me, as I am easy to alienate and so have a low tolerance for inundation.)

If you are hoping to make me 'very' concerned, you're preaching to the converted though perhaps you were more interested in convincing LW.

Comment author: Armok_GoB 13 December 2012 12:20:04AM 1 point [-]

I have like 10 different articles I'd like to submit to this, many of which have been on ice for literally years!

Comment author: Epiphany 13 December 2012 08:37:34PM *  3 points [-]

What are your reasons for postponing? More interestingly, what would get you to post them? Would the writer's group as described above do it, or this other suggestion here?

Would something else help?

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 10:04:33PM 2 points [-]

I'm glad to see that you were brave enough to insert a little piece of the future into this product of the past.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2012 01:48:07PM 6 points [-]

(:

I can no longer hold my tongue. Your smileys are upside-down, and the tiny moments of empathetic sadness when my eyes haven't sorted out which side of the parens the colon is on are really starting to add up. :)

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 09:03:07PM 1 point [-]

Rofl. I am not sure if this is supposed to get me to stop, or get me to laugh.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2012 01:43:44PM *  1 point [-]

We seem to have different connotations on "obedience", and might be talking about slightly different concepts. You're observations about how most people use power, and the bad kind of obedience, are spot-on.

The topic came up because of the "I'd kneel to anyone who declared themselves king" thing. I don't think such a behaviour pattern has to go to bad power abusing obedience and submission. I think it's just a really strategically useful thing to support someone who is going to act as the group-agency. You seem to agree on the important stuff and we're just using different words. case closed?

romantic.

lol what? Either you or me has utterly misunderstood something because I'm utterly confused. I made a mock-sleazy joke about the goddam troll toll, and suggested that we wouldn't have to pay it but we could still discuss if we PMed instead. And then suddenly this romantic thing. OhgodwhathaveIdone.

It feels good.

That's good. :)

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 06:14:04PM *  1 point [-]

You seem to agree on the important stuff and we're just using different words. case closed?

Yeah I think the main difference may be that I am very wary of power abuse, so I avoid using terms like "obedience" and "kneeling" and "king" and choose other terms that imply a situation where power is balanced.

lol what? Either you or me has utterly misunderstood something

Sorry, I think I must have misread that. I've been having problems sleeping lately. If you want to talk in PM to avoid the troll toll go ahead.

That's good. :)

Well not anymore. laughs at self

Comment author: bogus 11 December 2012 02:42:39AM 1 point [-]

over here, you're enjoying a comment that implies that either the commenter, or the people the commenter is addressing perceive you as a god?

I have to agree with Eliezer here: this is a terrible standard for evaluating phygishness. Simply put, enjoying that kind of comment does not correlate at all with what the harmful features of phygish organizations/social clubs, etc. are. There are plenty of Internet projects that refer to their most prominent leaders with such titles as God-King, "benevolent dictator" and the like; it has no implication at all.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 07:59:43AM *  0 points [-]

You have more faith than I do that it will not be intentionally or unintentionally misinterpreted.

Also, I am interpreting at that comment within the context of other things. The "arrogance problem" thread, the b - - - - - - k, Eliezer's dating profile, etc.

What's not clear is whether you or I are more realistic when it comes to how people are likely to interpret, in not only a superficial context (like some hatchet jobbing reporter who knows only some LW gossip), but with no context, or within the context of other things with a similar theme.

Comment author: Larks 10 December 2012 11:08:50PM 3 points [-]

Without some measure of who the respondants are, this survey can't mean much. If the recent arrivals vote on mass that there is no problem, the poll will suggest there isn't any, even though Eternal September is the very mechanism that causes the poll outcome! For the same reason that sufficiently large immigration becomes politically impossible to reverse, so too Eternal September cannot be combatted democractically.

To get a more accurate response, we'd have to restrict it to people who had more than 100 karma 12 months ago or something.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 07:58:17AM -1 points [-]

If the recent arrivals vote on mass that there is no problem

Well that's not what's happened. Most of the votes are in, and the majority has voted that they're very or somewhat concerned.

Any other concerns?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2012 04:19:27AM 2 points [-]

A group like this would probably result in more writing.

That's a really good idea.

Let me know when you've organized something.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 07:47:01AM 0 points [-]

(: I do not have time to organize this currently. I'm not even sure I will have time to post on LessWrong. I have a lot of irons on the fire. :/

I would sure love to run a LW writer's group though, that would be awesome. Inevitably, it would be pointed out that I am not an expert on LW culture. If things slow down, and I do not see anyone else doing this, I may go for it anyway.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2012 04:17:07AM 0 points [-]

Simply put: I'm not the type that wants obedience. I'm the type that wants people to think for themselves.

Please allow me to change your mind. I am not the type who likes obedience either. I agree that thinking for selves is good, and that we should encourage as much of it as possible. However, this does not negate the usefulness of authority:

Argument 1:

Life is big. Bigger than the human mind can reasonable handle. I only have so much attention to distribute around. Say I'm a meetup participant. I could devote some attention to monitoring LW, the mailing list, etc until a meetup was posted, then overcome the activation energy to actually go. Or, the meetup organizer could mail me and say "Hi Nyan, come to Xday's meetup", then I just have to go. I don't have to spend as much attention on the second case, so I have more to spend on thinking-for-myself that matters, like figuring out whether the mainstream assumptions about glass are correct.

So in that way, having someone to tell me what to think and do reduces the effort I have to spend on those things, and makes me more effective at the stuff I really care about. So I actually prefer it.

Argument 2:

Even if I had infinite capacity for thinking for myself and going my own way, sometimes it just isn't the right tool for the job. Thinking for myself doesn't let me coordinate with other people, or fit into larger projects, or affect how LW works, or many other things. If I instead listen to some central coordinator, those things become easy.

So even if I'm a big fan of self-sufficiency and skepticism, I appreciate authority where available. Does this make sense?

Replies to downvoted comments blah blah blah

Perhaps we should continue this conversation somewhere more private... /sleaze

PM me if you want to continue this thread.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 December 2012 07:15:50AM *  1 point [-]

Please allow me to change your mind. I am not the type who likes obedience either.

Well that is interesting and unexpected.

Argument 1:

This seems to be more of a matter of notification strategies - one where you have to check a "calendar" and one where the "calendar" comes to you. I am pattern-matching the concept "reminder" here. It seems to me that reminders, although important and possibly completely necessary for running a functional group, would be more along the lines of a behavioral detail as opposed to a fundamental leadership quality. I don't know why you're likening this to obedience.

Even if I had infinite capacity for thinking for myself

We do not have infinite capacity for critical thinking. True. I don't call trusting other people's opinions obedience. I call it trust. That is rare for me. Very rare for anything important. Next door to trust is what I do when I'm short on time or don't have the energy: I half-ass it. I grab someone's opinion, go "Meh, 70% chance they're right?" and slap it in.

I don't call that obedience, either.

I call it being overwhelmingly busy.

Thinking for myself doesn't let me coordinate with other people, or fit into larger projects, or affect how LW works, or many other things. If I instead listen to some central coordinator, those things become easy.

Organizing trivial details is something I call organizing. I don't call it obedience.

When I think of obedience I think of that damned nuisance demand that punishes me for being right. This is not because I am constantly right - I'm wrong often enough. I have observed, though, that some people are more interested in power than in wielding it meaningfully. They don't listen and use power as a way to avoid updating (leading them to be wrong frequently). They demand this thing "obedience" and that seems to be a warning that they are about act as if might makes right.

My idea of leadership looks like this:

  • If you want something new to happen, do it first. When everyone else sees that you haven't been reduced to a pile of human rubble by the new experience, they'll decide the "guinea pig" has tested it well enough that they're willing to try it, too.

  • If you really want something to get done, do it your damn self. Don't wait around for someone else to do it, nag others, etc.

  • If you want others to behave, behave well first. After you have shown a good intent toward them, invite them to behave well, too. Respect them and they will usually respect you.

  • If there's a difficulty, figure out how to solve it.

  • Give people something they want repeatedly and they come back for it.

  • If people are grateful for your work, they reciprocate by volunteering to help or donating to keep it going.

To me, that's the correct way of going about it. Using force (which I associate with obedience) or expecting people not to have thoughts of their own is not only completely unnecessary but pales in comparison effectiveness-wise.

Maybe my ideas about obedience are completely orthogonal to yours. If you still think obedience has some value I am unaware of, I'm curious about it.

if you want to continue...

Thank you for your interest. It feels good.

I have a romantic interest right now who, although we have not officially deemed our status a "relationship" are considering one another as potential seriously partners.

This came to both of us as a surprise. I had burned out on dating and deleted my dating profile. I was like:

insane amount of dating alienation * ice cube's chance of finding compatible partner > benefits of romance

(Narratives by LW Women thread if you want more)

And so now we're like ... wow this amount of compatibility is special. We should not waste the momentum by getting distracted by other people. So we decided that in order to let the opportunity unfold naturally, we would avoid pursuing other serious romantic interests for now.

So although I am technically available, my expected behavior, considering how busy I am, would probably be best classified as "dance card full".

Comment author: fubarobfusco 11 December 2012 06:30:18AM 5 points [-]

Try working in system administration for a while. Some people will think you are a god; some people will think you are a naughty child who wants to be seen as a god; and some people will think you are a sweeper. Mostly you will feel like a sweeper ... except occasionally when you save the world from sin, death, and hell.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 09:30:14AM 1 point [-]

I feel the same way as a web developer. One day I'm being told I'm a genius for suggesting that a technical problem might be solved by changing a port number. The next day, I'm writing a script to compensate for the incompetent failures of a certain vendor.

When people ask me for help, they assume I can fix anything. When they give me a project, they assume they know better how to do it.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 04:07:20AM *  1 point [-]

What a brave topic. This makes me think. I realized, to my surprise, that I don't experience gratitude at good events happening and I can't recall a time when I ever have, even though I was formerly Christian. I wondered what "aliefs" I might have though, and I remembered one that has popped up to my surprise a few times semi-recently that because I am a good person I was magically rescued. (This is making me laugh so hard, at myself!). I also haven't done any praying or "please-please" for a long time.

So now I am wondering what the difference is between you and I that might give you insight into how to stop your gratitude alief and please-please alief.

I think the key, for me, has been the sheer number of things that went wrong outside of my control. I've been ridiculously unlucky.

I can guess from prior experience that right now, you're writing the bad luck off as something I caused myself. What if you didn't do that? If you haven't had enough bad luck yourself to see that nothing is controlling your life, then look at someone else's life and marvel at the luck they've had.

That's a belief, too: that people are in control. We get to have an influence, but no way to dictate what happens. Normalcy bias and optimism bias protect our sense of security. Without something to give us a sense of security, life is very stressful. I have a source of security in having lost a great deal of attachment (I'm not a religious Buddhist, but I have borrowed quite a bit from Buddhist philosophy). So, I have managed to, for the most part, deal with the fact that not nothing is in control, including myself.

Not god, not you, not me. Nothing.

That is a hard thing to accept, but that is what you are asking to accept if you want to get rid of normalcy bias, optimism bias, and your alief that there's some magic causing good things and preventing bad ones.

I had either the luck or the terrible misfortune, depending on how you want to look at it, to have the fact that I am not in control of my life shoved in my face hard. Not just once, but repeatedly. Not just repeatedly but like ad nauseum beating a dead horse to death three or four extra times repeatedly.

I woke up from a lot of silly dreams and lost a great deal of attachment.

I have found that often what I need when getting rid of something is to figure out what need it filled and replace it with something better and that it isn't until I replace it that I am able to get rid of it. As I see it, the main thing you're likely to need in order to let go of this one is some way to deal with the fact that the universe does not give a rat's behind about you.

Now I'm thinking about my rescued-good-person alief. That pops up after something bad happens, not when I am considering a bad thing that might happen in the future. It seems like it's purpose is to explain how I survived - this does seem kind of magical since my bad luck has been so ridiculous. I think I will mindhack this now. meditates

Note: I do use the phrasing "thank goodness!" sometimes but it is as an expression of relief. I will probably try to avoid using that phrasing from now on.

Comment author: saturn 10 December 2012 06:43:24AM 3 points [-]

I wish I could trust other's information.

You might think about the reasons people have for saying the things they say. Why do people make false statements? The most common reasons probably fall under intentional deception ("lying"), indifference toward telling the truth ("bullshitting"), having been deceived by another, motivated cognition, confabulation, or mistake. As you've noticed, scientists and educators can face situations where complete integrity and honesty comes into conflict with their own career objectives, but there's no apparent incentive for anyone to distort the truth about the name of the Center for Applied Rationality. There's also no apparent motivation for Alicorn to bullshit or confabulate; if she isn't quite sure she remembers the name, she doesn't have anything to lose by simply moving on without commenting, nor does she have much to gain by getting away with posting the wrong name. That leaves the possibility that she has the wrong name by an unintended mistake. But different people's chances of making a mistake are not necessarily equal. By being more directly involved with the organization, Alicorn has had many more opportunities to be corrected about the name than you have. That makes it much more likely that you are the one making the mistake, as turned out to be the case.

Perhaps there is a way to be more pleasant while still questioning everything. If you can think of something, I will consider it.

You could phrase your questions as questions rather than statements. You could also take extra care to confirm your facts before you preface a statement with "no, actually".

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 03:34:15AM *  0 points [-]

there's no apparent incentive for anyone to distort the truth about the name of the Center for Applied Rationality. There's also no apparent motivation for Alicorn to bullshit or confabulate

I know. But it's possible for her to be unaware of the existence of CFMR, had there been two orgs. If you read the entire disagreement, you'll notice that what it came down to is that it did not occur to me that CFMR might have changed it's name. Therefore, denial that it existed appeared to be in direct conflict with the evidence. The evidence being two articles where people were creating CFMR.

Alicorn has had many more opportunities to be corrected about the name than you have.

I was surprised she didn't seem to know about it, but then again, if she doesn't read every single post on here, it's possible she didn't know. I don't know how much she knows, or who she specifically talks to, or how often she talks to them, or whether she might have been out sick for a month or what might have happened. For something that small, I am not going to go to great lengths to analyze her every potential motive for being correct or incorrect. My assessment was simple for that reason.

As for wanting to trust people more, I've been thinking about ways to go about that, but I doubt I will do it by trying to rule out every possible reason for them to have been wrong. That's a long list, and it's dependent upon my imperfect ability to think of all the reasons that a person might be wrong. I'm more likely to go about it from a totally different angle: How many scientists are there? What things do most of them agree on? How many of those have been proven false? Okay, that's an estimated X percent chance that what most scientists believe is actually true based on sample set of (whatever) size.

You could phrase your questions as questions rather than statements.

This is a good suggestion, and I normally do.

You could also take extra care to confirm your facts before you preface a statement with "no, actually".

I did confirm my fact with two articles. That is why it became a "no actually" instead of a question.

Comment author: Alicorn 10 December 2012 05:55:32PM 5 points [-]

Just as it didn't occur to her that the organization could have changed its name, it didn't occur to me that she could seriously think there were two of them.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 03:08:40AM 0 points [-]

We have both acknowledged our oversights now. Thank you.

Comment author: katydee 10 December 2012 09:14:15PM 0 points [-]

So, trust you guys more while I'm still trying to figure out how much to trust you? Not going to happen, sorry.

So you're trying to figure out how much to trust "us," but you're only willing to update in the negative direction?

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 03:03:44AM *  1 point [-]

Perhaps the perception you're having is caused by the fact that you did not know how cynical I was when I started. My trust has increased quite a bit. If I appear not to trust Alicorn very much, this is because I've seen what appears to be an unusually high number of mistakes. I realize that this may be due to biased sample (I haven't read thousands of Alicorn's posts, maybe a dozen or so). But I'm not going to update with information I don't have, and I don't see it as a good use of time to go reading lots and lots of posts by Alicorn and whoever else trying to figure out how much to trust them. I will have a realistic idea of her eventually.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 December 2012 03:11:11PM 3 points [-]

Good points, but a bucket of picked fruit does not make a pie.

We've generated a lot of really valuable insight on this site, but right now it has no structure to it.

Maybe it's time to move from an article-writing phase to a knowledge-organization phase.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 02:53:57AM 1 point [-]

I had been thinking that, too. Some people had mentioned argument mapping software, however I have heard some really harsh criticisms of those. Not sure if that's the right way.

Maybe a karma-infused wiki (alluding to Luke's recent post).

Comment author: RobertLumley 10 December 2012 12:37:53AM 2 points [-]

Official publications from the SI have said that LW was specifically about community building. This is very well established.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 02:48:55AM *  2 points [-]

Not sure why you're equating "community building" with "supporting SIAI". I'm sure they would not have started LW if they didn't think it would help with SIAI goals (they're probably too busy / too focused for that) but to me "I would not have started this without it needing to serve x purpose" does not mean "this is going to serve several purposes" has no value. It may be that they would not have started it without it serving y and z purposes as well (where y and z may be raising the sanity waterline, encouraging effective altruism and things like that.)

Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2012 05:23:02AM *  6 points [-]

I think we could use more intellectual productivity. I think we already have the capacity for a lot more. I think that would do a lot against any problems we might have, Obviously I am aware of the futility of the vague "we" in this paragraph, so I'll talk about what I could do but don't.

I have a lot of ideas to write up. I want to write something on "The improper use of empathy", something about "leading and following", something about social awkwardness from the inside. I wrote an article about fermi estimation that I've never posted. And some other ideas that I can't remember right now. I'll admit I have one meta-essay in here somewhere too. "Who's in charge here?"

I don't write as much for LW as I could, because I feel like a mere mortal among gods. I feel kindof inadequate, like I would be lowering the level of discussion around here. Ironically, the essays that I do post are all quite well upvoted, and not posting may be one source of the lowered quality of LW.

I may not be the only one.

EDIT: this is also why I post to discussion and not main.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 02:39:50AM *  4 points [-]

I don't feel inadequate but I do feel likely to get jumped all over for mistakes. I've realized that you really need to go over things with a fine-toothed comb, and that there are countless cultural peculiarities that are, for me, unexpected.

I've decided that the way I will feel comfortable posting here is to carefully word my point, make sure that point is obvious to the reader, identify and mentally outline any other claims in the piece, and make sure every part is supported and then (until I get to know the culture better) ask someone to check it out for spots that will be misunderstood.

That has resulted in me doing a lot of research. So now my main bottleneck is that I feel like posting something requires doing a lot of research. This is well and good IMO, but it means I won't post anywhere near as much simply because it takes a lot of time.

I've wondered if it would do us good to form a writer's group within LW where people can find out what topics everyone else is interested in writing about (which would allow them to co-author, cutting the work in half), see whether there are volunteers to do research for posts, and get a "second pair of eyes" to detect any karma-destroying mistakes in the writings before they're posted.

A group like this would probably result in more writing.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 09 December 2012 06:47:06AM *  6 points [-]

Yep, that's my experience as well. Recently, I decided "screw what LW thinks" and started posting more thoughts of mine, and they're all getting upvoted. My vague intuitions about how many upvotes my posts will get doesn't seem to correlate very well with how many upvotes they actually get either. This is probably true for other people as well.

The only potential problem with this, IMO, is if people think I'm more of an authoritative source than I actually am. I'm just sharing random thoughts I have; I don't do scholarly work like gwern.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 02:34:31AM *  1 point [-]

It seems to me that there are lots and lots of people who want to write posts but they're concerned about whether those posts will be received well. I've read, also, that more people put "public speaking" as their worst fear than "death" when surveyed. If we made a karma prediction tool, maybe that would help get people posting here. Here's what I'm thinking:

First, we could create a checklist of the traits that we think will get a LessWrong post upvoted. For instance:

  • Is there an obvious main point or constructive goal?
  • Is the main point supported / is there a reasonable plan for the constructive goal? (Or are they otherwise framed in the correct context "This is hypothetical" or whatever.)
  • What type of support is included (math, citations, graphics, etc).
  • Was the topic already covered?
  • Is it a topic of interest to LessWrong?
  • Is it uplifting or unhappy?
  • (Or do a separate survey that asks people's reasons for upvoting / downvoting and populate the checklist with those.)

Then we could post the checklist as a poll in each new post and article for a while.

Then we could correlate the karma data with the checklist poll data and test it to see how accurately it predicts a post's karma.

If you had a karma prediction tool, would it help you post more?

Submitting...

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 09 December 2012 06:35:29AM 5 points [-]

A related request: there are a lot of goals common enough that better achieving these goals should be of interest to a large-ish portion of LW. I'm thinking here of: happiness; income; health; avoiding auto accidents; reading more effectively; building better relationships with friends, family, dating partners, or co-workers; operationalizing one's goals to better track progress; more easily shedding old habits and gaining new ones.

Could we use our combined knowledge base, and our ability to actually value empirical data and consider counter-evidence and so on, to find and share some of the better known strategies for achieving these goals? (Strategies that have already been published or empirically validated, but that many of us probably haven’t heard?) We probably don’t want to have loads and loads of specific-goaled articles or links, because we don’t want to look like just any old random internet self-help site. But a medium amount of high-quality research, backed by statistics, with the LW-community’s help noticing the flaws or counter-arguments -- this sounds useful to me. Really useful. Much of the advantage of rationality comes from, like, actually using that rationality to sort through what’s known and to find and implement existing best practices. And truth being singular, there’s no reason we should each have to repeat this research separately, at least for the goals many of us share.

Anna Salamon, 2009. So this "destruction" was at least semi-planned.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 02:24:48AM *  1 point [-]

I read that twice, and went to the post you linked to, and am still not seeing why it supports the idea:

this "destruction" was at least semi-planned.

Maybe you are viewing optimization related posts as a form of cultural collapse?

Comment author: [deleted] 10 December 2012 12:54:29AM 3 points [-]

I would love to do that, but I've just gotten a volunteer offer for a much larger project I had an idea for. I had been hoping to do a few smaller projects on LW in the meantime, while I was putting some things together to launch my larger projects, and the timing seems to have worked out such that I will be doing the small projects while doing the big projects. In other words, my free time is projected to become super scarce.

grumble grumble. Like I said, everyone who could is doing something else. Me too.

However, if a job offer were presented to me from LessWrong / CFAR I would seriously consider it.

I don't think they'll take the initiative on this. Maybe you approach them?

I don't believe in this. I am with Eliezer on sentiments like the following:

<the following>

I don't see how those relate.

But thank you.

Thank you for giving a shit about LW, and trying to do something good. I see that you're actively engaging in the discussions in this thread and that's good. So thanks.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 02:15:22AM *  2 points [-]

grumble grumble. Like I said, everyone who could is doing something else. Me too.

Yeah. Well maybe a few of us will throw a few things at it and that'll keep it going...

I don't think they'll take the initiative on this. Maybe you approach them?

I mentioned a couple times that I'm dying to have online rationality training materials and that I want them badly enough I am half ready to run off and make them myself. I said something like "I'd consider doing this for free or giving you a good deal on freelance depending on project size". Nobody responded.

I don't see how those relate.

Simply put: I'm not the type that wants obedience. I'm the type that wants people to think for themselves.

Thank you for giving a shit about LW, and trying to do something good. I see that you're actively engaging in the discussions in this thread and that's good. So thanks.

Aww. I think that's the first time I've felt appreciated for addressing endless September. (: feels warm and fuzzy

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 09:06:28PM 6 points [-]

I tend to see a fairly sharp distinction between negative aspects of phyg-leadership and the parts that seem like harmless fun, like having my own volcano island with a huge medieval castle, and sitting on a throne wearing a cape saying in dark tones, "IT IS NOT FOR YOU TO QUESTION MY FUN, MORTAL." Ceteris paribus, I'd prefer that working environment if offered.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 December 2012 01:56:14AM *  1 point [-]

And how are people supposed to make the distinction between your fun and signs of pathological narcissism? You and I both know the world is full of irrationality, and that this place is public. You've endured the ravages of the hatchet job and Rationalwiki's annoying behaviors. This comment could easily be interpreted by them as evidence that you really do fancy yourself a false prophet.

What's more is that I (as in someone who is not a heartless and self-interested reporter, who thinks you're brilliant, who appreciates you, who is not some completely confused person with no serious interest in rationality) am now thinking:

How do I make the distinction between a guy who has an "arrogance problem" and has fun encouraging comments that imply that people think of him as a god vs. a guy with a serious issue?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 06:50:12AM 10 points [-]

Okay, that? That was one of the most awesome predicates of which I've ever been a subject.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 08:53:59PM *  0 points [-]

You're defending yourself against accusations of being a phyg leader over there and over here, you're enjoying a comment that implies that either the commenter, or the people the commenter is addressing perceive you as a god? And not only that, but this might even imply that you endorse the solution that is "always the same" of "building a new one (god-emperor)".

Have you forgotten Luke's efforts to fight the perceptions of SI's arrogance?

That you appear to be encouraging a comment that uses the word god to refer to you in any way, directly or indirectly, is pretty disheartening.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 December 2012 06:16:32AM 1 point [-]

Unless you can think of a fast way to test the glass is a liquid theory?

Look at old windows that have been in for decades. Do they pile up on the bottom like caramel? No. Myth busted.

More interesting than simple refutation though is "taboo liquid". Go look at non-newtonian fluids and see all the cool things that matter can do. For example, Ice and rock flow like a liquid on a large enough scale (glaciers, planetary mantle convection).

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 08:25:24PM *  0 points [-]

Oh. Yeah. Good point. Obviously I wasn't thinking too hard about this. Thank you.

Wait, so they put the glass is a liquid theory into school curriculum and it was this easy to test?

I don't recall that in my own school curriculum. I'll be thinking about whether to reduce my trust for my own schooling experience. It can't go much further down after reading John Taylor Gatto, but if the remaining trust that is there is unfounded, I might as well kill it, too.

Comment author: katydee 10 December 2012 03:52:52AM 5 points [-]

I'm not saying that a hypothetical vague "you" shouldn't question things. I'm saying that you specifically, User: Epiphany, seem to not be very well-calibrated in this respect and should update towards questioning things less until you have a better feel for LessWrong discussion norms and epistemic standards.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 08:21:44PM *  1 point [-]

I'm not saying that a hypothetical vague "you" shouldn't question things.

Neither was I:

what reason do I have to believe that any authority figure or expert or established user is more likely to be correct?


I'm saying that you specifically, User: Epiphany, seem to not be very well-calibrated in this respect and should update towards questioning things less until you have a better feel for LessWrong discussion norms and epistemic standards.

So, trust you guys more while I'm still trying to figure out how much to trust you? Not going to happen, sorry.

Comment author: Decius 10 December 2012 02:12:23AM 2 points [-]

Slightly wrong heuristic. Go with "What proportion of things in the curriculum that are this easy to test have been wrong when tested?" The answer is disturbing. Things like 'Glass is a slow-flowing liquid'.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 04:11:48AM 0 points [-]

Actually 'Glass is a slow-flowing liquid' would take decades to test, wouldn't it? I think you took a different meaning of "easy to test". I meant something along the lines of "A thing that just about anyone can do in a matter of minutes without spending much money."

Unless you can think of a fast way to test the glass is a liquid theory?

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 10 December 2012 12:55:36AM *  1 point [-]

That's a good point - I hadn't considered sample bias. Extending that point, though, Lesswrong and Mensa are a biased sample in more than the simple fact that the people are gifted. It is only a subset of gifted people that choose to participate in Mensa It should be mentioned, I'm using "internet" as shorthand for the "deep" internet ... not facebook. I'm talking websites that most people do not use, that you'd have to spend a lot of time on the internet to find. As such, the "internet" hypothesis would predict a greater bias towards smaller sub-reddits.

Anyway, I was mostly posing an alternate hypothesis. When I first noticed the trend on the personality forums, this is what I thought was happening -

Slacking off / internet addiction selects for Perceiving and low Conscientiousness.

Non-social-networking internet use selects for Introversion.

Any forum discussing an idea without immediate practical benefits selects for iNtuition.

And then, factor in lesswrong/giftedness...

If it's a math/science/logic topic, it selects for Thinking and iNtuition.

High scores on Raven's matrices select for Thinking, iNtuition. High scores on Working memory components select for Judging. The ACT/SAT additionally select for Conscientiousness

Strong mathematical affinity shifts those on the border of *NTP and *NTJ into *NTJ (people prefer dealing with intellectually ordered systems, even if they have messy rooms and chaotic lifestyles)

A scientific/engineering ideology creates a shift towards the concrete (empirical evidence, practical gains in technology, etc) shifts those on the border of *NTJ and *STJ into ISTJ.

In summary, I think LW and Mensa surveys are attracting a special subset of idea driven and logical people (iNtuitives and Thinkers) and likely to use the internet often/spot the survey. (Introverts)

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 01:21:14AM *  1 point [-]

That's much nicer and much more detailed. Questions this raises:

  1. Might the "deep" internet you refer to be selecting for gifted people? (I think this is likely!)

  2. Do we have figures on personality types and IQs for internet forums in general, not from a biased sample set? These figures would test your theory.

Comment author: Decius 10 December 2012 12:24:19AM 0 points [-]

I've never accepted that belief in the authority on any subject could pay rent. The biggest advantage experts have to me is when they can quickly point me to the evidence that I can evaluate fastest to arrive at the correct conclusion; rather than trust Aristotle that heavier items fall faster, I can duplicate any number of experiments that show that any two objects with equal specific air resistance fall at exactly the same speed.

Downside: It is more expensive to evaluate the merits of the evidence than the credentials of the expert.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 12:35:03AM 1 point [-]

The biggest advantage experts have to me is when they can quickly point me to the evidence that I can evaluate fastest to arrive at the correct conclusion

I relate to this.

Downside: It is more expensive to evaluate the merits of the evidence than the credentials of the expert.

There simply isn't enough time to evaluate everything. When it's really important, I'll go to a significant amount of trouble. If not, I use heuristics like "how likely is it that something as easy to test as this made it's way into the school curriculum and is also wrong?" if I have too little time or the subject is of little importance, I may decide the authoritative opinion is more likely to be right than my absolutely not thought out at all opinion, but that's not the same as trusting authority. That's more like slapping duct tape on, to me.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 December 2012 12:14:33AM *  0 points [-]

female web developer who obviously cares a lot about LW and can implement solutions would be a good choice?

Female doesn't matter, web development is good for being able to actually write what needs to be written. Caring is really good. The most important factor though is willingness to be audacious, grab power, and make things happen for the better.

Whether or not we need someone with CEO-power is uninteresting. I think such a person having more power is good.

If you're talking about yourself, go for it. Get a foot in the code, make the front page better, be audacious. Make this place awesome.

I've said before in the generic, but in this case we can be specific: If you declare yourself king, I'll kneel.

(good luck)

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 12:27:59AM 0 points [-]

Female doesn't matter, web development is good for being able to actually write what needs to be written. Caring is really good. The most important factor though is willingness to be audacious, grab power, and make things happen for the better.

Well I do have the audacity.

If you're talking about yourself, go for it. Get a foot in the code, make the front page better, be audacious. Make this place awesome.

I would love to do that, but I've just gotten a volunteer offer for a much larger project I had an idea for. I had been hoping to do a few smaller projects on LW in the meantime, while I was putting some things together to launch my larger projects, and the timing seems to have worked out such that I will be doing the small projects while doing the big projects. In other words, my free time is projected to become super scarce.

However, if a job offer were presented to me from LessWrong / CFAR I would seriously consider it.

If you declare yourself king, I'll kneel.

I don't believe in this. I am with Eliezer on sentiments like the following:

In Two More Things to Unlearn from School he warns his readers that "It may be dangerous to present people with a giant mass of authoritative knowledge, especially if it is actually true. It may damage their skepticism."

In Cached Thoughts he tells you to question what HE says. "Now that you've read this blog post, the next time you hear someone unhesitatingly repeating a meme you think is silly or false, you'll think, "Cached thoughts." My belief is now there in your mind, waiting to complete the pattern. But is it true? Don't let your mind complete the pattern! Think!"

But thank you. (:

Comment author: Vaniver 09 December 2012 10:14:17PM *  2 points [-]

Have you considered the opposite?

Yes, and I'm familiar with your IQ-related links in the OP*. But what's the opposite here? Let me make sure my position is clear: I agree that the people who post on LW are noticeably cleverer than the people that post elsewhere on the internet.

The narrow claim that I'm making is that the average self-reported IQ is almost definitely an overestimate of the real average IQ of people who post on LW, and a large change towards the likely true value in an unreliable number should not be cause for alarm. The primary three pieces of evidence I submit are:

  1. On this survey, around a third of people self-reported their IQ, and it's reasonable to expect that there is a systematic bias, such that people with higher perceived IQs are more likely to share them. I haven't checked how many people self-reported on previous surveys, but it's probably similarly low.

  2. When you use modern conversion numbers for average SAT scores, you get a reasonable 97th percentile for the average LWer. Yvain's estimate used a conversion chart from two decades ago; in case you aren't familiar with the history of psychometric testing, that's when the SAT had its right tail chopped off to make the racial gap in scores less obvious.

  3. The correlation between the Raven's test and the self-reported IQ scores is dismal, especially the negative correlation for people without positive LW karma. The Raven's test is not designed to differentiate well between people who are more than 99th percentile (IQ 135), but the mean score of 127 (for users with positive karma) was 96th percentile, so I don't think that's as serious a concern.

* I rechecked the comment you linked to in the OP, and I think it was expanded since I read it first. I agree that more than half of people provided at least one IQ estimate, but I think that they should not be weighted uniformly; for example, using the self-reported IQ to validate the self-reported IQ seems like a bad idea! It might be interesting to see how SAT scores and age compare- we do have a lot of LWers who presumably took the SAT before it was dramatically altered, and with younger LWers we can compare scores out of 1600 to scores out of 2400. It's not clear to me how much more clarity this will give, though, and how much the average IQ of LW survey responders actually matters.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 December 2012 12:19:43AM *  1 point [-]

What IQ would you correlate to the SAT numbers, considering?

As for the Raven's numbers, I am not sure where you're getting them from. I don't see a column when searching for "raven" in the 2012 spreadsheet, nor do I see "raven" on the survey result threads.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2012 05:52:02AM 16 points [-]

Here's two things we desperately need:

  1. An authoritative textbook-style index/survey-article on eveything in LW. We have been generating lots of really cool intellectual work, but without a prominently placed, complete, hierarchical, and well-updated overview of "here's the state of what we know", we arent accumulating knowledge. This is a big project and I don't know how I could make it happen, besides pushing the idea, which is famously ineffective.

  2. LW needs a king. This idea is bound to be unpopular, but how awesome would it be to have someone who's paid job it was to make LW into an awesome and effective community. I imagine things like getting proper studies done of how site layout/design should be to make LW easy to use and sticky to the right kind of people (currently sucks), contacting, coordinating, and encourageing meetup organizers individually (no one does this right now and lw-organizers has little activity), thinking seriously and strategically about problems like OP, and leading big projects like idea #1. Obviously this person would have CEO-level authority.

One problem is that our really high-power agent types who are super dedicated to the community (i.e. lukeprog) get siphoned off into SI. We need another lukeprog or someone to be king of LW and deal with this kind of stuff.

Without a person in this king role, the community has to waste time and effort making community-meta threads like these. Communities and democratic methods suck at doing the kind of strategic, centralized, coherent decision making that we really need. It really isn't the comparative advantage of the community to be having to manage these problems. If these problems were dealt with, it would be a lot easier to focus on intellectual productivity.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 11:54:25PM *  -2 points [-]

I don't think a CEO level monarch is necessary though I don't know what job title a community "gardener" would map to. Do you think a female web developer who obviously cares a lot about LW and can implement solutions would be a good choice?

This doesn't look like it's very likely to happen though, considering that they're changing focus:

For 12 years we've largely focused on movement-building through the Singularity Summit, Less Wrong, and other programs... But in 2013 we plan to pivot so that a much larger share of the funds we raise is spent on research.

Then again maybe CFAR will want to do something.

Comment author: Vaniver 02 December 2012 09:12:04PM *  10 points [-]

From the public dataset:

165 out of 549 responses without reported positive karma (30%) self-reported an IQ score; the average response was 138.44.

181 out of 518 responses with reported positive karma (34%) self-reported an IQ score; the average response was 138.25.

One of the curious features of the self-reports is how many of the IQs are divisible by 5. Among lurkers, we had 2 151s, 1 149, and 10 150s.

I think the average self-response is basically worthless, since it's only a third of responders and they're likely to be wildly optimistic.

So, what about the Raven's test? In total, 188 responders with positive karma (36%), and 164 responders without positive karma (30%) took the Raven's test, with averages of 126.9 and 124.4. Noteworthy is the new max and min- the highest scorer on the Raven's test claimed to get 150, and the three sub-100 scores were 3, 18, and 66 (of which I suspect only the last isn't a typo or error of some sort).

Only 121 users both self-reported IQ and took the Raven's test. The correlation between their mean-adjusted self-reported IQ and mean-adjusted Raven's test was an abysmal .2. Among posters with positive karma, the correlation was .45; among posters without positive karma, the correlation was -.11.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 11:49:43PM 2 points [-]

Thank you for these numbers, Vaniver! I should have thanked you sooner. I had become quite busy (partly with preparing my new endless September post) so I did not show up to thank you promptly. Sorry about that.

Comment author: RobertLumley 09 December 2012 07:07:49AM *  0 points [-]

My point is that as LW was founded largely as a way of drumming up support for SIAI. The fact that they want to and are making efforts to grow LW in number should make it utterly unsurprising that we are regressing to the mean.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 11:37:09PM *  0 points [-]

Then what do you make of this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

Yes, when Eliezer made this place, he was frustrated that people didn't seem, to him, to understand the deal with AI / existential risk, but he also really cares about this place as a garden of it's own and I don't think he wants a large quantity of users as much as he wants quality thinking going on.

Nor does he want "support for SIAI" - he does not want undiscriminating skeptics or followers like Ayn Rand had who did what she did without thinking for themselves about it.

Considering those two constraints, I figure LW is not largely about getting support for SIAI, but largely about raising the sanity waterline. He believes that if the sanity waterline raises, people will be able to see the value of his ideas. He acknowledges, also, that you can't capture all the value you create, and I believe he said he expected most of the benefits from this site to be applied elsewhere, not necessarily benefiting SIAI.

Comment author: Kindly 09 December 2012 04:59:57PM 0 points [-]

Same here, but I have no clue how to address this problem. I suspect making discussion posts complaining about people complaining about cultural erosion would be the wrong approach.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 11:18:27PM *  0 points [-]

(nevermind)

Comment author: Vaniver 09 December 2012 09:03:54PM 8 points [-]

The fear is that this is due to a selection effect. Of the people I know through LW, a disappointing number have stopped reading the site. One of my hobbies, for over a decade now, has been posting on forums, and so the only way I'd stop reading / posting on LW is if I find a forum more relevant to my interests. (For the curious, I've moved from 3rd edition D&D to xkcd to here over that timeframe, and only post in xkcd's MLP and gaming threads these days.) For many of the former LWers I know, forum-posting isn't one of their hobbies, and they came here for the excellent content, primarily by EY. Now that there aren't blog posts that they want to read frequently enough, they don't come, and I'm not sure that any of them even know that EY has started posting a new sequence.

I think that this fear is mostly misplaced, because the people in that class generally aren't the people posting the good content, and I think any attempt to improve LW should be along the lines of "more visible good content" and not "less bad content," but it's important for evaporative cooling reasons to periodically assess the state of content on LW.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 11:14:32PM *  1 point [-]

I wonder if it would make a big difference to add email notifications... perhaps the type where you only receive the notification when something over X number of karma is posted?

That would keep users from forgetting about the site entirely. And draw more attention and karma (aka positive reinforcement) to those who post quality things.

Hmm that would also keep older users logging in, which would help combat both trending toward the mean and new users outstripping acculturation capacity.

Comment author: Decius 09 December 2012 09:50:27PM 2 points [-]

That's not a problem unless it's false. Almost all evidence and statements to the contrary are less reliable than my belief regarding what's true.

That's a very expensive state to maintain, since I got that way by altering my internal description of what's true to match the most reliable evidence that I can find...

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 10:59:23PM *  2 points [-]

I don't think I am right about everything, but I relate to this. I am not perfectly rational. But I decided to tear apart and challenge all my cached thoughts around half my life ago (well over a decade before Eliezer wrote about cached thoughts of course, but it's a convenient term for me now) and ever since then, I have not been able to see authorities the same way...

I think it would be ideal if we were all to strive to do enough hard work that we've successfully altered our internal description of what's true to match the most reliable evidence on so many different topics as to be able to see fatal flaws in the authoritative views more often than not.

Considering the implications of the first three links in this post that accomplishment may not be an unrealistic one and sadly, I don't say this because I think we're all so incredibly smart, but because the world is so incredibly broken.

Did you start questioning early as well?

Comment author: katydee 09 December 2012 07:34:06AM *  6 points [-]

I think you would find me less frustrating if you provided more context.

I think LessWrong as a whole would find you less frustrating if you assumed most comments from established users on domain-specific concepts or facts were more likely to be correct than your own thoughts and updated accordingly.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 10:39:03PM *  4 points [-]

I think LessWrong as a whole would find you less frustrating if you assumed most comments from established users on domain-specific concepts or facts were more likely to be correct

Agreed. That's easier. However, sometimes the easier way is not the correct way.

In a world where the authoritative "facts" can be wrong more often than they're right, scientists often take a roughly superstitious approach to science and the educational system isn't even optimized for the purpose of educating what reason do I have to believe that any authority figure or expert or established user is more likely to be correct?

I wish I could trust other's information. I have wished that my entire life. It is frequently exhausting and damn hard to question this much of what people say. But I want to be correct, not merely pleasant, and that's life.

Eliezer intended for us to question authority. I'd have done it anyway because I started doing that ages ago. But he said in no uncertain terms that this is what he wants:

In Two More Things to Unlearn from School he warns his readers that "It may be dangerous to present people with a giant mass of authoritative knowledge, especially if it is actually true. It may damage their skepticism."

In Cached Thoughts he tells you to question what HE says. "Now that you've read this blog post, the next time you hear someone unhesitatingly repeating a meme you think is silly or false, you'll think, "Cached thoughts." My belief is now there in your mind, waiting to complete the pattern. But is it true? Don't let your mind complete the pattern! Think!"

Perhaps there is a way to be more pleasant while still questioning everything. If you can think of something, I will consider it.

Comment author: drethelin 09 December 2012 09:26:29AM 1 point [-]

It's a specific problem Epiphany has that she assumes her own internal monologue of what's true is far more reliable than any evidence or statements to the contrary.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 10:26:02PM 0 points [-]

Give three examples.

Comment author: Vaniver 09 December 2012 08:38:38PM *  0 points [-]

The bad news is that LessWrong's IQ average has decreased on each survey. It can be argued that it's not decreasing by a lot or we don't have enough data, but if the data is good, LessWrong has lost 52% of it's giftedness since March of 2009.

What? The inflated self-estimates have dramatically declined towards more likely numbers. Shouldn't we be celebrating a decrease in bias?

Edit: My analysis of the public survey data; in particular, the number of responders is a huge part of the estimate. If you assume every non-responder has, on average, an IQ of 100, the total average LW IQ is 112. Much of the work might be done by the selection effects of self-reporting.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 09:50:14PM *  1 point [-]

This might be virtuous doubt. Have you considered the opposite?

See Also:

Luke's article on overconfident pessimism.

My IQ related links in the OP.

Comment author: Kindly 09 December 2012 08:33:05PM *  6 points [-]

Although 52% is a figure you calculate with math, describing it as "losing giftedness" is not math. Math is not about dividing numbers by other numbers; it's about figuring out which numbers are the correct ones to divide.

What you have calculated, as far as I know, is that the IQ mean has moved 52% of the way towards an arbitrary cutoff point. I have two objections to this:

  1. The arbitrary cutoff point. Why should we specifically care about whether someone's IQ exceeds 132?

  2. More importantly, even if we did care about this, the correct measure would be the number (or proportion) of people on LW with an IQ of 132+. We can get some idea of what this is from gwern's reply, but the decrease in this is nowhere near 52%.

Edit: to be clear, I think that the "7-point drop in IQ" figure is the initial figure to report. Further analysis might reveal that this drop is due to new users arriving with a new IQ distribution, or to older users leaving at a rate dependent on IQ, or a mix of the two; that would also be useful to know, and report details on.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 09:11:08PM *  -1 points [-]

No matter what cutoff point I choose for the giftedness calculations, it will be argued that it is the wrong cutoff point. There are a lot of definitions of giftedness, and there's a lot of controversy over how giftedness should be defined. There's nothing I can do about that.

The reason I chose IQ 132 (or rather the top 2% which can vary from one test to another) is explained in the comment I linked to about this. Briefly: if you have that IQ, you qualify as gifted by most IQ based definitions of giftedness.

The most relevant thing about this IQ is that the research on giftedness tends to be done on people who have IQs over 132. I could have picked 110, but there would be very little research to read about "gifted" people with an IQ of 110. Conversely, had I picked 180, you'd be hard pressed to find any research at all. I looked once and found exactly one book on that IQ range. It's full of case studies. Those people are so rare, that this is about all they could do.

I picked the top 2% because although there's no standard, it is as close to a standard as I've got.

I decided to do the math anyway, and I'm content with having chosen a number that's connected to something meaningful: most of the research on giftedness. (Yes there are meaningful connections between IQ and all kinds of things. It's a common myth to assume IQ is only a number. It's not.)

Since there really isn't an IQ threshold that could have been chosen that would not be controversial, what would you have done?

Comment author: pleeppleep 09 December 2012 02:47:05PM *  18 points [-]

I'm disappointed in some of you. Am I the only person who prefers feeling elitist and hipstery to spreading rationality?

In all seriousness, though, I don't see why this is getting down voted. Eternal September probably isn't our biggest issue, but the massive increase in users is likely to cause problems, and those problems should be addressed. I personally don't like the idea of answering the horde of newbies with restrictions based on seniority or karma. That's not really fair and can select for poster who have used up their best ideas while shutting out new viewpoints. I much prefer the calls for restrictions based on merit and understanding, like the rationality quiz proposed below, or attempts to enlighten new users or even older users who have forgotten some of the better memes here. I also like the idea of a moderator of some kind, but my anti-authoritarian tendencies make me wary of allotting that person too much power as they are assuredly biased and will have a severely limited ability to control all the content here, which will generate unfairness and turn some people off.

I doubt that endless September is the main problem here, but I think it's pretty clear that this site just isn't as useful, or more importantly, fun, as it used to be. I notice that I come here less and less every day, and that more and more opinions that should be presented in discussions just aren't.

I think we need to fix that. I maintain that Lesswrong is the best thing to ever happen to me, and I want it to keep happening to other people. We need a more general assessment of the problem and ways to solve it. I honestly do miss some of the (admittedly somewhat elitist) optimism that used to flood this site.

We're rationalists. We aimed to build gods, eradicate the plagues of the human mind, and beat death itself. We said we'd win a staring contest with the empty, uncaring abyss of reality. We sought to rewrite human knowledge; to decide what, over the past 8 thousand years, was useful, and what wasn't.

If we can't keep one little community productive, we might as well hang up our hats and let the world get turned into paper clips, cause we've shown there's not much we can do to about it one way or the other.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 08:09:05PM *  0 points [-]

Eternal September probably isn't our biggest issue

What would that be in your opinion?

the massive increase in users is likely to cause problems, and those problems should be addressed.

Thank you pleeppleep for bringing this up. I am especially curious about why this thread has been hovering between -3 and 1 karma when the majority of people are concerned about this, and have chosen a solution for at least one problem. If you get any theories, please let me know.

more and more opinions that should be presented in discussions just aren't.

People have theorized that the users who might post these discussions are too intimidated to post. Do you have additional theories, or do you think this is the problem, too?

I maintain that Lesswrong is the best thing to ever happen to me

It is one of the best things that's happened to me, too. I feel strongly about protecting it.

We need a more general assessment of the problem and ways to solve it.

How would you describe the problem? What would you suggest for ways to assess it?

I honestly do miss some of the (admittedly somewhat elitist) optimism that used to flood this site.

What do you mean by that exactly? (No, I will not bite your head off about elitism. I have strong feelings about specific the type of elitism that means abusing others with the excuse that one is "better than" them, but I am curious to hear about any and all other varieties.)

We're rationalists. We aimed to build gods, eradicate the plagues of the human mind, and beat death itself. We said we'd win a staring contest with the empty, uncaring abyss of reality. We sought to rewrite human knowledge. To decide what, over the past 8 thousand years, was useful, and what wasn't.

Wow. That's inspirational. Okay, I think I know what "elitist optimism" means now. I don't agree with the goal of building gods (an awesome idea but super dangerous), but I want to quote this in places. I will need to find places to quote it in.

If we can't keep one little community productive, we might as well hang up our hats and let the world get turned into paper clips, cause we've shown there's not much we can do to about it one way or the other.

Upvote. (:

Comment author: FiftyTwo 09 December 2012 02:40:53AM 4 points [-]

Also, why is there no option for "new users are a good thing?"

Maybe a diversity of viewpoints might be a good thing? How can you raise the sanity waterline by only talking to yourself?

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 07:35:00PM *  5 points [-]

The question is asking you:

"Assuming user is of right type/attitude, too many users for acculturation capacity."

Imagine this: There are currently 13,000 LessWrong users (well more since that figure was for a few months ago and there's been a Summit since then) and about 1,000 are active. Imagine LesWrong gets Slashdotted - some big publication does an article on us, and instead of portraying LessWrong as "Cold and Calculating" or something similar to Wired's wording describing the futurology Reddit where SingInst had posted about AI "A sub-reddit dedicated to preventing Skynet" they actually say something good like "LessWrong solves X Problem". Not infeasible since some of us do a lot of research and test our ideas.

Say so many new users join in the space of a month and there are now twice as many new active users as older active users.

This means 2/3 of LessWrong is clueless, posting annoying threads, and acting like newbies. Suddenly, it's not possible to have intelligent conversation about the topics you enjoy on LessWrong anymore without two people throwing strawman arguments at you and a third saying things that show obvious ignorance of the subject. You're getting downvoted for saying things that make sense, because new users don't get it, and the old users can't compensate for that with upvotes because there aren't enough of them.

THAT is the type of scenario the question is asking about.

I worded it as "too many new users for acculturation capacity" because I don't think new users are a bad thing. What I think is bad is when there are an overwhelming number of them such that the old users become alienated or find it impossible to have normal discussions on the forum.

Please do not confuse "too many new users for acculturation capacity" with "new users are a bad thing".

Comment author: FiftyTwo 09 December 2012 02:43:18AM 1 point [-]

I'm curious, how do you propose spreading ideas or raising the sanity waterline without bringing in new people?

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 02:56:15AM *  2 points [-]

Firstly, it is not my view that we should not bring in new people. My view is that if we bring in too many new people at once, it will be intolerable for the old users and they will leave. That won't raise the sanity waterline as effectively as growing the site at a stable pace.

Secondly, the poll has an option "Send beginners to the Center for Applied Rationality" (spelled "Modern" not "Applied" in the poll because I was unaware that CFMR changed it's name to CFAR).

Comment author: Nornagest 09 December 2012 01:24:38AM 0 points [-]

The option I wanted to see but didn't was something along the lines of "somewhat, but not because of cultural erosion".

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 01:55:34AM *  0 points [-]

Well, I did not imagine all the possibilities for what concerns you guys would have in order to choose verbiage sufficiently vague enough that those options would work as perfect catch-alls, but I did as for "other causes" in the comments, and I'm interested to see the concerns that people are adding like "EY stopped posting" and "We don't have enough good posters" which aren't about cultural erosion, but about a lapse in the stream of good content.

If you have concerns about the future of LessWrong not addressed so far in this discussion, please feel free to add them to the comments, however unrelated they are to the words used in my poll.

Comment author: Alicorn 09 December 2012 01:23:22AM 12 points [-]

So, you assigned a higher probability to there being two organizations from the same people on the same subject at around the same time with extremely similar names and my correction being mistaken in spite of my immersion in the community in real life... than to you having out-of-date information about the organization's name?

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 01:44:24AM *  -2 points [-]

The possibility that the organization had changed it's name did not occur to me. I wish you would have just said "It changed it's name."

As for why I did not assume you knew better than me: The fact that the article was right there talking about the "Center for Modern Rationality" contradicted your information.

I have never met an infallible person, so in the event that I have information that contradicts yours, I will probably think that you're wrong.

It's nice when all the possibilities for why my information contradicts others occurs to me so that I can do something like go search for whether the name of an organization was changed, but that doesn't always happen.

If you knew that it used to be called "Center for Modern Rationality" and changed it's name to "Center for Applied Rationality" why did you not say "It changed it's name."?

I've noticed a pattern with you: Your responses are often missing some contextual information such that I respond in a way that contradicts you. I think you would find me less frustrating if you provided more context.

Comment author: gjm 09 December 2012 01:05:45AM *  0 points [-]

What intermediate options would you suggest?

I have no particular opinion on what exactly should be in the poll (and it's probably too late now to change it without making the results less meaningful than they'd be without the change). But the sort of thing that's conspicuously missing might be expressed thus: "It's possible that a huge influx of new users might make things worse in these ways, or that it's already doing so, and I'm certainly not prepared to state flatly that neither is the case, but I also don't see any grounds for calling it likely or for getting very worried about it at this point."

The poll doesn't have any answers that fit into your category 2. There's "very concerned" and "somewhat concerned", both of which I'd put into category 1, and then there's "not at all".

Check boxes: Oh, OK. I'd thought there was a workaround by making a series of single-option multiple-choice polls, but it turns out that when you try to do that you get told "Polls must have at least two choices". If anyone with the power to change the code is reading this, I'd like to suggest that removing this check would both simplify the code and make the system more useful. An obvious alternative would be to add checkbox polls, but that seems like it would be more work.

[EDITED to add: Epiphany, I see you got downvoted. For the avoidance of doubt, it wasn't by me.]

[EDITED again to add: I see I got downvoted too. I'd be grateful if someone who thinks this comment is unhelpful could explain why; even after rereading it, it still looks OK to me.]

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 01:29:24AM *  0 points [-]

it's probably too late now to change it without ...

Yes. I asked because my mind drew a blank on intermediate options between some problem and none. I interpreted some problem as being intermediate between problem and no problem.

"It's possible that a huge influx of new users might make things worse in these ways, or that it's already doing so, and I'm certainly not prepared to state flatly that neither is the case, but I also don't see any grounds for calling it likely or for getting very worried about it at this point."

Ok, so your suggested option would be (to make sure I understand) something like "I'm not convinced either way that there's a problem or that there's no problem).

Maybe what you wanted was more of a "What probability of a problem is there?" not "Is there a problem or not, is it severe or mild?"

Don't know how I would have combined probability, severity and urgency into the same question, but that would have been cool.

I'd thought there was a workaround by making a series of single-option multiple-choice polls

I considered that (before knowing about the two options requirement) but (in addition to the other two concerns) that would make the poll really long and full of repetition and I was trying to be as concise as possible because my instinct is to be verbose but I realize I'm doing a meta thread and that's not really appreciated on meta threads.

Epiphany, I see you got downvoted. For the avoidance of doubt, it wasn't by me.

Oh, thank you. (:

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 09 December 2012 01:03:48AM 3 points [-]

Was Mensa's test conducted on the internet? The internet has a systematic bias in personalities. For example, reddit subscriptions to each personality type reddit favor Introversion and Intuition 4,828 INTJ 4,457 INTP 1,817 INFP 1,531 INFJ

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 01:18:44AM *  2 points [-]

I don't have any more data than that, sorry.

To suggest that people on the internet may have certain personality types is a good suggestion, but it raises two questions:

  • Might your example of Reddit be similar to LW because LW gets lots of users from Reddit? (Or put another way, if the average LessWronger is gifted, maybe "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" and Reddit has lots of gifted people, too.)

  • Might gifted people gather in large numbers on the internet because it's easier to find people with similar interests? (Just because people on the internet tend to have those personality types, it doesn't mean they're not gifted.)

As for "the internet" having a systematic bias in personalities, I would like to see the evidence of this that's not based on a biased sample. It's likely that the places you go to find people like you will, well, have people like you, so even if you (or somebody else on one of those sites) observed a pattern in personality types across sites they hang out on, the sample is likely to be biased.

Comment author: Alicorn 09 December 2012 12:32:15AM *  7 points [-]

No. You're wrong. They changed it, which you would know if you clicked my link.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 12:56:44AM *  0 points [-]

I thought there were two centers for rationality, one being the "Center for Modern Rationality" and the other being the "Center for Applied Rationality". Adding a link to one of them didn't rule out the possibility of there being a second one.

Comment author: faul_sname 09 December 2012 12:34:10AM 16 points [-]

You're focusing on negative reinforcement for bad comments. What we need is positive reinforcement for good comments. Because there are so many ways for a comment to be bad, discouraging any given type of bad comment will do effectively nothing to encourage good comments.

"Don't write bad posts/comments" is not what we want. "Write good posts/comments" is what we want, and confusing the two means nothing will get done.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 12:48:01AM 0 points [-]

That's a good observation but for the record, the solution ideas were created by the group, not just me.

If you want to see more positive reinforcement suggestions being considered, why not share a few of yours?

Comment author: printing-spoon 09 December 2012 12:14:05AM *  30 points [-]

I think this site is dying because there's nothing interesting to talk about anymore. Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles, and idea threads where the highest comment has more votes than the thread itself (i.e. a crappy idea). Main is not much better. Go to archive.org and compare (date chosen randomly, aside from being a while ago). I don't think eternal september is the whole explanation here -- you only need 1 good user to write a good article.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 12:39:42AM 1 point [-]

Do you have a theory as to why there aren't enough good users, or why they are not writing good articles?

Comment author: gjm 09 December 2012 12:34:12AM 9 points [-]

Why do the first three questions have four variations on the theme of "new users are likely to erode the culture" and nothing intermediate between that and "there is definitely no problem at all"?

Why ask for the "best solution" rather than asking "which of these do you think are good ideas"?

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 12:37:27AM *  1 point [-]

Why do the first three questions have four variations on the theme of "new users are likely to erode the culture" and nothing intermediate between that and "there is definitely no problem at all"?

Why do you not see the "eroded the culture" options as intermediate options? The way I see it is there are three sections of answers that suggest a different level of concern:

  1. There's a problem.
  2. There's some cultural erosion but it's not a problem (Otherwise you'd pick #1.)
  3. There's not a problem.

What intermediate options would you suggest?

Why ask for the "best solution" rather than asking "which of these do you think are good ideas"?

A. Because the poll code does not make check boxes where you select more than one. It makes radio buttons where you can select only one.

B. I don't have infinite time to code every single idea.

If more solutions are needed, we can do another vote and add the best one from that (assuming I have time). One thing at a time.

Comment author: Alicorn 09 December 2012 12:18:33AM 3 points [-]

It's the Center for Applied Rationality, not Modern Rationality.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 December 2012 12:27:24AM *  -2 points [-]

No, actually, there is a "Center for Modern Rationality" which Eliezer started this year:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bpi/center_for_modern_rationality_currently_hiring/

Here is where they selected the name:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/9lx/help_name_suggestions_needed_for_rationalityinst/5wb8

The reason I selected it for the poll is because they are talking about creating online training materials. It would be more effective to send someone to something online from a website than to send them somewhere IRL from a website as only half of us are in the same country.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 December 2012 11:42:32PM *  0 points [-]

Endless September Poll:

I condensed the feedback I got in the last few threads into a summary of pros and cons of each solution idea if you would like to something for reference.


How concerned should we be about LessWrong's culture being impacted by:

...overwhelming user influx?

...trending toward the mean?

...some other cause?

(Please explain the other causes in the comments.)


Which is the best solution for:

...overwhelming user influx?

(Assuming user is of right type/attitude, too many users for acculturation capacity.)


...trending toward the mean?

(Assuming user is of wrong type/attitude, regardless of acculturation capacity.)


...other cause of cultural collapse?

Note: Ideas that involve splitting the registered users into multiple forums were not included for the reasons explained here.

Note: "The Center for Modern Rationality" was renamed to "The Center for Applied Rationality".

Submitting...

Poll - Is endless September a threat to LW and what should be done?

4 Epiphany 08 December 2012 11:42PM

Various people raised concerns that growth might ruin the culture after reading my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread.  There has been some discussion about whether endless September, a phenomenon that kills online discussion groups, is a significant threat to LessWrong and what can be done.  I really care about it, so I volunteered to code a solution myself for free if needed.  Luke invited debate on the subject (the debate is here) and will be sent the results of this poll and asked to make a decision.  It was suggested by him in an email that I wait a little while and then post my poll (meta threads are apparently annoying to some, so we let people cool off).  Here it is, preceded by a Cliff's notes summary of the concerns.


Why this is worth your consideration:

 - Yvain and I checked the IQ figures in the survey against other data this time, and the good news is that it's more believable that the average LessWronger is gifted.  The bad news is that LessWrong's IQ average has decreased on each survey.  It can be argued that it's not decreasing by a lot or we don't have enough data, but if the data is good, LessWrong's average has lost 52% of it's giftedness since March of 2009.

 - Eliezer documented the arrival of poseurs (people who superficially copycat cultural behaviors - they are reported to over-run subcultures) which he termed "Undiscriminating Skeptics".

 - Efforts to grow LessWrong could trigger an overwhelming deluge of newbies.

 - LessWrong registrations have been increasing fast and it's possible that growth could outstrip acculturation capacity. (Chart here)

 - The Singularity Summit appears to cause a deluge of new users that may have similar effect to the September deluges of college freshman that endless September is named after.  (This chart shows a spike correlated with the 2011 summit where 921 users joined that month, which is roughly equal to the total number of active users LW tends to have in a month if you go by the surveys or Vladmir's wget.)

 - A Slashdot effect could result in a tsunami of new users if a publication with lots of readers like the Wall Street Journal (they used LessWrong data in this article) decides to write an article on LessWrong.

 - The sequences contain a lot of the culture and are long meaning that "TLDR" may make LessWrong vulnerable to cultural disintegration.  (New users may not know how detailed LW culture is or that the sequences contain so much culture.  I didn't.)

 - Eliezer said in August that the site was "seriously going to hell" due to trolls.

 - A lot of people raised concerns.

 

Two Theories on How Online Cultures Die:


  Overwhelming user influx.
  There are too many new users to be acculturated by older members, so they form their own, larger new culture and dominate the group.

  Trending toward the mean. 
  A group forms because people who are very different want a place to be different together.  The group attracts more people that are closer to mainstream than people who are equally different because there are more mainstream people than different people.  The larger group attracts people who are even less different in the original group's way for similar reasons.  The original group is slowly overwhelmed by people who will never understand because they are too different.

 

Poll Link:

Endless September Poll.


Request for Feedback:

In addition to constructive criticism, I'd also like the following:

  • Your observations of a decline or increase in quality, culture or enjoyment at LessWrong, if any.

  • Ideas to protect the culture.

  • Ideas for tracking cultural erosion.

  • Ways to test the ideas to protect the culture.

 

Comment author: NonComposMentis 02 December 2012 09:56:49PM *  1 point [-]

The people who take the survey know that their IQ contribution is going to be watered down by the 1000 other people taking the survey.

I have thought of that. But a person who wants to lie about his IQ would think this way: If I lie and other LWers do not, it is true that my impact on the average calculated IQ will be negligible, but at least it will not be negative; but if I lie and most other LWers also lie, then the collective upward bias will lead to a very positive result which would portray me in a good light when I associate myself with other LWers. So there is really no incentive to not lie.

(I'm not saying that they definitely lied; I'm merely pointing out that this is something to think about.)

How likely is it, do you think, that this group of rationality-loving people has reasoned that claiming to have joined a group that anybody can join is a good way to brag about their awesomeness?

Fair point; but very often the kind of clubs you join does indicate something about your personality and interests, regardless of whether you are actually an active/contributing member or not. Saying "I read LessWrong" or "I joined LessWrong" certainly signals to me that you are more intelligent than someone who joined, say, Justin Bieber's fan club, or the Twilight fan-fiction club. And if there are numbers showing that LW readers tend to have IQs in the gifted range, naturally I would think that X is probably quite intelligent just by virtue of the fact that X reads LW.

One last point is that LWers might not be deliberately lying: Perhaps they were merely victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect when self-reporting IQs. I am not sure if there are any studies showing that intelligent people are generally less likely to fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Last but not least, I would again like to suggest that future surveys include questions asking people how much time they spent on average preparing for exams such as the SAT and the ACT -- as I pointed out previously, scores on such exams can be very significantly improved just by studying hard, whereas tests like iqtest.dk actually measure your native intelligence.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 December 2012 06:32:16AM 1 point [-]

there is really no incentive to not lie.

Not true. It would probably take at least 20 minutes to fudge all the stuff that has to be fudged. When you're already fatigued from filling out survey questions, that's even less desirable at that time. At best, this would be falling for a Pascal's mugging. True that some people may. But would the majority of survey participants... at a site about rationality?

Perhaps they were merely victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect when self-reporting IQs

They were not asked to assess their own IQ they were asked to report the results of a real assessment. To report something other than the results of a real assessment is a type of lie in this case.

I would again like to suggest that future surveys include questions asking people how much time they spent on average preparing for exams

That's a suggestion for Yvain. I don't assist with the surveys.

Comment author: JonatasMueller 02 December 2012 05:26:14PM *  8 points [-]

As I mentioned previously, and judging from the graphs, the standard deviations of the IQs are obviously mixed up, because they were not determined in the questionnaire, and probably people who answered are not educated about them either. Including IQs in s.d. 24 with those in s.d. 16 and 15 is bound to inflate the average IQ. The top scores in that graph, or at the very least some of them, are in s.d. 24, which means that they would be a lot lower in s.d. 15. IQ 132 is the cutoff for s.d. 16, while s.d. 15 is the one most adopted in recent scientific literature. For s.d. 24, it is 148. Mensa and often people on the press like to use s.d. 24 to sound more impressive to amateurs.

This probably makes tests like the SAT more reliable as an estimation, because they have the same standard for all who submitted their scores, although in this case the ceiling effect would become apparent, because perfect or nearly-perfect scores wouldn't go upwards of a certain IQ.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 08:23:31PM 2 points [-]

Ooh, you bring up good points. These are a source of noise, for sure.

Now I'm wondering if there are any clever ways to compensate for any of these and remove that noise from the survey...

Comment author: Swimmer963 02 December 2012 01:27:11PM 0 points [-]

If you decide to do mental stamina experiments, definitely let me know!

I hadn't actually thought of that before...but it's an awesome idea! I will let you know if I get around to it.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 08:17:35PM 0 points [-]

Woo-hoo! (:

Comment author: [deleted] 02 December 2012 12:11:50PM 1 point [-]

An interesting experiment would be to see if there's anything that restores your stamina like a bath, a 20 minute nap after work, meditation, watching TV, or playing a fun game.

I've also found that pouring lots of cold water on my face helps me squeeze out the last drops of stamina I have left, and allow me to work twenty more minutes or so. (It doesn't actually restore stamina, so it doesn't work if I do that more than a couple times in a row.)

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 08:16:46PM 0 points [-]

Hmmm. That might be one or a combination of the following:

  1. Taking a five minute break.
  2. Enjoying physical sensation. (Enjoyment seems to restore stamina for me, perhaps that's because the brain uses neurotransmitters for processing, and triggering pleasure involves increasing the amount of certain neurotransmitters.)

    Fifteen minute breaks are supposed to be optima, and if you maximized pleasure during your break, I wonder what amount of stamina that would restore?

Comment author: [deleted] 02 December 2012 11:59:26AM 2 points [-]

It would be interesting to see if you'd get different types of fatigue from doing different kinds of activities.

That happens to me, too.

In response to comment by [deleted] on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 08:06:29PM 2 points [-]

What are your fatigue symptoms? How much can you do of each activity before becoming fatigued?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 December 2012 11:18:45AM 0 points [-]

I think mental stamina is an important concept.

I'll add mental exuberance (not an ideally clear word, but I don't have a better one)-- how much people feel an impulse to think.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 08:05:00PM *  1 point [-]

Nancy, there is already a term for this. It's "intellectual overexcitability" or "intellectual supersensitivity". These are terms from Dabrowski. Look up the "Theory of Positive Disintegration" to learn more.

Comment author: NonComposMentis 02 December 2012 08:44:05AM *  7 points [-]

That most people lied about their IQ, and fudged their SAT, ACT and personality type data to match, or that they're telling the truth?

Scores on standardized tests like SAT and ACT can be improved via hard work and lots of practice -- there are abundant practice books out there for such tests. It is entirely conceivable that those self-reported IQs were generated via comparing scores on these standardized tests against IQ-conversion charts. I.e., with very hard work, the apparent IQs are in the 130+ range according to these standardised tests; but when it comes to tests that measure your native intelligence (e.g., iqtest.dk), the scores are significantly lower. In future years, it would be advisable for the questionnaire to ask participants how much time they spent in total to prepare for tests such as SAT and ACT -- and even then you might not get honest answers. That brings me to the point of lying...

it's not like the liars are likely to get anything out of boasting anonymously

Not necessarily true. If the survey results show that LWers generally have IQs in the gifted range, then it allows LWers to signal their intelligence to others just by identifying themselves as LWers. People would assume that you probably have an IQ in the gifted range if you tell them that you read LW. In this case, everyone has an incentive to fudge the numbers.

erratio has also pointed out that participants might have answered those personality tests untruthfully in order to signal intelligence, so I shan't belabour the point here.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 07:59:37PM *  2 points [-]

People would assume that you probably have an IQ in the gifted range if you tell them that you read LW. In this case, everyone has an incentive to fudge the numbers.

Ok, now here is a motive! I still find it difficult to believe that:

  1. Most of 1000 people care so much about status that they're willing to prioritize it over truth, especially since this is LessWrong where we gather around the theme of rationality. If there's anyplace you'd think it would be unlikely to find a lot of people lying about things on a survey, it's here.

  2. The people who take the survey know that their IQ contribution is going to be watered down by the 1000 other people taking the survey. Unless they have collaborated by PM and have made a pact to fudge their IQ test figures, these frequently math oriented people must know that fudging their IQ figure is going to have very, very little impact on the average that Yvain calculates. I do not know why they'd see the extra work as worthwhile considering the expected amount of impact. Thinking that fudging only one of the IQs is going to be worthwhile is essentially falling for a Pascal's mugging.

  3. Registration at LessWrong is free and it's not exclusive. At all. How likely is it, do you think, that this group of rationality-loving people has reasoned that claiming to have joined a group that anybody can join is a good way to brag about their awesomeness?

I suppose you can argue that people who have karma on their accounts can point to that and say "I got karma in a gifted group" but lurkers don't have that incentive. All lurkers can say is "I read LessWrong." but that is harder to prove and even less meaningful than "I joined LessWrong".

Putting the numbers where our mouths are:

If the average IQ for lurkers / people with low karma on LessWrong is pretty close to the average IQ for posters and/or people with karma on LessWrong, would you say that the likelihood of post-making/karma-bearing LessWrongers lying on the survey in order to increase other's status perceptions of them is pretty low?

Do you want to get these numbers? I'll probably get them later if you don't, but I have a pile of LW messages and a bunch of projects going on right now so there will be a delay and a chance that I completely forget.

Comment author: Desrtopa 02 December 2012 07:17:36AM 5 points [-]

What did they do when you saw them?

I didn't. I don't particularly have to go out of my way to find Twilight fans, but if I did, I wouldn't.

How do we distinguish the difference between the kind of fanaticism that mentally unbalanced people display for, say, a show that is considered by many to have unhealthy themes and the kind of excitement that normal people display for the things they love? Maybe Twilight isn't the best example here.

I think you're dramatically overestimating the degree to which fans of Twilight are psychologically abnormal. Harlequin romance was already an incredibly popular genre known for having unhealthy themes. Twilight, like Eragon, is a mostly typical work of its genre with a few distinguishing factors which sufficed to garner it extra attention, which expanded to the point of explosive popularity as it started drawing in people who weren't already regular consumers of the genre.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 07:44:34PM 3 points [-]

I think you're dramatically overestimating the degree to which fans of Twilight are psychologically abnormal.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is true.

This still does not answer the question "What sample can we use that filters out fanaticism from mentally unbalanced people to compare the type of excitement that gifted people feel to the type of excitement that everyone else feels?" Not to assume that no gifted people are mentally unbalanced... I suppose we'd really have to filter those out of both groups.

Comment author: RobertLumley 02 December 2012 06:39:18AM 2 points [-]

Three points referred to the number of surveys taken, which I didn't bother to look up, but I believe is three.

10% and 100% referred to the time span over which these data points referred to, ie. three years. Basically, I might be OK with you making a prediction for the next three months (still probably not) but extrapolating for three years based on three years of data seems a bit much to me.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 07:41:34PM -1 points [-]

Oh I see. The problem here is that "if the trend continues" is not a prediction. "I predict the trend will continue" would be a prediction. Please read more carefully the next time. You confused me quite a bit.

Comment author: Desrtopa 02 December 2012 05:24:55AM 0 points [-]

If you have to go looking, you're lucky.

If you want to find them in person, the latest Twilight movie is still in theaters, although you've missed the people who made a point of seeing it on the day of the premier.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 05:49:22AM *  1 point [-]

If you have to go looking, you're lucky.

Haha, I guess so. I am very, very nerdy. I had fun getting worldly in my teens and early 20's, but I've learned that most people alienate me, so I've isolated myself into as much of an "ivory tower" as possible. (Which consists of me doing things like getting on my computer Saturday evenings and nerding so hard that I forget to eat.)

If you want to find them in person...

Not really.

the latest Twilight movie is still in theaters, although you've missed the people who made a point of seeing it on the day of the premier.

What did they do when you saw them?

How do we distinguish the difference between the kind of fanaticism that mentally unbalanced people display for, say, a show that is considered by many to have unhealthy themes and the kind of excitement that normal people display for the things they love? Maybe Twilight isn't the best example here.

Comment author: RobertLumley 02 December 2012 03:38:59AM 6 points [-]

I was mostly just trying to point out that you are extrapolating from a sample size of three points. Three points which have a tremendous amount of common causes that could explain the variation. Furthermore you aren't extrapolating 10% further from the span of your data, which might be ok, but actually 100% further. You're extrapolating for as long as we have data, which is... absurd.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 05:19:58AM *  0 points [-]

extrapolating from a sample size of three points

One, I am used to seeing the term "sample size" applied to things like the people being studied, not a number of points done in a calculation. If there is some valid use of the term "sample size" that I am not aware of would you mind pointing me in the correct direction?

Two, I am not sure where you're getting "three points" from. If you mean the amount of IQ points that LessWrong has lost on the studies, then it was 7.18 points, not three.

Three points which have a tremendous amount of common causes that could explain the variation.

Two points per year, which could be explained in other ways, sure. No matter what the trend, it could be explained in other ways. Even if it was ten points per year we could still say something like "The smartest people got bored taking the same survey over and over and stopped." There are always multiple ways to explain data. That possibility of other explanations does not rule out the potential that LessWrong is losing intelligent people.

Furthermore you aren't extrapolating 10% further from the span of your data, which might be ok, but actually 100% further.

Not sure what these 10% and 100% figures correspond to. If I am to understand why you said that, you will have to be specific about what you mean.

You're extrapolating for as long as we have data, which is... absurd.

Including all of the data rather than just a piece of the data is bad why?

Comment author: Desrtopa 02 December 2012 03:58:58AM 7 points [-]

Eliezer is clearly gifted and intense and he probably experiences admiration with a higher level of emotional intensity than most. If the readers of LessWrong and Hacker News are gifted, same goes for many of them. To those who feel so strongly, excited praise may seem fairly normal. To all those who do not, it probably looks crazy.

Would you predict then that people who're not gifted are in general markedly less inclined to praise things with a high level of intensity?

This seems to me to be falsified by everyday experience. See fan reactions to Twilight, for a ready-to-hand example.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 05:10:17AM 1 point [-]

Ok, where do I find them?

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 03:21:59AM *  1 point [-]

(This used to be the draft of my endless September poll)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 02 December 2012 01:57:44AM *  7 points [-]

you're actually taking the time to distinguish between 10 different amounts of confidence (10%, 20%, 30%, etc), and then making ten more tiny distinctions (30%, 31%, 32% for instance)... at least that's the way that I do it

The straightforward interpretation of your words evaluates as a falsity, as you can't estimate informal beliefs to within 1%.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 02:10:27AM 0 points [-]

Well, you can, but it would be a waste of time.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 02 December 2012 02:05:54AM *  3 points [-]

If you think figuring out stuff is instant, you underestimate the number of steps your brain does in order to figure things out.

(I was commenting on a skill/habit that might be useful in the situations where you don't/can't make the effort of explicitly reasoning about things. Don't fight the hypothetical.)

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 02:09:37AM 1 point [-]

(I was commenting on a skill that might be useful in the situations where you don't/can't make the effort of explicitly reasoning about things. Don't fight the hypothetical.)

Is it your position that there is a thinking skill that is actually accurate for figuring stuff out without thinking about it?

Comment author: katydee 01 December 2012 11:27:31PM 3 points [-]

Being rational takes more energy than being irrational. You have to put thought into it. Some people have a lot of mental energy. To refer to something less vague and more scientific: there are different levels of intelligence and different levels of intellectual supersensitivity (A term from Dabrowski that refers to how excitable certain aspects of your nervous system are.) Long story short: Some people cannot analyze constantly because it's too difficult for them to do so. They run out of juice. Perhaps you are one of those rare people who has such high stamina for analysis that you rarely run into your limit. If that's the case, it probably seems strange to you that anybody wouldn't attempt to maintain a state of constant analysis.

The point is to make these things automatic so that one doesn't have to analyze all the time. I definitely don't feel like I "maintain a state of constant analysis," even when applying purportedly advanced rationality techniques. It basically feels the same as thinking about things normally, except that I am right more often.

So in reality, the vast majority of people are not capable of the kind of constant meta-cognitive analysis that is required to be rational all the time. You use the word "ingrained" and I have seen Eliezer talk about how patterns of behavior can become habits (I assume he means that the thoughts are cached) and I think this kind of habit / ingrained response works beautifully when no decision-making is required and you can simply do the same thing that you usually do. But whenever one is trying to figure something out (like for instance working out the answers to questions on a survey) they're going to need to put additional brainpower into that.

I don't believe that your claim is true, but if it is I think LessWrong is doomed as a concept. I frankly do not think people will be able to accurately evaluate when they need to apply thinking skills to their decisions, so if we cannot teach skills on this level-- teach habits, as you say-- I do not think LessWrong will ever accomplish anything of real worth.

One example of a skill that I have taken on on this level is reference class forecasting. If I need to estimate how long something will take, my go-to method is to take the outside view. I am so used to this that it is now the automatic response to questions of estimating times.

As I used my brainpower rationing strategies, it dawned on me that others ration brainpower, too. I see it all the time. Suddenly, I understood what they were doing. I understood why they kept telling me things like "You think too much!" They needed to change the subject so they wouldn't become mentally fatigued. :/

I don't use "brainpower rationing" because I frankly have never felt the need to do so. I have told people that they "think too much" under certain circumstances (most notably when thinking is impeding action), and the thought of "brainpower rationing" has never come to mind until I saw this post.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 01:20:45AM *  3 points [-]

What do you make of this?

I don't believe that your claim is true

Maybe I misinterpreted here but it sounds like you're saying you don't believe in mental stamina limits? Maybe you mean that you don't think rationality requires much brainpower?

but if it is I think LessWrong is doomed as a concept.

I don't think we'd be doomed, and there are a few reasons for that:

  1. There are people in existence who really can analyze pretty much constantly. THOSE people would theoretically have a pretty good chance of being rational all the time.

  2. People who cannot analyze anywhere near constantly can simply choose their battles. If they're aware of their mental stamina limits, they can work with them. Realizing you don't know stuff and that you don't have enough mental stamina to figure it out right now is kind of sad but it is still perfectly rational, so perhaps rationalists with low mental stamina can still be good rationalists that way.

  3. There are things that decrease mental fatigue. For instance, taking 15 minute breaks every 90 minutes (The book "The power of full engagement: manage energy not time" talks about this). We could do experiments on ourselves to find out what other things reduce or prevent mental fatigue. There may be low-hanging apples we're totally unaware of.

One example of a skill that I have taken on on this level is reference class forecasting. If I need to estimate how long something will take, my go-to method is to take the outside view. I am so used to this that it is now the automatic response to questions of estimating times.

Okay, so you've learned to instantly go to a certain method. I can believe that this does not take much brainpower. However, how much brainpower does it take to execute the outside view method, on average, for the types of things you use it for? How many times can you execute the outside view in a day? Have you ever tried to reach your mental stamina limit?

I don't use "brainpower rationing" because I frankly have never felt the need to do so.

Do you ever get home from work and feel relieved that you can relax now, and then do something that's not mentally taxing? Do you ever find that you're starting to hate an activity, and notice you're making more and more mistakes? Do you ever feel lazy and can't be bothered to do anything useful? I bet you do experience mental fatigue but don't recognize it as such. A lot of people just berate themselves for being unproductive, and don't consciously recognize that they've hit a real limit.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 01 December 2012 11:30:30PM *  5 points [-]

Re the problem of having to think all the time: a good start is to develop a habit of rejecting certainty about judgments and beliefs that you haven't examined sufficiently (that is, if your intuition shouts at you that something is quite clear, but you haven't thought about that for a few minutes, ignore (and mark as a potential bug) that intuition unless you understand a reliable reason to not ignore it in that case). If you don't have the stamina or incentives to examine such beliefs/judgments in more detail, that's all right, as long as you remain correspondingly uncertain, and realize that the decisions you make might be suboptimal for that reason (which should suitably adjust your incentives for thinking harder, depending on the importance of the decisions).

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 12:52:48AM *  2 points [-]

The process of choosing a probability is not quite that simple. You're not just making a boolean decision about whether you know enough to know, you're actually taking the time to distinguish between 10 different amounts of confidence (10%, 20%, 30%, etc), and then making ten more tiny distinctions (30%, 31%, 32% for instance)... at least that's the way that I do it. (More efficient than making enough distinctions to choose between 100 different options.) When you are wondering exactly how likely you are to know something in order to choose a percentage, that's when you have to start analyzing things. In order to answer the question, my thought process looked like this:

  • Bayes. I have to remember who that is. Okay, that's the guy that came up with Bayesian probability. (This was instant, but that doesn't mean it took zero mental work.)

  • Do I have his birthday in here? Nothing comes to mind.

  • Digs further: Do I have any reason to have read about his birthday at any point? No. Do I remember seeing a page about him? I can't remember anything I read about his birthday.

  • Considers whether I should just go "I don't know" and put a random year with a 0% probability. Decides that this would be copping out and I should try to actually figure this out.

  • When was Bayesian probability invented? Let's see... at what point in history would that have occurred?

  • Try to brainstorm events that may have required Bayesian probability, or that would have suggested it didn't exist yet.

  • Try to remember the time periods for when these events happened.

  • Defines a vague section of time in history.

  • Considers whether there might be some method of double-checking it.

  • Considers the meaning of "within 20 years either way" and what that means for the probability that I'm right.

  • Figures out where in my vague section of time the 40 year range should be fit.

  • Figures out which year is in the middle of the 40 year range and types it in.

  • Consider how many years Bayes would likely have to have lived for before giving his theorems to the world and adjust the year to that.

  • Considers whether it was at all possible for Bayesian probability to have existed before or after each event.

  • If possible, consider how likely it was that Baye's probability existed before/after each event.

  • Calculate how many 40-year ranges there are in the vague section of time between the events where Bayes could not have been born.

  • Calculate the chance that I chose the correct 40-year section out of all the possible sections, if odds are equal.

  • Compare this to my probabilities regarding how likely it was for Bayes theorem to have existed before and after certain events.

  • Adjust my probability figure to take all that into account.

My answer to this question took at least twenty steps, and that doesn't even count all the steps I went through for each event, nor does it count all the sub steps I went through for things that I sort of hand-waved like "Adjust my probability figure to take all that into account".

If you think figuring out stuff is instant, you underestimate the number of steps your brain does in order to figure things out. I highly recommend doing meditation to improve your meta-cognition. Meta-cognition is awesome.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 01 December 2012 11:36:01PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I can reliably recognize what mental fatigue feels like. I'd like to be able to diagnose it in myself (because I suspect that I have less mental energy than I used to), so do you know of any reasonably quick way to induce something that feels like mental fatigue, e.g. alcohol?

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 12:14:36AM *  2 points [-]

Whatever your worst subject is, do a whole bunch of exercises in it until you start making so many mistakes it is not worth continuing. No need for alcohol, might as well wear out your brain.

It would be interesting to see if you'd get different types of fatigue from doing different kinds of activities. For instance, if I do three hours of math problems, I have trouble speaking after that - it's like my symbol manipulation circuitry is fried. (I have dyslexia, so that's probably related.) If I wear out my verbal processor (something that I think only started happening to me after I developed some unexpected vitamin deficiencies) this results in irritation. I can't explain myself very well, so people jump on me for mistakes, and it's really hard to tell them what I meant instead, so I get frustrated.

So, exercising each area of mental abilities might yeild different fatigue symptoms.

If you decide to experiment on yourself I'm definitely curious about your results!

Comment author: Swimmer963 01 December 2012 11:24:44PM 7 points [-]

Long story short: Some people cannot analyze constantly because it's too difficult for them to do so. They run out of juice. Perhaps you are one of those rare people who has such high stamina for analysis that you rarely run into your limit.

Fascinating!

It's making me realize why my summer project, which was to read Eat That Frog by Brian Tracey, was such a failure. The book is meant to be applied to work, preferably in an office environment–i.e. during your 40 productive work-hours. I was already working 40 hours a week at my extremely stimulating job as a nurse's aid at the hospital, where I had barely any time to sit down and think about anything, and I certainly didn't have procrastination problems. Then I would get home, exhausted with my brain about to explode from all the new interesting stuff I'd been seeing and doing all day, and try to apply Brian Tracey's productivity methods to the personal interest projects I was doing in my spare time.

This was a very efficient way to make these things not fun, make me feel guilty about being a procrastinator, etc. It gave me an aversion to starting projects, because the part of my brain that likes and needs to do something easy and fun after work knew it would be roped into doing something mentally tiring, and that it would be made to feel guilty over not wanting to do it.

I'm hoping that once I'm graduated and work as a nurse for a year or two, so that I have a chance to get accustomed to a given unit and don't have to spend so much mental effort, I'll have more left over for outside interests and can start reading about physics and programming for fun again. (Used to be able to do this in first and second year, definitely can't now.)

Comment author: Epiphany 02 December 2012 12:00:42AM *  2 points [-]

I'm glad you seem to have benefited from my explanation. If you want to do mentally draining reading, maybe weekends or later on in the evenings after you've rested would be a good time for that? If you've rested first, you might be able to scrape up a little extra juice.

Of course everyone has their own mental stamina limit, so nobody can tell you whether you do or don't have enough stamina to do additional intellectual activities after work. And it may vary day to day, as work is not likely to demand the exact same amount of brainpower every day.

An interesting experiment would be to see if there's anything that restores your stamina like a bath, a 20 minute nap after work, meditation, watching TV, or playing a fun game. Simply laying down in a dark quiet place does wonders for me if I am stressed out or fatigued. I would love to see someone log their mental stamina over time and correlate that to different activities that might restore stamina.

There are also stress reduction techniques that may help prevent you from losing stamina in the first place that could be interesting to experiment with.

And if you're not taking 15 minute breaks every 90 minutes during work, you might be "over-training" your brain. Over-training might result in an amplification of fatigue. "The Power of Full Engagement: Manage Energy Not Time" is likely to be of interest.

If you decide to do mental stamina experiments, definitely let me know!

Comment author: erratio 01 December 2012 10:41:19PM 10 points [-]

Alternate possibility: The distribution of personality types in Mensa/LW relative to everyone else is an artifact produced by self-identified smart people trying to signal their intelligence by answering 'yes' to traits that sound like the traits they ought to have.

eg. I know that a number of the T/F questions are along the lines of "I use logic to make decisions (Y/N)", which is a no-brainer if you're trying to signal intelligence.

A hypothetical way to get around this would be to have your partner/family member/best friend next to you as you take the test, ready to call you out when your self-assessment diverges from your actual behaviour ("hold on, what about that time you decided not to go to the concert of [band you love] because you were angry about an unrelated thing?")

Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 11:17:13PM *  4 points [-]

Ok, it's possible that all of the following happened:

  • Most of the 1000 people decided to lie about their IQ on the LessWrong survey.

  • Most of the liars realized that their personality test results were going to be compared with Mensa's personality type results, and it dawned on them that this would bring their IQ lie into question.

  • Most of the liars decided that instead of simply skipping the personality test question, or taking it to experience the enjoyment of finding out their type, they were going to fudge the personality test results, too.

  • Most of the liars actually had the patience to do an additional 72 questions specifically for the purpose of continuing to support a lie when they had just slogged through 100 questions.

  • Most of the liars did all of that extra work (Researching the IQ correlation with the SAT and the ACT and fudging 72 personality type questions) when it would have been so much easier to put their real IQ in the box, or simply skip the IQ question completely because it is not required.

  • Most of the liars succeeded in fudging their personality types. This is, of course, possible, but it it is likely to be more complicated than it at first seems. They'd have to be lucky that enough of the questions give away their intelligence correlation in the wording (we haven't verified that). They'd have to have enough of an understanding of what intelligent people are like that they'd choose the right ones. Questions like these are likely to confuse a non-gifted person trying to guess which answers will make them look gifted:

"You are more interested in a general idea than in the details of its realization"

(Do intelligent people like ideas or details more?)

"Strict observance of the established rules is likely to prevent a good outcome"

(Either could be the smarter answer, depending who you ask.)

"You believe the best decision is one that can be easily changed"

(It's smart to leave your options open, but it's also more intellectually self-confident and potentially more rewarding to take a risk based on your decision-making abilities.)

"The process of searching for a solution is more important to you than the solution itself"

(Maybe intelligence makes playing with ideas so enjoyable, gifted people see having the solution as less important.)

"When considering a situation you pay more attention to the current situation and less to a possible sequence of events"

(There are those that would consider either one of these to be the smarter one.)

There were a lot of questions that you could guess are correlated with intelligence on the test, and some of them are no-brainers, but are there enough of those no-brainers with obvious intelligence correlation that a non-gifted person intent on looking as intelligent as possible would be able to successfully fudge their personality type?

  • The massive fudging didn't create some totally unexpected personality type pattern. For instance, most people are extraverted. Would they realize the intelligence implications and fudge enough extravert questions to replicate Mensa's introverted pattern? Would they know to choose the judging questions over the perceiving questions would make them look like Mensans? It makes sense that the thinking vs. feeling and intuiting vs sensing metrics would use questions that would be of the type you'd obviously need to fudge, but why would they also choose introvert and judging answers?

The survey is anonymous and we don't even know which people gave which IQ responses, let alone are they likely to receive any sort of reward from fudging their IQ score. Can you explain to me:

  • What reward would most of LessWrong want to get out of lying about their IQs?

  • Why, in an anonymous context where they can't even take credit for claiming the IQ score they provided, most of LessWrong is expecting to receive any reward at all?

  • Can you explain to me why fudged personality type data would match my predictions? Even if they were trying to match them, how would they manage it?

Comment author: Swimmer963 01 December 2012 09:35:35PM 5 points [-]

When these people encounter this question, they're slogging through this huge survey. They're not doing an IQ test. This is more casual. They're being asked stuff like "How many partners do you have?" By the time they get down to that question, they're probably in a casual answering mode, and they're probably a little tired and looking for an efficient way to finish... If we really want to test them, we need to make it clear that we're testing them.

My first thought about this is that people's rationality 'in real life' totally is determined by how likely they are to notice a Bayes question in an informal setting, where they may be tired and feeling mentally lazy. In Keith Stanovich's terms, rationality is mostly about the reflective mind: it's someone's capacity and habits to re-compute a problem's answer, using the algorithmic mind, rather than accept the intuitive default answer that their autonomous mind spits out.

IQ tests tend to be formal; it's very obvious that you're being tested. They don't measure rationality in the sense that most LWers mean it; the ability to apply thinking techniques to real life in order to do better.

It might still be valuable to know how LWers do on a more formal test of probability-related knowledge; after all, most people in the general public don't know Bayes' theorem, so it'd be neat to see how good LW is at increasing "rationality literacy". But that's not the ultimate goal. There are reasons why you might want to measure a group's ability to pick out unexpected rationality-related problems and activate the correct mindware. If your Bayesian superpowers only activate when you're being formally tested, they're not all that useful as superpowers.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 10:55:48PM *  2 points [-]

I can see why you'd criticize someone for saying "the problem is that the setting wasn't formal enough" but that's not exactly what I was getting at. What I was getting at is that there's a limit to how much thinking that one can do in a day, everyone's limit is different, and a lot of people do things to ration their brainpower so they avoid running out of it. This comment on mental stamina explains more.

My point was, more clearly worded: It would be a very rare person who possesses enough mental stamina to be rational in literally every single situation. That's a wonderful ideal, but the reality is that most people are going to ration brainpower. If your expectation is that rationalists should never ration brainpower and should be rational constantly, this is an unrealistic expectation. A more realistic expectation is that people should identify the things they need to think extra hard about, and correctly use rational thinking skills at those times. Therefore, testing for the skills when they're trying is probably the only way to detect a difference. There are inevitably going to be times when they're not trying very hard, and if you catch them at one of those times, well, you're not going to see rational thinking skills. It may be that some of these things can be ingrained in ways that don't use up a person's mental stamina, but to expect that rationality can be learned in such a way that it is applied constantly strikes me as an unreasoned assumption.

Now I wonder if the entire difference between the control groups results and LessWrong's results was that Yvain asked the control group only one question, whereas LessWrong had answered 14 pages of questions prior to that.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 09:57:18PM *  4 points [-]

IQ Trend Analysis:

The self-reported IQ results on these surveys have been, to use Yvain's wording, "ridiculed" because they'd mean that the average LessWronger is gifted. Various other questions were added to the survey this time which gives us things to check against, and the results of these other questions have made the IQ figures more believable.

Summary:

LessWrong has lost IQ points on the self-reported scores every year for a total of 7.18 IQ points in 3.7 years or about 2 points per year. If LessWrong began with 145.88 IQ points in May 2009, then LessWrong has lost over half of it's giftedness (using IQ 132 as the definition, explained below).

The self-reported figures for each year:

IQ on 03/12/2009: 145.88

IQ on 00/00/2010: Unknown*

IQ on 12/05/2011: 140

IQ on 11/29/2012: 138.7

IQ points lost each year:

2.94 IQ point drop for 2010 (Estimated*)

2.94 IQ point drop for 2011 (Estimated*)

1.30 IQ point drop for 2012

Analysis:

Average IQ points lost per year: 1.94

Total IQ points lost: 7.18 in 3.7 years

Total IQ points LessWrong had above the gifted line: 13.88 (145.88 - 132*)

Percent less giftedness on the last survey result: 52% (7.18 / 13.88)

Footnotes:

* Unknown 2010 figures: There was no 2010 survey. The first line of the 2011 survey proposition mentions that.

* Estimated IQ point drops for 2010 and 2011: I divided the 2011 IQ drop by 2 and distributed it across 10/11.

* IQ 132 significance: IQ 132 is the top 2% (This may vary a little bit from one IQ test to another) which would qualify one as gifted by every IQ-based definition I know of. It is also (roughly) Mensa's entrance requirement (depending on the test) though Mensa does not dictate the legal or psychologist's definitions of giftedness. They are a club, not a developmental psychology authority.

Comment author: RobertLumley 01 December 2012 05:14:21PM 6 points [-]

If the trend continues

we will all be brain-dead in 70 years.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 09:44:33PM *  0 points [-]

It's true that the downward trend can't go on forever, and to say that it's definitely going to continue would be (all by itself, without some other arguments) an appeal to history or slippery slope fallacy. However, when we see a trend as consistent and as potentially meaningful as the one below, it makes sense to start wondering why it is happening:

IQ Trend Analysis

Comment author: Kindly 01 December 2012 01:57:57PM 1 point [-]

Thank you, I appreciate that.

In response to comment by Kindly on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 09:06:55PM *  0 points [-]

Would you mind trying to avoid jumping to the conclusion that I'm acting stupid in the future, Kindly? I definitely don't mind being told "Your statement could be interpreted as such-and-such stupid behavior, so you may want to change it." but it's a little frustrating when people speak to me as if they really believe I am as confused as your "The True Answer" interpretation would imply.

Comment author: katydee 01 December 2012 03:59:28AM 7 points [-]

If we really want to test them, we need to make it clear that we're testing them. And if we want them to be serious about it, we have to make it clear that it's important.

Uh, what? The point of LessWrong is to make people better all the time, not just better when they think "ah, now it's time to turn on my rationality skills." If people aren't applying those skills when they don't know they're being tested, that's a very serious problem, because it means the skills aren't actually ingrained on the deep and fundamental level that we want.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 10:29:01AM *  8 points [-]

You know that, Katydee, but do all the people who are taking the survey think that way? The majority of them haven't even finished the sequences. I agree with you that it's ideal for us to be good rationalists all the time, but mental stamina is a big factor.

Being rational takes more energy than being irrational. You have to put thought into it. Some people have a lot of mental energy. To refer to something less vague and more scientific: there are different levels of intelligence and different levels of intellectual supersensitivity (A term from Dabrowski that refers to how excitable certain aspects of your nervous system are.) Long story short: Some people cannot analyze constantly because it's too difficult for them to do so. They run out of juice. Perhaps you are one of those rare people who has such high stamina for analysis that you rarely run into your limit. If that's the case, it probably seems strange to you that anybody wouldn't attempt to maintain a state of constant analysis. Most people with unusual intellectual stamina seem to view others as lazy when they observe that those other people aren't doing intellectual things all the time. It frequently does not occur to them to consider that there may be an intellectual difference. The sad truth is that most people have much lower limits on how much intellectual activity they can do in a day than "constant". If you want to see evidence of this, you can look at Ford's studies where he shows that 40 hours a week is the optimum number of hours for his employees to work. Presumably, they were just doing factory work assembling car parts, which (if it fits the stereotype of factory work being repetitive) was probably pretty low on the scale for what's intellectually demanding, but he found that if they tried to work 60 hours for two weeks in a row, their output would dip below the amount he'd normally get from 40 hours. This is because of mistakes. You'd think that the average human brain could do repetitive tasks constantly but evidently, even that tires the brain.

So in reality, the vast majority of people are not capable of the kind of constant meta-cognitive analysis that is required to be rational all the time. You use the word "ingrained" and I have seen Eliezer talk about how patterns of behavior can become habits (I assume he means that the thoughts are cached) and I think this kind of habit / ingrained response works beautifully when no decision-making is required and you can simply do the same thing that you usually do. But whenever one is trying to figure something out (like for instance working out the answers to questions on a survey) they're going to need to put additional brainpower into that.

I had an experience where, due to unexpected circumstances, I developed some vitamin deficiencies. I would run out of mental energy very quickly if I tried to think much. I had, perhaps, a half an hour of analysis available to me in a day. This is very unusual for me because I'm used to having a brain that loves analysis and seems to want to do it constantly (I hadn't tested the actual number of hours for which I was able to analyze, but I would feel bored if I wasn't doing something like psychoanalysis or problem-solving for the majority of the day). When I was deficient, I began to ration my brainpower. That sounds terrible, but that is what I did. I needed to protect my ability to analyze to make sure I had enough left over to be able to do all the tasks I needed to do each day. I could feel that slipping away while I was working on problems and I could observe what happened to me after I fatigued my brain. (Vegetable like state.)

As I used my brainpower rationing strategies, it dawned on me that others ration brainpower, too. I see it all the time. Suddenly, I understood what they were doing. I understood why they kept telling me things like "You think too much!" They needed to change the subject so they wouldn't become mentally fatigued. :/

Even if the average IQ at LessWrong is in the gifted range, that doesn't give everyone the exact same abilities, and doesn't mean that everyone has the stamina to analyze constantly. Human abilities vary wildly from person to person. Everyone has a limit when it comes to how much thinking they can do in a day. I have no way of knowing exactly what LessWrong's average limit is, but I would not be surprised if most of them use strategies for rationing brainpower and have to do things like prioritize answering survey questions lower on their list of things to "give it their all" on, especially when there are a lot of them, and they're getting tired.

Comment author: Kindly 01 December 2012 03:56:31AM 2 points [-]

If you'll excuse the expression, I'm suspicious of your sudden epiphany. That is, I accept your suggestion as a possible explanation (although I'm not convinced, mainly because this doesn't describe the way I answered the question; I don't know about anyone else). But I think saying "Oh gosh! The true answer has been staring us in the face all along!" is premature.

In response to comment by Kindly on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 09:53:52AM *  2 points [-]

I am not sure why you took "a new explanation" so seriously. I guess I have to be really careful on LessWrong to distinguish ideas from actual beliefs. I do not think it's "The True Answer". I just think it's a rather obvious alternate explanation that should have occurred to me immediately, and didn't, and I'm surprised about that, and about the fact that it didn't seem to occur to Yvain either. I reworded some things to make it more obvious that I am not trying to present this as "The True Answer" but just as an idea.

Comment author: Kindly 30 November 2012 10:35:25PM *  7 points [-]

The mean was 1768, the median 1780, and the mode 1800. Only 169 of 1006 people who answered the question got an answer within 20 years of 1701. Moreover, the three people that admitted to looking it up (and therefore didn't give a calibration) all gave incorrect answers: 1750, 1759, and 1850. So it seems like your first explanation can't be right.

After trying a bunch of modifications to the data, it seems like the best explanation is that the poor calibration happened because people didn't think about the error margin carefully enough. If we change the error margin to 80 years instead of 20, then the responses seem to look roughly like the untrained example from the graph in Yvain's analysis.

Another observation is that after we drop the 45 people who gave confidence levels >85% (and in fact, 89% of them were right), the remaining data is absolutely abysmal: the remaining answers are essentially uncorrelated with the confidence levels.

This suggests that there were a few pretty knowledgeable people who got the answer right and that was that. Everyone else just guessed and didn't know how to calibrate; this may correspond to your second explanation.

In response to comment by Kindly on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 01 December 2012 03:05:08AM *  2 points [-]

Good points, Kindly, thank you. New alternate explanation idea:

When these people encounter this question, they're slogging through this huge survey. They're not doing an IQ test. This is more casual. They're being asked stuff like "How many partners do you have?" By the time they get down to that question, they're probably in a casual answering mode, and they're probably a little tired and looking for an efficient way to finish. When they see the Bayes question, they're probably not thinking "This question is so important! They're going to be gauging LessWrong's rationality progress with it! I had better really think about this!" They're probably like "Output answer, next question."

If we really want to test them, we need to make it clear that we're testing them. And if we want them to be serious about it, we have to make it clear that it's important. I hypothesize that if we were to do a test (not a survey) and explain that it's serious because we're gauging LessWrong's progress, and also make it short so that the person can focus a lot of attention onto each question, we'd see less atrocious results.

In hindsight, I wonder why I didn't think about the effects of context before. Yvain didn't seem to either; he thought something might be wrong with the question. This seems like one of those things that is right in front of our faces but is hard to see.

I think that people may be rationing their mental stamina, and may not be going through all the steps it takes to answer this type of question.

Comment author: DaFranker 30 November 2012 03:00:03PM *  3 points [-]

Thanks for the analysis. I agree with your conclusion.

On a less relevant note, it does feel good to see more evidence that the community we hang out with is smart and awesome.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 09:01:29PM *  16 points [-]

This also explains a lot of things. People regard IQ as if it is meaningless, just a number, and they often get defensive when intellectual differences are acknowledged. I spent a lot of time doing research on adult giftedness (though I'm most interested in highly gifted+ adults) and, assuming the studies were done in a way that is useful (I've heard there are problems with this), and my personal experiences talking to gifted adults are halfway decent as representations of the gifted adult population, there are a plethora of differences that gifted adults have. For instance, in "You're Calling Who A Cult Leader?" Eliezer is annoyed with the fact that people assume that high praise is automatic evidence that a person has joined a cult. What he doesn't touch on is that there are very significant neurological differences between people in just about every way you could think of, including emotional excitability. People assume that others are like themselves, and this causes all manner of confusion. Eliezer is clearly gifted and intense and he probably experiences admiration with a higher level of emotional intensity than most. If the readers of LessWrong and Hacker News are gifted, same goes for many of them. To those who feel so strongly, excited praise may seem fairly normal. To all those who do not, it probably looks crazy. I explained more about excitability in the comments.

I also want to say (without getting into the insane amount of detail it would take to justify this to the LW crowd - maybe I will do that later, but one bit at a time) that in my opinion, as a person who has done lots of reading about giftedness and has a lot of experience interacting with gifted people and detecting giftedness, the idea that most survey respondents are giving real answers on the IQ portion of the survey seems very likely to me. I feel 99% sure that LessWrong's average IQ really is in the gifted range, and I'd even say I'm 90%+ sure that the ballpark hit on by the surveys is right. (In other words, they don't seem like a group of predominantly exceptionally or profoundly gifted Einsteins or Stephen Hawkings, or just talented people at the upper ends of the normal range with IQs near 115, but that an average IQ in the 130's / 140's range does seem appropriate.)

This says nothing about the future though... The average IQ has been decreasing on each survey for an average of about two points per year. If the trend continues, then in as many years as LessWrong has been around, LessWrong may trend so far toward the mean that LessWrong will not be gifted anymore (by all IQ standards that is, it would still be gifted by some definitions and IQ standards but not others). I will be writing a post about the future of LessWrong very soon.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 09:16:28AM *  0 points [-]

A virtuous doubt that applies to us:

Doubt that LessWrong is gifted.

Here, I consider the opposite.

I realize this isn't a prediction that people are overconfident and pessimistic about, but these are such great concepts, I would like to apply them everywhere.

In addition to my experiences where LessWrongers have been surprisingly overconfident and pessimistic about IQ claims, Yvain has also made an observation in the 2012 survey with "some people have been pretty quick to ridicule this survey's intelligence numbers as completely useless and impossible and so on". It's not just me who is encountering this, so I wonder if this might be common mistake that LessWrongers make.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 07:09:06AM *  2 points [-]

Alternate Explanations for LW's Calibration Atrociousness:

Maybe a lot of the untrained people simply looked up the answer to the question. If you did not rule that out with your study methods, then consider seeing whether a suspiciously large number of them entered the exact right year?

Maybe LWers were suffering from something slightly different from the overconfidence bias you're hoping to detect: difficulty admitting that they have no idea when Thomas Bayes was born because they feel they should really know that.

Comment author: gwern 30 November 2012 02:22:27AM 7 points [-]

(I believe Mensa's personality test results were published in the December 2006 Mensa newsletter which is, unfortunately, behind a login on the Mensa website, so I can't link to it here.)

Make a copy and post it. Most browsers have the ability to print/save pages as PDFs or various forms of HTML.

In response to comment by gwern on 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 02:24:37AM *  21 points [-]

Ok I managed to dig it up!

 E/I | S/N | T/F | J/P (Category)
----------------------------------------------
75/25 75/25 55/45 50/50 (Overall population)
27/73 10/90 75/25 65/35 (Mensans)
15/85 03/97 88/12 54/46 (LessWrongers) *

From the December 1993 Mensa Bulletin.

* The LessWrongers were added by me, using the same calculation method as in the comment where I test my personality type predictions and are based on the 2012 survey results.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 02:19:06AM *  22 points [-]

On IQ Accuracy:

As Yvain says, "people have been pretty quick to ridicule this survey's intelligence numbers as completely useless and impossible and so on" because if they're true, it means that the average LessWronger is gifted. Yvain added a few questions to the 2012 survey, including the ACT and SAT questions and the Myers-Briggs personality type question that I requested (I'll explain why this is interesting), and that give us a few other things to check against, which has made the figures more believable. The ridicule may be an example of the "virtuous doubt" that Luke warns about in Overconfident Pessimism, so it makes sense to "consider the opposite":

The distribution of Myers-Briggs personality types on LessWrong replicates the Mensa pattern. This is remarkable since the patterns of personality types here are, in many significant ways, the exact opposite of what you'd find in the regular population. For instance, the introverted rationalists and idealists are each about 1% of the population. Here, they are the majority and it's the artisans and guardians who are relegated to 1% or less of our population.

Mensa's personality test results were published in the December 1993 Mensa Bulletin. Their numbers.

So, if you believe that most of the people who took the survey lied about their IQ, you also need to believe all of the following:

  • That most of these people also realized they needed to do IQ correlation research and fudge their SAT and ACT scores in order for their IQ lie to be believable.

  • Some explanation as to why the average of lurker's IQ scores would come out so close to the average of poster's IQ scores. The lurkers don't have karma to show off, and there's no known incentive good enough to get so many lurkers to lie about their IQ score. Vaniver's figures.

  • Some explanation for why the personality type pattern at LessWrong is radically different from the norm and yet very similar to the personality type pattern Mensa published and also matched my predictions. Even if they had knowledge of the Mensa personality test results and decided to fudge their personality type responses, too, they somehow managed to fudge them in such a way that their personality types accidentally matched my predictions.

  • That they decided not to cheat when answering the Bayes birthday question even though they were dishonest enough to lie on the IQ question, motivated to look intelligent, and it takes a lot less effort to fudge the Bayes question than the intelligence and personality questions. (This was suggested by ArisKatsaris).

  • That both posters and lurkers had some motive strong enough to justify spending 20+ minutes doing the IQ correlation research and fudging personality test questions while probably bored of ticking options after filling out most of a very long survey.

It's easier just to put the real number in the IQ box than do all that work to make it believable, and it's not like the liars are likely to get anything out of boasting anonymously, so the cost-benefit ratio is just not working in favor of the liar explanation.

If you think about it in terms of Occam's razor, what is the better explanation? That most people lied about their IQ, and fudged their SAT, ACT and personality type data to match, or that they're telling the truth?


Summary of criticism:

Possible Motive to Lie: The desire to be associated with a "gifted" group:

In re to this post, it was argued by NonComposMentis that a potential motive to lie is that if the outside world perceives LessWrong as gifted, then anyone having an account on LessWrong will look high-status. In rebuttal:

  • I figure that lurkers would not be motivated to fudge their results because they don't have a bunch of karma on their account to show off and anybody can claim to read LessWrong, so fudging your IQ just to claim that the site you read is full of gifted people isn't likely to be motivating. I suggested that we compare the average IQs of lurkers and others. Vaniver did the math and they are very, very close..

  • I argued, among other things, that it would be falling for a Pascal's mugging to believe that investing the extra time (probably at least $5 worth of time for most of us) into fudging the various different survey questions is likely to contribute to a secret conspiracy to inflate LessWrong's average IQ.

Did the majority avoid filling out intelligence related questions, letting the gifted skew the results?

Short answer: 74% of people answered at least one intelligence related question and since most people filled out only one or two, the fact that the self-report, ACT and SAT score averages are so similar is remarkable.

I realized, while reading Vaniver's post that if only 1/3 of the survey participants filled out the IQ score, this may have been due to something which could have skewed the results toward the gifted range, for instance, if more gifted people had been given IQ tests for schooling placement (and the others didn't post their IQ score because they did not know it) or if the amount of pride one has in their IQ score has a significant influence on whether one reported it.

So I went through the data and realized that most of the people who filled out the IQ test question did not fill out all the others. That means that 804 people (74% not 33%) answered at least one intelligence related question. As we have seen, the IQ correlations for the IQ, SAT and ACT questions were very close to each other (unsurprisingly, it looks like something's up with the internet test... removing those, it's 63% of survey participants that answered an intelligence related question). It's remarkable in and of itself that each category of test scores generated an average IQ so similar to the others considering that different people filled them out. I mean if 1/3 of the population filled out all of the questions, and the other 2/3 filled out none, we could say "maybe the 1/3 did IQ correlation research and fudged these" but if most of the population fills out one or two, and the averages for each category come out close to the averages for the other categories, why is that? How would that happen if they were fudging?

It does look to me like people gave whatever test scores they had and that not all the people had test scores to give but it does not look to me like a greater proportion of the gifted people provided an intelligence related survey answer. Instead it looks like most people provided an intelligence related survey answer and the average LessWronger is gifted.

Exploration of personality test fudging:

Erratio and I explored how likely it is that people could successfully fudge their personality tests and why they might do that.

  • There are a lot of questions on the personality test that have an obvious intelligence component, so it's possible that people chose the answer they thought was most intelligent.

  • There are also intelligence related questions where it's not clear which answer is most intelligent. I listed those.

  • The intelligence questions would mostly influence the sensing/intuition dichotomy and the thinking/feeling dichotomy. This does not explain why the extraversion/introversion and perceiving/judging results were similar to Mensa's.

In response to 2012 Survey Results
Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 02:07:17AM *  2 points [-]

Problem:

The line: "This includes all types with greater than 10 people. You can see the full table here." links to a gif that is inaccurate, has no key to explain oddities, and is of such poor graphical quality that parts of it are actually unreadable.

It may be that the reason that invalid personality types like "INNJ" are listed is due to typos on the part of the survey participants. If so, then great! But it may also be that the person who constructed this graphic put typos in (I consider this fairly likely due to the fact that the graphical quality is so low that some of it's not readable. For instance, the number of INTPs is so unclear I can't even tell what it says - it looks like 113 but your results in the post claim 143). It isn't obvious why the invalid types are there, so a key or note would be nice.

Also, some of the participants had a good idea: if one of your personality dimension letters changes when taking the test multiple times, you can fill it out with an X. Can we add an instruction for them to do this on the next survey?

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:40:49PM 3 points [-]

Personality Type Predictions:

The vast majority are introverts, ballpark 90% introverts.

Most common type: INTJ

NT types > 75% of the population

NF types - a handful or none (possibly more than the next type, possibly less)

ISTJ - a single digit percentage of the LW population

Other guardians and artisans: none or nearly none.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 November 2012 02:04:00AM *  6 points [-]

The survey results are in, so I am updating this:

If you scroll down to "MYERS-BRIGGS" you'll see that there are 436 people in Yvain's selection of results (of greater than 10 people for each type, leaving out a total 3.1% of the survey data). That's what these figures are based on. (The raw data is missing around 10% of the responses due to people wanting anonymity, and the graphic provided to show more detail has some issues so I used Yvain's selection.)

  • Ballpark 90% Introverts: Correct

    371 Introverts (85% of 436)

  • Most common type: INTJ: Correct

    163 INTJs (37% of 436)

  • NT types > 75% of the population: Correct

    371 NTs (85% of 436)

  • NF types - a handful or none (possibly more than ISTJs) : Correct

    51 NFs 436 (12% of 436)

  • ISTJ a single digit percentage of the LW population: Correct

    14 ISTJs (3% of 436)

I wasn't sure exactly how I should interpret the somewhat vague "a handful or none" for NF types, but I see that I used enough numbers to be able to do a literal, mathematical interpretation so I chose that method. I had predicted it was possible that there would be more of them than the ISTJs who I had predicted would be in the single digit percents (implying that 10% or more of them wasn't outside the range) and that there could necessarily be no more than 25% of them because it would contradict the NT prediction, so since they were within the numerical bounds, I interpreted this as correct.

Another interesting thing to note is that each personality type in the top 98% of LW personality types is in the same order as the type list I wrote here. Unfortunately that comment had been previously edited, so whether or not you believe that I did this intentionally will be based on how much you trust me not to lie and what you think the probability is of me having the ability to correctly list the personality types of 98% of the LessWrong population in same order as we'd see on the actual personality test results after having proven to you just now that I can make correct predictions about the Myers-Briggs personality types on LessWrong.

What's really interesting though is that our personality type pattern matches the pattern Mensa discovered when they did a personality type survey, and the pattern that Mensa and LessWrong share is very different from the ordinary personality type statistics. This makes the IQ figures on the yearly surveys more believable.

Comment author: Caerbannog 01 October 2012 02:13:48AM 1 point [-]

A newly created copy or electronic upload of me (call him 'Copy B') would have all my behavioral attributes and memories. He could be called $myName by anyone else observing either of us (we could be indistinguishable to a third observer).

However, to me (the guy writing this response, call me 'Copy A'), there would be an obvious observable difference between Copy A and Copy B. I see the world from Copy A's point of view, with his eyes and ears and I would observe Copy B from the outside as I would any other person, without knowing what is going on in his mind or experiencing the world from his point of view. Yes, Copy B might say the same about Copy A, but it's my fear that Copy A would never find himself genuinely waking up inside a copying chamber or as an upload. If that's true, uploading myself would be the death of my subjective point of view.

I get where you're coming from. I don't necessarily have an epiphenomenal view of the mind, but I also believe that the concept of qualia is not well understood by anyone. I do not understand why I'm me and not someone else, and neither does our current knowledge on the subject.

Based on this I'm agnostic on whether mind uploading in the style we're discussing would really preserve me and my stream of qualia, or kill me and create another person with a new stream of qualia. Without any evidence that it would preserve me, I would not accept going through such a process.

There are possible scenarios in which the copying process could preserve what I consider to be me: For example, if there is only one observer at all, who experiences all qualia streams throughout the world (that possibility scares me, honestly). Another possibility might be that copying me would simply double my measure in the world, and what I consider my qualia stream would have twice as many experiences after the copying process. These are just speculation, though.

This has definitely been an interesting discussion for me. Examining my thoughts on this subject has raised more possible interpretations than settled anything, though!

Comment author: Epiphany 28 November 2012 03:49:59AM *  0 points [-]

I had the same reaction, but the majority of others I've talked to disagree with me, so it's nice to see someone who thinks the same way. Here are my arguments with TheOtherDave (Ironic, I know!):

Teleporter Malfunction Scenario

Comment author: Epiphany 28 November 2012 03:07:12AM *  1 point [-]

I learned from various people I've talked to who have had actual health problems that doctors often fail to figure things out (Examples: They do a pile of tests that come out negative and shrug it off or throw pills at it and never get down to the root cause.) and even fail to give useful referrals, so if that's why you're asking, I can grok why you're looking for answers here.

I find that if I just go to any old doctor, they have no idea what is wrong. The only way I've ever been helped is to find someone who specializes in my set of symptoms and has lots of experience with it. The absolute best thing to do would be to find somebody who has had the same problem and has seen it resolved by a doctor who specializes in those symptoms, and get a referral to THEIR doctor. (That, more specifically, was what I did.) A group dedicated to your problems might be a good place to ask for a useful referral.

Barring that, a doctor or GP who has a special interest in your group of symptoms is likely to be more useful than an arbitrary general practitioner. GPs have to remember tens of thousands of symptoms and match them to tens of thousands of conditions - not a very reasonable thing to expect of a human brain when it comes down to it. That's a key reason I think the people I know are so frequently having problems with getting a useful diagnosis. (Note: www.diagnose-me.com claims to help counter this problem. It's a program that takes a 1000 symptom questionnaire and searches a bunch of medical data to give you suggestions for what might be wrong, and they have doctors on staff to review the results as well. I've tried it - it's inexpensive and marvelously detailed. Not all their info is accurate, but if your expectation is simply to get ideas to have checked by your doctor, this is likely to give you some.)

I'm not a doctor, but here's an idea you can take to a medical professional to get evaluated for if interested:

Your digestive system and immune system seem involved. It occurs to me to mention that one can have an infection in their digestive system without realizing it. Aside from your immune symptom (allergies), and digestive-immune link (I read that the majority of your immune system is located in your digestive system) there may be another link: I read somewhere that the immune system outputs substances that cause aches and pains when fighting infections (if I am not mistaken, one specific substance that causes this is tumor necrosis factor-alpha).

Consider getting tested for microbial imbalances in your digestive system. Candida albicans, a yeast, is supposed to be a common cause of dysbiosis and might be especially useful to research.

Before killing bugs in your digestive system, ask the doctor if doing dietary modification before taking the anti-microbials would be a good idea. Helping them multiply by giving them the foods they prefer while also killing them off can result in a prolonged Herxheimer reaction. This essentially results in feeling 10x worse for however long.

Let me know if that helps.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 November 2012 02:13:04AM *  11 points [-]

I took it and did all the extra credit questions except one because it would not be accurate for me.

Comment author: Liza 07 November 2012 06:35:58AM *  0 points [-]

I live to make other people happy. This is a very feminine trait - probably related to maternal instincts.

That's great that you can be so clear about a goal like that! I am not sure what I live for, I like making people happy but I also like trying to encourage them to experience new things.

I have never been as aggressive as I want to be. [...]

If I behave too aggressively it makes me feel very uncomfortable so I kind of understand what you mean. When I'm aggressive, like when playing a competitive game, there's always a certain playfulness to it that reminds me it's all in fun. I think this is what let's me be aggressive without feeling uncomfortable; the knowledge that everyone else knows I would never seriously be aggressive.

I am no gender expert but I hope I made you feel better.

You did. : ) And I'm still trying to figure out my sexuality but I'm probably some form of pansexual too.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 07:17:51AM 0 points [-]

That's great that you can be so clear about a goal like that! I am not sure what I live for, I like making people happy but I also like trying to encourage them to experience new things.

Well... do you think encouraging them to experience new things is likely to make them happy?

I think this is what let's me be aggressive without feeling uncomfortable; the knowledge that everyone else knows I would never seriously be aggressive.

For me, it's just tiring. I want to be making people happy, not competing and winning. I like doing things that are awesome, and I like doing things that are challenging. But I don't enjoy defeating people. I can get angry enough that I'm able to be very aggressive and not feel drained by it, but I almost never get that angry.

You did. : )

Oh good!

And I'm still trying to figure out my sexuality but I'm probably some form of pansexual too.

Cool. (:

Comment author: Liza 05 November 2012 02:56:15AM *  3 points [-]

Also some of Eliezer's statements on gender have made me worried.

nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/bd/my_way/86u

Does this mean my personality has no depth? I feel very complicated and very confused but I don't know how to tell if my personality is masculine or feminine.

I want to repair myself in the way that produces as whole and real a person as possible.

Or perhaps I am incoherent entirely, knowing both too little and too much simultaneously.

P.S. I decided to read Kushiel's Legacy to which Eliezer keeps referring. The writing is intensely beautiful.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 06:19:54AM *  2 points [-]

nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth.

I have I have!

flies over and says something to Eliezer

Does this mean my personality has no depth?

Absolutely not! It just means Eliezer is working from a biased sample and therefore his perceptions should not be taken as scientific fact.

I am sorry you're having such problems, Liza. I kind of relate because I didn't even believe in gender for a long time. Then I realized that there were a few things about me that I had never accepted and couldn't seem to change:

  1. I live to make other people happy. This is a very feminine trait - probably related to maternal instincts.

  2. I have never been as aggressive as I want to be. I force myself to be aggressive when life demands it, and I'm very proud of this -- but the fact that I have to force myself and that I feel proud of it are signs that I'm not naturally aggressive. Men often have a natural aggression that ... actually allows them to have fun while being aggressive. I don't get that, and I want to, but I don't.

I hope you have encountered alternative gender labels like "genderqueer". You do not need to choose between male and female! There are even more options. You can also be N/A, gender apathetic, not believe in gender, or make up a new gender term and define your gender for yourself. Not saying everyplace will always have a drop down for that, but there's no reason you can't do something other than pick "male" or "female".

There's a TED talk on gender (I forgot the exact ted.com URL but it shouldn't be too hard to find with the search) that explains that human bodies can have soooo many variations when it comes to gender that there are hundreds of combinations and sometimes people can have both male and female parts and not realize it because they are internal. The video makes a pretty good case that our binary gender concept is a false dichotomy.

If I was you, I'd feel comforted to know that there are some who are attracted to people regardless of their gender. I am one of them. And I don't just mean that there are bi people who date the binary "men" and "women". There are also pansexual people who will date people of any gender (genderqueer, gender N/A, etc.) or most of them. I call my orientation "sapiosexual" because my attractions are to minds - physique and gender do not stop my attractions.

I am no gender expert but I hope I made you feel better.

In response to comment by Z_M_Davis on My Way
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 April 2009 11:58:29PM 7 points [-]

Okay. I've never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other's deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we're talking about here.

In response to comment by Eliezer_Yudkowsky on My Way
Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 05:55:15AM *  2 points [-]

I have I have! He identifies as male but ... wow. He knew what I felt in IM. He played me like a symphony. It was incredible. He must have had me all worked out in his head. And he was so sensitive, so very much like a woman...

It may be true that you've never seen this but this comment upset somebody so I hope that in the event that you have the perception that this is not possible, you do realize that you're likely to be working with a biased sample. Do men who identify as male frequently wish to share emotionally intimate thoughts with other men? Do men who are feminine inside and want a male mate do this with males who are straight? Do trans women do this with just everyone? How many trans women have you attempted to get close to? How many others do we allow to see more than a superficial view of us, period?

From the view you have of me, am I displaying a feminine personality with "the same sort of depth and internal integrity"?

Comment author: CronoDAS 03 November 2012 11:33:57PM 2 points [-]

If my IQ was measured as "really high" (140-ish) back when I was 8, but I'm now 30, should I expect the same kind of "really high" score if I took an IQ test today, as an adult?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 05:29:16AM *  -1 points [-]

If your IQ was over the highest possible score on the test because they based that on an estimation calculated using your age (for a hypothetical example: you scored IQ 100 as a 2 year old, the equivalent of an average adult. You're much smarter than an average adult then, doing that at 2, so they'd give you a ridiculously high score.)

Unless this was the case, and it doesn't seem like it (it's not likely the test they gave you had a ceiling below 140) then you should expect a similar score. IQ is supposed to stay the same throughout one's life. Whether it actually does, I'm not sure. I haven't done research to confirm that IQ does what it is supposed to. But I can say that it is supposed to stay the same.

One problem you may run into is that if you take a different test it may give you a different score. This is less likely if your IQ is 100, and increasingly likely the higher your IQ is. That's because it's difficult to get the tests to behave properly for rare people due to not being able to find enough of them to test the test on.

Comment author: philh 02 November 2012 11:17:12PM 2 points [-]

I believe that in the past there have been "where are we?" threads used to try to locate other LWers, and possibly also a map. These things need constant maintenance as people move, disappear, etc. And they do not get this maintenance. So they're only useful for a few months at a time, at a guess.

I've been thinking that a solution might be for people to enter their location and email address in a webapp, and once a month they get an email asking them to confirm that they're still there. They can either stay in the same place or remove themselves with a single click, I'm not sure what the default should be if they ignore. Or they can update to a new location.

I have more thoughts on this, but any feedback on the idea?

Another possible solution would be an official LW map based on the locations in our profiles, possibly ignoring inactive accounts. This would require integration, which might make it harder than a standalone app; in particular, I might make the standalone app but the inconvenience of setting up to work on the reddit codebase makes me unlikely to make an integrated one.

Again, I have more thoughts but would appreciate yours first.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 05:15:15AM *  0 points [-]

The better way of doing this would be to allow people to fill out their location in their profile and then the website could just display all the users who posted in the last x amount of time. The emails would be annoying. Could you imagine if you got a monthly email from every site that had information about you? shiver

Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 02:29:36AM *  1 point [-]

Related Research:

Harvard did a study on LLI (Low latent inhibition. It means that you don't block as much stimulus and can mean having a lot more ideas to sort through) and discovered that people with high LLI and high IQs tend to be more creative whereas people with low IQs and high LLI are more likely to be schizophrenic. This may be because people with higher IQs are able to evaluate a larger number of ideas whereas those with lower IQs may find themselves overwhelmed trying to do so.

This suggests that schizophrenic people could benefit from assistance with processing their ideas. It also suggests that teaching reasoning skills all by itself might not be enough for many of them. If a key part of the problem turns out to be that they're generating more weird ideas than they can process, it may be more useful to have someone to talk it over with.

Then again, if Bayes is faster than whatever technique they're using, it could theoretically bring a lot of them over that "sanity waterline" threshold if it makes them able to judge ideas faster than they generate them.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 November 2012 02:07:11AM *  2 points [-]

A Related Experiment:

I once read about an experimental mental hospital for people with schizophrenic symptoms in California called Soteria House.

At Soteria house, the philosophy was to let the mental patients do whatever they wanted with the exception of hurting people. They got to run around naked if they wanted to, and there was a room for them to break things in (with breakable objects).

The staff was trained on a method to help the schizophrenics sort out reality from delusion. They were assisted by being told which things others couldn't see and were asked to interpret them as they would a dream. The result was that most of them were better in three months, were able to be independent in six months and a very low proportion of them (I think 15%?) had another schizophrenia episode.

This experiment was repeated at another location in California, though I forgot the name of the sister house. You can also check out Soteria Bern in Germay.

I think it may have been important that the emphasis was on "try interpreting that a different way" instead of "that isn't real" - because there is likely to have been some emotional or belief content in what they were experiencing that they needed to process (for the same reason we have to process feelings and can't just repress them). It was probably also very important that the patients didn't feel trapped. If you feel trapped, you're less likely to trust the people helping you. It might be hard for a person who is already confused about reality to tell whether someone is gaslighting them. It probably takes a lot of trust to accept this type of guidance.

They weren't using Bayes specifically to convince patients that their delusions weren't real, but I think this is still relevant because they were essentially getting the patients interpret delusions in a more rational way.

Comment author: lukeprog 05 November 2012 06:59:00AM 3 points [-]

There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

Comment author: Epiphany 05 November 2012 07:14:09AM 3 points [-]
Comment author: Curiouskid 05 November 2012 04:58:17AM 1 point [-]

http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7514/433

("Most published research findings are false... including this one.") ("I heard you like publication bias")

Comment author: Epiphany 05 November 2012 07:08:53AM *  0 points [-]

Whoa neat. Yes, this brings to mind a certain internet meme... (:

Comment author: lukeprog 02 November 2012 08:10:56AM 36 points [-]

Took it.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 November 2012 08:51:00PM *  0 points [-]

(nevermind)

Comment author: Epiphany 04 November 2012 08:49:56PM *  18 points [-]

Problem: You might want to specify "this year's survey" in the following line, otherwise people may think that having taken a previous year's survey means they do not need to take this year's survey to be counted:

Everyone who took the survey before, your responses are still saved and you don't have to take it again.

Comment author: jooyous 04 November 2012 08:40:36PM 16 points [-]

I also de-lurked for the first time to take the survey!

I'm too intimidated to post anything else. :(

Comment author: Epiphany 04 November 2012 08:47:05PM 8 points [-]

Aww.

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 November 2012 07:43:50PM 0 points [-]

What do you mean by "gifted adults"? Just "adults with very high IQ"? I think there's a standard trick for that when you pen them all together and then you have a regular human society where the social effects of giftedness disappear. Or do gifted people have abnormal psychology in absolute terms, not just relative with alienation and boredom and so on?

Comment author: Epiphany 04 November 2012 08:22:45PM *  1 point [-]

There are lots and lots of definitions for "gifted". State's legal definitions range from vague things like "people with a talent" to numerical specifications. The gist: I've seen definitions that range from a rarity of 1 in 4 to 1 in 50. Truth be told, my real interest is highly gifted adults and geniuses, not just "gifted adults" in general.

From what I've read, "highly gifted" tends to be associated with IQs > 145.

The people in each IQ range have their own characteristics. People with IQs near 130 tend to be more popular. People with IQs around 160 or greater have difficulty fitting in and tend to limit social contact because they are too different. These are relative obviously. It has been observed that people with IQs over 145 frequently have enough intensity that it results in them coming across in an energetic way that is called a variety of things from electric to charismatic. This appears to be genetic. There are other things like how exceptionally gifted children have trouble answering "simple" questions and doing "simple" tasks like "draw a bird" - too many options come to mind, and they have to choose, then, between 100 kinds of birds.

This is just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to the differences that have been talked about. I am not sure that any one piece of research I've read is true, but there are probably over a hundred differences that have been either researched or observed by psychologists who work with gifted individuals. I have observed a lot of these differences for myself, and have seen patterns. I can also use what I know to make guesses about who is gifted and how gifted they are and I am usually close. I feel certain that there are a huge number of differences of both types, though what, specifically they are and how common they are to each IQ range would be hard to say.

Also, I don't think it's called "abnormal psychology" when there's nothing wrong with them.

Comment author: V_V 15 October 2012 07:37:11PM *  3 points [-]

Alternate explanation for "insanity": If your IQ is high enough, you're likely to have problems fitting in with others.

Do you have a reference?

As far as I know, there is positive correlation beween social skills and IQ up to an IQ of about 120. There are claims that for a very high IQ (> 140) the correlation may be negative, but this is disputed.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 November 2012 07:57:20PM *  2 points [-]

I'm in "Halt, melt, and catch fire" mode right now regarding psychology knowledge and research in general.

I cannot give you anything good and I am questioning whether such a thing is possible in psychology right now. ):

I have a lot of experience interacting with gifted adults and have read a lot about them, so I think I have some useful insight when it comes to making the correct distinctions that help with untangling this controversy. First, there's a difference between feeling lonely and being unable to fit in socially. There's another gigantic difference between being unable to fit in and being able to fit in but only with a huge effort.

What I'm seeing is that most of the very gifted adults are able to fit in by putting in a lot of effort and hiding most of their thoughts and feelings (which would not make sense to others since their thoughts are often complex and difficult to explain and their feelings are often in reaction to complex thoughts), but they do not enjoy those social experiences which are so demanding of their energy, and so they end up lonely. The profoundly gifted people I've met are so frustrated by things like explaining across inferential distances that it's practically characteristic of them. Their way of dealing with the differences seems to be to reduce social contact and learn specialized social skills for interacting in environments that are unavoidable like workplaces. They often succeed with these specialized social skills in limited environments and usually prevent social disasters simply by staying quiet, not leaving the house, or avoiding social environments with people who aren't like minded. So, they have usually had coping mechanisms that work for them to prevent social ineptness. However, when it comes down to it, there's nothing that improving one's social skills can do to solve the problem of loneliness. The issue is not that people don't respect or like them, the problem is that people do not relate to them when they try to share their inner worlds. You can build one-way rapport by learning what your audience cares about and keeping your conversations within the boundaries of their comfort zone. If the audience cannot build rapport the other way you end up feeling lonely and misunderstood. This is what I'm seeing.

Sorry for the delay. I haven't memorized all my citations and it can be a bit of a pain to dig them up (I'm thinking about the best way to organize them right now) so I'm kind of burnt out on digging up citations right now which is resulting in some procrastination when answering comments like this.

Comment author: satt 04 November 2012 03:00:31PM 2 points [-]
  1. What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance... or any number of other professions) if we can't even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge?

That makes things sound worse than they are. I disagree that we have no real knowledge, and I'm also not sure about lumping doctors or psychologists together in this context. In medicine there are effects so huge that explaining them away as publication bias or spurious correlations is implausible (maybe because the relative risk is so huge, as with smoking causing lung cancer, or because the base rate is so low, as with asbestos causing malignant mesothelioma), so I count them as real knowledge. But I don't know of similarly huge effects in psychology, so psychology might differ in that key respect.

(Here's a speculative tangent that belongs in brackets. The foregoing might partly explain bad epistemic habits in research. Historically, lots of research went into things we basically fixed with magic bullets. So it didn't much matter when people suppressed negative results or leaned heavily on observational studies; the true effect of the magic bullets was so huge that it held up despite the biases. This might've gotten researchers into the habit of not worrying about, or not finding out about, methodological biases. But now we're searching for smaller effects those biases matter.)

Better still, most of the problems you refer to above are solvable. We could, for instance,

  • publish negative results
  • learn about warning signs that can indicate flaky study results
  • force researchers to publicly announce trials and their endpoint measures before their trials begin
  • force researchers to disclose funding sources and possible conflicts of interest
  • put more effort into searching the grey literature and foreign literature when reviewing studies
  • focus on randomized experiments (and use placebo controls where applicable in medical or psychological trials) over observational studies
  • impress the importance of evidence-based methods & treatments on practitioners and professional organizations
  • use statistical tests for detecting publication biases in reviews and meta-analyses

So, supposing I did accept the premise that the research base is so bad as to make doctors and psychologists useless, there'd still be an obvious alternative to giving up and walking away: I could become an epidemiologist or a medical statistician or a policy pundit, and encourage people to do the things I listed above.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 November 2012 07:05:12PM *  0 points [-]

Thank you for responding to this, Satt. I really did need some input here, and it's very good to see another perspective and to have been shown a whole list of things that could be done.

I am in an unusually bad situation because the subject I'm most interested in is psychology. I noticed something was wrong with the psychology industry while I was still young enough to avoid getting into it. The three main problems are:

  1. That you have to diagnose people immediately to collect insurance payments when in reality it takes a long time to know whether there's even anything wrong with them at all, and being deemed "messed up" by a professional could be very hurtful to the patient.

  2. I could tell that a lot of what was passing for therapy was BS and decided there must be something drastically wrong with the schooling. I didn't know that that it was this bad, but I am glad I noticed something was drastically wrong early on.

  3. I am primarily interested in gifted adults. Neither an abnormal psychology degree or developmental psychology degree would give me a solid understanding of gifted adults - those are focused on the average Joe and children with learning disabilities respectively. Gifted adults are neither very well served by the typical therapist (imagine taking a space ship to a car mechanic) or by schooling methods intended for children with learning disabilities. I didn't realize that my main interest was in gifted adults until later, but I could tell that the psychology that I had been exposed to wasn't what I was looking for. I have a space ship myself, and wanted psychology that taught me about space ships like mine.

So I went to college for web design instead. I studied psychology on my own. I love being a web developer, a lot, but I want to really make a difference in the world and I don't feel that adding little buttons to websites is making that happen. Of course, web development can be used for making a difference, too, but if most of what I know about psychology is wrong (it quite possibly could be?) then how am I supposed to pursue my main interest? I was hoping to do self-improvement writing, and I can still do that at any time, and possibly gain an audience that way, but if the foundation of knowledge I am working from is bad, then it's not useful to do so. What I want to get from writing about self-improvement is meaning, not money, so that would be unacceptable to me.

Something occurred to me: I've learned enough about the psychology of gifted adults now that I'd probably have a strong advantage when it comes to writing review articles or meta-analyses on gifted adults. I'm not credentialed, so could not give the articles any traditional "credibility" (that's in quotes for a reason, now that I know all of this...). However, considering the circumstance (that getting an accredited psychology degree requires you to learn a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and that they don't teach about gifted adults anyway), I'm thinking that getting a degree would not increase the quality of my articles substantially enough to justify spending tens of thousands of dollars and so many hours on it. Reading the key books on research practices would probably be the best action, though I do not know what they are.

If you (or other LWers) have thoughts on how to approach this sticky problem, I'm interested in hearing them.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 November 2012 02:25:41AM *  1 point [-]

Add logical rudeness to the sequences. Why:

  • Getting everyone to be consciously aware of this may help them improve their thinking quality.

  • Being able to link to this and say "this argument is wrong" can be extremely helpful. I am noticing a pattern - when I simply describe bad reasoning, I am ignored or stupid arguments are thrown at me. When I link to a sequence describing bad reasoning, I am not ignored. It's like it's causing them to behave. I think everyone should be aware of this in order to be able to link to it and get people to realize they're doing this. That would help maintain quality in the discussions.

  • It's really useful for me to have words for these irksome behaviors. I keep referring back to it over and over again. It's clarifying and validating. I'd have missed something important if I had not encountered it. I think you should make sure everyone encounters this.

Comment author: MixedNuts 03 November 2012 01:09:56AM 1 point [-]

Most effects of testosterone are permanent; do testosterone blockers reduce crime? Probably, since aggression and high sex drive are among the temporary effects.

Way too little is known about large hormonal alterations. What is known is that hormone replacement therapy can make people very happy, which vaguely suggests that giving T blockers to most men could make them miserable. (Then again we're not suggesting adding estrogen, so the comparison doesn't hold.)

In the early days of LW there was an eunuch who wouldn't shut up about how great T blockers were. N=1 study powered by selection bias.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 November 2012 02:00:40AM *  0 points [-]

Castration works very well to reduce violent behavior based on the research I read. I didn't spend months researching this, but I went through a lot of information, and reducing testosterone was the most effective thing they had tried.

which vaguely suggests that giving T blockers to most men could make them miserable

Or could help them in the event that their testosterone is ten times the level of non-violent inmates, which was the case in one of the studies I read. It was so effective that I wonder why they're not using it. One bottleneck that has been proposed is that people perceive testosterone reduction as unhealthy or as a thing that would depersonalize a man by reducing his manliness. In light of this, it's interesting that you reacted to my comments about high testosterone and chemical imbalance with the idea that giving testosterone blockers to most men would make them miserable. That's irrelevant because most men don't need them. Only the ones who have such unusually high testosterone that it significantly raises the risk of criminal violence, or for some other health reason qualifies as excessive / qualifies as a chemical imbalance should be prescribed testosterone blockers.

Now I'm wondering if the reason people don't use testosterone blockers might be because people are, for some reason, afraid that it would be prescribed to most men.

I wish I had known there was a place where people appreciated this type of nerdy-yet-un-credentialed dip into subjects. I'd have made a site similar to Gwern's. Alas, my research findings are not written up and my citations are scattered throughout things like bookmark backups from old OS installs.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 November 2012 01:38:46PM *  0 points [-]

I only got K-8[\6] (I'm not a highschool dropout, thank you, I just never went in the first place) so I've got no idea what people learn when they're 14.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 November 2012 01:26:54AM *  1 point [-]

I think it's a good thing you didn't receive more schooling. I'm an autodidact, too. I wish I had embarked on a self-education journey sooner. Reasons.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 08:27:36AM *  5 points [-]

I'm having a pretty intense reaction to reading certain articles and could use some support or a solution:

Here's what I read and my reactions:

  1. Feynman's Cargo Cult Science (Which is about how a lot of scientific studies are done badly, often due to researchers not being allowed to do the research correctly.)

  2. The PLOS Medicine article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

  3. An article about how psychologists aren't usually using the treatments most supported by science which links to a document that contains a horrifying account:

"During many of my 20 years at Stanford University, Albert Bandura and I tried to hold on to a science-based clinical training program. The bizarre situation we faced there is of more than personal and historical interest: I suspect that many of the same conflicts still exist and motivate the efforts described by Baker and colleagues. Bandura and I, and our students and other colleagues, were discovering the remarkable discrepancies between what the scientific work was revealing and the requirements imposed by the pressures for maintaining accreditation. The professional accreditation requirements insisted on continuing practices whose value was contradicted by the empirical findings. Those requirements not only flew in the face of the data but also made enormous demands on faculty and student time in the clinical program."

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/inpress/baker.pdf

I'm having a variety of reactions:

  1. What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance... or any number of other professions) if we can't even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge? How do you find meaning, LessWrong?

  2. Thank goodness I found this place. I am in love with the glimmers of sanity I see here. Before I found LessWrong I was just kind of... "WTF humanity is a mess." Now it's more like "WTF humanity is a mess but at least there's a group of people trying not to be." If anyone is up to describing this wonderful and horrible feeling in their own words, I could really use to feel related to about this.

  3. Do you know of a website where one can look up a piece of research to see what flaws it has? Is one planned? I need this because it would take a very long time for me to read enough on each relevant topic to discover whether a piece of research I want to use is flawed or not. For instance, Feynman explained about how lots of studies have been done with mazes and rats, but people didn't seem to realize that the rats were using methods to find the food that were unexpected and all sorts of stuff has to be controlled for ranging from the scent of food to the type of flooring in the maze. If you don't know that all of these things need to be controlled for, you won't know that the vast majority of studies done on putting rats into mazes are useless. It's simply not realistic to expect ourselves to be able to single handedly give every single study we read a thorough enough review to detect all the flaws. I love research, but I now feel that it's futile. Does anyone know a solution? I know that peer reviewed journals are supposed to address this type of problem, but I don't see the online studies that I find being rated or marked as flawed in an obvious way.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 November 2012 12:39:51AM *  0 points [-]

suddenly thinks of a coping strategy

Wikipedia addresses this... I was just reading the wiki on the Paleo diet and saw a bunch of stuff about repeatability and study relevance like:

Loren Cordain, a proponent of a low-carbohydrate Paleolithic diet, responded to the U.S. News ranking, stating that their "conclusions are erroneous and misleading" and pointing out that "five studies, four since 2007, have experimentally tested contemporary versions of ancestral human diets and have found them to be superior to Mediterranean diets, diabetic diets and typical western diets in regards to weight loss, cardiovascular disease risk factors and risk factors for type 2 diabetes."[27] The editors of U.S. News replied that their ranking included a review of all five studies which found that all of them were small and/or of short duration.

I realize Wikipedia isn't credible for citing or anything but I feel heartened because:

  • I bet they often link to a credible meta-analysis, making it easier to find them (I've been told by Gwern that one way of coping with this is to read a meta-analysis because it gives you a number of advantages over reading individual pieces of research).

  • It serves as a method for finding out about some of the flaws you need to look for when reading studies on the topic.

  • It often lists a collection of relevant research, which can save time.

  • It might be a good starting point for creating your own thorough reviews of studies because a lot of things will already have been hashed out, so it's just a matter of verifying that what's there is correct, which should save time if you build on it.

Hm...

Wikipedia is not a perfect solution but I think this will help me cope.

.oO I wonder if there are features that could be added to Wikipedia that would encourage the entries to transform into credible meta-analyses...

In response to comment by shminux on Less Wrong Parents
Comment author: DaFranker 02 November 2012 06:42:48PM *  7 points [-]

Is this from real data?

I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents' belief systems and behaviors and their children's.

I'm not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I've noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle "problematic" behavior / do anything to "educate" their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.

The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding "I don't know, let's find out" to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.

I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child's chances of not being stupid is something you care about.

At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven't read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.

Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.

If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 November 2012 07:48:17PM 7 points [-]

Alternate explanation for:

everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding "I don't know, let's find out" to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.

Highly intelligent people tend to have better memories. If less intelligent people don't recall something from childhood, that definitely doesn't rule out the possibility that it did happen to them and yet had no effect, because they may just have forgotten about it.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 November 2012 02:26:23AM *  0 points [-]

Update: My boss assigned me a multiple week project, so being replaced is not likely in the very near-term.

Please help. I might be getting replaced by an ad agency very soon. I am the only IT person (an in-house web developer) for a small business, and the boss no longer has the time to do his own research to decide which projects I should do in order to make his site more competitive. What I need most are ideas for a quick example program that I can put online to show my capability and some code grooming. I read a book on PHP security (Essential PHP Security) before I started writing PHP, I tried reading a code quality book but discovered very little new information in the first three chapters (Code Craft - I guess code quality was common sense to me or that book wasn't challenging), have worked closely with an SEO, and I just bought Design Patterns by the Gang of Four (haven't gotten too far in yet though), so I'm probably looking better than a lot of other web developers, but I must acknowledge that I taught myself PHP/MySQL with no mentor and this might mean that I'm in need of grooming and do not realize it.

Would you, or anybody else reading this, be willing to help me decide what to make for my example, tell me what improvements to make to the code when it is finished, and criticize my resume?

Comment author: gwern 28 October 2012 09:54:42PM 3 points [-]

Really? blink (I quit watching television over a decade ago with the resolve that I was going to make my own life more interesting.)

Yeah. It's especially bad in media targeted at youngsters - I think Family Guy has made prison rape jokes more than once.

(I don't watch much TV anymore either; there's a long list of reasons, starting with apathy and torrenting, but somewhere on it appears 'finds male rape amusing'.)

Comment author: Epiphany 30 October 2012 12:41:13AM 0 points [-]

Yeah. It's especially bad in media targeted at youngsters - I think Family Guy has made prison rape jokes more than once.

Ohhhhh. That I can believe. Not to say laughing at prison rape is okay, it isn't, it's just that when you made that comment, I envisioned people finding all male rape funny.

:/ I wouldn't be surprised if some people do. So that still bothers me.

What have you gotten out of quitting TV? In addition to obvious things like more time for learning and self-improvement, it also helped my self-esteem to stop exposing myself to commercials designed to make me feel like I need a bunch of products to be "good enough".

Comment author: Epiphany 30 October 2012 12:29:20AM *  1 point [-]

According to an article on PLOS Medicine, Most Published Research Findings Are False. Feynman provides an unsettling perspective on what's happened with research as well in Cargo Cult Science.

Have we done any better?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 October 2012 01:54:31AM 0 points [-]

Maybe there are people who don't identify with any political label at all, so not even "other" would be an accurate answer for them.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 October 2012 02:18:07AM 0 points [-]

Hmmm. But if we were to reword your question to something like: "How would you describe your political views if different from the above?" (three words) then that would make everyone happy.

Except Yvain who would have to figure out how to display those results. That might annoy him.

If Yvain won't want to display all the results, then I think you're right with a "none of the above" question. Otherwise I'd rather see a box where you can fill it in how you want.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 October 2012 12:47:58AM 0 points [-]

OTOH, I've changed my mind and now like yours better -- but I'd replace "other" with "none of the above".

Comment author: Epiphany 29 October 2012 01:03:05AM 0 points [-]

Really? Why?

Comment author: [deleted] 28 October 2012 11:35:14PM 1 point [-]

"If you'd had an "other" option on the politics question, would you have used it?"

Or “is there any political label with which you identify more than with any of the five above”?

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 11:59:00PM 0 points [-]

Hmm I like this one better. (:

Comment author: gwern 28 October 2012 08:47:09PM 3 points [-]

Rape comes to mind. Men cannot get pregnant from rape, and rape of men is played for laughter on TV. Hence it is that men are raped more often than women in the USA, and no one cares.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 09:00:44PM *  3 points [-]

rape of men is played for laughter on TV.

Really? blink (I quit watching television over a decade ago with the resolve that I was going to make my own life more interesting.)

Hence it is that men are raped more often than women in the USA, and no one cares.

I care. :/

I have met at least two men who have been raped. They were both raped by women, though, and not while in jail. This will probably immediately raise questions about how such a thing is possible. This page explains. (See the second and third points from the bottom.)

I'd have a hard time feeling bad for a serial killer being raped, but there are a lot of people in jail for things like drug possession and the idea of those guys being raped really bothers me.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 October 2012 08:25:07PM 1 point [-]

If unintended pregnancy were unheard-of, human sexuality and sexual politics would be vastly different in a lot of ways ....

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 08:38:01PM 2 points [-]

Hmm. I bet you're right. But what specifically do you think would be different?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 October 2012 06:10:48PM 2 points [-]

It's interesting therefore that most anti-abortion folk are not too enthusiastic about contraception. It's almost as if they might be optimizing for something other than minimizing abortions, such as the promulgation of a particular moral order of society — one based on sin, guilt, and redemption — as against other ones such as harm minimization. If there is no harm, there need be no guilt and thus no redemption; harm reduction as a policy amounts to immanentization of the Eschaton.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 07:00:04PM *  2 points [-]

Alright. I sometimes forget how irrational people can be. I have a question though: if unintended pregnancy were unheard of and people only considered abortions on rare occasions, do you think there would be as many people fighting about abortion?

(The people who do care about harm reduction could do this despite them.)

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 08:27:36AM *  5 points [-]

I'm having a pretty intense reaction to reading certain articles and could use some support or a solution:

Here's what I read and my reactions:

  1. Feynman's Cargo Cult Science (Which is about how a lot of scientific studies are done badly, often due to researchers not being allowed to do the research correctly.)

  2. The PLOS Medicine article "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"

  3. An article about how psychologists aren't usually using the treatments most supported by science which links to a document that contains a horrifying account:

"During many of my 20 years at Stanford University, Albert Bandura and I tried to hold on to a science-based clinical training program. The bizarre situation we faced there is of more than personal and historical interest: I suspect that many of the same conflicts still exist and motivate the efforts described by Baker and colleagues. Bandura and I, and our students and other colleagues, were discovering the remarkable discrepancies between what the scientific work was revealing and the requirements imposed by the pressures for maintaining accreditation. The professional accreditation requirements insisted on continuing practices whose value was contradicted by the empirical findings. Those requirements not only flew in the face of the data but also made enormous demands on faculty and student time in the clinical program."

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/inpress/baker.pdf

I'm having a variety of reactions:

  1. What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance... or any number of other professions) if we can't even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge? How do you find meaning, LessWrong?

  2. Thank goodness I found this place. I am in love with the glimmers of sanity I see here. Before I found LessWrong I was just kind of... "WTF humanity is a mess." Now it's more like "WTF humanity is a mess but at least there's a group of people trying not to be." If anyone is up to describing this wonderful and horrible feeling in their own words, I could really use to feel related to about this.

  3. Do you know of a website where one can look up a piece of research to see what flaws it has? Is one planned? I need this because it would take a very long time for me to read enough on each relevant topic to discover whether a piece of research I want to use is flawed or not. For instance, Feynman explained about how lots of studies have been done with mazes and rats, but people didn't seem to realize that the rats were using methods to find the food that were unexpected and all sorts of stuff has to be controlled for ranging from the scent of food to the type of flooring in the maze. If you don't know that all of these things need to be controlled for, you won't know that the vast majority of studies done on putting rats into mazes are useless. It's simply not realistic to expect ourselves to be able to single handedly give every single study we read a thorough enough review to detect all the flaws. I love research, but I now feel that it's futile. Does anyone know a solution? I know that peer reviewed journals are supposed to address this type of problem, but I don't see the online studies that I find being rated or marked as flawed in an obvious way.

Comment author: Alicorn 28 October 2012 05:39:24AM 5 points [-]

If we made unintended pregnancy unheard of, the abortion debate would be N/A.

This is not true, even ignoring the problems with making unintended pregnancy unheard of solely by improving contraceptive technology. There would still be cases of unwanted unpredictable fetal disability, conditions like preeclampsia, ectopic pregnancy, selective abortion in cases where there are many fetuses, and people changing their minds or experiencing a sudden change in pregnancy-relevant circumstances (spousal death, financial catastrophe, etc.).

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 06:16:58AM *  2 points [-]

Okay, but:

“A 2011 study reported that 49% of pregnancies in the United States were unintended in 2006, a slight increase from 48% in 2001.”

Reference: U.S. Center for Disease Control: Unintended Pregnancy Prevention.

About half of unintended pregnancies end in abortion:

“The 80 million unintended pregnancies that occur worldwide each year (38% of all pregnancies) can justifiably be deemed an “epidemic.” These pregnancies result in 42 million induced abortions and 34 million unintended births — births that contribute substantially to the annual world population growth of 78 million.”

Reference: Assn. of Reproductive Health Professionals: The Potential of Long-acting Reversible Contraception to Decrease Unintended Pregnancy.

For a person who believes abortion is murder, that looks like an epidemic of evil. For a person who believes in abortion rights, that looks like a huge need for abortion. If the amount of pregnancies where people were thinking about having abortions was very small and people usually had some sort of justification for them other than that they had caused a pregnancy before being ready for kids, I think the focus would shift to something common like child abuse.

Then again, it's possible that the commonness of a particular problem isn't a big factor in some of those people's decisions to pursue abortion as an important cause. If it is, I think the drastic reduction in abortions that would happen if we made unintended pregnancy history would probably result in those people focusing on something else.

Drastically reducing unintended pregnancy might actually be pretty easy. This is because a leading reason for unintended pregnancy may be that a lot of people do not understand contraceptive efficacy statistics. For instance, condom efficacy studies are done in one year periods, which means they're totally useless to help us determine whether they're enough protection for the duration that we want protection for (like 20 or 30 years before the females become infertile). For all we know, the failure rate adds up over the years. For a 2% failure rate, that would mean something like 50% over one's lifetime. (What statistic does that sound like?)

I tried and tried to find a condom study longer than one year and could not. I did encounter this other study on the aftermath of condoms as a sole method of contraception:

“Three hundred four women (78%) had used condoms for an aggregate total of 1178 years (average=3.9 years per woman; range=1 month-25 years). Seventy-eight women (25.6%) reported becoming pregnant while using condoms”

Reference: Journal of Family Practice: Lifetime Patterns of Contraception and Their Relationship to Unintended Pregnancies

Drastically reducing the number of unintended pregnancies might be as simple as getting people to understand these statistics and encouraging them to use enough of the right methods in combination that they actually get the low failure rate they want.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 October 2012 08:41:42AM 2 points [-]

I think I noticed that, holding ‘objective’ (FLOABW) reasons to get sad constant, the less I have eaten recently the more likely I am to get sad. Has anyone experienced the same?

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 05:32:55AM *  3 points [-]

I have. I read somewhere (don't feel like digging up the citation right now) that you require sugar (in your blood, which does not necessarily require you to eat sugar) and B vitamins to process tryptophan into serotonin. Also, you need to have tryptophan in your system. And water. Point is, since we get necessary ingredients for our brain chemicals from food, we need food to be happy.

Comment author: Yvain 19 October 2012 11:14:46AM *  10 points [-]

Current status of these suggestions:

  • I will probably not be implementing any suggestion that requests a multi-checkbox style question, like:

"What activities do you enjoy? Check all that apply"

[] Fishing

[] Boating

[] Hiking

[] Climbing

The reason is that I haven't been able to figure out how to computer process these effectively; I end out with rows of boxes like "hiking,fishing" or "fishing,boating,climbing" and it's apparently beyond my limited skills to get SPSS to separate these out into separate chunks of information. I could do it like this:

Do you enjoy fishing?

[] Y

[] N

Do you enjoy boating?

[] Y

[] N

And so on, but the more options you want, the less happy I am doing this. Or, teach me a good way to solve this problem using Google Forms and SPSS.

  • I am reluctant to change questions that have been on the survey since previous years. For example, Will's suggestion to change the Politics question is good, except that if we did it we would no longer be able to confidently say something like "Less Wrong has gotten more liberal since the last survey". I would rather just include a political compass in the Bonus Questions, plus maybe maybe a more complicated one-word political affiliation question.

  • This is also part of my beef with "other", along with the fact that it's going to mean people who are 99% similar to one option but don't feel it perfectly describes them are instead going to pick something that gives us zero information. I very much agree with Vaniver here. I might or might not add it.

  • I'm balancing ability to totally perfectly capture all answers with ability to let people who just want to take a basic survey do that without answering a thousand mostly-similar questions. So while I understand that it might be theoretically desirable to separate out for example race vs. ethnicity, or country of birth vs. country of residence, or asexual romantic relationships versus sexual romantic relationships, I'm reluctant to bloat any section too much more than it's already bloated - especially the one on sex. I can already see someone like that tabloid reporter from a while back going "And also, the latest Less Wrong survey included 256 questions about your sex life!"

  • Can I get around the ethnicity problem by replacing "White (Non-Hispanic)" with "Latino"? It seems like it should work, but I'm suspicious because none of the US surveys I've encountered have ever done it.

  • Kind of want to avoid beating a dead basilisk.

  • IQ suggestions sound good.

  • ACT suggestion sounds good.

  • Most other bonus question suggestions sound good.

  • Happy to include Big Five test, AQ test, etc in the Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions section.

  • Will fix the Singularity question

  • Will probably fix moral views question to mirror PhilPapers version, even though that screws up past-survey-comparison

  • Will correct all typos

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 01:26:28AM *  1 point [-]

Political question solution:

Add an "other" option, then make a copy of the political question for THIS survey only, minus the "other" option, and ask "What would you have selected if "other" was not present?"

You can compare the results of the second question to past surveys and the first question to future surveys and therefore have a sense of whether LessWrong has moved in a particular direction.

Or, alternately, add a question below the political question saying:

"If you'd had an "other" option on the politics question, would you have used it?"

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 October 2012 10:07:59AM *  8 points [-]

I think it might be interesting to measure altruism somehow.

Also, my political affiliation is "clueless pragmatist": I don't know how to run my country and haven't studied the question much, but I'm open to whatever works in practice. I assume this is too rare to get its own option in the politics section? Pretty sure I've met at least one other LWer who has a similar view.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 01:08:54AM *  1 point [-]

I'm sort of like this, except my view is "I'm pragmatic and I might not be knowledgeable enough to know what to do but I'm knowledgeable enough to have noticed that the political machine is clueless".

I requested "other" and explained my view a bit.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 12:28:28AM *  2 points [-]

Political:

You have no option for "other". I think that if one wants to make a difference in the world, one should get involved in non-profit work, not spend a bunch of time researching candidates only to contribute an extraordinarily tiny fraction of the overall decision making power toward picking somebody that you can't be sure will do what they said they would and will most likely favor some totally unproven strategy for improving things anyway. What really clinches it for me is that I often have reasons to believe that the ideas being promoted are not worth my time. For instance, our school system is fundamentally broken in a way that no amount of tweaking can possibly fix, but I've never seen a school reform idea that addresses this. For another example: In a country where we've got so much technology that most of us are essentially carrying around tiny computers in our pockets, why do we see it as worthwhile to bicker over whether abortion should be legal when we could put all that time, money and energy into improving contraceptive technology? If we made unintended pregnancy unheard of, the abortion debate would be N/A.

Because I prefer to spend my time doing things that make more sense than this, I can't be bothered to research the different political orientations in order to choose one.

I need an "other" option if I am to answer the politics question.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 October 2012 12:05:18AM *  0 points [-]

Degree:

You have no option for 2 year degrees. I have one, so I need that option.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 11:23:38PM *  0 points [-]

Work experience:

I'm an IT person but not a computer scientist. Maybe you don't see us other IT people as being "one of us" but if so, then the question needs an IT option.

I don't see a pattern behind the work experience question. This might be something that happened if the goal with this question changed between surveys but you wanted to keep the same options for the sake of being able to compare the two surveys. So, I won't suggest refocusing it to follow a clarified pattern but maybe a few other general categories (like "Other IT" for instance) can be added if there were enough responses from the last survey to justify it.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 10:39:30PM *  1 point [-]

The relationship goal question isn't specific enough. Considering that the male to female ratio is so off, we should also be asking how many people have given up on finding someone. "Not looking" doesn't indicate that at all as you can stop looking temporarily due to circumstance and there were so many on the last survey that I have to wonder if those guys have given up. There could be a lot of them.

Not sure how to phrase this, since people would react to this in multiple ways. Some will try to settle and have a relationship with people who are not compatible or they'll accept some kind of alternative arrangement. For instance, special friends, or resorting to poly due to inability to find someone who sufficiently satisfies their needs, resulting in needing multiple lovers to do the job (NOT saying this is the only reason someone might go poly or even a common one, I really have no idea.) Others might feel that even though they don't think it's likely that they'll find someone, they don't give up. Also, there's a difference between people who are not actively looking but would take it if they got a chance and people who are intentionally refraining due to unfavorable circumstances. Maybe this:

Relationship Goals

...and currently looking for more relationship partners.

...and currently refraining from adding relationship partners for reasons I expect to be temporary.

...and currently not active in seeking compatible relationship partners due to the difficulty of finding them.

...and currently not looking due to my existing relationship(s).

...and currently not looking for some other reason.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 10:01:58PM *  0 points [-]

Suggested addition:

There is a free online version of the Myers-Briggs personality test that does not require an email address and even gives percentages at humanmetrics.com. Not saying this is scientific but I've used it to test predictions in the past and that has worked. That I've compared two different maps to a territory and gotten the same result with each seems like evidence they're detecting patterns of some kind and that's enough to make me think that the humanmetrics test was not completely botched.

I have posted a detailed prediction of LessWrong's Myers-Briggs results.

The Myers-Briggs is criticized for being imperfect due to people sometimes transcending a personality type dichotomy, though, from my view, developing multiple aspects of yourself is a sign that one has made progress in developing as a person. I don't see it as meaning that the test is flawed but that the idea that personality should never change is an incorrect assumption and that the Myers-Briggs therefore MIGHT have the unintended consequence of also being able to detect people who have reached an advanced level of personal development. Because I am curious about this, and because it will give us some data about the test itself, I am proposing these questions:

Have you gotten a score near the border between any of the letters? If so, which pairs?

Have you gotten a different result when taking the test multiple times? If so, which pairs were different?

Note: There can be more than one pair that switches! (This is rare, but I've seen it happen to a few people, including me.)

Comment author: ShannonFriedman 27 October 2012 04:13:33AM 1 point [-]

Hi Epiphany, yes good to hear from you as well!

I like your points. I did say at the top that I think this applies to everyone, but it sounds like that didn't stand out to you, and like a lot of other people missed that as well. The suffering about suffering is something that I see pretty much everyone experience. For example, someone who is unhappy because they are tired, might think about how they are unhappy because they are tired, and worry that they are going to do things that make them tired like this a lot in the future, and see it as a persistent state. I'd say more often than not, people see their states as persistent, even when they logically can look at their lives over time and realize that the states are not persistent. So when someone is in an uncomfortable state, they often angst about it because of this bias. In Learned Optimism, Seligman talks about how the difference between optimistic and pessimistic people is which states they (biasedly) view as persistent - optimistic people identify more with their positive moods and see negative as passing, and vice-versa. When I used to be depressed, I identified with my depressed state as "real," and all other states as passing and "not who I actually am." (guess I should have cited this in the article!)

I've been good, super super busy. You? Feel free to drop me an email: shannon dot friedman at positivevector dot com.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 04:46:09AM 1 point [-]

I think this applies to everyone, but it sounds like that didn't stand out to you

I think the problem is that I didn't know what you meant by meta suffering at that time, so I was unable to evaluate the claim that the topic is valuable to most people. Therefore, I ignored everything up until the point where I understood what you meant by that.

Meta suffering is when you suffer because you are distressed that you are suffering. You are feeling depressed and hopeless, and there is a part of you that genuinely fears that it will never end.

^ This is the point at which I understood what you meant.

For example, someone who is unhappy because they are tired, might think about how they are unhappy because they are tired, and worry that they are going to do things that make them tired like this a lot in the future, and see it as a persistent state.

I don't see this happening around me so I think it is not a good example of why the meta suffering concept is applicable to a broad audience.

I'd say more often than not, people see their states as persistent, even when they logically can look at their lives over time and realize that the states are not persistent. So when someone is in an uncomfortable state, they often angst about it because of this bias.

I believe it, but it'd be nice to have some kind of term for this (like whatever the academic or psychology term is for this bias) or a study as opposed to a reference to a person who seems to believe the same thing (Seligman).

When I used to be depressed, I identified with my depressed state as "real," and all other states as passing and "not who I actually am." (guess I should have cited this in the article!)

I don't think it'll help people see it as relevant to them if you write about how it was relevant to you. Though, it might help them feel related to.

I think the best bet for presenting this as relevant to this audience is to dig up the study that showed that 50% of people experience depression (assuming it was a good cite. I have no memory of where I got that from).

Writing for these guys is difficult. Would you like having someone to trade feedback with? Then we can both find out about presentation problems before anybody votes us down. :)

I've been good, super super busy. You?

Alienated but less so than I was last time we talked. Thanks for the email address. I saved it for if I need to email you.

Comment author: alexvermeer 26 October 2012 06:41:29PM 0 points [-]

We will be looking for volunteer Sequence proofreaders* using our new volunteer platform, with details are to come shortly.

*proofreading, in this case = spelling, punctuation, minor grammar fixes, etc. Changes to content, terminology, overall style, etc. are beyond the scope of this project.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 02:29:31AM 0 points [-]

I am not the best choice as a spelling and grammar proofreader, to be honest.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 01:35:34AM 7 points [-]

I wasn't sure why this was on topic until I saw the part where you're explaining about how people need to actually track their moods due to them frequently being incorrect about how unhappy they are. Then I had a hindsight bias experience and was like "Wait a minute. This seems so obvious. Why do I need to read a post about it?"

I did recognize this as hindsight bias, but your post might get better ratings from others if that area were written in a way that makes it more obvious that unhappy people are biased toward thinking that they are going to be unhappy. There's probably a name for that. "Appeal to history" or something, or some psychology term.

Then I questioned whether depression was a relevant topic for LessWrong. I naturally have an interest in the topic since I'm a psychology enthusiast, and, knowing that you work with depressed people, I became curious about what you had to say. But I wasn't sure that others here would be interested. Then I remembered that statistic I had heard, that 50% of the population experiences depression at some point. You may want to mention that so people know why this information may be relevant here.

Also, I haven't seen you on for a while. How have you been?

In response to comment by Epiphany on Wanting to Want
Comment author: Ghatanathoah 26 October 2012 09:48:37AM 4 points [-]

You make an excellent point. I will edit my post to make it sound less political and judgemental.

Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 12:31:28AM *  2 points [-]

I am charmed by your polite acknowledgement of the flaw and am happy to see that this has been updated. Thanks for letting me know that pointing it out was useful. :)

In response to comment by Epiphany on Wanting to Want
Comment author: MugaSofer 26 October 2012 08:33:00AM *  4 points [-]

I upvoted despite this. If you overlook that one problem, everything else is gold. That single flawed sentence does not effect the awesome of the other 14 paragraphs, as it does not contribute to the conclusion.

In response to comment by MugaSofer on Wanting to Want
Comment author: Epiphany 27 October 2012 12:25:32AM *  -2 points [-]

My experience of it was more like:

"Oh, this is nice and organized... Still orderly... Still orderly... OHMYSPAGHETTIMONSTER I DID NOT JUST READ THAT!"

To me, it was a disappointment. Like if I were eating ice cream and then it fell to the ground.

If Eliezer is going to praise it like it's the epitome of what LessWrong should be, then it should be spotless. Do you agree?

Comment author: alexvermeer 26 October 2012 06:51:06PM 0 points [-]

Since the planned improvements are minor, the effort will not be expended to backport the changes to the web version. A published book is not planned.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 09:40:45PM *  1 point [-]

This makes no sense to me. Here's how I interpreted this:

"It's too much effort to update the web version because these changes are minor."

If you don't update all the versions at the same time, you will end up with several versions. If Eliezer EVER wants to put out a new and improved version of the sequences and he thinks that LW's input is helpful, then he will be in this pickle:

If the changes were approved for the e-book, it will be assumed that they were improvements. If you want to make sure your your latest version is as good as possible, you need to apply all those improvements. In order to make sure you apply all the improvements, someone must find all the differences between the versions.

If they go through the comments on this thread, that will take longer than it would have for a volunteer to make edits to the original sequences at the same time as the e-book.

If they have to compare each page and look for differences that's really tedious and would take forever.

If the e-book editing person makes a list of all the edits so they're organized, that will probably take LONGER than copying and pasting the change into the sequences or even removing an article out of them. This is for several reasons.

Reason 1: The list is going to have to describe what to change (For instance: "Paragraph three, word two, there is a typo" -- the text of which is different from and therefore in addition to the actual change). You can't just paste the new word onto the list. It won't make sense later. You CAN just paste the new word into the web version of the sequences, though and no further explanation will be needed because you've put it into a context that justifies it.

Reason 2: You can't just put stuff like "Delete Bayesian Judo" onto a to-do list. That will not make sense later. The people who made the list may forget, and they may not be the same people executing the to do list items. You would have to explain why to delete it on to to do list or else the future volunteer, if they're a sceptic or critical thinker at all (which is likely, considering), will go "What? Delete Bayesian Judo? Why?" and will need explanation before feeling that it is justified to do so. This explanation will most likely be sought by said volunteer if it is not in the list, wasting their time. Even if the volunteer manages to ignore their own curiosity and obediently delete the listed items, people will notice the changes. It is likely that they'll be challenged with "Why did you do that"? Then the volunteer or the list maintainer or somebody will feel obligated to justify not putting it back the way it was (which is easy enough) and this puts them in a position where they have to dig up the original explanation.

There is no method I can think of by which it would actually take LESS time to synch the versions of the sequences later compared with synchronising them at the same time when the e-book is made. Can you think of any?

If these are minor changes, why will synchronizing the web version take so much more effort that it's unreasonable?

Comment author: alexvermeer 26 October 2012 06:42:58PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure if we will need these, though you should definitely put your summaries in the LW wikI!

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 07:36:22PM 0 points [-]

Hmm okay. Maybe I will do just that. (:

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 26 October 2012 09:50:59AM *  0 points [-]

Analogizing AGI mainly to existing software projects probably isn't a good starting point for an useful contribution. The big problems are mostly tied to the unique features an actual AGI would have, not to making a generic software project with some security implications work out right.

For a different analogy, think about a software that fits on a floppy disk that somehow turns any laptop into an explosive device with a nuclear bomb level yield (maybe it turns out you can set up a very specific oscillation pattern in a multicore CPU silicon that will trigger a localized false vacuum collapse). I'm not sure I'd be happy to settle with "code gets stolen anyway, so let's make sure everyone gets access to it". An actual working AGI could be extremely weaponizable both for very cheap and into something much more dangerous than any software engineering analogy gives reason to suppose, and significantly less useful as a defensive than as an offensive measure.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 07:18:24PM *  -1 points [-]

For a different analogy, think about a software that fits on a floppy disk that somehow turns any laptop into an explosive device with a nuclear bomb level yield.

Okay. I get that AGI would be this powerful. What I don't get is that the code for it would fit onto a floppy disk. When you say I am making a mistake analogizing AGI to existing software projects, what precisely do you mean to say? Is it that it really wouldn't need very many programmers? Is it that problems with sloppy, rushed coding would be irrelevant? I'm not sure exactly how this counters my point.

I'm not sure I'd be happy to settle with "code gets stolen anyway, so let's make sure everyone gets access to it".

I'm not happy with it. I think it's better than the alternative. See next point.

An actual working AGI could be extremely weaponizable both for very cheap and into something much more dangerous than any software engineering analogy gives reason to suppose, and significantly less useful as a defensive than as an offensive measure.

Agreed. That is precisely why everyone should have it. Because it's "the one ring". They say, "absolute power corrupts absolutely" because there are a billion examples of humans abusing power throughout history. You can't trust anybody with that much power. It will ruin the checks and balances between governments and the people they're supposed to serve, it will ruin the checks and balances between branches of governments and it will make hackers, spies and any criminal or criminal organization who are capable of stealing the software (this might be terrorists, the mafia, gangs, corrupt government leaders, cult leaders, etc.) into superpowers.

To check and balance the power there needs to be a mutually assured destruction type threat between the following:

The people and the governments they serve.

Each branch of governments and the other branches of those governments.

The pirates, hackers, spies and criminals and the good people in the world.

The reason the US government was set up the way it was - with the right to bear arms and with and balances between branches of government - is because power corrupts and mutually assured destruction keeps the humans accountable, and this type of accountability is necessary to keep the system healthy. In a world where AGI exists, the right to bear arms needs to include AGI, or power imbalances will probably ruin everything.

We can't assume the AGIs will all be friendly. Even if we succeed in the incredibly hard task of making sure every AGI released is initially friendly, this won't guarantee they won't be hacked or fooled into being unfriendly. To think that there's a way to ensure that they won't be hacked is foolish.

What would solve the problem of the power of AGI corrupting people if not checks and balances?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 October 2012 04:28:09AM 9 points [-]

We should point people to this whenever they're like "What's special about Less Wrong?" and we can be like "Okay, first, guess how Less Wrong would discuss a reluctant Christian homosexual. Made the prediction? Good, now click this link."

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 07:21:48AM *  -2 points [-]

I'm surprised you regarded it so highly. The flaws I noticed are located in a response to Ghatanathoah's comment.

In response to comment by Vaniver on Wanting to Want
Comment author: Ghatanathoah 25 October 2012 07:30:00AM *  22 points [-]

Let me try using an extended metaphor to explain my point: Remember Eliezer's essay on the Pebblesorters, the aliens obsessed with sorting pebbles into prime-numbered heaps?

Let's imagine a race of Pebblesorters that's p-morality consists of sorting pebbles into prime-numbered heaps. All Pebblesorters have a second-order desire to sort pebbles into prime-numbered heaps, and ensure that others do so as well. In addition to this, individual Pebblesorters have first order desires that make them favor certain prime numbers more than others when they are sorting.

Now let's suppose there is a population of Pebblesorters who usually favor pebble heaps consisting of 13 pebbles but occasionally a mutant is born that likes to make 11-pebble heaps best of all. However, some of the Pebblesorters who prefer 13-pebble heaps have somehow come to the erroneous conclusion that 11 isn't a prime number. Something, perhaps some weird Pebblesorter versions of pride and self-deception, makes them refuse to admit their error.

The 13-Pebble Favorers become obsessed with making sure no Pebblesorters make heaps of 11 pebbles, since 11 obviously isn't a prime number. They begin to persecute 11-Pebble Favorers and imprison or kill them. They declare that Sortulon Prime, the mighty Pebblesorter God that sorts stars into gigantic prime-numbered constellations in the sky, is horribly offended that some Pebblesorters favor 11 pebble piles and will banish any 11-Pebble Favorers to P-Hell, where they will be forced to sort pebbles into heaps of 8 and 9 for all eternity.

Now let's take a look at an individual Pebblesorter named Larry the Closet 11-Pebble Favorer. He was raised by devout 13-Pebble Favorer parents and brought up to believe that 11 isn't a prime number. He has a second order desire to sort pebbles into prime-numbered heaps, and a first order desire to favor 11-pebble heaps. Larry is stricken by guilt that he wants to make 11-pebble heaps. He knows that 11 isn't a prime number, but still feels a strong first order desire to sort pebbles into heaps of 11. He wishes he didn't have that first order desire, since it obviously conflicts with his second order desire to sort pebbles into prime numbered heaps.

Except, of course, Larry is wrong. 11 is a prime number. His first and second order desires are not in conflict. He just mistakenly thinks they are because his parents raised him to think 11 wasn't a prime number.

Now let's make the metaphor explicit. Sorting pebbles into prime-numbered heaps represents Doing the Right Thing. Favoring 13-pebble heaps represents heterosexuality, favoring 11-pebble heaps represents homosexuality. Heterosexual sex and love and homosexual sex and love are both examples of The Right Thing. The people who think homosexuality is immoral are objectively mistaken about what is and isn't moral, in the same way the 13-Pebble Favorers are objectively mistaken about the primality of the number 11.

So the first and second order desires of Larry the Closet Homosexual and Larry the Closet 11-Pebble Favorer aren't really in conflict. They just think they are because their parents convinced them to believe in falsehoods.

I am having trouble seeing a significant difference between that and what you've described. Mimi's enabler could argue "human happiness is a Good Thing unless it seriously interferes with some other really important goal," and then one would have to make the engineering judgment of whether heroin addiction and homosexuality fall on opposite sides of the "serious interference" line.

Again, I assumed that Mimi was a psychologically normal human who had normal human second order desires, like having friends and family, being healthy, doing something important with her life, challenging herself, and so on. I assumed she didn't want to use heroin because doing so interfered with her achievement of these important second order desires.

I suppose Mimi could be a mindless hedonist whose second order desires are somehow mistaken about what she really wants, but those weren't the inferences I drew.

Mimi's enabler could argue "human happiness is a Good Thing unless it seriously interferes with some other really important goal,"

Again, recall my mention of a hypothetical Heroin 2.0 in my earlier comment. It seems to me that if Heroin 2.0 was suddenly invented, and Mimi still didn't want to use heroin, even though it no longer seriously interfered with her other important values, that she might be mistaken. Her second order desire might be a cached thought leftover from when she was addicted to Heroin 1.0 and she can safely reject it.

But I will maintain that if Larry and Mimi are fairly psychologically normal humans, that Mimi's second order desire to stop using heroin is an authentic and proper desire, because heroin use seriously interferes with the achievement of important goals and desires that normal humans (like Mimi, presumably) have. Larry's second order desire, by contrast, is mistaken, because it's based on the false belief that homosexuality is immoral. Homosexual desires do not interfere with important goals humans have. Rather, they are an important goal that humans have (love, sex, and romance), it's just that the objective of that goal is a bit unusual (same sex instead of opposite).

EDITED: To change some language that probably sounded too political and judgemental. The edits do not change the core thesis in any way.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 07:09:12AM *  6 points [-]

First, I would like to make one thing clear: I have absolutely nothing against homosexuals and in fact qualify as queer because my attractions transcend gender entirely. I call my orientation "sapiosexual" because it is minds that I am sexually attracted to, and good character, never mind the housing.

Stops at "pigheaded jerks"

downvotes

You know where this is going, oh yes, I am going right to fundamental attribution error and political mindkill.

The parents are deemed "pigheaded jerks" - a perception of their personality.

Larry the homosexual, convinced by the exact same reasoning, is given something subtly different - an attack on his behavior -- "he gullibly believed them" and you continue with "They (the Larrys) just think they are because their parents fed them a load of crap." attributing his belief to the situation that Larry is in.

Do you think Larry's grandparents didn't teach Larry's parents the same thing? And that Larry's great grandparents didn't teach it to Larry's grandparents?

This was a "good solid dig" at the other side.

Comment author: wedrifid 26 October 2012 02:13:50AM 0 points [-]

Example: Luminosity is a new word for the existing concept "self-awareness"

A new annoying word. I'd nominate it for "worst local jargon (single-word division)".

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 05:57:33AM 0 points [-]

Does any other unnecessary jargon come to mind?

Comment author: wedrifid 26 October 2012 02:14:33AM 0 points [-]

Since metacognition is thinking about your thoughts, and self-awareness means introspecting, which means thinking about your thoughts (or self-awareness can mean being aware that you have a separate personality, a self, which isn't how you use it), I would say these could be synonymous.

One could also say that 'meta-cognition' allows one to arrive at self-awareness.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 05:52:55AM 0 points [-]

I dunno, I think it might go the other way around actually. As tempting as it is to continue this, I'm becoming aware of the fact that this has resulted in a bunch of people talking about wording and I am not sure whether there's a point in discussing this further. I do want to discuss my ideas to slow Moore's Law though.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 05:29:58AM *  -2 points [-]

Help good guys beat the race:

Please provide constructive criticism.

An open source project might prevent this problem, not because having an open source AGI is safe, but because 1.) open source projects are open, so anybody can influence it, including people who are knowledgeable about risks and 2.) the people involved in open source projects probably tend to have a pretty strong philanthropic streak and they're more likely to listen to the dangers than a risk-taking capitalist. The reason it may stop them is this: If an open source project gets there first, it won't be seen as a juicy target to capitalists anymore. It will be a niche that's already filled for free. If they wanted to make an AGI they'd have to make one that was so much better than the existing one that it makes sense to charge, or fail at business.

Making an open source AGI, in order to compete with a business might cause the open source programmers to rush. However, imagine what would happen if customers got the following messages around the time that the closed source AGI was going to be released: If you wait a while longer, an AGI will come out for free, plus, the open source AGI is going to be thoroughly tested to discover dangers before you run it. The closed source AGI is very risky." That would deter a lot of people from buying, which would at least reduce the exposure to the closed source AGI - and the open source group would not have to release the AGI until they had tested thoroughly. If, during the course of their tests, they discover hideous risks, these could serve as warnings about AGI in general, make those risks feel real, and prevent people from running risky AGIs. Assuming that the open source project had good PR and advertising / public education campaigns.

Why open source might have a competitive advantage:

  • Open source people may be more willing to merge, especially if our future depends on it, whereas companies tend to behave in self-interested ways and work separately for the most part. They're already divided, so open source could conquer them.

  • I was told by a Microsoft employee that he thought Linux would eventually win. Considering the influence that corporate culture can have on software design (the rushing to make deadlines which results in code debt), I don't disagree with him one bit. One concept here that could turn out to be really important is that any company working on AGI that does not put safety first may also have a short-term culture, which means they might actually take much, much longer to release their project, or to have recalls that force them to start over, than an organization of programmers that is allowed to do things the right way. An open source project has that potential benefit on it's side.

  • People who work on open source projects are probably more altruistic. They may be able to be persuaded that working on AI is so much more important to the future of humanity that they jump out of their current open source project and get involved.

    For those three reasons, I think an open source project has a good chance of getting there first.

    The obvious argument against this would be "An open source AGI!!! Won't bad people write their own versions?" My counter argument is: In a world where pirates routinely crack software within days of it coming out, and corporate espionage is a real possibility for a target this juicy, what makes you think the code won't get stolen THE VERY NEXT DAY? In that event, the best tool to save us from rogue AGIs would be if every open source programmer has access to editable copies of a friendly AGI, don't you think?

    An even faster solution: How just the threat of having to compete with a massive open source project may stop them.

    See Also "Sabotage would not work"

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 05:29:46AM *  -2 points [-]

Create public relations nightmare for anyone producing risky AGI:

Please provide constructive criticism.

One powerful way to get people thinking about safety is if clever ways are invented to shout from the rooftops that this could be dangerous and present the message in a way that most people will grok. If everybody is familiar enough with how dangerous it could be, then funding an AGI project without a safety plan in place would be a PR disaster for the companies doing it. That would put a lot of pressure on them to put safeties into place. This wouldn't need to cost a lot. Sometimes small, clever acts can get a huge amount of attention. For instance, Improv Everywhere. Imagine what would happen if a few hundred volunteers gathered in every major city on the same day and did this:

Dressed in business suits, covered in happy face stickers, they start asking strangers "Have you seen my robot anywhere? It was trying to make me happy and it covered me in these stickers. What do you think it will do next?" They'll probably say "I don't know." And you could respond "Yeah, the companies currently building robots like this one have no idea what they're going to do either... you might need this (the volunteer hands them a pamphlet on AGI safety) "I've got to keep an eye out for my robot." (Then they go away and do it again.) The suits are important because they would contrast the happy face stickers such that the message was more likely to be interpreted as "Being covered in happy face stickers is very embarrassing and therefore really bad" as opposed to just seeming silly, gives the person an upper-class look that supports the idea that they own a robot, and also makes strangers more likely to interpret somebody covered in happy face stickers as sane.

Another idea: If the internet "wears" black for a time, like they did for SOPA, that could work to get attention. Surely intelligent people in tech companies would grok the threat that unfriendly AGI poses to humanity, and they're in a unique position to warn about it. It's not like the people on this forum have no connections to the technology world...

Even if millions of dollars aren't available to spend on a public advertising campaign, if enough people try enough clever ways to get everyone's attention (internet memes on youtube for instance) then something will probably get through. When large masses of people fear something, they tend to push for regulation and tend to scare investors off. They can also be given specific actions to take.

See Also "Sabotage would not work"

Comment author: gwern 26 October 2012 01:55:27AM 2 points [-]
  • Patents is a completely unworkable idea.
  • Convincing programmers might work, if we think very few programmers or AI researchers are the ones making actual progress. Herding programmers is like herding cats, so this works only in proportion to how many key coders there are - if you need to convince more than, say, 100,000, I don't think it would work.
  • PR nightmare seems to be the same thing.
  • Winning the race is a reasonable idea but I'm not sure the dynamic actually works that way: someone wanting to produce and sell an AI period might be discouraged by an open-source AI, but a FLOSS AI would just be catnip to anyone who wants to throw it on a supercomputer and make $$$.
Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 05:21:26AM -1 points [-]

I wish this was on the idea comment rather than over here... I'm sorry but I think I will have to relocate my response to you by putting it on the other thread where my comment is. This is because discussing it here will result in a bunch of people jumping into the conversation on this thread when the comment we're talking about is on a different thread. So, for the sake of keeping it organized, my response to you regarding the feasibility of convincing programmers to refuse risky AI jobs is on the other thread.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 04:21:09AM *  1 point [-]

Convince programmers to refuse to work on risky AGI projects:

Please provide constructive criticism.

We're in an era where the people required to make AGI happen are in so much demand that if they refused to work on an AGI that wasn't safe, they'd still have plenty of jobs left to choose from. You could convince programmers to adopt a policy of refusing to work on unsafe AGI. These specifics would be required:

  • Make sure that programmers at all levels have a good way to determine whether the AGI they're working on has proper safety mechanisms in place. Sometimes employees get such a small view of their job and will be told such confident fluff by management, that they have no idea what is going on. I am not qualified to do this, but if someone reading this post is, it might be very important if you write some guidelines for how programmers can tell whether the AGI they're working on might be unsafe from within their employment position. It may be more effective to give them a confidential hotline. Things can get complicated, both in programming, and in corporate culture, and employees may need help sorting out what's going on.

  • You could create resources to help programmers organize a strike or programmer's walk. Things like: An anonymous web interface where people interested in striking can post their intent - this would help momentum build. A place for people to post stories about how they took action against unsafe AI projects. They might not know how to organize otherwise (especially in large projects) or might need the inspiration to get moving.

  • If a union is formed around technological safety, the union could make demands that outside agencies must be allowed to check on the project, and that the company must be forthcoming with all safety related information.

On the feasibility of getting through to the programmers

See Also "Sabotage would not work"

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 05:08:26AM *  0 points [-]

Gwern responded to my comment in his Moore's Law thread. I don't know why he responded over there instead of over here but I decided that it was more organized to relocate the conversation to the comment it is about so I put my response to him here.

Herding programmers is like herding cats, so this works only in proportion to how many key coders there are - if you need to convince more than, say, 100,000, I don't think it would work.

Do you have evidence one way or the other of what proportion of programmers get the existential risk posed by AGI? In any case, I don't know how to tell whether you're too pessimistic or whether I am too optimistic here.

researches for figures for this project

There are between 1,200,000 and 1,450,000 programmers depending on whether you want to count web people (who have been lumped together) in the USA according to the 2010 US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's not the entire world but getting the American programmers on board would be major progress and researching the figures for all 200 countries in the world is outside the scope of this comment, so I will stick to that for right now.

LessWrong has over 13,000 users and over 10,000,000 visits. It isn't clear what percentage of the American programmer population has been exposed to AI and existential risk this way (and a bit over half the visits are from Americans) but since LessWrong has lots of programmers and has eight times as many visits as there are programmers in America, it's possible that a majority of American programmers have at least heard of existential risk or SI. This is just the beginning though because LessWrong is growing pretty fast and it could grow even faster if I (or someone) were to get involved in web marketing such as improving the SEO or improving the site's presentation (I may do both of these, though I want to address the risk of endless September first and I'm letting that one cool off for a while, at Luke's advice, so that people don't explode because I made too many meta threads).

I don't see any research on what percentage of programmers believe that AI poses significant risks... I doubt there is any right now, but maybe you know of some?

In either case, if someone might create a method of getting through to them that is testable and works, then this is not a straight up "x percent of relevant programmers get it" sort of problem. Teachers and sales people do that for a living, so it's not like there isn't a whole bunch of knowledge about how to get through to people that could be used. Eliezer is very successful at certain super important teaching skills that would be necessary to do this. For instance, the sequences are rapidly gaining popularity, and he's highly regarded by a lot of people who have read them. Whether or not readers understand everything they read is questionable, but that he is able to build rapport and motivate people to learn is pretty well supported. In addition to that, I became a sales person for a while after the IT bubble burst and was pretty good at it. I would be completely willing to assist in attempting to figure out a way of using consultative / question selling techniques (these work without using dark tactics by encouraging a person to consider each aspect of a decision and provide necessary information for all the choices required for their final decision) to convince programmers that AI poses existential risks.

I think this is worth formally researching. If, say, 50% of American programmers already know about it and get it, which is possible considering the figures above, then my idea is still plausible and it's just a matter of organizing them. If not, Eliezer or somebody (me maybe?) can figure out a method of convincing programmers and test it, then we'd know there was a viable solution. Then it's just a matter of having a way to scale it to the rest of the programmer population -- but that's what the field of marketing is for, so it's not like there's a need to despair there.

That would mean getting the word out to programmers around the world. This wouldn't be a trivial effort, but if they were getting it, and most American programmers had been convinced, it would be a worthwhile effort, and this would make it worth investing in. Considering that programmers are well off pretty much everywhere and that technology oriented folks tend to want internet access, communicating a message to all the programmers in the world probably is not anywhere near as hard as it would at first seem. Especially since LW is already growing so fast and there is a web professional here who is willing to help it grow (me).

You know the people at SI better than I do. Do you think SI would have an interest in finding out what percentage of programmers get it, testing methods of getting through to them, and determining what web marketing strategies work for getting the message out?

Comment author: gwern 19 October 2012 03:11:50PM 0 points [-]

Yes, I've pointed out most of those as reasons effective regulation would not be done (especially in China).

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 01:38:46AM *  0 points [-]

Oh, sorry about that! After this dawned on me, I just kind of skimmed the rest and the subtitle "The China question" did not trigger a blip on my "you must read this before posting that idea" radar.

What did you think of my ideas for slowing Moore's law?

Comment author: Alicorn 26 October 2012 12:09:48AM -2 points [-]

"Luminosity" is best glossed as "self-awareness", not "metacognition". Also, Eliezer didn't make it up (and I didn't make it up from scratch), so bringing it up under the grandparent is peculiar.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 October 2012 01:21:37AM *  0 points [-]

"Luminosity" is best glossed as "self-awareness", not "metacognition"

Since metacognition is thinking about your thoughts, and self-awareness means introspecting, which means thinking about your thoughts (or self-awareness can mean being aware that you have a separate personality, a self, which isn't how you use it), I would say these could be synonymous. To test whether my perception here is wrong, I went to wikipedia, Google, and the dictionary to see how they used those words. Here's what I discovered:

Both the internet and you are using self-awareness in a broader way to encompass emotions and states of mind. Metacognition is more narrow and is something I personally use more frequently when I'm referring to re-engineering my thought processes. I think the reason I initially selected "meta cognition" as a term to suggest is because the sequences are, to me, an invitation to think about thinking and re-engineer one's thinking processes, so I was interpreting your luminosity concept within that context. Also, the way that I introspect about my feelings and experiences, I'm pretty focused on getting down to the thoughts behind everything and re-engineering them. The way I experience self-awareness, self-awareness and metacognition are inseparable and may as well be synonymous, but I acknowledge that other people may do it differently.

If your focus is more on the emotional / state of mind type aspects (I have not read all of your luminosity articles to be able to see the patterns in how you use it) self-awareness is probably a closer synonym for luminosity.

I also discovered that you have one of the top five Google results for luminosity. Good job. However, I think you're more likely to show up when people are looking for light bulbs or similar than when they are looking for self-improvement materials, so in my view it was not the most optimal term to SEO.

Eliezer didn't make it up (and I didn't make it up from scratch

I took the word "luminosity" from "Knowledge and its Limits" by Timothy Williamson, although I'm using it in a different sense than he did.

I see that, but I did not say that Eliezer came up with that specific example.

so bringing it up under the grandparent is peculiar

Because luminosity is a term used in the sequences, it's relevant. Because it's an example of a word that's synonymous with a much more common word:

Luminosity, as I'll use the term, is self-awareness.

It is definitely relevant as an example of uneccessary jargon in the sequences.

It would not support the point that Eliezer is coming up with unneccessary jargon, but that's not my point, my real point is that the sequences have unneccessary jargon. That is what's important here.

Since the sequences would get more hits from search engines by using existing terms, LWers and other flavors of rationalists would be able to communicate more easily, and people would have to remember less terms overall if existing terms were used, do you think it would be of greater benefit to use "self-awareness" instead?

Note: For SEO reasons it may be safer to add the term self-awareness to the title rather than replace luminosity. (When you change your title entirely, it may look like search engine spamming and get you spam penalties. I will check whether this specific technique worked if you're interested.)

Comment author: Epiphany 25 October 2012 08:01:50AM *  1 point [-]

Unsupported claim: "Everything you do in the mind has an effect, and your brain races ahead unconsciously without your supervision."

I've studied psychology enough to think this could be a problem, but why should anyone else think so?

This is a powerful point but it's unsupported.

There is also a minor typo: "dis ease" (It's the space.)

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 01:04:42AM *  0 points [-]

I think what this person is saying is "We already have words for a lot of these things so Eliezer and the other people who wrote the sequences are making up their own words for no reason."

In many cases, there's existing academic jargon that can take the place of the phrases Yudkowky uses.

The sequences would get more hits from search engines by using existing terms, LWers and other flavors of rationalists would be able to communicate more easily, and people would have to remember less terms overall if he just uses existing terms.

(Edit: added "and other people" to above sentence about making up unnecessary words for the sequences)

Comment author: Epiphany 25 October 2012 03:58:14AM *  1 point [-]

Example: Luminosity is a new word for the existing concept "self-awareness"

(Edit: "self-awarness" used to say "metacognition").

Comment author: Bugmaster 23 October 2012 02:15:52AM 0 points [-]

These are all interesting ideas, but are they true ? That is, is there any evidence to support any of them ?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 October 2012 03:18:37AM *  0 points [-]

Well sure. Observing humans, I think there is plenty of evidence that we do a lot of those things.

Teenage boys spend how many hours of their lives poaching monsters in video games? Sure, some games are designed for them to grind, but they find this to be recreational why? Maybe they really would use all the animals as target practice if there weren't some type of instinct to stop them.

We've all seen people taking out anger on others, or on the dog. No reason to think they wouldn't do that to a forest full of animals.

We've seen humans do class signaling - a lot of poor people will spend $100 on shoes to make themselves look richer. Some people get stuck in the "keeping up with the Jones's" cycle, spending ever more to look just as good. If killing animals was a way of class signaling for primitive people, there's no reason to think that they wouldn't be competitive about it like modern humans can be.

We know that humans sometimes hunt animals to extinction, so it's not implausible to suggest that humans without cuteness might have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.

As for whether specifically cave people / tribes would do any of these things if specifically their instinct for cuteness were removed and whether they'd end up with such a dearth of animals as to interfere with their survival is obviously not testable, but the things I suggested are plausible based on the way that people behave.

These things are not common knowledge?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 October 2012 01:43:02AM *  0 points [-]

Different explanation from what I saw in the comments:

Maybe it isn't that cuteness causes us to care for children, but that it stops us from destroying all other life in the vicinity. Considering that a lot of males have an aggressive instinct (testosterone is connected with violent behaviors in both genders, but males are more likely to have high levels), what would uncivilized people with no sense of cuteness do to animal populations? I have practically no aggressive instincts myself, being female and having the stereotypically low testosterone, but here's how I think that might go:

They might think it's a good idea to practice hunting skills by killing everything in sight.

When they're angry would they shoot the first thing they see even if it's a baby deer? In contrast, if they go out into the forest to shoot something in anger a few times and encounter cute baby deer, which calms them down and makes them feel bad for wanting to shoot them, this may condition them not to develop a habit of shooting things when angry.

When a cave person with no cuteness instinct feels ambitious, do they set out to kill everything they see for a week as a way of showing dominance over the jungle?

If a non-cute experiencing cave person sees a family of bears, do they launch their spear at the mother, not caring whether all of the cubs die or do they feel concern about orphaning cubs and wait to find a lone male? This is very important because if the cave person allows the first scenario, their hunting practices will reduce the edible bear population substantially. In the second, the cave person has minimized their impact. (Few male bears are can impregnate many females, meaning that the bears can reproduce at a similar pace even after losing most of them, while fewer female bears will certainly mean less reproductive capacity for the bears.)

When a cave man meets a cave woman he finds sexy, does he catch every animal he can find to show her how good he is at catching animals? Do the other men kill even more in order to compete? If she has an instinctive respect for life, then lots of dead bunnies and baby deer will upset her. This may encourage them to channel their urges to compete for her into a "quality over quantity" strategy by finding one really good trophy instead.

I might question here whether cuteness was necessary if they had empathy. However, empathy is triggered for things like verbal explanations, tears and certain facial expressions - behaviors that animals are very disadvantaged at accomplishing. Also, these would be difficult to detect from the distance at which you'd start stalking them, and they would be very brief, as they'd start running as soon as they notice you, so after that, all you'd see was the back of them. Also, cuteness works even after the animal is dead - it can trigger "Oh no! I killed something cute!" remorse when an empathetic equivalent might not be triggered because expressiveness isn't a likely characteristic of an inanimate face.

This might also explain why babies are less cute - we spend enough time close up to them to notice their facial expressions and empathize with them, and they have various advantages in being able to trigger specific empathetic reactions, so since empathy is frequently triggered, cuteness is less important.

Though, a much simpler explanation is also possible: Maybe your notions about how common it is for humans to find animals cuter than babies is based on a biased sample. I bit, just now, not even thinking about it, because I agreed with your idea that most people find animals cuter but then it dawned on me: maybe it's not that common for people to find babies less cute than animals. There could be some other reason our cuteness websites seem to focus on animals - parents don't like putting up pictures of babies for security reasons, they're concerned they'll look like braggarts, and on a website dominated by animals they don't want to upload pictures of a child because it makes the dehumanizing implication that their baby is just an amusing little animal.

Also, it could have to do with the supply and demand of cute little animals to cute human babies. There are 300 million Americans and probably only a few million of them are babies. To contrast, Americans probably have millions of cats and dogs and gerbils, etc plus there must be many times more bunnies and squirrels and such that they might see in their lawns than there are human babies. Also, animals are cute for longer - many of them are cute as adults - whereas cute babies are, by definition, only cute while they're babies.

And we can add goofy words to animal pictures without worrying about it humiliating them, or take dozens of videos of them jumping into boxes (like with Maru cat, my personal favorite) without anyone worrying about it damaging their future reputations or near-term mental health. That we can take more pictures of animals and do more things with them may increase the ratio of animal pictures to baby pictures by quite a bit.

Come to think of it, how often do you see cute animals in real life vs. how often do you see cute babies? I work in front of a window that looks out into a garden. I see cute birds and squirrels all day. I probably see at least a hundred times as many cute animals as babies in my daily life. Multiply this by a lot because I think bumblebees are cute. When I see people carrying their babies around at the supermarket, I might smile at them, but I don't stare at them the way I might watch a cute birdie because that's rude. I spend a lot less time appreciating cute babies than animals for this reason.

If my mind fills with images of cute animals and leaves me at a loss when coming up with cute baby images when I think about whether animals or babies are cuter, maybe that's why.

Comment author: niceguyanon 16 October 2012 11:39:53PM *  15 points [-]

How trainable is the trait of Conscientiousness? Is it as rigid as I.Q?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 October 2012 01:12:03AM *  -1 points [-]

I think there are a couple ways to go about answering this question. If you go about it by seeing whether people who are related and people with a few life experiences that you want to track score high on a conscientiousness test, you're not really answering the question "what training would work?"

I don't have a direct answer to that, but I do have several bits of information that would be very useful for a person who would like to try and solve this:

Dabrowski did research on morality also. His theory is that there are certain traits called "super sensitivities" that predict moral behavior. There may be a way to increase these - perhaps with drugs or life experiences designed to make your nervous system more excitable.

See also Jane Elliot's brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. I don't know whether they did these formally, but they observed that when the situation was reversed (the situation was that kids with a certain eye color were told they were better and became abusive) the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the "better than" role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior.

I researched violent crime one day and discovered that the main thing that was connected with violent crime was high testosterone. In theory, treatment using existing drugs could make a very big difference. That would probably require some kind of training intended to explain to the violent criminals that their problem was chemical, and convince them to take the drugs. This would be difficult because if they're chemically imbalanced it may not be easy to get that through to them. To an ordinary person, it's a no-brainer, but to them, it's probably not. Some type of educational program designed to get them to wake up and realize they need testosterone reduction treatment may go a long way.

This doesn't exactly qualify as training, as I've gone up to a meta level, but this kind of thinking could potentially make a very big difference:

We need to consider the role of perverse incentives. There are a lot of perverse incentives in life, and a lot of them are improperly checked and balanced. For instance, diagnosing a person with a mental disorder can be devastating to that person and to come up with an accurate diagnosis can take some time. However, psychologists are pressured to diagnose on the first visit because they can't get paid by the insurance company without it. Take a good person and put them into a bad situation, and they may react as if they were a bad person because they need to in order to survive. Identifying and changing perverse incentives might really change not only the way that a large number of people behave, but would also redirect the selection pressure on humans such that the good ones are more likely to survive and reproduce, helping to "train" our genes in the right direction, rather than just our behavior.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 October 2012 04:45:09AM *  0 points [-]

An amusing thought occurred to me while reading HPMOR. Harry Potter may already be able to rule the world in chapter 6 by doing the following:

  1. Turn his mokeskin pouch inside out.
  2. Ask the mokeskin pouch for the universe.
Comment author: nancyhua 21 October 2012 08:44:42PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for your reply, it makes me feel much better and I'm glad and impressed we're not annoyed at each other, especially considering I can also be easily annoyed. I think a lot of people can understand being alienated but I don't know what the rationalist solution is. For me, it was one of those things that was a feedback loop and thus really hard to get out of. That's part of why I like HPMOR- Harry is like an alien trying to make a single friend. In his case, he's alone because he's superior to everyone and thus can't rely on anyone else, which may be some cold comfort, but that wasn't exactly my situation...

Comment author: Epiphany 21 October 2012 09:41:51PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for your reply, it makes me feel much better and I'm glad and impressed we're not annoyed at each other, especially considering I can also be easily annoyed.

Oh! Yay! (:

I think a lot of people can understand being alienated but I don't know what the rationalist solution is.

It seems to me that many on LW are alienated, and it's resulting in the most ridiculous clusterf... People desire to quickly jump to the conclusion that the person they're talking to is not worth talking to (I think this might apply more to new people than others)... because they are so alienated and have to do something about it, but there's this wild mix of causes of annoyance and it just makes a mess. There are older users who are spitting out logical fallacies, newer users who are clueless, new users who are sharp, old users who are sharp of course... and sometimes one annoys one's self (which is what happened to me just now). And of course if people DON'T ignore annoying users, or at least tell them that they're doing it wrong, they're encouraged to stick around without improving the annoying behavior... but this is wrought with peril because as you have seen, if I am the one who made the mistake, and I tell you that you've made a mistake, I get to look like an idiot, and you get to feel bad for no reason. Many times, when somebody points out my mistake, it's the same problem - they made a mistake but didn't notice it, possibly because they're so annoyed with the last 10 people that annoyed them that they're not giving me the benefit of the doubt. Occasionally they do point out some mistake I made, so that's good. But it seems like people here are a bit too apt to reach for the 2 x 4.

That's part of why I like HPMOR- Harry is like an alien trying to make a single friend. In his case, he's alone because he's superior to everyone and thus can't rely on anyone else, which may be some cold comfort, but that wasn't exactly my situation...

What was your exact situation?

I am an alien for sure. I relate to not being able to rely on anyone else, but it is not comforting that I'm usually better at figuring things out than those around me. I have plenty of friends but the friendships are one-sided: I am understanding and emotionally supportive to them, but they do not understand me deeply enough so they aren't really useful for me to talk to about my thoughts and feelings. I've noticed that most of the other aliens haven't mastered staying rational when they've discovered an interesting alien they might get close to. This has ruined the vast majority of my attempts to get to know other aliens. I used to have a problem with staying rational when meeting other aliens myself - but that's not my problem anymore. Now my problem is that nearly everybody else is going about it in dysfunctional ways and I'm burnt out on that. I have no idea how to solve this, so I'm just walking away from that catastrophe and I've decided to fill my time up with group projects for now.

Comment author: nancyhua 21 October 2012 07:33:53PM *  0 points [-]

I had read the article extract included in the OP, didn't look at the link. The article itself says that lesswrongers were part of the data set but I didn't take this to mean this was about lesswrong in general.

What are the reasoning skills you identified as lacking in my comments? I clicked on all the links, certainly. The WSJ refers to the yourmorals and I had clicked on that but didn't think it was lesswrong because it's offsite and seems inaccessible. My information on the plurality being liberal/socialist is from a 2011 lesswrong census I read on this site, although I may be misremembering.

Is the point you're disagreeing with that calling libertarians "cold and calculating" does not equal calling lesswrongers this? I agree that it's calling a subset of lesswrongers "cold and calculating"- the libertarian subset.

I think to a certain audience I would describe myself as libertarian, although not to the lesswrong audience. My impression is that in general liberals are stereotyped as emotional, educated hippies whereas conservatives are stereotyped as selfish, stupid traditionalists. I had less idea what libertarians were stereotyped as, probably since there are less of them so people don't really bother.

I want to know if I'm being irrational, that's the whole point of this. But I'm unsure how to interpret your words or your tone. Is it a language thing, like you're saying specific libertarian lesswrongers were called cold and calculating but I'm saying lesswrong as a community is not called this? Maybe it's common for people to say things like this to each other, and I appreciate if you're trying to help me, but that's not how I'm left feeling after this interaction- maybe it'd be more helpful if you were more specific, just my impression- please don't interpret this as a plea for you to sink time into educating me or something, I guess unless you want to of your own volition.

Sorry if I somehow offended you in the first place. Maybe you're annoyed I didn't get your child/rapist example? I think I understood your point about people fearing the rapist more, but I don't see how it relates to the "cold and calculating" topic, unless you're suggesting the kid would not be called this. It can be hard to communicate tone via the internet and I'm new to all internet forums as of a few months ago so I'm not desensitized yet or accustomed to internet culture. I've already realized people often come off very differently online vs offline.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 October 2012 08:19:31PM *  0 points [-]

The article itself says that lesswrongers were part of the data set but I didn't take this to mean this was about lesswrong in general.

I read the subject line for the OP but the title of the article was so similar I didn't notice it wasn't exactly the same. Sigh. I think I've been had by change blindness. (There's an interesting LW article I'm being reminded of right now.). My title oversight explains most of the confusion here.

What are the reasoning skills you identified as lacking in my comments?

None. It was perceived lack of motivation to read things that prompted that. This perception is fixed now. I'm sorry about that.

Maybe you're annoyed I didn't get your child/rapist example?

I am constantly alienated and usually somewhere near my limit for alienation. Often past it, often just below it. If I seem annoyed, that is probably to blame more than anything. I'm perma-annoyed.

I want to know if I'm being irrational, that's the whole point of this.

If you want to continue after my oversight with the title, I will engage, but I should probably start over and re-focus. What specific perception(s) do you want to discuss?

Comment author: nancyhua 21 October 2012 08:05:26AM 1 point [-]

I hadn't realized LessWrongers were being called cold and calculating. Despite Hanson writing some libertarian things, my impression was the plurality of lesswrongers subscribed to socialism or liberalism. Is this erroneous?

Does the description imply that the person thinks they are superior to or separate from other people? If I were worried about being described as cold and calculating, I think I'd try to show I cared about and could relate to normal people, despite being, in some ways, atypical. So if a libertarian, or anyone, were worried about being described this way, maybe they should think of ways to show they're not indifferent to the masses.

I think I agree with your remarks in general, although I'm not sure I understand what the kid/rapist example is saying. I'm getting the impression that "cold and calculating" means inhuman/monstrous, but also not like the animals, so maybe an impassive, evil robot monster.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 October 2012 06:55:36PM *  -2 points [-]

I hadn't realized LessWrongers were being called cold and calculating.

Really? There's an article link in the OP. The Wall Street Journal did an article on LessWrong. Why don't you read it?

Despite Hanson writing some libertarian things, my impression was the plurality of lesswrongers subscribed to socialism or liberalism. Is this erroneous?

The article links to a survey that LessWrongers did and so does the OP.

I see you're new here. FYI people are not going to take kindly to it if you comment on threads without reading the OP and/or closely related materials (such as the WSJ link and survey in the OP). This is because a lot of the people here are very well read. Maybe you are, too, and can understand this. They also don't take kindly to it if people haven't endeavored to read about reasoning skills. Maybe you have already read some books on things like logic and biases or have read the sequences or something. If not, I'll let you know that you need familiarity with these types of subjects if you want to fit in.

Comment author: wedrifid 21 October 2012 04:47:14AM 1 point [-]

The type of murderer who just completely flips out isn't described as "cold and calculating"

Unless it will sell more newspapers.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 October 2012 05:51:57AM 0 points [-]

Hah! Ok. They can be inappropriately described. :P But perhaps you mean something more along the lines of "it's not worth thinking about this because WSJ is just saying that to make it sound more interesting."

Comment author: nancyhua 21 October 2012 03:44:29AM *  0 points [-]

I agree, it's not a positive description. But looking on the upside...? Plus I was wondering if people realized or agreed that they were suggesting libertarians were smarter.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 October 2012 04:26:10AM *  0 points [-]

The type of murderer who just completely flips out isn't described as "cold and calculating" but we might describe a strategic killer that way. However, that comparison just means the strategic one is thinking more - not necessarily that the thinking being done is more intelligent. It might only imply that the strategic one isn't flying off the handle in response to emotion.

Try this scenario:

There's a murder who wants to kill a certain victim. The murderer watches the victim for a while to discover their commuting habits. They make a plan and purchase supplies. After a few weeks of planning, the murderer waits in the bushes, possessing everything necessary to kill their victim - formaldehyde for a snare, handcuffs for restraints, a knife, and a first aid kit in case the victim hurts them in a struggle. They wait for an hour until the victim is in exactly the right spot, and then they pounce with the formaldehyde. The murder handcuffs the victim and takes them to a different location where nobody can see. Then the murderer kills the victim.

Is this murderer cold and calculating?

Did the murderer use more strategy than the average person might use on a camping trip that involves hunting?

I think the answer to that is "no", so the meaning is potentially more like "cold enough to calculate" not "cold but intelligent".

Also, "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care". If people see you as malicious but weak, say a child who fights with the other kids, they're likely to write you off as an annoyance and ignore you.

However, if they see you as malicious but strong, a fully grown person who is a rapist we'll say, then one is seen as a threat and people will pull out all the stops to get rid of you. A serial rapist gets news coverage. People stay indoors to avoid them. Police put in extra effort.

How often have there been news reports of a child bully wandering the sidewalks, urging you to protect your children? Probably never. That would just make people laugh. But I've seen rapists on the news plenty of times.

I think LessWrong would be better off with a label that means something more along the lines of "harmless nerds" or "intelligent people who care about the world".

I'm pretty sure cold and calculating means something more like "monstrous".

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 04:33:21AM *  4 points [-]

I have suggestions other than posts to add or remove, for instance like how the crux of My Wild and Reckless Youth seems to be that you need to use "retrospective predictions" but this term is not defined and it's not searchable because the common term for this is "retrodiction". Gwern explained in the comments, but that sequence could really use a definition and example. Or how "Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence" has a terrible title because it sounds too much like he's saying "make appeals to ignorance". I already know what an appeal to ignorance is but if one has never heard of it before, one may be encouraged to make appeals to ignorance because of this article. I think it would be beneficial if he put more emphasis on differentiating between his point and appeals to ignorance - the distinction he makes is brief and not emphasized.

I suspect that edit suggestions won't be as well-received since it would require that Eliezer spends time editing the sequences, as opposed to simply approving addition and removal requests. You might have a volunteer editor though, if you want one.

Anyway, what should I do with edit suggestions like these? Comment in the sequences, comment here, comment to /dev/null?

Comment author: loup-vaillant 18 October 2012 11:11:57PM 4 points [-]

Maybe we could test that. Does LessWrong keep non-anonymous access logs? If so, we may be able to (approximately?) reconstruct access patterns over the weeks/months/years by unique user. We could know:

  • What are the first reads of newcomers?
  • What are typical orders of reading?
  • Does reading stops, when, and where?

For instance, if we find that people that start by the quantum mechanic sequence tend to leave more often than the others, then it is probably a good idea to segregate it in a separate volume. It would at least signal that the author knows this is advanced or controversial.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 02:35:16AM *  3 points [-]

From Google analytics:

Google has a term for pages that people come in on: "landing pages". Basically, it can tell whether someone got to the page from clicking an external link / advertisement or by using a search engine -- or whether they clicked a link from within the same site.

"Timeless Physics" is in the 50 most popular landing pages and so is "An intuitive explanation of quantum mechanics" (though it is not a sequence). I am not seeing any pattern to the topics that people prefer in these landing pages. I can tell you this though, all the top 50 landing pages have terrible bounce rates (meaning people leave the site without clicking further), usually 80% or 90%.

"What are typical orders of reading?"

Analytics has something like this, but it's not specific to the sequences, so it basically shows people coming in on the main page, checking out discussions or maybe an article, going to the user sections or discussions or maybe a different article, and so on. It's not really useful for figuring this out.

"Does reading stops, when, and where?"

Everywhere. Most of the pages I've seen on there have an 80% or 90% bounce rate. The question here is what pages do they NOT quit reading on?

restricts the analytics view to landing pages with < 60% bounce rate and orders them by total visits

Well, look at that. "The Quantum Physics Sequence" is the first sequence page in the list. The next piece of writing is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" which has a somewhat lower bounce rate but not nearly as many visits.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 02:15:46AM *  5 points [-]

Removal Suggestion: Bayesian Judo. I'm an atheist, too, but this post has a pile of issues:

  1. His reasoning is "If this one thing is false, the entire religion is wrong" - but that's a hasty generalization. I briefly explained in the comments why this cannot prove religion wrong.

  2. Since the reasoning is poor, and he opens with "You can have some fun with people..." this really looks like he's just putting in a "good, solid dig" like in the political mindkill piece.

  3. Also, this is likely to scare off religious people by causing them mindkill right as they begin to read the sequences. It seems to me that a better objective would be to encourage them to read more.

  4. Also, to avoid encouraging problems like undiscriminating skepticism and people confusing optimal things for rational ones and going the way of Ayn Rand's objectivists, it is probably better not to put the following line in the first few sequences:

"There's a theorem of rationality called Aumann's Agreement Theorem which shows that no two rationalists can agree to disagree. If two people disagree with each other, at least one of them must be doing something wrong."

Regardless of whether this is true, if new people aren't inoculated against the conformity in thinking that this kind of statement encourages, it could make them more likely to behave like phyg members.

Comment author: Dolores1984 17 October 2012 04:30:51PM *  2 points [-]

In general, when something can be either tremendously clever, or a bit foolish, the prior tends to the latter. Even with someone who's generally a pretty smart cookie. You could run the experiment, but I'm willing to bet on the outcome now.

It's important to remember that it isn't particularly useful for this book to be The Sequences. The Sequences are The Sequences, and the book can direct people to them. What would be more useful would be a condensed, rapid introduction to the field that tries to maximize insight-per-byte. Not something that's a definitive work on rationality, but something that people can crank through in a day or two, rave about to their friends, and come away with a better idea of what rational thinking looks like. It'd also serve as a less formidable introduction for those who are very interested, to the broader pool of work on the subject, including the Sequences. Dollar for sanity-waterline dollar, that's a very heavily leveraged position.

Actually, if CFAR isn't going to write that book, I will.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 01:21:56AM *  1 point [-]

I'm currently writing a summary of each sequence as I read them. I am doing this because it helps me to remember what I read. What is going to result from my doing this is a Cliff's notes version of the sequences.

If you were going to do something similar anyway, I might as well just post these notes when I am done to save you the work. Would that serve the purpose you were thinking of? Or is your idea significantly different?

Comment author: DaFranker 17 October 2012 08:14:06PM 2 points [-]

Regarding the jargon, I agree with wedrifid that LW-specific jargon is actually being defined as the sequences, and from what I've heard and experienced this is extremely helpful in setting down a common language for us to discuss these matters.

However, there is some jargon that could and probably should be done away with: the computer science stuff. Not all sequences/articles have it, but when it's there it's usually several levels of inference away from laypeople. The CS/programming examples, comparisons and metaphors are fun for someone like me, but it's an accepted matter among IT people that things like the XKCD comic on a random function that always returns 4 will not help get the point across to non-IT people.

I'm sure that has been mentioned before, but it's worth making sure that it's looked over and that while doing it you remember that when writing educative material, most people severely overshoot the level that they're aiming for, and end up writing a text that's perfect for undergrads when they were targeting a middle school audience or somesuch.

Personally, I'd leave in most of the random intercultural references (like the anime references, for instance) since I suspect they'd still reach a good portion of the audience and wouldn't have negative impact, but that'd be up for discussion. This also gives me an idea, but I'll make a separate comment for it.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 01:17:48AM *  1 point [-]

However, there is some jargon that could and probably should be done away with: the computer science stuff.

On the one hand, I agree with you. If people can't understand, then that's bad. On the other hand, touches like those give the sequences personality, and that personality may be part of what makes them popular.

Usually, though, there's a way to phrase IT descriptions such that everyone can understand. I do this for my boss all the time. Maybe giving it a high-tech "personality" and making it comprehensible are not mutually exclusive.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 01:11:58AM *  5 points [-]

I'm somewhat interested in doing editing work for these. I'm not sure if you guys are looking for a volunteer editor, and we'd have to negotiate before I would want to commit to such a huge project, but I'm inquiring about this.

I have three years of experience as a writer's group organizer, have been paid to edit two books in the past, and I write practically constantly (though I have not attempted to get published).

P.S. I have an editing suggestion, myself: there are places that use odd wording that is reminiscent of ancient holy books. This might contribute to The Singularity Institute's Arrogance Problem as well as making lesswrong.com look like a phyg.

Update: I have SEO training. I forgot to mention that. This isn't as useful for an e-book as for web pages but I don't see why you'd have someone edit only the e-book and not the web pages only to end up with two different versions.

Comment author: wedrifid 17 October 2012 01:24:48AM 6 points [-]

There's a lot of LW-specific jargon that isn't helpful

For most part the sequences define said jargon, rather than using it.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 01:04:42AM *  0 points [-]

I think what this person is saying is "We already have words for a lot of these things so Eliezer and the other people who wrote the sequences are making up their own words for no reason."

In many cases, there's existing academic jargon that can take the place of the phrases Yudkowky uses.

The sequences would get more hits from search engines by using existing terms, LWers and other flavors of rationalists would be able to communicate more easily, and people would have to remember less terms overall if he just uses existing terms.

(Edit: added "and other people" to above sentence about making up unnecessary words for the sequences)

Comment author: alexvermeer 17 October 2012 04:06:58PM 1 point [-]

This is a separate project solely to get the Sequences into ebook form.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 12:56:10AM 0 points [-]

Will the improvements to the sequences be made to the web version also? If a published book is made, will that be built on the improvements made in the e-book?

It makes little sense to me that there could potentially be three versions. Since I am considering volunteering to help with this, I am interested in knowing how contributions will be used.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 12:53:38AM *  2 points [-]

Depending on your deadline for the e-book... I'm in the process of reading the sequences right now (just finished mysterious answers to mysterious questions). If you want, I could agree to provide feedback as I go and also to finish them ASAP. I've already done work on improving my rationality like setting out to raze my cached thoughts (almost half my life ago, not triggered by the sequences), detecting biased reasoning in myself and learning about logical fallacies and I ran a writer's group for several years, so I'd probably give good feedback.

What is the deadline for the feedback / would you be interested in somebody reading it over with these and/or other concerns in mind?

Comment author: Epiphany 20 October 2012 12:51:35AM *  1 point [-]

Because writing out summaries of what I just read along with the terms used to describe things (like titles) assists me in remembering things, I am essentially creating a Cliff's notes version of the sequences as I read them. Is there any interest in posting either a Cliff's notes version of the sequences or using summaries in the table of contents or marketing materials?

Comment author: gwern 18 October 2012 02:59:56PM *  1 point [-]

Mm, maybe. It is difficult for me to see such things; as I pointed out in another comment, before I wrote this, I spent scores of hours reading up on and researching terrorism and indeed posted that to LW as well; to me, terrorism is such an obviously useless approach - for anything but false flag operations - that nothing needs to be said about it.

That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke's older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.

Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO - one will spend much more time on a book than even a long essay. 1344 page views doesn't impress me. For example, for this October, gwern.net had 51x more or 69,311 total page views. The lifetime total for this essay on my site is already at 7,515, and most of that is from before I deleted the version here so I expect that will boost the numbers a bit in the future.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 October 2012 02:54:05AM 0 points [-]

Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO

Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author's new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that - "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.

I'm not trying to say Luke's article is a "bestseller" (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 October 2012 02:35:27AM *  0 points [-]

the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by global regulation of chip fabs

I think it might be a hard sell to convince governments to intentionally retard their own technological progress. Any country who willingly does this will put themselves at a competitive disadvantage economically and defense-wise.

Nukes are probably an easier sell because they are specific to war - there's no other good use for them.

I think this might be more like Eliezer's "let it out of the box" experiments: The prospect of using the technology is too appealing to restrain it.

Also, another problem is that this is abstract. Nuclear weapons are a very tangible problem - they go boom, people die. Pretty much everyone can universally understand that.

With AI, the problems aren't so easy to understand. First of all, people might not even believe AI is possible in order to believe it is a risk. Secondly, people regard IT people practically the way they'd regard a real life wizard. I am called a genius at work for doing stupid tasks and thanked up and down for accomplishing small things that took five minutes. This is simply because others don't know how to do them. Simultaneously, it is assumed that no matter what type of IT problem I am given, I will be able to solve it. They assume a web developer can fix their computer for instance. I can fix some problems, but I'm no computer tech.

I wonder if they don't understand the risks of AI well enough to realize that the IT people can't fix it.

And then there's optimism bias. I can't think of a potentially useful technology we've passed up because it was dangerous. Can you think of an example where that has actually happened? Or where a large number of people understood an abstract problem, believed in it's feasibility, and took appropriate measures to counteract it?

I'll be thinking about this now...

Comment author: Kindly 19 October 2012 02:18:15AM 1 point [-]

Considering all this, do you still think the risk of bad publicity is insignificant?

Pretty much, yeah. The opinion of RationalWiki is probably worth somewhere in between the opinion of 4chan and the opinion of Conservapedia. And people quit forums all the time, that's not something to worry about.

I see this as a case of "the original version of the article was unclear, and has been edited to make it clearer". Not a scandal of any kind.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 October 2012 02:27:57AM 0 points [-]

So do I, to all of the above, so you apparently have more faith in humanity than I do in regards to people taking things out of context and acting stupid about it.

Comment author: Kindly 18 October 2012 09:19:49PM 0 points [-]

My position is still that beta testers should ideally catch any potential PR disasters, and I don't think that's an over-reaction. At all.

To be specific, the hypothesis I am suggesting is that you are now, currently, over-reacting by calling this a "potential PR disaster".

Comment author: Epiphany 19 October 2012 01:15:28AM *  1 point [-]

I really didn't expect that. As I see it, a post that multiple people took as being in support of terrorism and somebody quit over is definitely sensational enough to generate a buzz. Surely, you have seen reporters take things out of context. Eliezer has already been targeted for a hatchet job by one reporter.

There was once an occasion where a reporter wrote about me, and did a hatchet job. It was my first time being reported on, and I was completely blindsided by it. I'd known that reporters sometimes wrote hatchet jobs, but I'd thought that it would require malice—I hadn't begun to imagine that someone might write a hatchet job just because it was a cliche, an easy way to generate a few column inches. So I drew upon my own powers of narration, and wrote an autobiographical story on what it felt like to be reported on for the first time—that horrible feeling of violation. I've never sent that story off anywhere, though it's a fine and short piece of writing as I judge it.

For it occurred to me, while I was writing, that journalism is an example of unchecked power—the reporter gets to present only one side of the story, any way they like, and there's nothing that the reported-on can do about it. (If you've never been reported on, then take it from me, that's how it is.) And here I was writing my own story, potentially for publication as traditional journalism, not in an academic forum. I remember realizing that the standards were tremendously lower than in science. That you could get away with damn near anything, so long as it made a good story—that this was the standard in journalism. (If you, having never been reported on yourself, don't believe me that this is the case, then you're as naive as I once was.)

RationalWiki sometimes takes stuff out of context. For instance, the Eliezer facts thread has a "fact" where an LWer edited a picture of him speaking beside a diagram that shows a hierarchy of increasingly more intelligent entities including animals, Einstein and God. The LW'er added Eliezer to the diagram, at a level well beyond God. You can see below this that Eliezer had to add a note for RationalWiki because they had apparently made the mistake of taking this photoshopped diagram out of context.

If some idiot who happens to have a RationalWiki account dropped by or a reporter who was hard up for a scoop discovered this, do you think it isn't likely for them to take it out of context either to make it more sensational or because of mindkill? I, for one, do not think there was anything special about the original post that would prevent it from becoming the subject of a hatchet job.

People act crazy when they're worried about being attacked. I have a friend who has dual citizenship. He came to visit (America) and was harassed at the airport simply because he lives in a different country and the security guard was paranoid about terrorism. I don't see this post getting LW shut down by the government or anything, but it could result in something really disappointing like Eliezer being harassed at airports, or something bad in between.

Considering all this, do you still think the risk of bad publicity is insignificant?

Comment author: Kindly 18 October 2012 01:24:30PM 2 points [-]

I think you should consider the hypothesis that you are over-reacting before the hypothesis that lots of different beta readers are all under-reacting.

(Which in turn is more likely than the hypothesis that the beta readers have a neurological condition that causes them to under-react.)

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 07:16:04PM 3 points [-]

I think you should consider the hypothesis that you are over-reacting

Except that I didn't over-react. I wasn't upset. I just went "Is this a piece endorsing terrorism?" looked into it further, realized this interpretation is false, and wandered away for a while.

Then I saw mention after mention around the site saying that people were creeped out by this piece.

I came back and saw that someone had left because of it - like, for real, as in they haven't posted since they said they were leaving due to the piece. And then I went "Wow a lot of people are creeped out by this. This is making LessWrong look bad. Even if it IS a misinterpretation, thinking that this post supports terrorism could be a serious PR problem."

My position is still that beta testers should ideally catch any potential PR disasters, and I don't think that's an over-reaction. At all.

(Which in turn is more likely than the hypothesis that the beta readers have a neurological condition that causes them to under-react.)

For the record, even though it did occur to me for a moment as a possible explanation, I didn't say that because I really believed it was likely that everyone here has Asperger's. That would be stupid. I said it as an expression of surprise. I figured it would be obvious that it was an expression of surprise and not a rational assessment.

I think my surprise was due to hindsight bias.

Comment author: cata 18 October 2012 08:24:36AM 2 points [-]

There's a strong feeling in the culture here that it's virtuous to be able to discuss weird and scary ideas without feeling weirded out or scared. See: torture and dust specks, AI risk, uploading, and so on.

Personally, I agree with you now about this article, because I can see that you and the fellow above and probably others feel strongly about it. But when I read it originally, it never occurred to me to feel creeped out, because I've made myself to just think calmly about ideas, at least until they turn into realities -- I think many other readers here are the same. Since I don't feel it automatically, quantifying "how weird" or "how scary" these things are to other people takes a real conscious effort; I forget to do it and I'm not good at it either.

So that's how it happens.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 05:31:18PM 0 points [-]

I like entertaining ideas that others find weird and scary, too, and I don't mind that they're "weird". I have nothing against it. Even though my initial reaction was "Does this guy support terrorism?" I was calm enough to investigate and discover that no, he does not support terrorism.

Since I don't feel it automatically, quantifying "how weird" or "how scary" these things are to other people takes a real conscious effort; I forget to do it and I'm not good at it either.

Yeah, I relate to this. Not on this particular piece though. I'm having total hindsight bias about it, too. I am like "But I see this, how the heck is it not obvious to everyone else!?"

You know what? I think it might be amount of familiarity with Gwern. I'm new and I've read some of Gwern's stuff but I hadn't encountered his "Terrorism isn't effective" piece, so I didn't have any reason to believe Gwern is against terrorism.

Maybe you guys automatically interpreted Gwern's writing within the context of knowing him, and I didn't...

Comment author: wedrifid 18 October 2012 10:54:05AM 4 points [-]

Does everyone here have Asperger's or something?

No, almost certainly less than 90% of the people here have Asperger's!

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 05:24:59PM *  0 points [-]

I'm confused about how this happened. Edit: I think I figured it out.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 October 2012 07:11:30AM 0 points [-]

Does everyone here have Asperger's or something?

It would be incredibly improbable. Not-so-subtly suggesting your interlocutors aren't neurotypical is such a wonderful debate tactic, though; it'd be a pity to let the base rate get in the way.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 07:20:49AM *  4 points [-]

I'm genuinely confused at this point and just trying to figure out how this happened. From my point of view, the fact that this got posted without him realizing that it was going to be mistaken as a pro-terrorism piece is, by itself, surprising. That it was beta tested by other LW'ers first and STILL made it out like this is even more surprising.

I'm not trying to convince you of anything, paper-machine. This isn't a debate. I am just going WTF.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 October 2012 06:59:47AM *  0 points [-]

Big fish are starting to pay attention to LessWrong. That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views.

So, much less traffic than gwern.net gets in a month, on an arguably less controversial topic than the usual gwern.net fare.

If you use LessWrong for beta testing, you're not just getting a critique from a handful of friends, you're informing the entire world about who LessWrong is.

He's using the IRC channel, #lesswrong, as his beta testers. #lesswrong is a different thing from LessWrong.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 07:05:53AM *  0 points [-]

So, much less traffic than gwern.net gets in a month, on an arguably less controversial topic than the usual gwern.net fare.

Then it's very odd that he doesn't seem to care that people are mistaking him as being in support of terrorism.

He's using the IRC channel, #lesswrong, as his beta testers. #lesswrong is a different thing from LessWrong.

Oh dear.

I assumed from the context (the fact that this thing got out onto the site without him appearing to know / care that people would think it was pro terrorism) that he was referring to the website.

Does everyone here have Asperger's or something?

Note: I removed the part in my post that referred to using LW as beta testers.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 06:57:13AM *  0 points [-]

I may make quizzes for logic, biases, rationality, etc. because I am itching to get enough practice that I detect every type of rational flaw instantly and immediately have names for them. I'm a web developer, so I could make online versions of these and post them for all to use.

What I am wondering is have you already made something like this? If you're planning to, would you mind describing what you plan to make so I don't duplicate anything?

I assume you have a web developer?

Comment author: gwern 14 October 2012 10:39:22PM 4 points [-]

Maybe somebody should let them know... since they don't come to the site anymore, that would be hard, but if you know who the person's friends are, you could ask if they'll pass the message on.

I think that would be pretty pointless; if he could think that after reading the original, the amendments aren't going to impress him. If he's that careless a reader, LW may be better off without him. (I did read his comment: I subscribe via RSS to the comments on every article I post.) If you were to track him down and ask him to re-read, I'd give <35% that he'd actually come back and participate (where participate is defined as eg. post >=1 comment a month for the next 6 months).

If you'd like, I will read your stuff before you post it if you'll read mine - we can trade each other pages 1 for 1. That should reduce the risk of this happening to a much lower level.

Nah, I'm fine with #lesswrong as 'beta readers', as it were.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 October 2012 06:38:54AM *  2 points [-]

If he's that careless a reader, LW may be better off without him.

I don't think the problem was careless reading. When you open with a comment about attacking chip fabs without specifying that you mean a government level military and your audience is mainly in a country where everyone has been bathed in the fear of terrorism for years, this is bound to trigger mind kill reactions. You could argue "Good LW'ers should stay rational while thinking about terrorism." but aside from the fact that everyone has flaws and that's a pretty common one, more importantly, you seem to overlook the fact that the entire rest of the world can see what you wrote. Humans aren't known for being rational. They're known for doing things like burning "witches" and poisoning Socrates. In this time and place, you're less likely to get us killed by an angry mob, but you could easily provoke the equivalent of that in negative attention. Reddit and The Wall Street Journal have both done articles on Less Wrong recently. Big fish are starting to pay attention to LessWrong. That means people are paying attention YOU. Yes, you. This post has gotten 1,344 page views. One of Luke's older posts got 200,000 views. (Google analytics). For contrast, a book is considered a bestseller if it sells 100,000 copies.

YOU could end up getting that much attention on this site, Gwern, and the attention is not just from us. There are only about 13,000 registered users in the user database, and only 500-1000 of them are active in a given month. That just doesn't account for all of the traffic to the posts.

Even if it were true that all the people who misread this are schmoes, choosing to leave the site over it may be a perfectly valid application of one's intelligence. Not associating one's reputation with a group that is mistakenly thought to be in favor of terrorism is a perfectly sane survival move. I wondered if I should quit, myself before deciding to suggest that you edit the post.

Considering the amount of attention that LessWrong is getting, and the fact that you are a very prominent member here whose words will be taken (or mistaken) as an indication of the group's mentality, do you not think it's a good idea to avoid making others look bad?

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 16 October 2012 05:21:25PM -2 points [-]

Ok; now do the same calculation for the world outside academia, making similar assumptions - no going up to every random person on the street and asking what their IQ is, if you please. You can't do any better than maximising your odds; showing that the odds are still bad is unpersuasive, you have to show that they are the same as, or worse than, the alternative course of action.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 October 2012 07:31:55PM *  1 point [-]

you have to show that they are the same as, or worse than, the alternative course of action.

No I don't. That WOULD be the way to go IF the argument was "Academia is a better place to meet people than on the street." But that wasn't the disagreement. My original suggestion was "If your IQ is high enough, it can be really hard to find people to bond with." the counterargument was "Academia is a playground (implying that it's a solution, not just that it's better.)" and my rebuttal was "Academia is not a solution to this problem." Don't straw man me.

All I had to do is explain why academia wasn't a solution. Since you seem to agree:

showing that the odds are still bad...

I am going to guess that I've convinced you of my point that academia isn't a solution. Have I?

Comment author: lukeprog 16 October 2012 12:42:04AM 2 points [-]

I experienced almost none of the Summit, because I had my ear glued to a phone the whole time.

But, people tell me it was the most well-organized and professionally presented Summit yet, probably because we got e2k involved.

People seemed enthusiastic about my own talk, which is nice because I had almost no time to prepare and was literally reading from notes on the podium most of the time. Many people didn't even notice I was reading from notes, somehow.

And yes, I got Eliezer's permission to steal my conclusion from The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 October 2012 05:15:40AM *  2 points [-]

Aww, I'm sorry you didn't get to enjoy the Summit, Luke. :(

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 15 October 2012 09:24:58PM 2 points [-]

Even for those of IQ 160 there is a huge difference between interacting with people whose average IQ is 130, and interacting with the general population. Further, supposing IQ 160 is one-in-X in the world, it's one-in-X/10, or even X/50, in academia. Shifting the average has all kinds of effects on thin tails.

Also consider that in addition to raw intelligence, academia tends to concentrate various forms of neuro-atypicality, and to be relatively tolerant of unusual interests.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 October 2012 05:07:29AM *  -1 points [-]

Even for those of IQ 160 there is a huge difference between interacting with people whose average IQ is 130, and interacting with the general population.

This does not mean they will experience group bonding with those people.

Further, supposing IQ 160 is one-in-X in the world, it's one-in-X/10, or even X/50, in academia. Shifting the average has all kinds of effects on thin tails.

Okay, but you've got to consider that the students are broken up into different classes and the classes only contain something like 30 students each, depending, and they're broken up into levels (that correspond more or less to how many years they've spent in college). So if a rare person is 1 in 1000 in the wild, and they're 1 in 100 in a school, and a school has 10,000 students...

10,000 \ 4 levels = 2,500 possible students who might get classes at your level (25 people like you)

The 25 people like you will be divided between 83 different classes if the class size is 30 each.

So you've got about a 30% chance that there's somebody like you is in a given class. Now, since there are 28 other students in each class (aside from you and them), what's the chance you'll actually identify each other out of the crowd? After that, what's the chance you'll have anything in common? Maybe you won't like their personality. Maybe they're shy and never say anything. Maybe you sit on opposite ends of the room and never talk. There are a lot of factors influencing whether you might meet someone and whether you figure out if they're compatible.

If you are 1 in 100 and take 6 classes per semester, you may have an opportunity to meet 4 people like yourself in class each year. An opportunity to meet a total of 16 people like you over the course of your four year college career would actually be pretty crappy odds, especially considering all of the other factors.

Comment author: MixedNuts 15 October 2012 06:07:36PM 4 points [-]

There's a playground for smart adults looking to meet their likes. It's called academia and it's full of shiny toys.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 October 2012 07:58:32PM *  0 points [-]

Schools do not cater to every IQ ballpark. If your IQ is 130 (about 1 in 50 people) sure you could find a school that caters to that. If your IQ is 160 (one in thousands, exactly how rare is controversial), good luck.

I don't know what this person's IQ is, but I do know that colleges have to mind their finances and it simply does not make sense from a business standpoint for colleges to invest in creating a curriculum in various subjects for customers beyond a certain level of rarity. Harvard is rumored to have an average IQ of 130. If even Harvard is targeted for 130, where would people outside the socially optimal IQ range (the range ends somewhere beyond 145) go to meet each other?

Add to that that this person sounds like they're living in the middle of bufu and it really would not surprise me if they're gifted and haven't met others. Also, according to one testing center 50% of gifted children weren't given an IQ test, so if that's the case, or if they got one and nobody explained what the score means (they almost never do) then they may not even realize they're gifted, or may have no idea what giftedness means.

They may not even know that it means anything at all, let alone that it means they need to find others, and then there's not a good answer to "where do you find people this rare" let alone "how am I going to find them in bufu?"

Comment author: Epiphany 15 October 2012 06:01:27PM *  3 points [-]

Alternate explanation for "insanity": If your IQ is high enough, you're likely to have problems fitting in with others. Normally I wouldn't suggest high IQ as a reason for not fitting in since an IQ high enough to cause that problem occurs in less than 1% of the population. However, here you are posting on LessWrong, a place that is known for it's intelligent members. (See Yvain's surveys to discover that most claim a high enough IQ for the average to be in the 140's). Not only that, but if you were using Bayesian techniques as a child and experimenting with making AIs as a teen, I'd say you're very likely to be smarter than the average bear.

If you want to look into this further:

Try researching a concept called "socially optimal IQ range".

Check out this article by the Prometheus Society: The Outsiders

Consider reading this book: Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults

Research the term: Existential depression (common to gifted adults, and your inability to hack utility table complaint is reminiscent of this).

If you or someone reading this needs a concierge into the subject of gifted adults, I can be one. If the prospect of being flamed for claiming giftedness / looking into giftedness is a concern, use PM.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 10:46:50PM 1 point [-]

I have some ideas for slowing Moore's law as well and, I'm wondering what you guys think of them (Gwern, too). I'm thinking of making these into post/s of their own and am curious about whether they'd be well-received or what, if anything, should to be done first.

Comment author: gwern 14 October 2012 09:48:22PM 7 points [-]

I wasn't sure that this was worth acting on, but I see that another person seems to be taking it the wrong way, so I guess you are right. I've done the following:

  • Substantially edited the summary here and there to make the logic clearer and mention upfront that terrorism won't work
  • Changed the title of the essay
  • Deleted the body here so people will have to read the full up-to-date version and not whatever old version is here
  • Reworked the intro sections to give more background and a hopefully more logical flow
Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 10:32:58PM 1 point [-]

Oh thank goodness you did something about this! I guess you didn't read every comment on your thread, or you just didn't take rwallace seriously at first, but rwallace actually decided to quit LessWrong because of your essay. You can tell for sure because that's the last thing they said here and they haven't posted anything since March: http://lesswrong.com/user/rwallace/

Maybe somebody should let them know... since they don't come to the site anymore, that would be hard, but if you know who the person's friends are, you could ask if they'll pass the message on.

You know, it's really hard to tell how people will take one's writing before it is posted. If you'd like, I will read your stuff before you post it if you'll read mine - we can trade each other pages 1 for 1. That should reduce the risk of this happening to a much lower level.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 12 October 2012 06:42:02AM 1 point [-]

Someone could be deliberately not making public replies to an user out of experience of public threads with that user often turning into messes, while still thinking that the user isn't a deliberate troll and could benefit from private advice.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 06:01:42PM 1 point [-]

If I happen to be this "someone" I would appreciate the private advice.

Comment author: Cthulhoo 09 October 2012 02:56:42PM *  7 points [-]

I have left more than one online community for similar reason. The flow chart goes roughly like this:

  • receive a question / be addressed in a comment
  • don't have time/don't want to answer right now
  • time passes: now any response will feel weird
  • I can't really answer to other people/threads if I didn't answer the previous one
  • only solution: leave the community for some time

I perfectly know this is absolutely stupid, and I try to avoid this behavior as much as I can, but it still pops up sometimes (still have to fully hack myself).

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 05:56:53PM 1 point [-]

If I think a comment needs a response, but I failed to get back to it for a long time, I will just reply anyway. I am the same way with email. I must come across as very aloof because I often let a message sit for a week, and sometimes several weeks, before getting back to them.

So far, nothing has exploded.

Comment author: aelephant 14 October 2012 11:57:54AM 1 point [-]

I'm not really interested in arguing any further. My point was that your comment seemed overblown to me. You're not going to argue me out of my feeling & you can't exactly prove it wrong either. I agree that the OP should consider the risks, so on that important point we agree. Maybe our communication styles are just so different that it is tough to grok one another in a satisfying way.

Looking over your original comment, I do see that you used those words. Although "probably" is less uncertain than "certainly", it seems to me that neither of us is really qualified to, based on our anecdotal evidence, produce a true estimate of the likelihood of the OP having a problem finding employment due to a gap in his employment history. To me, "probably" implies that something is, "more likely than not" -- I try to use "possibly" instead if I'm not sure because it implies that it could really go either way.

I don't feel very emotional about this discussion, but I also feel a bit like just disengaging. I said I'm not interested in arguing anymore, but I'm still going on, so who knows. How are you feeling?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 05:32:07PM -1 points [-]

You're not going to argue me out of my feeling & you can't exactly prove it wrong either. ... I agree that the OP should consider the risks, so on that important point we agree.

Thank you for realizing this.

Maybe our communication styles are just so different that it is tough to grok one another in a satisfying way.

I think the problem might just be that I think it's likely the OP will be discriminated against with an employment gap and you don't, or that IMO the consequences are more likely to be severe (being jobless for a long time or ending up in some horrible workplace).

neither of us is really qualified to, based on our anecdotal evidence, produce a true estimate of the likelihood of the OP having a problem finding employment due to a gap in his employment history

I agree with this and I think I see where you're coming from - you just don't feel that these problems are as likely as I think they are. Maybe all your experiences support it. That's understandable. It can be hard to determine the exact probability of things. I didn't see any research on this, so unless there is some that I failed to locate, there's not a good way for either of us to support our side.

I said I'm not interested in arguing anymore, but I'm still going on, so who knows. How are you feeling?

It seems like you want a conclusion and perhaps to end on a friendly note rather than an argumentative one. I also feel like not arguing further, and I'd prefer to end friendly than unfriendly. My reasoning for not wanting to argue is that you don't seem to be very familiar with logical fallacies. It always takes a lot more energy for me to disagree with a person if they're not. Often, I won't bother to argue at all after I see enough logical fallacies. I made an exception this time because not defending my point might have meant that someone was influenced to do something risky without really considering the risk.

I feel pretty satisfied that I have supported my "be careful" point adequately, so I am content to stop arguing.

Comment author: aelephant 14 October 2012 02:53:53AM *  0 points [-]

Blows it way out of proportion according to whom? Have you ever talked with recruiters or known someone with an employment gap? [...] Have you got something to base your "blowing this out of proportion" claim on?

It seems blown out of proportion based on the way you phrased your original comment. Your comment implied to me that having any gap in your employment history for any reason will lead to insurmountable difficulties, potentially ending you up in a sweatshop.

I had an employment gap personally & had absolutely no difficulty finding a job.

Your comments seem to be based on 1 case of someone having problems (availability bias?) & a sample of recruiters who told you that their clients don't want people with "significant" employment gaps. What qualifies as a "significant" gap? Might one client's "significant" be another client's "insignificant"?

I also think you have a problem understanding language.

Does the statement

"Cats are mammals."

imply that SOME cats are mammals or ALL cats are mammals?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 05:31:19AM *  1 point [-]

Your comment implied to me that having any gap in your employment history for any reason will lead to insurmountable difficulties, potentially ending you up in a sweatshop.

That's interesting because I am in the habit of intentionally using phrasings that show my uncertainty, and that post includes phrasings like "probably", "some people", "you might" and "I don't know" for a reason. So, the question is why did you ignore those words?

I had an employment gap personally & had absolutely no difficulty finding a job.

Okay. Since it would be foolish of them to make a hasty generalization and assume they won't have a problem based on you not having a problem, especially after I explained about the problems I have seen, I say this does nothing to counter my point which was "Consider this very carefully." If you were arguing with somebody who had said "No matter what you do if there's an employment gap you won't be hired." then your statement would be a counterargument. It appears that you're arguing with a strawman.

What qualifies as a "significant" gap? Might one client's "significant" be another client's "insignificant"?

Of course. If I remember right, some begin discriminating at the one month point.

I also think you have a problem understanding language.

Does the statement:

"Coconut milk is delicious." imply that it never goes rotten? Does "Cars are a means of transportation." include cars in junkyards that are beyond repair?

People frequently say statements like these because it would be time consuming and awkward to phrase everything the way you suggest. Also, if anybody ever phrases things without the word "all", while not intending a hasty generalization (probably just about everyone) it's probably better not to expect what they're saying to be "all". This isn't a problem with understanding language, I'm simply not assuming something that wasn't specified and don't expect others to, either.

I think you're having an emotional reaction to my posts. This is understandable, but I think it might be influencing the way you interpreted me.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 14 October 2012 02:50:09AM 0 points [-]

No.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 02:52:59AM 0 points [-]

Okay, well, I guess he doesn't know.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 14 October 2012 12:14:56AM 0 points [-]

Sorry for the harsh tone up there. But it just seems unbelievable that there may be a place on earth were smart educated multilingual, lesswrong-level people can't find a job. Even if they are paraplegic, old, and didn't work for 10 years in a row to pursue meditation in tibet.

The shock caused me to think "well, this person's life could be immensely improved if living elsewhere, somewhere where those rules don't apply, and people are free to come and go."

Try to keep in mind that such places exist. Also, teaching english is somenthing most anglophones can do, anywhere in the world were it is not a first language.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 01:23:05AM *  -1 points [-]

Sorry for the harsh tone up there.

That's alright. You remind me of myself when I was younger and didn't know these things. Your reaction was more or less how I would have reacted to the same thing.

But it just seems unbelievable that there may be a place on earth were smart educated multilingual, lesswrong-level people can't find a job.

If they have bad social skills, a noticeable mental disorder, don't know how to dress for an interview, forget to check the spelling in their resume, or do any number of minor things wrong when it comes to "playing the game" they may have trouble. Nothing is a silver bullet in life, not even a good mind.

The shock caused me to think "well, this person's life could be immensely improved if living elsewhere, somewhere where those rules don't apply, and people are free to come and go."

Yeah, maybe. I haven't really thought about the effects of working constantly, but I bet it would be better if I could take three month vacations. I heard Europeans take very long vacations like that and that their children don't attend school for a full 8 hours a day. What is it like in your country?

I have thought about living somewhere other than the US, for numerous reasons, but I'm not convinced that humans are any less of a mess elsewhere.

Comment author: MileyCyrus 13 October 2012 10:02:44PM 0 points [-]

Yeah I gave him $5.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 October 2012 12:07:34AM 0 points [-]

Did you say it was for flimple utility?

Comment author: MileyCyrus 13 October 2012 12:48:03PM *  0 points [-]

Done. It's not really a sacrifice since I already donate to the SIAI. I will miss that 5 karma though.

Edit: Apparently you only get the -5 karma if you directly reply to a downvoted comment/post. Replying to reply is fine.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 05:06:47PM 0 points [-]

What? I don't understand. Did you give him 5$ or 5 karma or what?

Comment author: staticIP 13 October 2012 02:24:12AM 0 points [-]

Well done. Roryokane mentioned it up here however.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 02:33:27AM *  0 points [-]

I wonder what Eliezer would DO if he actually got $5 for flimple utility. I kinda want to try sending him five bucks as a psychology experiment.

Comment author: staticIP 13 October 2012 02:03:47AM -1 points [-]

If we have two gods, one claiming that if I do X, they'll mug me, and one claiming that if I don't do X they'll mug me, well I'm probably going to believe the god that isn't fuzzy and celery...

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 02:28:16AM *  0 points [-]

Well that's making the wrong choice, buddy. Other Gods are useless against fuzzy celery God because fuzzy celery God can transform itself at will into the Most Believable God. Don't think of fuzzy celery God as a piece of fuzzy celery. Fuzzy celery God is nothing like that. If an old wise man is the most compelling God-form for you, fuzzy celery God looks like an old wise man. If benevolent Gods are more credible to you, fuzzy celery God becomes benevolent. No matter what Pascal's mugging the person wants to accept, fuzzy celery God will always take on the appearance and traits of the most believable God that the person can conceive of.

Comment author: staticIP 13 October 2012 02:12:48AM 0 points [-]

Ahh, makes sense. I actually found many different and interesting solutions to pascals mugging with my search terms though. Just not this "counter" solution.

This thread already shows up pretty close to the top for searches of "pascals mugging solutions" that I've attempted. For that exact phrase it's number 3, and has been before you posted this. I don't know that this particular solution needs to be more closely associated with the search terms then it already is.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 02:17:03AM *  1 point [-]

Eliezer presented a counter solution similar to this on Overcoming Bias. search fu

Click here for Flimple Utility!!!

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 02:04:57AM *  2 points [-]

would be very interested if you could expand on why you wanted to see all of my failed attempts, instead of my one successful attempt?

Because all of the other people who want to start threads on solutions to Pascal's muggings will be more likely to find your thread and go "Oh, someone already did this." That will save us from similar "solutions to Pascal's mugging threads" in the future. The worse your search terms failed, the better - that way Pascal's mugging solvers with low search-fu skill (no quotes this time) will be likely to find the existing solutions.

P.S. It's better to put them into complete sentences to avoid search engine penalties.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 02:06:21AM *  2 points [-]

My fu cents:

Solutions to Pascal's Muggings. I Solved Pascal's Mugging. Would this Solve Pascal's Mugging? Possible Solution to Pascal's Muggings. Solve for Pascal's Muggings. Pascal's Mugging has been solved. Pascal's Mugging has a solution.

Comment author: staticIP 13 October 2012 01:54:23AM 0 points [-]

Because I doubt I can remember all of them. Also, I'm not entirely clear on why you have "quotes" around search-fu. It's a pretty accepted term on the internet. Search-fu is the skill one is employing when searching for something.

A more reasonable question seems to me like asking how I arrived at the answer, not asking how I failed to arrive at the answer. I find it odd that you'd go that particular route, and would be very interested if you could expand on why you wanted to see all of my failed attempts, instead of my one successful attempt?

Seeing all my failed attempts is more difficult for me to write out (there were a few of them) and contains less usable information. I'm curios as to why you'd pick that instead of what seems to me like the more reasonable "post the search term that got you the answer".

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 02:04:57AM *  2 points [-]

would be very interested if you could expand on why you wanted to see all of my failed attempts, instead of my one successful attempt?

Because all of the other people who want to start threads on solutions to Pascal's muggings will be more likely to find your thread and go "Oh, someone already did this." That will save us from similar "solutions to Pascal's mugging threads" in the future. The worse your search terms failed, the better - that way Pascal's mugging solvers with low search-fu skill (no quotes this time) will be likely to find the existing solutions.

P.S. It's better to put them into complete sentences to avoid search engine penalties.

Comment author: roryokane 13 October 2012 12:40:02AM *  2 points [-]

This solution doesn’t work. Why? Because I pledge that if anyone fails to accept a “Pascal’s Mugging style trade-off with full knowledge of the problem, then I will slowly torture to death 3^^^^3 sentient minds”. I’ve just canceled out your pledge.

You could say all your allies take the same pledge as you, and you have more allies than me, but that’s getting too far into the practicalities of our lives and too far away from a general solution. A general solution can’t assume that the person considering whether to accept a Mugging will have heard either of our pledges, so the person would be unable to take those pledges into account for their decision.

I don’t know the actual solution to Pascal’s Mugging myself. I’ve pasted my outline-form notes on it so far into a reply to this comment, in case they’re useful.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 01:51:15AM *  3 points [-]

You're not thinking big enough. If anyone ever accepts a Pascal's mugging again, my fuzzy celery God will execute a worse Pascal's mugging than any other in existence no matter what the original Pascal's mugging is.

P.S. You'll never find out what muggings fuzzy celery God executes because they're always unpredictable. This makes them impossible to disprove.

(My brother always hated having fights like this with me.)

Comment author: staticIP 13 October 2012 12:36:26AM *  0 points [-]

Apparently my search-fu is weak. Would you care to link, or suggest search terms that would make finding it less arduous?

EDIT: found it, I think, over here. One of the obvious issues is that it's not a credible threat.

So far I haven't seen a counter argument over there that satisfies me. If there is anywhere that they go into it more in depth, please do give it a link here.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 01:44:03AM *  0 points [-]

Why not put all the search terms you tried during your search-fu session into a comment. That will make this less likely to happen in the future.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 01:39:20AM *  -2 points [-]

The fact that we're not dying off right now proves this untrue.

Comment author: joaolkf 11 October 2012 04:43:47AM *  3 points [-]

Maybe having months or even years gaps in your CV can make it harder for you to have a perfect career path. But in Brazil, it doesn't count as something so serious. If you are graduated or if you speak English, you WILL get a job with 99% certainty -I'm not saying it will be a job you like - no matter what. If you have both, then turning your CV public will make you receive 1 to 2 job proposals a day, for 3 to 4 weeks, no matter how many gaps you have. Jealous? Maybe diegocaleiro have a empty bedroom for rent.... Although it's hard to believe the situation in US is that different.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 01:36:08AM *  0 points [-]

It really is that different. I elaborated a bit about why I think this is true in the USA.

I'm lucky enough to have skills that are in demand, so I am not particularly jealous. My reaction is more like ... I have a hard time believing that business people anywhere don't discriminate against candidates with an employment gap. Maybe the culture is so different in other places that they really don't. I don't know. That's interesting though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 October 2012 12:32:41AM 1 point [-]

I agree that a gap is (almost) always a negative. I was merely saying that depending on demand the effect isn't necessarily strong enough to keep you from getting a job.

The example I had in mind was silicon valley at the height of the tech boom.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 01:32:46AM -1 points [-]

Considering that you view your "it depends" statement as being valid only during rare events which do not necessarily affect every industry, do you really think it's appropriate to soften reality with "it depends"?

Comment author: aelephant 12 October 2012 11:12:45AM 2 points [-]

I think the reality is that having an employment gap probably does have some effect, but your post blows it way out of proportion.

Some people who have an employment gap find it impossible to get employment no matter what they do

And some people without an employment gap also find it impossible to get employment no matter what they do.

and employers are not going to take "I was trying out being a traveler" as a good reason for a gap

Should read "some employers". And some will take it as a good reason for a gap.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of job you might end up with if you haven't got an address. There are sweatshops right here in the USA, believe it or not.

Do you know how easy it is to get an address? Have you ever known or heard of anyone with a college education & fluent in English working in a sweatshop?

Comment author: Epiphany 13 October 2012 12:31:28AM *  0 points [-]

I think the reality is that having an employment gap probably does have some effect, but your post blows it way out of proportion.

Blows it way out of proportion according to whom? Have you ever talked with recruiters or known someone with an employment gap? I have BOTH types of experience. I am talking from experience here. I made the mistake of not mentioning that in the comment, figuring that what I had to say would seem like common sense, but I mentioned it when questioned in a different comment (and just updated the original). Have you got something to base your "blowing this out of proportion" claim on?

And some people without an employment gap also find it impossible to get employment no matter what they do.

Red herring. If you had phrased it as "How are you sure it was an employment gap rather than some other problem?" that would have been a great challenge. Since it was so close to the wording that would have been a really good challenge, I decided to answer the challenge anyway, and I updated my original comment to add a couple paragraphs under "Why I think this"

Should read "some employers". And some will take it as a good reason for a gap.

I didn't say "all employers", so "some employers" should already be assumed. I shouldn't have to put "some" just to prevent people from making a hasty generalization out of it.

Do you know how easy it is to get an address?

Regardless of how easy or hard it is to get an address, if you don't consider whether they might discriminate against you due to things like not providing an address or trying to use a P.O. box on your resume (unsure if they discriminate for that, but I would not be surprised), you may end up discriminated against without knowing why. This point was not intended as "If you're homeless there's no way to make yourself look like you have a home." it was intended as a "Here's a potential problem you might not have thought of." and it's appropriate in the context of my point which is "Consider this very carefully."

Have you ever known or heard of anyone with a college education & fluent in English working in a sweatshop?

You seem to be arguing against the straw man "You will end up in a sweatshop." but I said "I'm not sure what kind of job you might end up with." It's meant to get them thinking about the risks, not convince them that they'll end up in a sweatshop. In the event that I were to follow through with a vagabond dream, I would want to know all the awful things that could happen to me first so that I could be prepared for all of them. If ending up in a sweatshop is a possibility, I would definitely want to consider that. I'm not going to create a plan or find out all the reasons they might or might not end up in a sweatshop. They should calculate the risk of that on their own. It should be pretty obvious from my "I don't know" statement that I am only introducing that possible risk so they can determine how big it is and what they should do with it.

Do you agree that this person aught to be careful? If so, it might be a better idea not to try and discredit these points with red herrings and straw men. If you have not already familiarized yourself with logical fallacies, that's tremendously useful in disagreements.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 09:31:40PM 13 points [-]

I am questioning the value of diet and exercise. Thermodynamics is technically true but useless, barring the application of physical constraint or inhuman willpower to artificially produce famine conditions and keep them in place permanently. You, clearly, are one of the metabolically privileged, so let me assure you that I could try exactly the same things you do to control your weight and fail. My fat cells would keep the energy that yours release; a skipped meal you wouldn't notice would have me dizzy when I stand up; exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 October 2012 03:30:03AM *  0 points [-]

I've had your symptoms, too. Skipping a meal would cause my blood sugar to crash (causing irritability and brain fog, for me) and I stopped losing weight temporarily even on the meal plan that worked for me (other comment). The problems that caused this for me were getting a new food intolerance and microbial imbalance (caused by eating things I was intolerant of while I was still trying to figure out the source of the problem). I was hungrier and I stopped losing weight. You've wondered about your metabolism, but have you thought about whether your digestion could be improved?

I'm not sure what kinds of conditions might cause this problem and whether they might be hidden (or even whether the problem is more of an absorption issue, some result of the immune system response, or something else), and it's definitely not my business whether you have symptoms or not, but I'll tell you a few things in case they could be useful:

I've heard that food intolerance tests are unreliable. If I wanted to know if I had a food intolerance, I'd do an elimination diet to be sure.

Probiotic supplements (heck, supplements in general) tend to be poor quality. I won't buy supplements by brands that aren't verified to meet quality standards when independently tested. I use ConsumerLab.com for this, because the government doesn't test them for you. This related link may be of interest.

Comment author: Troshen 11 October 2012 11:46:55PM 3 points [-]

This is actually has been a problem with real-life examples. I've read that the oaths in NAZI Germany were specifically to Hitler himself, and that many members of the military felt bound by their oaths to obey orders, even when it was clear the orders shouldn't be obeyed. I think the critical danger is in giving oaths to an individual (any of which have a very real chance of being corrupted by power, unless they take action to prevent it).

I see the difference that the U.S. pledge of alliegence is to the republic and it's symbol, the flag. The saving factors to prevent abuses of power are:

The focus on alliegence to the nation as a whole, including all it's members, it's leaders, and it's ideals.

The "with liberty and justice for all" line, which is the guarantee of what the State offers in return. The U.S. has to be worthy of the alliegence.

The extreme other war example is the U.S Civil War, where many military officers left the army to join the Confederacy. They formed ranks and marched right out of West Point because they opposed the U.S. leadership. And the soldiers who stayed let them go, knowing they were going to help the seceding states fight. Even if they disagreed, it was felt the honorable thing to do was to let them go.

This idea shows up specifically in our military training and culture in the definition of lawful orders. The military culture and legal rules define your duty to obey all lawful orders from your chain of command, up to the President. So that if you feel that an order is unlawful it's actually your duty to disobey. Now, of course, that carries with it all the weight of being the first one to be the opposition, so it's no guarantee to prevent abuses of power, but it does exist.

I gues my point is that the danger is in making oaths to a person.

I agree that it's a form of indoctrination for children. But as long as the trade of alliegence and freedom it describes is a true and real one, I think it's a good thing to keep those principles in their minds.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 October 2012 12:16:58AM 0 points [-]

Ooh, I like these points, Troshen. You might be right that there's enough "security" built into the pledge. Now you've got me questioning whether it might actually protect us.

If nothing else, it would make tyrannical pledges look bad by comparison, perhaps blocking them.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2009 09:31:40PM 13 points [-]

I am questioning the value of diet and exercise. Thermodynamics is technically true but useless, barring the application of physical constraint or inhuman willpower to artificially produce famine conditions and keep them in place permanently. You, clearly, are one of the metabolically privileged, so let me assure you that I could try exactly the same things you do to control your weight and fail. My fat cells would keep the energy that yours release; a skipped meal you wouldn't notice would have me dizzy when I stand up; exercise that grows your muscle mass would do nothing for mine.

Comment author: Epiphany 12 October 2012 12:04:15AM *  3 points [-]

I solved my cravings issues. After developing a food intolerance, I planned a diet that included enough salt, fruit, vegetables, protein, fat, everything. Because I was ensuring that I got everything that I needed every day, my cravings went away. I stuck to that diet for years, with 20% less calories than I needed. I didn't miss them. I discovered that counting calories for each meal was such a chore for me that it would ruin my willpower. So I made a meal plan that had everything already counted out, provided enough variety to keep me from getting bored, and was designed for fast cooking so I wouldn't get tempted to snack instead of sticking to my meals. I stuck to that diet for years, and consistently lost weight.

From what I can tell, my entire problem with "lack of willpower" was actually imbalanced nutrition. I'd fail to eat enough salt one day and then find myself pigging out on pizza the next. I'd eat a lot of seeds one day and wouldn't feel satisfied, so I'd keep eating them. I've stopped binges by adding salt and I've noticed that if I eat vegetables with my seeds, I feel satisfied much sooner.

Also, I think food additives cause me cravings. Sometimes there is a processed food item I can't stop eating once I start, but a home made version doesn't have the same effect. I make everything from scratch on my diet (not as time-consuming as it sounds because I maximize efficiency) and I think that was a large part of my success.

Comment author: Alicorn 11 October 2012 05:17:50AM 2 points [-]

If someone is ignoring you, they will probably not stop ignoring you to tell you why. That's what "ignoring" means.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 05:23:57AM 5 points [-]

I see why you think it's pointless now. I think a lot of times, people ignore others instead of giving them feedback because they're concerned that it will be rude to state their problem or because they assume the other person will be stubborn. I am much more likely to ignore a stubborn person and much more likely to give feedback instead if I know a person is open to it.

For me, that's a major factor, so I figure there must be people like me.

Comment author: Alicorn 11 October 2012 04:25:23AM 2 points [-]

If anyone has decided to ignore me, I invite them to tell me why in PM or here.

This statement seems pointless and/or absurd for all purposes that are not your own signaling purposes.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 05:15:34AM *  1 point [-]

I'm not sure whether you're telling me "I think this is status signaling and so I disagree with it." or "I disagree with you inviting people to tell you if they're ignoring you". (Not sure what your reason would be if it was the second one.)

I was told by someone that I was annoying to other users. Maybe just a personal opinion but since I have received that criticism, and it is possible that somebody is ignoring me due to being annoyed, it made sense to me to open a communication channel.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 04:50:28AM *  0 points [-]

I don't think these will be problems.

We would still have a use:

This is relevant because if we have any use at all, there will be some evolutionary pressure to optimize that. Even if there's no other reason for it than that useful people are sexier.

To differentiate ourselves, I think we would specialize in feeling. That would be the main difference between us and the technology, and feeling would be the reason for all of it to exist - our happiness. If we didn't need to trade money or time, instead we'd give everything a purpose. I think a lot of people would become artists - and I don't think technological advancements would make human art worthless to people. Unlike most other things, art is often valued BECAUSE it is hand-made or shows human imperfections. If we make machines that feel, then things get hairy. I predict that I would probably choose to get implants in that future, so that I could still do meaningful, goal-directed work. I think a lot of other people would, too.

Or it may be that the humans who reproduce the most are the ones with the kinds of genes to take the best implants. Who knows what those would be. High intelligence might be a factor, as more intelligent brains may be able to take more input and therefore handle more sophisticated implants.

We would not devolve by accident, and probably not even on purpose:

Also, I imagine we would have the ability to use eugenics or gene therapy to prevent the human gene pool from devolving into primordial ooze. On it's own, it might do that, but you've got to remember, the offspring will be born to humans, who so far, have shown they're very attached to the human form and who, in this scenario, won't sacrifice something like eyesight just to save a few calories a day or whatever. I think we're a heck of a lot more likely to evolve ourselves into an ever-increasing number of new species than into slime. After enough generations had passed that the taboo of being a new species was gone, I see us expressing our imaginations, adding wings, blue hair, sparkles or as yet unimagined alterations. But not slime. Even if someone chose to devolve their offspring (if that were even legal), their offspring may choose to get gene therapy later, and even if they forego that, they may use eugenics on their children, or the children may choose gene therapy, and so on.

Consider sexual desirability, also. Are you more likely to mate with someone who is halfway between you and ooze, or someone nearer to your own abilities? Even if a few genetic lines fall through the cracks, I don't think the majority of humans would. And we may have some failsafe for that, like free gene therapy for anyone who is disabled to the extent that someone else has to have power of attorney over them because they are not able to make decisions for themselves anymore. We have that already for seriously disabled people, and those people can choose to give their wards medical treatments. Any devolved humans would probably just be given gene therapy.

Outsorcing everything would be boring, so we wouldn't:

According to the author of "Flow: the psychology of optimal experience", doing something that gives you a challenge (that is not too hard or too easy) is an important pleasurable experience and an important key to happiness. (He explains this in his TED video). If we outsourced all of our thinking tasks, we would immediately realize that we were bored. I suspect our solution to this will be to play games or do tasks that are still challenging for a human even if considered simple by the standards of the day.

Perhaps what will maximize fitness in the future will be nothing but non-stop high-intensity drudgery, work of a drab and repetitive nature

How could that possibly happen in a world where computers were so much more advanced?

Get rid of enough constraints, and you’ll get the equivalent of a Spiegelman’s monster, no longer even remotely human.

Flying, blue-haired, sparkling rock stars and super-intelligent, goal-directed altruists are not remotely like viruses. I agree, though, that if technology progresses enough, we'll evolve ourselves into a whole bunch of stuff. Maybe it will even become so easy to evolve that we'll all try out different forms. This virus interpretation is way off, I think. I think it's more likely that we'd become a race of shape-shifters than Spiegelman’s monsters.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

If we are able to make ourselves intelligent enough to correlate the contents of our minds, we'll be able to make ourselves intelligent enough to process the revelations, or at least, to pace the correlations in such a way that it prevents madness. This is similar to the problem posed by a trait called "low latent inhibition" which means you take in more information and have more ideas. If you can't process it all, you are likely to develop schizophrenia. But, if your IQ is high enough (Harvard link) it results in creativity. So perhaps Lovecraft made more connections than he could process and was rightly terrified of making any more, but that doesn't mean the brain designers in the future will get the balance wrong.

I think the specific concerns in this blog post, although they broach a topic that's really interesting to think about, will ultimately be irrelevant.

Comment author: nancyhua 07 October 2012 05:52:56AM 5 points [-]

Does anyone else associate the description "cold and calculating" with intelligence? I was wondering if you could describe dumb animals that rape and kill each other as cold and calculating and decided not. To me this article is suggesting libertarians are more intelligent.

Disclosure: I would not describe myself as libertarian (maybe because I'm not particularly interested in politics) although I did donate money to Ron Paul once and have read some libertarian documents, whereas I would describe myself as "feminine."

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 03:27:11AM *  1 point [-]

"Cold and calculating" also sounds synonymous with "sociopathic".

So, this description is bad.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 02:35:32AM 0 points [-]

If anyone has decided to ignore me, I invite them to tell me why in PM or here. As for reasons I ignore people: Too many comments is the biggest one. High frustration level with communicating my perspectives to people I find it difficult to communicate to (all reasons) is the second one. My frustration level waxes and wanes. I will try to communicate to just about anyone on a good day, and ignore everybody on a bad day, and there are days in between. Sorry to anyone I have not gotten back to. If you were really hoping for a response or for resolution, you are free to ping me about it.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 11 October 2012 02:16:38AM -1 points [-]

I'm sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I'm not asking if it is true. I'm telling you it isn't. This is an Affective Death Spiral. Back away while you can!

Also, if capitalistic minds are the awful thing you described (I don't think they are, but assuming) then the last thing you want to do is get inside their heads! I mean it. Run, run fast, run far.....

You can live on $10.000 dollars for a year in asia, or central and south america, and a bit more money than that in Europe. Start by couchsurfing.org .
We'll talk when you are back, and we'll take it from there! Warm regards, and please, please, run! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlT6owR5Ytg&feature=related

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 02:28:28AM *  2 points [-]

I'm not asking if it is true. I'm telling you it isn't. This is an Affective Death Spiral. Back away while you can!

What? I have seen this first hand. I've talked with people who recruit. They do it, they know other people consider it discrimination, and they do it anyway. Consider this: You JUST said you would hate to live in a world in which this is true. Might denial be affecting you? Might you be suffering from selection bias in the methods you use to tell yourself it isn't true? If you haven't looked for evidence supporting my conclusion, as well as evidence against, you haven't really objectively looked at this.

I can't say whether you'd have problems with an employment gap in any country but this one. But I can tell you most certainly do not try having an employment gap in the USA without some sort of really good plan.

if capitalistic minds are the awful thing you described ... the last thing you want to do is get inside their heads!

Wrong. These guys run everything. If you don't understand the people in power, you don't understand your own situation.

please, please, run!

I'm here to be rational. I won't run from information. Neither should you.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 11 October 2012 01:57:52AM -1 points [-]

"Warning: If you quit your job and stay jobless for more than, say, a month, you will probably be discriminated against when you go looking for a job in the future. Some people who have an employment gap find it impossible to get employed no matter what they do, and employers are not going to take "I was trying out being a traveler" as a good reason for a gap." I would hate to live in a world in which this was true. If this in your opinion is true about our world, consider it an www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf information hazard.

Thank goodness it isn't true. Also, if it is true where you live, run, run fast, run far.

I can stand a world without a god, and with the kludgy, tinkered weird ways of blind evolution. I cannot stand the world described above.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 02:13:10AM 0 points [-]

And remember - the greedy people and their perspectives are likely to be over-represented in your perceptions.

This is because they stand out more. Who makes the commercials? The people with millions of dollars, or the poor school teachers who just want kids to learn?

Let's say a rich person does something heinous today. A good person does something wonderful. Which are you more likely to hear about on the news? They tend to hook with morbid fascination, so the heinous act is more likely to get attention. :/

And it's not popular to talk about altruistic things one has done. It SHOULD be (Overcoming Bias just put out an article on that, which is worth reading) but there's a taboo against it. At least in America. (Christian people think that if you talk about good deeds that you "got your reward on earth" and won't receive a reward in heaven - so that may be why.)

A lot of what is good is hidden.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 11 October 2012 01:57:52AM -1 points [-]

"Warning: If you quit your job and stay jobless for more than, say, a month, you will probably be discriminated against when you go looking for a job in the future. Some people who have an employment gap find it impossible to get employed no matter what they do, and employers are not going to take "I was trying out being a traveler" as a good reason for a gap." I would hate to live in a world in which this was true. If this in your opinion is true about our world, consider it an www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf information hazard.

Thank goodness it isn't true. Also, if it is true where you live, run, run fast, run far.

I can stand a world without a god, and with the kludgy, tinkered weird ways of blind evolution. I cannot stand the world described above.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 02:06:50AM *  0 points [-]

It's definitely true. I don't know where you live, but I definitely wouldn't try taking time off from work in the USA without some plans for how you're going to get back into the job market.

If you are an altruist, and it sounds like you might be, you're going to have to do a lot of work to understand greedy people in order to navigate this world. It's very hard to predict what they're thinking when you don't think like they do. For instance: they think there's something dreadfully wrong with you if you're not greedy, they can't understand taking time off from work. If you aren't able to understand them, do everything you can to get inside their heads.

I've felt exactly the same way, that I couldn't stand the greed in the world. Surround yourself with people who care and want to make a difference. I need it, you probably do, too.

Edit: The word capitalist was replaced because it had been juxtaposed with altruist in a way that makes it look like I think they're opposites. I chose the word "greedy" because it was more accurate to my meaning.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 01:58:52AM 2 points [-]

I wasn't skeptical enough of these. -1 point to self. Thanks, Nisan. (:

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 01:49:35AM *  0 points [-]

Warning about the vagabond idea: If you quit your job and stay jobless for more than, say, a month, you will probably be discriminated against when you go looking for a job in the future.

Why I think this

  1. I know a person who was having difficulty getting employed and did everything they could to get a job. Nothing worked. Then, they tried re-explaining an employment gap and they were employed quickly. The person speaks English and has a degree. This person had the type of skills that are useful in various industries and had applied in a wide variety of industries. It wasn't during a time of economic trouble. Discrimination against people with an employment gap appears to me to be a widespread response among many employers and something that can happen even if the economy is fine and one has marketable skills.

  2. Something that confirms this for me is that I have spoken with recruiters. The recruiters say that their clients request people with no significant gap in work history. They explained that they can't get those candidates hired because the clients don't want them and they have to make clients happy. I've seen job ads that specifically say you have to be currently employed in order to apply. It's no secret that employers consciously choose to discriminate based on an employment gap.

(The "Why I think this" section was added after the comment was down voted and people didn't seem to believe it. For me, this seems like common sense, so I didn't expect to have to explain.)

Some people who have an employment gap find it impossible to get employment no matter what they do, and employers are not going to take "I was trying out being a traveler" as a good reason for a gap. I'm not saying a month is safe, either. It's really not. It can take a month or three to find a new job anyway (depending on the amount of demand there is for what you do of course, so it could be longer...) and if you add additional time onto that because you're trying out being a vagabond, you might easily surpass the window of time where employers will consider you due to a gap in your employment history.

Also, I'm not sure what kind of job you might end up with if you haven't got an address. There are sweatshops right here in the USA, believe it or not. Some people end up there because they don't know English. Might you end up in some kind of horrible employment situation due to looking for a job with no address?

Consider this very carefully.

Comment author: Epiphany 11 October 2012 01:38:45AM *  5 points [-]

Usually, the feelings I have as I am shifting due to personal growth are intense, yet temporary - and I've changed myself a lot of times, so the temporary nature of those feelings seems to be a pretty well-established pattern to me. And the way that my ideas settle is always unexpected at first. Making a major decision during a transition could end you up somewhere you don't want to be later.

I once read the story of a person who decided to become a vagabond. She thought it would be good for her, but people treated her like a homeless person, and she was technically homeless, so she started to feel like a homeless person... Homelessness was what her experience turned into.

I have a friend who travels the world and loves it. He decided to use a bicycle as transportation, catch his own fish, and sleep in a tent - but before he left, he saved $100,000 to make sure he wouldn't be worried about money. When you've got 100k in the bank, you're probably not going to feel as though you've turned into a homeless person, and that may be part of why things turned out well for him.

I can't tell you what lifestyle to live. You have to know what you want to get out of it. Then you have to know the pros and cons of each lifestyle. I can tell you this, though: If you try the utilitarian lifestyle for a while, and don't like it, you can always go back. Put your excess stuff in public storage for a few months and see if you like living without it. If so, you can call Salvation Army and they'll take it away. If not, you can have it back.

If you're going to go vagabond, it's a lot harder to switch back. If there is some way of testing that first, I would test it before trying that for real.

I can tell you this, though: My traveler friend is not an altruist. He spends all his time doing outdoors activities like kayaking and hanging out on beaches. If you want to be an altruist, you have to consider how you will make a difference, and that's probably not going to happen outside on a kayak. With no money to donate, no home office, and the random demands of survival disrupting your schedule, will you have the opportunity to make your most effective contribution to the world? Might having your needs met, like guaranteed food, shelter, privacy and office space be necessary to help others? They say "first help yourself." so I suspect that a utilitarian lifestyle would be a better foundation for altruism.

Note: Quitting one's job is not without risks, so trying the vagabond lifestyle might not be safe.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 October 2012 08:16:38AM *  1 point [-]

Sry, no time to comment. On LW.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 October 2012 07:56:17AM 0 points [-]

I think preventing "poseurs" requires going to a level deeper in the following ways:

Even though we might think that rationalists should agree if they all have the same information, we need to go deeper by acknowledging that we have no proven method which accomplishes this, and have no clue whether we ever will. It creates pressure to agree. We need to release that pressure and just start where we are, living with the fact that all we can do is keep learning and sharing and improving our methods for these and hope everyone gets on the same page eventually. It needs to be labeled as the far-off ideal that it is.

I agree with the problem you point out in undiscriminating skeptics, however I disagree with your solution there. Which was (paraphrasing) "The real rationalists are the ones who are able to disagree with the other skeptics and show that they've thought it out."

This encourages people to look for reasons to disagree in order to show off. It might, on the one hand, be a good thing, since it encourages people to think critically and they may find more mistakes that way, but going in the opposite direction of "Believe people are rationalists because they believe X, Y, and Z." is an over-correction. This is relevant because it is likely to promote schisms. A group of thinkers of any stripe are going to have an overwhelming number of disagreements as it is because groups of thinkers grow in their own directions and tend to refuse to conform to promote social cohesion.

When it comes down to it, promoting disagreement is no better aimed at the target of promoting truth-seeking than promoting agreement. If what you want is truth-seekers, promote truth-seekers.

There are nasty pitfalls to using labels at all but "rationalist" might be able to be a healthy and constructive label. Here's what I mean by pitfall and how I think a rationalist label might be made healthy and constructive:

When earning a label (whether that be a job title or a social status title), we're looking at it as a system to game (give the right answers on tests, do posturing) and it is those system-gaming efforts that result in the superficial and empty appearance of belonging (like undiscriminating skeptics who mock what you expect).

People desire to earn status, and that can be a really positive force, but only if it's directed at a goal and the right type of goal. "Disagree sometimes and support your point" will result in disagreements (not necessarily high quality ideas), whereas a goal like "make something that actually works" (a theory that's proven true, a social program that gets results, etc.) would be a wonderful "fire under the ass" to get us moving and figuring out how to do what works.

If status is going to be important to people, the way of determining whether they deserve it should not be quick and it should require that they game reality rather than gaming your model of what a rationalist is.

If you want to use quick mental models as shortcuts to save time while you're navigating the jungle of irrational people out there, this is understandable, everyone does it - but if you publish that here, it's going to become part of the culture, and applying these shortcuts when it comes to which people deserve respect is going to motivate people to value activity over results.

In response to comment by Epiphany on Chaotic Inversion
Comment author: MBlume 10 October 2012 06:48:50AM 3 points [-]

a 15 minute break every 90 minutes

People can work for 90 minutes?! Like... without stopping?

In response to comment by MBlume on Chaotic Inversion
Comment author: Epiphany 10 October 2012 07:25:46AM 1 point [-]

For me, it depends on what I'm doing. Give me something tedious, and I can barely focus to save my life. If it's something I'm well suited to, I can do it for hours and hours, resenting even the short breaks my body forces me to take in order to get something edible from the refrigerator. Maybe you just haven't really thought about which activities you have the most stamina for?

I'd find it hard to do math for a whole 90 minutes, but I can write, do visual art or do emotional support for hours at a time. Not sure how long I can flow while programming - the boss said I have to take breaks. I think I've gone at least two hours.

In response to Chaotic Inversion
Comment author: Epiphany 10 October 2012 06:33:16AM *  0 points [-]

"Chaotic" productivity explanations:

I read a book called "The power of full engagement, manage energy not time." in which it explains that studies show that a 15 minute break every 90 minutes or thereabouts increases productivity. There are other studies with results like this - for instance, Ford's study that showed that his workers, if putting in 60 hours a week, would actually lose productivity so that after two consecutive weeks of this, their productivity level would dip below 40 hours. If I remember correctly, the clue to why this happens is an increase in errors. You're probably familiar with the labor laws that correspond - I read somewhere that they were based on these discoveries.

Not sure whether there are any theories about why the brain needs to rest, but there's probably some kind of important purpose for this.

I have experimented a bit with my needs for rest and I've discovered things like:

The more I am enjoying my activity, the longer I can focus. Might this be similar to what's described in Overcoming Bias's new "Sleep Is To Save Energy" article which explains that some people seem not to need as much sleep because they have more energy. I realize "energy" is kind of a curiosity stopper here. For a guess at what it means, I'd say possibly more neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. Though it's obviously high-risk to mess with brain chemistry, it isn't high-risk to learn stress reduction techniques or increase your enjoyment of work and see if those make a dent.

Sometimes if I'm experiencing stress-related burnout, simply laying down in a quiet and dark environment for 20 minutes or so restores me. Note: I am not talking about sleeping, the objective is to avoid stimulation. This is especially good for stress-related burnout.

I've observed that stretching restores a decent amount of functioning during stress-related burnout. I don't know the reason for this but I've wondered if it had anything to do with muscles releasing chemicals when stretched or stretching affecting circulation.

I encounter little "snags" throughout my day - I'm wondering things like "How do I apply my philosophy to this scenario?" or "There's a new piece of information, I wonder if I will have to stop doing things this way after I investigate it." which can create a necessity to do some simple activity that allows for processing.

Sometimes a reminder keeps surfacing in my mind over and over again which interferes with my concentration so I get fed up and do something with it.

Sometimes I'm trying to remember something, or come up with an idea, and for some reason, doing something completely different for a short while causes a memory or idea to pop up suddenly.

I get a desire to exercise certain parts of my brain that haven't been exercised for a while (this often results in a need to do something visual after programming all day). The brain seems to have built-in motivation to do things that will cause you to learn optimally (From the book: Flow: The psychology of optimal experience) and to avoid things that won't. So it occurs to me to wonder if this is it's way of motivating me to be adaptive by avoiding specializing too narrowly.

I remember hearing a theory that dreaming is your brain's way of organizing your memories. I've read other theories since then which contradicted it and I'm not really sure what to think of them, but it occurs to me that there may be regular maintenance activities the brain must do to stay organized and optimized.

Variations in exercise may affect things: "The power of full engagement" explains that if you exercise 20 minutes twice a week, you'll get a 15% boost in productivity.

In addition to assuming that your productivity was chaotic, it is also a mistake to assume that the brain works in such a way that it SHOULD be able to do an arbitrary activity constantly for an indefinite time period. This may be a remnant of Puritan work ethics that have made their way into our culture, which are definitely not optimally productive if you look at the research.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 October 2012 07:30:16PM -1 points [-]

The rituals in question were my rationalist marriage ceremony and Raemon's solstice ritual. Obviously I have no objection to these being discussed, though I would strongly recommend doing so in a separate Discussion thread. As this thread is a part of a new sequence that may be used to introduce newcomers to LW, I am especially interested in keeping it clean.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 October 2012 12:37:48AM 2 points [-]

Sure. I saved my thoughts for a different thread where they'll be more on-topic.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 09 October 2012 11:08:25AM 2 points [-]

It seems to me that the thing to do would be to just explain why the basilisk wasn't feasible or wasn't worth worrying about.

The whole problem was that (in Eliezer's view) it is feasible and is worth worrying about.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 09:27:53PM *  0 points [-]

Mmm. :/ Well that's disappointing. As the SI literature itself says, there are countless possibilities for directions in which an AI project could go, such that any specific possibility would be dwarfed by them. For him to worry about one specific possibility is to focus on a drop in an ocean that doesn't even exist yet. I wonder if the responsibility of being a leader is in some way preventing him from having an emotionally supportive relationship regarding stress due to SIAI matters. I know this is a big problem for brilliant people: when they've got 40 IQ points on their counselor, how will the counselor even understand their thoughts in order to talk about them, let alone influence them in the sorts of profound ways that make them stronger? If a brilliant person is to receive quality support, they need a counselor who has experience with gifted adults. Finding a mentor or even a girlfriend who could help him with stress would probably seem like an unlikely possibility to him. Now I feel sorry for him.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 October 2012 06:58:34PM 2 points [-]

Separated from my last comment in case they decide to delete this one, too. Why is the basilisk such a touchy subject?

Largely due to the reaction of the site owner which was, to put it mildly, intemperate. It was sufficient to cause one of the most interesting and insightful posters on the website---by the name of Roko---to delete his comments and posts and abandon lesswrong entirely. Other factors include the impression to many that Eliezer's object level beliefs on the subject and the expression thereof made Eliezer sound like a hysterical crazy person as well as his declaration that just reading the post caused extreme psychological damage to multiple individuals including members of SIAI.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 07:15:08PM *  1 point [-]

Oh, that's bad. If these guys experience "extreme psychological damage" while processing information about existential risks, they need to do some meditation to strengthen themselves or find somebody really tough to put in there, otherwise how are they going to do the job? Existential risk research is going to be stressful, period.

But this doesn't answer my question. I knew Roko left. I knew that Eliezer censored the mentions of a certain AI danger that Roko posed. My question is "Why was it censored?"

"Because people had nightmares" just seems silly (though that was the reason presented on RW).

"Because Eliezer freaked out due to people having no idea how to cope with it." is human and makes sense, but I figured there was a more coherent reason than that. Perhaps this assumption was inappropriate.

I have really strong "should universe bias" at times. :/

Comment author: Nornagest 09 October 2012 06:54:46AM *  1 point [-]

I haven't thought about it in detail. On the object level, some people are known to take it seriously enough to have nightmares about it, so it might be mostly a community hygiene thing; I don't doubt that the idea itself at least contributes to its unique reception, though. People here take ideas seriously -- even if all my heuristics point to it being an exploit that a sophisticated system should handle gracefully.

At this point, in any case, I think it's likely that the reaction to the basilisk has brought it more notoriety (and therefore, paradoxically, more potential effectiveness) than it would've picked up if it'd been ignored or even discussed for a while and then forgotten about. Which is why I try not to talk about it too directly; it's embarrassing. But it's part of site culture at this point, and that's a difficult genie to cram back into its bottle.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 08:19:36AM 0 points [-]

People here take ideas seriously -- even if all my heuristics point to it being an exploit that a sophisticated system should handle gracefully.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It would be really hurtful and look really bad if someone irrational took it seriously enough to start doing things to appease some imaginary future AI.

I think it's likely that the reaction to the basilisk has brought it more notoriety (and therefore, paradoxically, more potential effectiveness) than it would've picked up if it'd been ignored or even discussed for a while and then forgotten about.

Yeah. It seems to me that the thing to do would be to just explain why the basilisk wasn't feasible or wasn't worth worrying about. "Fight information with more information."

You can't make information go away...

that's a difficult genie to cram back into its bottle.

lol! I don't think I've ever heard that one before. (:

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 08:06:29AM 3 points [-]

This is haunting the site. I see that your perspective is: "Does this imply that regulation could be accomplished by any modestly capable group, such as a Unabomber imitator or a souped-up ITS? No (reasons)" and that your position is that Terrorism is not effective. However, I have found several mentions of people being creeped out by this article around the site. Here is the last mention of someone being creeped out I noticed.. I think there is a serious presentation problem with this piece that goes like this:

  1. Person clicks article title thinking "This is going to be about ways that Gwern thinks are good ideas to stop Moore's Law". Most of them do not know that Gwern thinks terrorism is not effective.

  2. Person reads "the advent of brain emulation can be delayed by attacks on chip fabs."

  3. Person assumes attacker will be a terrorist, because that's the reflexive reaction after hearing that term so much in the media.

  4. Person thinks "Gee, a guy who thinks terrorism is a good idea. I'm outta here!"

  5. Person never reads far enough to realize that Gwern's conclusion is that only a conventional military attack would work to stop chip fabs.

Please fix this. My suggestion is to do the following three things:

  1. If you change the title, they won't interpret any of the scenarios you analyzed as "My idea of a great way to stop Moore's Law." For instance "Things that would and wouldn't work to stop Moore's Law" sounds more like an exploration of the possibilities, which is what you seem to have intended, than "How would you stop Moore's law?" which sounds like you're setting out to stop it.

  2. There's a lot of mindkill about terrorism. If you state in the very beginning, before mentioning anything about attacks, that your view is that terrorism is not effective, and link to your article on your site, I think that will inoculate against people jumping to that conclusion while they're reading it. Without a blatant statement against terrorism, this is probably going to trigger mindkill for a lot of people.

  3. The beginning of the article is a little bit confusing. I think if you introduced the possibilities you'll be going over before diving in, and stated your point in the beginning, it would be clear what your intent is. For instance: "I analyzed several different ways that people might try to stop Moore's law. Terrorism would not be effective but a conventional military assault could be."

Comment author: shminux 09 October 2012 06:17:50AM -1 points [-]

Well, that makes the second time you ignored my questions, so I will tap out.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 07:10:19AM *  1 point [-]

I've noted to self that this seems like a pattern with us, as you have complained about a question being ignored a few times now. Not sure what I should be doing about it when I don't see a question as relevant but maybe I should just be like "I don't see how this is relevant."

Don't know how I got the habit of ignoring things that seem irrelevant and moving on to whatever seems relevant but I can see why it would be annoying so I will be thinking about that. Thanks for getting me to see the pattern.

Comment author: Nornagest 09 October 2012 04:29:22AM *  2 points [-]

The rituals in question were Eliezer's rationalist marriage ceremony and Raemon's solstice ritual, and my comment's parent expressed concern that incorporating this sort of thing into our subculture could be epistemically dangerous in ways typically associated with cults. (The Objectivists didn't have much ritual as far as I'm aware, but that's beside the point; it's not like using, say, Scientology as an example would weaken the argument much.)

The parent covered a lot of ground, though, and I was only responding to one part of it. It, along with several comments downthread of it, got deleted following references to a certain basilisk.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 06:19:46AM 0 points [-]

references to a certain basilisk

Separated from my last comment in case they decide to delete this one, too. Why is the basilisk such a touchy subject? My guess is that they figured if people took it seriously, the resulting irrationality could have been really problematic.

Comment author: Nornagest 09 October 2012 04:29:22AM *  2 points [-]

The rituals in question were Eliezer's rationalist marriage ceremony and Raemon's solstice ritual, and my comment's parent expressed concern that incorporating this sort of thing into our subculture could be epistemically dangerous in ways typically associated with cults. (The Objectivists didn't have much ritual as far as I'm aware, but that's beside the point; it's not like using, say, Scientology as an example would weaken the argument much.)

The parent covered a lot of ground, though, and I was only responding to one part of it. It, along with several comments downthread of it, got deleted following references to a certain basilisk.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 06:08:15AM *  2 points [-]

Oh... okay. Yeah, a marriage ceremony and solstice ritual don't seem dangerous. I was refreshed to see that the ceremony expressed ideas I consider to be "common sense" which, naturally, are not common. I have to admit, it was pretty creepy to be kinda new here and see that those comments were deleted which apparently contained links to some rituals I was unaware of.

Thanks for assisting me in investigating this. Now I can see for myself that they look harmless.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 October 2012 04:32:01AM 2 points [-]

One interesting thing to note is that if you're accustomed to pledging your allegiance to something every day as a child, while you're still unable to enter into legal agreements and aren't thinking about them, it may not occur to you that when you go to school on your 18th birthday, you've just pledged your allegiance in a way that... might be legally binding?

I suppose it could, yet countries don't require you to do anything to place you in such legal binds. They have laws about "treason" that they can apply when people from their population don't act out allegiance, whether they have pledged it or not.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 06:02:38AM 0 points [-]

Sure but the people have to enforce those laws (the government is something like 3% of the population from what I understand, which means that the people could overwhelm them easily), so if the concept of allegiance is foreign to them, as opposed to being very familiar and feeling like an obligation, or if they haven't witnessed all the OTHER citizens pledging allegiance, it might feel like an empty word they can safely ignore.

Comment author: Nornagest 07 October 2012 09:21:29PM *  4 points [-]

Moreover, if you want to prevent Less Wrong from becoming a cult like the Objectivists, it may be advisable to absolutely avoid to perform rituals explicitly modeled after religious ceremonies, like this or this.

Mmm. I think it's fairly clear that modeling ceremonies on religious rites (or doing much ritual at all outside a certain narrow scope, for that matter) is more likely than the alternative to lead to undesirable perceptions of LW. And PR is important, yes. But I'm not convinced that they're actually epistemically dangerous to any significant degree.

There's a lot of possible reasons to do ritual. The two ceremonies you link seem to mainly fall under the general heading of "affirmation of shared values", which could be used as part of a more general Dark Artsy scheme but don't seem terribly dangerous in themselves; rituals with those aims show up in dozens of secular contexts, from the Boy Scouts to martial arts dojos to the Pledge of Allegiance recited by American schoolchildren. I might have been given pause if it snuck in some seriously controversial content, like a pledge to sign up for cryonics or that believers in the collapse postulate were stupid and also evil, but as long as it limits itself to cheering for a materialistic humanism I don't think there's much to object to. That's way too general to be epistemically risky, and attempts to cast it as such would probably be more funny than menacing.

Now, why pull from a theological source when there's all these other sources available? Well, religions have been doing it the longest, for one thing. In the absence of a deep understanding of the mechanics of something, a good heuristic for getting it done is to find someone that does it well and plagiarize.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 03:58:02AM 2 points [-]

Wait, there are rituals? And someone deleted the links to them? Anyone want to tell me what they're talking about?

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2012 01:45:03PM 6 points [-]

Pledge of Allegiance is recited at the beginning of every school day

[Googles for it and reads it] Whaaaaaat??? O.o

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 03:53:35AM 1 point [-]

Yep. I'm American. My school did it.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 October 2012 03:34:01AM *  8 points [-]

Expecting small children to give a solemn vow filled with patriotic propaganda every weekday morning that they can't even begin to know the ramifications of, OR ELSE, sounds like something you'd find in a totalitarian state.

It also sounds like something you would find in all sorts of other states that aren't totalitarian.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 03:38:41AM 1 point [-]

One interesting thing to note is that if you're accustomed to pledging your allegiance to something every day as a child, while you're still unable to enter into legal agreements and aren't thinking about them, it may not occur to you that when you go to school on your 18th birthday, you've just pledged your allegiance in a way that... might be legally binding?

Regardless of what sort of government expects it's children to pledge allegiance every day, do you agree with the practice of making people pledge allegiance?

Allegiance is kind of vague. It could be interpreted to mean doing normal responsibilities (not being a criminal, paying your taxes) or it might be interpreted to mean total obedience. I'm not sure whether to agree or disagree with the pledge. Maybe I should disagree with it on the grounds that it is too vague and therefore doesn't protect reciters from feeling obligated to obey a tyrant, were one to end up in power.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 02:28:11AM *  -1 points [-]

"The essence of self" seems like the wrong question to me. That sounds too much like "What is the essence of your personality?" and that's irrelevant here.

What I'm talking about is my ability to experience. We all have an ability to experience (I assume) that, although it may be shaped by our personalities, it is not our personalities. Example:

A Christian sees a Satanic ritual. A Satanist sees the same ritual.

The Christian is horrified. The Satanist thinks it's great.

The reason one was horrified and the other thought it was great is because they have different beliefs, possibly different personality types, different life experiences and possibly even different neurological wiring.

What did they have in common?

They both saw a Satanic ritual.

THAT is the part I am trying to point out here. The part that experiences. It's not one's personality, or beliefs, or experiences or neurological traits.

I am saying essentially "Even if personality, beliefs, experiences and neurological differences are copied, this does nothing to guarantee that the part of you that experiences is going to survive." Asking to define the essence of self is not relevant since I'm saying to you "Even if self is copied, this thing that I am talking about may not survive".

Here is a clarifying example:

Transporter Malfunction Scenario

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 03:17:39AM 0 points [-]

Note to self: Thinking about motion might be the key to this.

Comment author: shminux 08 October 2012 03:04:22AM 0 points [-]

As TheOtherDave pointed out, the question is what is, in your opinion, the essence of "self". Clearly it cannot just be all the same "particles" (molecules?), since particles in our bodies change all the time. You seem to be relating self with consciousness, but not identifying the two. That's why I'm asking questions aimed to nail the difference. That's why I asked these questions earlier:

So the "continuity of experience" is what you find essential for not-death? Presumably you would make exceptions for loss of consciousness and coma? Dreamless sleep? Anesthesia? Is it the loss of conscious experience that matters or what? Would a surgery (which requires putting you under) replacing some amount of your brain with prosthetics qualify as life-preserving? How much at once? Would "all of it" be too much?

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 02:28:11AM *  -1 points [-]

"The essence of self" seems like the wrong question to me. That sounds too much like "What is the essence of your personality?" and that's irrelevant here.

What I'm talking about is my ability to experience. We all have an ability to experience (I assume) that, although it may be shaped by our personalities, it is not our personalities. Example:

A Christian sees a Satanic ritual. A Satanist sees the same ritual.

The Christian is horrified. The Satanist thinks it's great.

The reason one was horrified and the other thought it was great is because they have different beliefs, possibly different personality types, different life experiences and possibly even different neurological wiring.

What did they have in common?

They both saw a Satanic ritual.

THAT is the part I am trying to point out here. The part that experiences. It's not one's personality, or beliefs, or experiences or neurological traits.

I am saying essentially "Even if personality, beliefs, experiences and neurological differences are copied, this does nothing to guarantee that the part of you that experiences is going to survive." Asking to define the essence of self is not relevant since I'm saying to you "Even if self is copied, this thing that I am talking about may not survive".

Here is a clarifying example:

Transporter Malfunction Scenario

Comment author: TheOtherDave 08 October 2012 08:28:57PM 0 points [-]

Yup. Which is why I say it's not clear to me those are fair questions.

That said... if in the future two entities exist that are physically and behaviorally indistinguishable from one another, and one of them is me, it follows that either both of them are me, or one and only one of them is me. In the latter case, it seems "me-ness" depends some physically and behaviorally undetectable attribute which only one of them has.

Occam's razor also seems to suggest that both of them are me, since the alternative posits an additional unnecessary entity in the system.

Comment author: Epiphany 09 October 2012 02:00:49AM *  0 points [-]

Yup. Which is why I say it's not clear to me those are fair questions.

I'm interpreting this as difficulty figuring out who the burden of proof belongs to. I think it helps to realize that with each theory there are at least three options:

Believe it's true. Believe it's false. Not believe anything.

If you say "There's a dragon in my garage." and I say "I don't believe this." I am not saying "I believe there is no dragon in your garage." I'm saying "I don't have a belief about this."

Now, I could go in there and inspect everything and conclude that there's no dragon, at which point I'd have a belief that there isn't a dragon. But why should I do this? You might claim next that there's a God in your garage. Then I'd have to go to all sorts of work trying to prove there is no God in your garage. Then you could claim that there's a pink elephant, and on and on.

This is why, if you want people to believe something the burden of proof lies on you - you can't just turn it around and say "Well prove that it's NOT this way!" - if that were the rule, people would troll the crap out of us with dragons and Gods and pink elephants and such.

Does that give you any clarity in whose burden it is to offer evidence regarding time copying people?

Occam's razor also seems to suggest that both of them are me, since the alternative posits an additional unnecessary entity in the system.

No. The additional entity is not unnecessary. The second instance is absolutely required to explain the way you reacted to my teleporter with technical failure argument.

I am surprised you didn't update after that by recognizing that there were two separate instances, and I don't know what to do about it. I'm stumped as to why you aren't seeing it this way.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 08 October 2012 05:46:26PM *  0 points [-]

I could reverse the question. Why do you think you're the same person at different times, as opposed to being a copy? By what mechanism is a single person carried forward through time? Has anyone actually observed this phenomenon, or is it just a theory?

It's not clear to me that those are fair questions, but then it's not clear to me that their reversals are fair, either.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 07:58:54PM *  0 points [-]

Occam's razor. The theory that I'm being copied and destroyed over and over again doesn't explain anything additional that I can think of, so it's more likely the simpler idea (that I am not being copied and destroyed over and over) is true.

Also, not believing that I am being copied does not qualify as a belief. That's just lack of belief in a theory.

If you guys believe I'm being copied over and over again, that IS a belief though, and if you want me to agree with it, the burden of proof lies on you.

Comment author: gwern 08 October 2012 05:50:25PM *  4 points [-]

In general, if someone thinks they've said something that is both new and valuable about the theodicy: they haven't.

Looking at your link, I have no idea what you're trying to say.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 07:56:07PM 0 points [-]

Well, I reworded my point as "The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil" but if you don't think it's going to be interesting, don't bother.

Comment author: gwern 08 October 2012 04:23:17PM 1 point [-]

Yes, that's pretty much what retrodiction is. It's not as good as prediction since you can come up with theories over-fitted to exactly the past (a big problem with financial retrodiction: people routinely find some complex strategy or apparent arbitrage when running over the last 30 years of market data, which disappears the moment they tried to use it), but if predictions are unavailable, at least retrodiction keeps you concretely grounded.

I'm not sure I would use God as an example. Theists like Plantinga have done a good job showing that they can come up with a version of God + concepts like 'free will' which is logically consistent with any observation, so neither retrodiction nor prediction matters for their God.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 05:21:17PM *  0 points [-]

I love it. Retrodiction is awesome.

I think I broke the free will God argument. The idea that evil is evidence that God gives us free will is contradicted by the existence of evil. What do you think?

Comment author: Kindly 08 October 2012 02:36:21PM 1 point [-]

Well, it doesn't even perfectly preserve the original, so I fail to see what else it could be but a copy.

You might argue that for some reason the time-derived copy is more important than an artificial copy, of course, but why?

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 05:08:15PM *  0 points [-]

Wait, wait, wait. I'm still confused as to why you think that time is copying me. By what mechanism does time create new instances of me and destroy the old ones? At what interval does this happen? Has anyone actually observed this phenomenon or is it just a theory?

Comment author: saturn 08 October 2012 05:49:34AM 0 points [-]

What motivates you to link personal identity to your specific particles? Any two atoms of the same type are perfectly indistinguishable.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 06:21:34AM 0 points [-]

I haven't touched on personal identity - for clarity I'm not equating that with continuous experience nor am I even equating continuous instance distinctions with continuous experience at this point. (I guess I'm interpreting personal identity either like "self" or identity the way it's used in "identity theft" - like a group of accounts and things like SSNs that places use to distinguish one person from another. I'm not using that term here and I'm not sure what you mean by it.).

I'm not trying to figure out whether my "self" maps to certain particles. I feel sure that "self" is copy-able (though I haven't formally defined self yet). However, I am separating self from continuous experience (like you can see in my Elements of Death comment).

What I am trying to do is to figure out whether the continuous experience of my current instance is linked to specific particles. The reason I am asking that question is made apparent in my transporter failure scenario.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 October 2012 03:27:19AM 1 point [-]

Whereas with evolution, I'd predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together...

I would expect most life to just end up as planets full of green goo (ie. like grey goo but natural). But I'd expect that in a tiny minority of cases things like Fisherian Runaway, complex signalling and just plain luck happen to throw some individual toward the 'general intelligence' path (and a bunch of other deal breaking to not happen on the way). I'd expect any intelligent agents to observe that they are on a planet, in a galaxy in an Everett Branch where life had evolved much like you said.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 06:07:46AM 0 points [-]

Hmm. I notice that I was not as specific as you are. I didn't say anything about what "most" life forms would be like or whether there would be lots of smart life forms. I haven't really done a thorough retrodiction on evolution, to tell the truth. But I am really liking this new imagination trick of "try to predict the past if the theory was true" (which is subtly different from my other tricks like "is there anything in the past that supports / refutes this?") and it's pleasant atheism-promoting effect on the remnants of my dead agnosticism phase. I'm glad I asked this question and that Gwern helped.

Thinking it out, I do not agree with your green goo hypothesis. I think that as long as there were mutations in the green goo's pattern (and stability in this pattern would be the exception not the rule due to the complexity of making a self-replicating, self-incarnating pattern, and due to environmental differences more complex and diverse than the green goo's pattern would be able to expect) and as long as there was always room for improvement (for something this complex that evolved randomly, perfection in the pattern would be the exception not the rule) it would have to change and mutate and new variations would inevitably emerge.

What would it take to have that kind of stability in life forms? Other than a perfectly stable planet? The life game is very, very complex.

I think, perhaps, a drastic reduction in the number of physical laws (when you have all kinds of neat toys to play with from electricity to friction, room for improvement is immense), as well as the number of substances available (otherwise the goo will only expand and encounter new things which promote adaptations), it MIGHT result in a simple life form becoming "perfect" for it's environment and then stabilizing it's genes as a way of optimizing perfection.

I think diversity and increasing improvement is more likely to result from evolution than perfect, stable green goo.

Comment author: gwern 08 October 2012 02:00:48AM 2 points [-]

Retrospective prediction is an expansion of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/retrodiction

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 03:07:30AM *  4 points [-]

Oh, thank you, Gwern! Ok, so retrodiction is more like this: There are facts that we currently know and phenomena that have already happened so you should consider whether your theory would have predicted them. It's not "did something related precede this" but "If we had known this theory before realizing certain facts or making certain observations, would the theory have predicted or explained these?"

Hmm for examples... if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God, what would I predict? If life on earth evolved, what would I predict?

What would God do? Make something awesome or lounge around feeling enlightened. I'm personifying here, and I know it... I have no idea what a God would do but I suspect that it would not be "Make a bunch of creatures knowing that a bunch of them will experience horrible suffering. Demand that they have faith but confuse them with a bunch of different religions to choose from. Create each of them knowing exactly how they'll reason and what they'll experience and what that combination will result in and demand certain beliefs that won't make sense to some of them."

Whereas with evolution, I'd predict that various life forms would evolve, some would succeed, some would not, life would be more like a chaotic experiment than a harmonious symphony, the smartest life forms would be dreadfully confused for quite some time before having it together...

And this sounds like earth.

Comment author: Epiphany 08 October 2012 12:48:55AM 0 points [-]

Problem: "retrospective predictions" is undefined here. Search does not locate this term anywhere on the LessWrong website, the LessWrong wiki or on Wikipedia, but it seems to be the crux of this piece that we have to make retrospective predictions. Also, it's not clear what you mean by it because it sounds oxymoronic - you can't predict something that already happened. My best guess about what you mean by "retrospective predictions" is: Say someone has a theory that humans are hairless because they evolved from aquatic monkeys. That person should "predict" that there's past evidence of aquatic monkeys existing at the right place/time/circumstance/whatever and then go do some research to find out.

Comment author: Kindly 07 October 2012 11:23:36PM 1 point [-]

What's not incoherent, though, is looking forward to experiencing something in the future, yet knowing you're going to be disassembled by a transporter and a copy of you will experience it instead. That, in no uncertain terms, is death.

Either way, only a copy of you will experience it, because the non-copy of you is trapped in the present and has no way to experience the future. The copy can be made artificially, using a transporter, or naturally as time passes. Why is there a difference?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 11:30:10PM 0 points [-]

Why do you think that time copies you?

Comment author: shminux 07 October 2012 06:42:56PM *  0 points [-]

Right, it's her definition of "same" vs "identical" that I am trying to tease out. Well, the boundary between the two.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 08:30:37PM *  0 points [-]

Yeah that has gotten tricky. I've worded the question as "Same instance or different instance?". I've also discovered a stickier problem - just because a re-assembled me might qualify, in all ways, as "the same instance" I am not sure that guarantees the continuation of my experience. I explore that here, in two examples being re-assembled from the same particles both in the same arrangement and in a different arrangement. (scroll to "Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience" - I labeled it to make it easy to find.)

Comment author: Kindly 07 October 2012 04:13:52PM 0 points [-]

Okay, I was pretty sure that was your real point, so I just wanted to confirm that and separate away everything else.

But to be honest, I don't have a real answer. It's definitely not obvious to me that I will stop experiencing in any real way, but I have a hard time dismissing this as well. One traditional answer is that "you will stop experiencing" is incoherent, and that continuity of experience is an illusion based on being aware of what you were thinking about a split second ago, among other things.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 08:01:21PM *  0 points [-]

The continuation of experience argument is compelling if you consider my transporter malfunction scenario.

That is one situation that would definitely result in a discontinuation of experience.

Others which I have discussed with Saturn and TheOtherDave (a wonderfully ironic handle for this discussion) have resulted in my considering other possibilities like being re-assembled with the exact same particles in the same or different locations and being transformed over time via neuron replacement or similar.

I decided that being transformed would probably maintain continuity of experience, and being re-assembled out of the same particles in the exact same locations would probably result in continuity of experience (because I can't see that as a second instance), but I am not sure about it (because the same particles in different locations might not qualify as the same instance, which brings into question whether same instance guarantees continuous experience) and I'm having a hard time thinking of a clarifying question or hypothetical scenario to use for working it out. (It's all in the link right there).

One traditional answer is that "you will stop experiencing" is incoherent, and that continuity of experience is an illusion based on being aware of what you were thinking about a split second ago, among other things.

What's not incoherent, though, is looking forward to experiencing something in the future, yet knowing you're going to be disassembled by a transporter and a copy of you will experience it instead. That, in no uncertain terms, is death. We can tell ourselves all day that having a continuous experience relies on you being able to connect your current thought and previous thought, but the real question we need to ask is "Will I have any thoughts at all?" so the connected thoughts question is a red herring (as it relates only to your second instance, not your first one) and is a poor clarifying question for telling whether you (the original) survived.

In coherent terms, what we should avoid is this:

The original Dave has died in such a way (by being disassembled by a transporter and dispersed) that he didn't even notice. Dave2 definitely doesn't want to think that an exact copy of himself died just a moment ago, and really definitely doesn't want to have to worry that he will need to cease experiencing in order to "go back" to where he came from, so due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died, and enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him until he ceases to experience when "loaded" back onto his space ship.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 04:11:37PM 2 points [-]

I choose #2, of course.

More than that... if I arrive at the transporter complex and am told that this is an option, that I can duplicate myself and send one copy to my destination while the other one stays here, I absolutely prefer to be duplicated... no reason for a conveniently timed technical failure.

Indeed, I might postpone the trip altogether and spend the next week right here hanging out with myself and having threesomes with our husband and meeting with lawyers to figure out what we do with our funds and material goods.

Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it.
At the time of pressing the button, I'm indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction... they are all me.
After pressing the button, one of me goes "Crap! I'm going to die in an hour!" and is unhappy about it, and the other two of me go "Whew! Dodged that bullet!" but feel bad for the third of me.
On my account it does not matter in the least which one of the three "was the original me," assuming there's even any way to tell, which there may not be.

Now, a question for you.

I enter a spaceship traveling to Alpha Centauri in suspended animation, along with all my friends and loved ones. We could have teleported instead, but we've been convinced by your account that this would be suicidal, so we opted for the slower but safer route.
While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship's captain has the option of using the ship's transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.

As far as I can tell, on your account, there's no particular reason why she should do so... either way, we're all going to die. Sure, if she does so some complete strangers will pop into existence on Alpha Centauri, but what has that got to do with her? The birthrate on Alpha Centauri is more than high enough already, creating more new people isn't particularly valuable.
Is that right?

Suppose she does so, though, for whatever reason.
So someone identical to me (but who on your account is not me, since I died on the ship) wakes up in a thawing chamber on Alpha Centauri, alongside a bunch of thawed people who are identical to my friends and loved ones, and all of us are under the (on your account deluded) belief that we are the same people who entered coldsleep. We throw a big party to celebrate our safe arrival on a new world.

During that party, we turn on the news and learn for the first time about the ship's actual fate.
We are presumably horrified at the sudden discovery that we're not who we thought we were.
The person with my memories looks at the man whom, a moment earlier, he'd thought was his husband, and becomes convinced it's actually a complete stranger... that they never actually got married. Indeed, they just met a few minutes ago, at the beginning of this party. He's been making out for the last five minutes with a complete stranger!
All around the room, similar realizations are being made, as what had previously been a celebration of safe arrival becomes a wake for me and my friends, who are on your account irretrievably and tragically dead.

Yes? Is this how you envision the situation?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 07:40:08PM *  0 points [-]

Scenario meant to discover whether the experience of life is valued

Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it. At the time of pressing the button, I'm indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction... they are all me.

Okay, so I guess what you're saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.

How do you feel about this scenario:

You and your husband are planning to go to a really awesome event soon. Maybe it's the Singularity summit, maybe your favorite rock star is having a concert, maybe it's the birth of a new baby you guys have been wanting for a long time. Imagine whatever sort of event you'd enjoy most.

You're really looking forward to it!

Then work calls and says "Dave, two days from now, we need you to do this really important job 3,000 miles away from your ordinary work site. We couldn't get you a plane ticket on such short notice, but fortunately we have a transporter."

You agree, as it is your job.

Now you hang up the phone and your husband comes over, saying "I can't believe we're actually going to have this event soon! Isn't it exciting!"

"Yeah, of course!" You say. But something feels wrong.

You realize that you are going to be disassembled by the transporter BEFORE the event happens.

YOU won't experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead.

Is this acceptable?

I certainly don't want to live a lifestyle where we use transporters to go everywhere and each instance of me only experiences until the next transport. My life would never be long enough to experience any satisfaction. That's reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland's absurd circumstance: "Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today."

A new instance of me can experience a future event I've been planning for tomorrow, and a past me may have experienced a continuous life before transporters, but most instances of me would just be slaving away during the few hours or days in which they experience, doing things like working or buying groceries, so that other temporary instances of myself can reap the rewards. The instances that do get a reward still wouldn't get to experience the fulfillment of planning out a goal and following through - this is really important to me for satisfaction.

Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience

While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship's captain has the option of using the ship's transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.

Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I'll assume it's intact) I assume you're saying the option is to reassemble those people out of their original particles. (Because if not, it isn't any different from the transporter with technical failure argument, and I'd say that their experiencing ceased when they were disassembled, which is unacceptable, so they're dead.).

First, I'd like to say that re-assembling the people, no matter what with, may be better than letting them die because that still saves them from four out of the five elements of death above.

So what we're arguing about is not whether this rescues their genes, their influence in the world, their selves, or their bodies (that's inconsequential in this case), but whether it saved their ability to experience.

I'm seeing several ways for this to go. The transporter could re-assemble them by putting the exact same particles into the exact same relative locations, or by putting the mass of particles from the accident into whatever locations (mostly not the same locations).

Putting the same particles into the same relative locations:

This, I think, would be the same as turning a computer on and off. I don't have any reason to think I have a "soul" that would "escape" in this case, and I see no reason to differentiate a me made of the exact same particles as me from a me made from the exact same particles as me. In other words, a copy was never made. The re-assembled me is not a new instance - it is the original. I theorize that me1's experience would continue.

Putting the mass of particles into different locations:

This is sticky. If I have some of the same particles, but not all of them, is it me1? What if I have all of the same particles but they're in different locations? That's really, really sticky. This calls into question: What is experience? To answer this question, I have to ask "What is consciousness?"

I have an idea. If we had enough technology to send a person's entire pattern to a new location, surely it would require less bandwidth to send only their thoughts or commands to the remote location. Also there would be no risk of being damaged due to copying errors. A brainless body could be constructed there (either in the exact likeness of the person, or in a form designed to make optimal use of resources), and the original person could control it using a mind reading interface such that they experience what the remote avatar is experiencing.

This would be more efficient and less risky, don't you think?

It still doesn't answer the sticky question of "Would my experience be continuous if my particles were disassembled and re-arranged?" but I think it addresses the practical transportation problem behind this (also, you'd likely get to inhabit a variety of avatars, which would be cool) but back to the original question:

If all of my particles were disassembled and re-arranged, would I have a continuous experience or not? I had been basing this on whether there would be a new instance or not. But this confuses me as to whether there's a new instance, and makes me ask whether being disassembled and re-assembled exactly the same way might mean I lose continuous experience even if I am the same instance.

Maybe continuous instance != continuous experience.

So I have to answer the question of "What is continuous experience?" and "How does it work?"

Unfortunately, I see no way of testing for whether a consciousness is having a continuous experience, since it follows that new instances will pick up where previous instances left off, causing them to have the illusion of continuous experience, and disassembled instances will be dead and therefore incapable of responding about whether they're having an experience. Not that I could test it anyway without a transporter, but this means I can't imagine a scenario and reason out whether a disassembled instance of me would experience or not after being put back together exactly the same way.

Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?

Comment author: Kindly 07 October 2012 01:23:21PM 4 points [-]

I'm perfectly willing to accept that if you get uploaded and then nobody ever runs the upload then that's death. But if you're trying to give the idea a fair chance, I'm not sure why you're assuming this.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 03:55:55PM *  1 point [-]

There's one really important detail here. If you get uploaded, even if the copy is put into a body exactly like yours and your genes are fully preserved and everything goes right, you still stop experiencing as soon as you die.

Is that acceptable to you?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 08:01:16AM *  3 points [-]

If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?

Assuming that it reliably creates that copy? Absolutely. Far more convenient than airplanes.

Yes.

I already know what your bumper sticker in the future is going to say:

I break (down) for transporters!

Now, say the transporter has a malfunction at the exact fraction of a second between the time when Dave2 has been verified as a complete copy and the time when Dave1 is going to be disassembled.

The technician says it's going to take three hours to fix. You go out and catch a movie. After the movie, you go outside and stretch, and you see that it's a beautiful day. You have two options:

  1. Go to the transporter and get disassembled.
  2. Avoid getting disassembled by the transporter.

What do you choose?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 08:03:47AM 0 points [-]

Note to self: "I break (down) / break down / breakdown / brake down / brakedown for transporters!" all get zero Google results. Yay.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 07:54:38AM 1 point [-]

I call this experiencing death. Different definitions, I guess.

(shrug) OK, sure. Incidentally, by your definition, many many people walking around today have experienced death. Hell, I've experienced death myself.

Anyway, using your definition, if I stepped into what I thought was a molecular disassembler that would kill me, and it disassembled me slowly enough that I experienced the process of being disassembled, I would "experience death" by your definition, and I would know I'd experienced it the same way I know I experience the taste of cheese when I experience the taste of cheese. Later, I would look around the teleport receiver booth and say "Huh. I'm not dead? Cool" and go on with my life.

That is, I would have "experienced death" but not actually died, just as many many people do in real life when they wake up after heart attacks, accidents, etc.

If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?

Assuming that it reliably creates that copy? Absolutely. Far more convenient than airplanes.

(By "reliably" here I just mean that I trust it to actually create a close-enough copy, and not to instead create some imperfect copy that does not resemble me closely enough to satisfy my preferences regarding consistency over time.)

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 08:01:16AM *  3 points [-]

If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?

Assuming that it reliably creates that copy? Absolutely. Far more convenient than airplanes.

Yes.

I already know what your bumper sticker in the future is going to say:

I break (down) for transporters!

Now, say the transporter has a malfunction at the exact fraction of a second between the time when Dave2 has been verified as a complete copy and the time when Dave1 is going to be disassembled.

The technician says it's going to take three hours to fix. You go out and catch a movie. After the movie, you go outside and stretch, and you see that it's a beautiful day. You have two options:

  1. Go to the transporter and get disassembled.
  2. Avoid getting disassembled by the transporter.

What do you choose?

Comment author: shminux 07 October 2012 06:34:58AM 0 points [-]

I'll call the original Epiphany and the copy I'll call Valorie.

So your definition of self stops at the physical body? Presumably mostly your brain? Would a partial brain prosthesis (say, to save someone's life after a head trauma) mimicking the function of the removed part make the recipient less of herself? Does it apply to the spinal cord? How about some of the limbic system? Maybe everything but the neocortex can be replaced without affecting "self"? Where do you put the boundary and why?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 07:48:31AM 0 points [-]

So your definition of self stops at the physical body?

No. As I mentioned, "This (referring to Death of Body) is important if your brain isn't somewhere else when it happens but may not be important otherwise."

If you get into a good replacement body before the one you're in dies, you're fine.

Presumably mostly your brain?

If you want to live, a continuation of your experience is required. Not the creation of a new instance of the experience. But the continuation of my (this copy's) experience. That experience is happening in this brain, and if this brain goes away, this instance of the experience goes away, too. If there is a way to transfer this experience into something else (like by transforming it slowly, as Saturn and I got into) then Epiphany1's experience would be continued.

Would a partial brain prosthesis (say, to save someone's life after a head trauma) mimicking the function of the removed part make the recipient less of herself?

If Epiphany1's experience continues and my "self" is not significantly changed, no. That is not really a new instance. That's more like Epiphany1.2.

Does it apply to the spinal cord? How about some of the limbic system?

Not sure why these are relevant. Ok limbic system is sort of relevant. I'd still be me with a new spinal cord or limbic system, at least according to my understanding of them. Why do you ask? Maybe there's some complexity here I missed?

Maybe everything but the neocortex can be replaced without affecting "self"?

Hmmm. If my whole brain were replaced all at once, I'd definitely stop experiencing. If it were replaced one thing at a time, I may have a continuation of experience on Epiphany1, and my pattern may be preserved (there would be a transformation of the hardware that the pattern is in, but I expect my "self" to transform anyway, that pattern is not static).

I am not my hardware, but I am not my software either. I think we are both.

If my hardware were transformed over time such that my continuation of experience was not interrupted, then even if I were completely replaced with a different set of particles (or enhanced neurons or something) that as long as my "self pattern" wasn't damaged, I would not die.

I can't think of a way in which I could qualify that as "death". Losing my brain might be a cause of death, but just because something can cause something else doesn't mean it does in every instance. Heat applied to glass causes it to become brittle or melt and change form, destroying it. But we also apply heat to iron to get steel.

I'm trying to think of a metaphor that works for similar transformations... larva turns into a butterfly. A zygote turns into a baby, and a baby, into an adult. No physical parts are lost in those processes that I am aware of. I do vaguely remember something about a lot of neural connections being lost in early childhood... but I don't remember enough about that to go anywhere with it. The chemicals in my brain are probably replaced quite frequently, if the requirements for ingesting things like tryptophan are any indicator. Things like sugar, water and nutrients are being taken in, and byproducts are being removed. But I don't know what amount of the stuff in my skull is temporary. Hmm...

I want to challenge my theory in some way, but this is turning out to be difficult.

Maybe I will find something that invalidates this line of reasoning later.

You got anything?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 06:55:49AM 0 points [-]

Okay, so would you recommend I check under my bed tonight for anything that might make a copy of me and disassemble the original? I need something more to go on. I'm having a hard time not equating this with worrying about boogeymen.

Indeed! And you should equate it with worrying about boogeymen. It's a silly thing to worry about.

The question is why it's silly.

I would say it's silly, not because I haven't noticed any boxes marked "human copier" under my bed, because every time in the past that I've woken up I've resembled the person who went to bed so closely that it's been ridiculous to worry that I might not be the same person.

Dave would be screaming in agony and he would most certainly notice that he is experiencing death by incineration.

Nope.

Dave would notice that he's experiencing being incinerated, certainly, if the incinerator were as slow as you describe. But he would not experience death by incineration. He wouldn't experience death at all. Here's how I know: as long as Dave is experiencing anything, Dave isn't yet dead. And if he's not dead, he certainly can't be experiencing death.

The original Dave has died ... due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died ... enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him

(nods) Just like his predecessor did the night before when he went to bed, and Dave woke up in his place.

But of course, as above, that was too silly to worry about, just like boogiemen.

So is this.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 07:08:40AM 0 points [-]

Indeed! And you should equate it with worrying about boogeymen. It's a silly thing to worry about.

Okay, I guess you were trying to say that my concern about being disassembled after being copied as a method of "transportation" is the equivalent of worrying about boogeymen?

But he would not experience death by incineration.

"OH GOD I'M DYING AHHH!" < I call this experiencing death. Different definitions, I guess. If you want to get technical about it, and talk about death in a solely tangible way, sure Dave isn't dead when he's thinking about that. But Dave is experiencing death emotionally and intellectually. He knows he's in the process of dying, that death is inevitable. He also feels emotional (and, well, physical) pain that amount to an experience worthy of symbolizing death. Maybe it would be more grammatically correct though if I said he is experiencing dying. In any case, I meant to differentiate this from transporter death because with transporter death, Dave believes that he is going to survive the "transportation" and doesn't feel any emotional or physical pain, so there's no knowledge of or suffering about his death.

But of course, as above, that was too silly to worry about, just like boogiemen. So is this.

If I offered you the free use of a device that could make a copy of you and put it anywhere you want and cause the current you to be disassembled and dispersed in the surrounding environment, (2-way trip) would you use it?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 06:15:49AM 0 points [-]

is there a human copier nearby?

This is exactly backwards.
I recognize a copier because it makes copies. That's how I know something is a copier.
If I need to know whether something is a copier before I can decide whether what it creates is a copy or not, there's something wrong with my thinking.

If you had stepped into a teleporter and pressed the button, how would you know that it killed you?

I wouldn't, naturally.

Of course, if Dave steps into an incinerator and presses the button, Dave also doesn't know that the incinerator killed Dave.
Dave is just dead, and knows nothing.

OTOH, if Dave steps into a non-incinerator and presses the button, Dave knows it didn't kill Dave.

And the way that Dave knows this is that something is standing there, not-dead, after pressing the button, and that something identifies as Dave, and resembles Dave closely enough.

This happens all the time... I have pressed many buttons in my life, and I know they haven't killed me, because here I am, still alive.

And I expect this is exactly what happens with a properly functioning teleporter. I press the button, and in the next moment something is aware of being Dave, and therefore not dead. It just happens to be in a different location.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 06:30:54AM *  0 points [-]

If I need to know whether something is a copier before I can decide whether what it creates is a copy or not, there's something wrong with my thinking.

Okay, so would you recommend I check under my bed tonight for anything that might make a copy of me and disassemble the original? I need something more to go on. I'm having a hard time not equating this with worrying about boogeymen.

if Dave steps into an incinerator and presses the button, Dave also doesn't know that the incinerator killed Dave.

Actually, for at least a few seconds, possibly a few minutes, Dave would be screaming in agony and he would most certainly notice that he is experiencing death by incineration.

OTOH, if Dave steps into a non-incinerator and presses the button, Dave knows it didn't kill Dave.

Unless the non-incinerator happens to be a human copier, and Dave did not recognize it at first.

something is aware of being Dave, and...

Yes, exactly. The original Dave has died in such a way that he didn't even notice. Dave2 definitely doesn't want to think that an exact copy of himself died just a moment ago, and really definitely doesn't want to have to worry that he will need to cease experiencing in order to "go back" to where he came from, so due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died, and enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him until he ceases to experience when "loaded" back onto his space ship.

That's one insidious death.

Two, actually. :p

Comment author: shminux 07 October 2012 05:54:35AM *  0 points [-]

It's a good list. Now to define "you" and see if an upload fits into the definition and if so, how much of your list applies.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 06:03:33AM *  1 point [-]

I am uploaded. A copy of my "self" is made (I believe this is the definition of "you" people are using when they're talking about uploading themselves) and the original is disassembled or dies of natural causes. That's all that was done. I'm assuming no other steps were taken to preserve any other element of me because it was believed that uploading me means I wouldn't die. I'll call the original Epiphany and the copy I'll call Valorie.

Epiphany:

Death of body - Check. Brain was in it? Check.

Death of experience - Check. (See previous note about my brain.)

Death of genes - Check. Pregnancy is impossible while dead. Genes were not copied.

Death of influence - Check. Upload was not incarnated.

Death of self - No. There is a copy.

Valorie:

Death of body - No body. It's just a copy.

Death of experience - Doesn't experience, it isn't being run, it's just a copy.

Death of genes - Doesn't have genes, a copy of my "self" is being stored in some type of memory instead of a body.

Death of influence - Cannot influence anything as a copy, especially if it is not being run.

Death of self - No. It's preserved.

Conclusion:

I am dead.

Of course it's not hard to imagine other scenarios where everything possible is copied and the copy is incarnated, but Epiphany would still stop experiencing, which is unacceptable, so I would still call this "dead".

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 05:40:40AM 1 point [-]

Ah! So when you say "If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I'd stop experiencing" you mean "I'd [permanently] stop experiencing." I understand you now, thanks.

So, OK.
Suppose Dave decides to go to sleep. He gets into bed, closes his eyes, etc.
The next morning, someone opens their eyes.
How would I go about figuring out whether the person who opens their eyes is Dave or Bob?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 05:52:56AM 0 points [-]

Well, first, is there a human copier nearby? If not, you're probably Dave.

How about this: If you had stepped into a teleporter and pressed the button, how would you know that it killed you?

Comment author: shminux 07 October 2012 04:28:55AM 0 points [-]

Define "dying".

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 05:42:53AM *  1 point [-]

Elements of death:

There are a lot of elements to dying and if technology progresses far enough I think we could have incidents where some but not all of them happen. However, depending on what exactly happens, some of these should still be regarded as being just as bad as death.

Death of experience

  • Your experience of the world stops permanently.

  • This is important because you will never experience pleasure again if you stop experiencing permanently.

Death of self

  • Your personality, memories, etc, your "software pattern" cease to exist.

  • This is important because other people are attached to them and will be upset if they can't interact.

Death of genes

  • Your genetic material, your "hardware pattern", is lost. Your genetic line may die out.

  • This is unacceptable if you feel that it's an important purpose in life to reproduce.

Death of influence

  • It becomes impossible for you to consciously influence the world.

  • This is important because of things like the necessity of taking care of children or a goal to make a difference.

Death of body

  • Your body, or the current copy of your "hardware" becomes unusable.

  • This is important if your brain isn't somewhere else when it happens but may not be important otherwise.

There may be others. Can you think of more?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 October 2012 04:46:20AM *  2 points [-]

Temporarily going unconscious is not the same as permanently going unconscious.
Whether we temporarily go unconscious or not does not entail permanent unconsciousness being or not being death.

Now, some questions of mine: you said "If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I'd stop experiencing. That's death."

When you fall asleep, do you stop experiencing?
If so, is that death?
If it isn't death, is it possible that other things that involve stopping experiencing, like the transporter, are also not death?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 05:26:24AM *  1 point [-]

We need to focus on the word "I" to see my point. I'm going to switch that out with something else to highlight this difference. For the original, I will use the word "Dave". As tempting as it is to use "TheOtherDave" for the copy, I am going to use something completely different. I'll use "Bob". And for our control, I will use myself, Epiphany.

Epiphany takes a nap. Her brain is still active but it's not conscious.

Dave decides to use a teleporter. He stands inside and presses the button.

The teleporter scans him and constructs a copy of him on a space ship a mile away.

The copy of Dave is called Bob.

The teleporter checks the copy of Bob before deleting Dave to make sure he was copied successfully.

Dave still exists, for a fraction of a second, just after Bob is created.

Both of them COULD go on existing, if the teleporter does not delete Dave. However, Dave is under the impression that he will become Bob once Bob exists. This isn't true - Bob is having a separate set of experiences. Dave doesn't get a chance to notice this because in only fractions of a second, the teleporter deletes Dave by disassembling his particles.

Dave's experience goes black. That's it. Dave doesn't even know he's dead because he has stopped experiencing. Dave will never experience again. Bob will experience, but he is not Dave.

Epiphany wakes up from her nap. She is still Epiphany. Her consciousness did not stop permanently like Dave's. She was not erased like Dave.

Epiphany still exists. Bob still exists. Dave does not.

The problem here is that Dave stopped experiencing permanently. Unlike Epiphany who can pick up where Epiphany left off after her nap because she is still Epiphany and was never disassembled, Bob cannot pick up where Dave left off because Bob never was Dave. Bob is a copy of Dave. Now that Dave is gone, Dave is gone. Dave stopped experiencing. He is dead.

Comment author: Nornagest 07 October 2012 03:52:52AM 4 points [-]

Sleep, total anesthesia, getting knocked on the head in the right way, possibly things like zoning out. Any time your subjective experience stops for a while.

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 04:20:46AM 0 points [-]

Ok are you saying that temporarily going unconscious is the same as permanently going unconscious?

Would you assert that because we temporarily go unconscious that permanent unconsciousness is not death?

Comment author: Nornagest 07 October 2012 03:28:21AM 4 points [-]

I used to think this way. I stopped thinking this way when I realized that there are discontinuities in consciousness even in bog-standard meat bodies -- about one a day at minimum, and possibly more since no one I'm aware of has conclusively established that subjective conscious experience is continuous. (It feels continuous, but your Star Trek transporter-clone would feel continuity as well -- and I certainly don't have a subjective record of every distinct microinstant.)

These are accompanied by changes in physical and neurological state as well (not as dramatic as complete disassembly or mind uploading, but nonzero), and I can't point to a threshold where a change in physical state necessitates subjective death. I can't even demonstrate that subjective death is a coherent concept. Since all the ways I can think of of getting around this require ascribing some pretty sketchy nonphysical properties to the organization of matter that makes up your body, I'm forced to assume in the absence of further evidence that there's nothing in particular that privileges one discontinuity in consciousness over another. Which is an existentially frightening idea, but what can one do about it?

(SMBC touched on this once, too.)

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 03:50:01AM 0 points [-]

What do you mean by discontinuities? I have not heard about this.

Comment author: saturn 06 October 2012 11:41:25PM 0 points [-]

Questions to consider: Would you feel the same way about using a Star Trek transporter? What if you replaced neurons with computer chips one at a time over a long period instead of the entire brain at once? Is everyone in a constant state of "death" as the proteins that make up their brain degrade and get replaced?

Comment author: Epiphany 07 October 2012 02:56:05AM *  0 points [-]

The million dollar question: Do I stop experiencing?

If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I'd stop experiencing. That's death. If some other particles elsewhere are reassembled in my pattern, that's not me. That's a copy of me. Yes, I think a Star Trek transporter would kill me. Consider this: If it can assemble a new copy of me, it is essentially a copier. Why is it deleting the original version? That's a murderous copier.

I remember researching whether the brain is replaced with new cells over the course of one's life and I believe the answer to that is no. I forgot where I read that, so I can't cite it, but due to that, I'm not going to operate from the assumption that all of the cells in my brain are replaced over time.

However, if one brain cell were replaced in such a way that the new cell became part of me, and I did not notice the switch, my experiencing would continue, so that wouldn't be death. Even if that happened 100,000,000,000 times (or however many times would equate to a complete replacement of my brain cells) that wouldn't stop me from experiencing. Therefore, it's not a death - it's a transformation.

If my brain cells were transformed over time into upgraded versions, so long as my experience did not end, it would not be death. Though, it could be said to be a transformation - the old me no longer exists. Epiphany 2012 is not the same as Epiphany 1985 because I was a child then, but my neural connections are completely different now and I didn't experience that as death. Epiphany 2040 will be completely different from Epiphany 2012 in any case, just because I aged. If I decide to become a transhuman and the reason I am different at that time is because I've had my brain cells replaced one at a time in order to experience the transformation and result of it, then I have merely changed, not died.

It could be argued that if the previous you no longer exists, you're dead, but the me that I was when I was two years old or ten years old or the me I was when I was a zygote no longer exists - yet I am not dead. So the arguer would have to distinguish an intentional transformation from a natural one in a way that sets it apart as having some important element in common with death. All of my brain cells would be gone, in that scenario, but I'd say that's not a property of death, just a cause of death, and that not everything that could cause death always will cause death. Also, it is possible to replace brain cells as they die, in which case, the more appropriate perspective is that I was being continued, not replaced. Doing it that way would be a prevention of death, not a cause of death. I would not technically be human afterward, but my experience would continue, and the pattern known as me would continue (it is assumed that this pattern will transform in any case, so I don't see the transformation of the pattern as a definite loss - I'd only see it that way if I were damaged) so I would not consider it a death.

The litmus test question is not "Would the copy of me continue experiencing as if nothing had happened." the litmus test question is "Will I, the original, continue experiencing?"

Here are two more clarifying questions:

Imagine there's a copy of you. You are not experiencing what the copy is experiencing. It's consciousness is inaccessible to you the same way that a twin's consciousness would be. Now they want to disassemble you because there is a copy. Is that murder?

Imagine there's a copy of you. You've been connected to it via a wireless implant in your head. You experience everything it experiences. Now they want to disassemble you and let the copy take over. If all the particles in your head are disassembled except for the wireless implant, will you continue experiencing what it experiences, or quit experiencing all together?

Comment author: Alicorn 03 September 2012 08:44:10AM 23 points [-]

Here's a point by point on what patterns you're matching if that'll help, but after that I want to end the thread because I find you kind of frustrating to talk to.

I don't see being less verbose as a good way to convey all relevant information.

Response to feedback about how to talk to us: denying that that's how to talk to us.

I guess this is too complicated for people to want to be involved in it. Maybe they don't care that much or just want someone to figure it out for them or something.

Subtly derisive remarks about others' virtue (tolerance for complexity, commitment to site, interest level, initiative, etc.)

I never seem to assume that, though. I always seem to assume they'll want to know. Maybe that's an odd habit.

Passive-aggressive assertion about self-exceptionalism and your rare, yet unfailing tendency to see the best in others even when constantly disappointed - budding martyr complex.

Still, I have a hard time understanding why they'd seek to censor somebody talking about something that was relevant, and could be important, that other people do want to talk about.

Ignorance claim that happens to oblige other people to justify wanting you to stop doing something. Trigger-happy use of the word "censor". Declaration of relevance, unsupported. Declaration of support from unspecified others.

If I'm right that this place is at risk, we're talking about the end of LessWrong.

Doomsaying. Also, you're conveniently the only one who has noticed this Terrible Danger.

I could wait until I wasn't a new user to discuss it, but I don't know how long that takes or how much time is left. It makes very little sense to wait when something is both important and could happen at any time.

It's an emergency! So, exceptionalism!

senseless chaos.

Nope, no rhyme or reason to what others are up to, just people who you've mysteriously chosen to hang out with acting at random.

Especially the guy who was like "You wrote too many posts I don't want!" - that is just ironic!

This seems to me like a misunderstanding or a hearing-past of the point you're responding to.

And then you end with a cookie for the person who engaged with you.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 October 2012 05:42:00AM 1 point [-]

I should have asked questions but my attitude was wrong. Instead I fell back on thinking habits that work to explain the behaviors of non-intellectuals. Now that I know more about LW's reasons for having those types of rejections, (which were unexpected for me), I can see why this would be taken as insulting. I think I understand criticisms 1 and 2. I am trying to understand.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 October 2012 08:36:15PM *  34 points [-]

Gwern Facts Thread

Because we already have an Eliezer Yudkowsky one and this website is awesome.

Found in Yvain's blog post:

Doesn't this mean that I must be wrong about its excellent safety profile? No. See for example Gwern's research on the subject. About half the people reading this paragraph are going to say "Wait, don't the FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government have more data and credibility than one guy with a website?" The other half of the people know Gwern.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012
Comment author: Epiphany 06 October 2012 03:34:52AM 7 points [-]

I went on an interview with Google. They told me that if I was hired, I'd be working on a unique innovation. When I asked what it was, they told me "We want to make an app that will search this guy named Gwern."

Comment author: KrisC 21 August 2012 06:29:02PM *  1 point [-]

Before I get to the rewrite, let me an answer some questions. The pitch is not the place to answer all questions, but instead just enough to recruit users

Form Factor There are a few misconceptions that I have allowed to creep in in order to simplify my description. While I am currently writing the app to be run on a smartphone, this is only the current design iteration. It started as a website, but websites can't properly store data locally. This took up several redesigns until I moved onto a standalone Java app. Then the rise of smartphones happened. Smartphones have many features to recommend them for this application. They are ubiquitous, feature a modular code design, and specialize in data transfer. And they are programmed in Java, so minimal learning curve.

The point of the backstory is that smartphones are a single form factor. A more visually appealing form factor is, what I refer to as, the 'magic mirror.' The magic mirror is a Raspberry Pi running Android and connected to a wall mounted flat screen TV. This TV is not a dedicated device, but a ~$35 component which runs the app on a single input (HDMI) to the TV. The premium version of the app makes configuration very easy.

Another form factor is far more utilitarian. A headless version, run on a Raspberry Pi, executes pre-programmed queues of commands without user interaction.

Note to makers: The reliance on the Raspberry Pi is not absolute. I was thinking Arduino before. The program is only in Java and Android because I decided to learn Java to execute the project. Rapberry Pi is the cheapest computer that runs Android that I know of.

Money at the App Store Honestly, money is a secondary concern. This project is a tool.

Even if no one else ever uses the app, I will draw value from it (though perhaps not enough to offset the time invested already, but that's Sunk Cost and written off).

Even if someone steals the idea, the open source version will be more efficient because it does not need to incorporate overhead to support financial motives. I have sufficient code and description posted to protect my own right to develop and publish. This development trail goes back several years across multiple sites.

So let's look at possible sources of revenue anyway.

The app store is a possible source of income. If there is a free version of an app and a pay version, some people will pay for the app. I wouldn't, but some people will. As I said above, the only thing I want to give those people is a little ease of customization.

Another way the app store can be used to generate income is through soliciting donations. When you ask for people's time and then ask for people's money, you get more of people's money then a direct request for donations. Using the hierarchy of gamification rewards (Status, Access, Power, Stuff), the first reward we give is status.

Another reinforcement mechanism that I am trying to call into play amounts to triggering the Sunk Cost Fallacy in users who decide to become contributors - financial or content. This is the lesser of the two purposes for splitting the app into two implementations. Users who go to the trouble of downloading an new app are going to feel the need to make use of its features. The relevant feature is the ability to add content.

The user is directed to download a new app ('Plan A') after they have created new content on their own (as opposed to when solicited from a peer). At this moment the user is being asked to take an extra step, possibly have to delete things from their phone, and to download a new copy of the app. This is because they have said they know how to do something better than someone else. This is when we ask them to upgrade to contribute more, and this is where we ask them for money. Maximum is $20 on Android market per app sale.

The new version of the app simply displays a full set of options for creating new content. These settings can be confusing for lay users which is the major reason they are kept apart. The same functionality should be accessible from the search bar in any version of the app.

Android apps make very little money compared to iPhone apps. Porting to iPhone should be an early priority.

Money and advertisers The model here is the phonebook. Businesses pay to get listed. We administer the starting directory that every app loads with. This is baked in at the code level in a mechanism used to simplify comparing databases. Under most conditions users will not be deleting these initial tables from their own devices. This does not guarantee top ranking, only the inclusion of the correct information in the results. If you don't pay, you aren't guaranteed even that.

Covert Advertising This is not meant to be a capitalist endeavor. It is meant to compete in a capitalist marketplace. The project is meant to drive users to other open source projects and solutions.

In terms of utility modeling: Every open source advance is available to me, so my fitness is increased by the sum of all open source knowledge. So is everyone else's. Preferential access to open source solutions exist. Fitness is a relative measure in a closed system.

I want "to be reminded to take my pills twice a day" Sample Responses: set alarm "Take my pills" every twelve hours, set alarm "Take my pills twice a day" time to be specified, text messages on timers.

User chooses to look for additional alternatives. Request sent to peers in network. User will not be satisfied without in home care. An opportunity. User could have been satisfied with talking to her daughter on the phone as she was actually looking for companionship.

I want "I'm hungry" Sample Responses: google maps closest restaurant, closest supermarket, local peer with excess food.

User closes search screen without selecting anything because the google map preview was sufficient. Ratings remain unchanged.

I want "to learn German" Sample Respones: google search with a website that teaches German, peer offering language lessons in exchange for dinner, Rosetta Stone website.

User chooses the peer tutoring based on the photo in the response.

Spammers The sharing algorithm is meant to allow spammers in, but force them to have a lower reputation. They play by the rules. I want something. They offer something. Their offer is of low value so they don't get up-voted.

My fear is account hijacking.

Current users I don't have users because I don't have a demo yet. I have abandoned my last several builds due to difficulties of peer to peer networking. What I have are small groups of reviewers who I consult for advice. Even that runs into problems. I usually only get one round of feedback from each person before they agree. And then stop providing meaningful feedback.

What I need are developers. I have taught myself various computer languages for the purpose of putting this program together. Experienced developers would hopefully already know how to implement the missing components. To reach developers I need a demo. So the only thing I can see to do is to continue work on the demo and to build up supporters and collateral skills and assets in the meantime.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 October 2012 01:01:21AM *  0 points [-]

I'm sorry for the delay. I got tied up in other things for a while. Here are my thoughts:

Okay, it was really important for me to realize you weren't trying to make money, you're just trying to do something useful. I think, with each presentation you make, you should make it explicit either that your presentation is ONLY for the end users (if so), OR (if not) that you're doing this as an act of altruism / hobby / non-profit organization / however you classify it.

Another reinforcement mechanism that I am trying to call into play amounts to triggering the Sunk Cost Fallacy

Really? Wouldn't it be better for all constructive purposes if you showed a solid reason to invest? Not only does that provide a more stable basis for getting investments, but it will force you to reality-check and ensure that your users are getting something of value out of the project. Not forcing yourself to jump through that hoop might result in a lost opportunity for getting important feedback / taking it seriously.

Phone book

Okay, why will users use a phone book that has only a few entries? Why will businesses pay for inclusion in a phone book if users aren't using it? Neither users or businesses will want to use your phone book in the beginning. This is a catch-22. How will you begin it?

It occurs to me to wonder what kinds of competing apps are out there and how yours compares to them. I'm not a cell phone apps connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. I barely use my phone. If I could speak all my commands to it, it might actually be useful to me for some purpose other than time sensitive calls while I'm out of the house - I can't stand typing each letter individually when I know I can do up to at least 105 wpm on a keyboard. If lost, I will take advice from ten strangers before I try and use it to pull up online maps. For this reason, convincing users to choose your app instead of competitors is probably not among my best abilities. All I can really do help you figure out how to make your presentation understood.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 October 2012 07:37:21AM *  0 points [-]

I would not have guessed that.

People who know me on lesswrong tend to tell me that I come across very differently in person than I do online. I think they are right although I suspect that my personal interactions with people here (few though they may be) are rather similar to who I interact in person in the 'real world'.

I know from experience that acting like a typical INFP in an online environment where INFP is rare is a recipe for disaster---it just doesn't work. I also find that I am best served by rationing my lesswrong interactions and keeping them balanced by interactions with INFP friends (and lovers). Too much dealing with "Js" just gets tiresome. I actually suspect I'll take another hiatus from here soon and get my intellectual stimulation from the textbooks and papers on my to-read queue for a while.

I wonder if some of your personality dimensions fluctuate or are on the border. For me, the E/I fluctuates and so does the F/T. I'm always an N and P. Are you right on the line between T and F?

I'm very close to the line on T/F, fairly close to the line on E/I.

Comment author: Epiphany 05 October 2012 07:25:52PM 0 points [-]

acting like a typical INFP in an online environment where INFP is rare is a recipe for disaster

Good point. That's likely to make it harder to discover Fs here.

I actually suspect I'll take another hiatus from here soon ...

Aww. ): I hope you'll still talk to me.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:39:31PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see a Myers-Briggs personality survey anywhere on LessWrong but I would like to make one. I also have predictions, and I think it would be neat to see if I'm correct (predictions below in an unedited comment.)

I am aware that the Myers-Briggs is considered to have inaccuracies - for instance, I've scored different types at different times. I do not feel that this makes it useless but that it reflects the fact that your personality can change due to things like (for me) switching from doing a lot of art and people work (feeler type) to doing more intellectually rigorous activities (thinker type).

Should I make a new post for that? Post a poll in the open threads over and over until I get 100 responses? Ask Yvain to include it on the next survey? How should I do this?

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 09:27:35PM *  3 points [-]

Proposed Poll:

What is your last Myers-Briggs personality type score:

  • INTJ
  • INTP
  • ENTJ
  • ENTP
  • INFP
  • INFJ
  • ENFJ
  • ENFP
  • ISTJ
  • ISTP
  • ESTJ
  • ESTP
  • ISFJ
  • ISFP
  • ESFJ
  • ESFP

These questions are interesting because there are some connections with personal development:

Regarding I/E (introversion / extroversion), have you gotten a score near the border between them, or gotten a different I/E result when taking the test multiple times?

  • I got results near the border (maybe the same result maybe different).
  • I got two very different results (not near the border, not the same result).
  • None of the above.

(Etc. for the other three dimensions)

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2012 07:59:09PM *  0 points [-]

NF types - a handful or none (possibly more than the next type, possibly less)

Here is one. INFP. Fairly consistent across tests, with the "N" and the "P" being close to the extremes.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 09:19:35PM 0 points [-]

I would not have guessed that. I wonder if some of your personality dimensions fluctuate or are on the border. For me, the E/I fluctuates and so does the F/T. I'm always an N and P. Are you right on the line between T and F? If this test is the one that I remember (the page changed) then I think it gives you percentages:

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

No idea about the accuracy, but it's free.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:39:31PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see a Myers-Briggs personality survey anywhere on LessWrong but I would like to make one. I also have predictions, and I think it would be neat to see if I'm correct (predictions below in an unedited comment.)

I am aware that the Myers-Briggs is considered to have inaccuracies - for instance, I've scored different types at different times. I do not feel that this makes it useless but that it reflects the fact that your personality can change due to things like (for me) switching from doing a lot of art and people work (feeler type) to doing more intellectually rigorous activities (thinker type).

Should I make a new post for that? Post a poll in the open threads over and over until I get 100 responses? Ask Yvain to include it on the next survey? How should I do this?

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:40:49PM 3 points [-]

Personality Type Predictions:

The vast majority are introverts, ballpark 90% introverts.

Most common type: INTJ

NT types > 75% of the population

NF types - a handful or none (possibly more than the next type, possibly less)

ISTJ - a single digit percentage of the LW population

Other guardians and artisans: none or nearly none.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:39:31PM *  1 point [-]

I don't see a Myers-Briggs personality survey anywhere on LessWrong but I would like to make one. I also have predictions, and I think it would be neat to see if I'm correct (predictions below in an unedited comment.)

I am aware that the Myers-Briggs is considered to have inaccuracies - for instance, I've scored different types at different times. I do not feel that this makes it useless but that it reflects the fact that your personality can change due to things like (for me) switching from doing a lot of art and people work (feeler type) to doing more intellectually rigorous activities (thinker type).

Should I make a new post for that? Post a poll in the open threads over and over until I get 100 responses? Ask Yvain to include it on the next survey? How should I do this?

Comment author: [deleted] 01 October 2012 08:36:15PM *  34 points [-]

Gwern Facts Thread

Because we already have an Eliezer Yudkowsky one and this website is awesome.

Found in Yvain's blog post:

Doesn't this mean that I must be wrong about its excellent safety profile? No. See for example Gwern's research on the subject. About half the people reading this paragraph are going to say "Wait, don't the FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government have more data and credibility than one guy with a website?" The other half of the people know Gwern.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012
Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:43:56AM *  6 points [-]

They went to upload Gwern's brain. They said they couldn't do it, but they were glad that someone had made most of the internet redundant.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 October 2012 08:36:15PM *  34 points [-]

Gwern Facts Thread

Because we already have an Eliezer Yudkowsky one and this website is awesome.

Found in Yvain's blog post:

Doesn't this mean that I must be wrong about its excellent safety profile? No. See for example Gwern's research on the subject. About half the people reading this paragraph are going to say "Wait, don't the FDA and the entire decision-making apparatus of the United States government have more data and credibility than one guy with a website?" The other half of the people know Gwern.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012
Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:18:36AM *  13 points [-]

I went to the library and it was empty. They said Gwern stopped by for a quick lookup.

Comment author: Blackened 03 October 2012 10:11:28AM 3 points [-]

Why do you think so? I would personally like more people who are actively talking about their good and bad sides, although I'm not sure if I'd do that in an interview, because it might mean they don't know what appears to be the most effective strategy.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:08:52AM 3 points [-]

I don't know man, but that weird habit of humans drives me up a friggin wall.

Comment author: Blackened 02 October 2012 09:20:58PM 2 points [-]

I'm writing my CV now and was wondering whether I should indeed be "as confident as possible" (which basically means, according to some people, that I'm limited to sentences that don't even contain words like "but", "mostly", "although" etc.). Overconfidence is a killer of rationality, and displaying it might signal that you're irrational. I would personally trust much more someone who actively doubts in many things he says, rather than someone who is always confident. However, some people say the opposite.

I was wondering how should I approach my CV? Would it attract more rational employers if it's more self-skeptical? I'm not going to take it to a degree where it's as self-skeptical as I usually get when I give my honest advice on something (pointing out as many assumptions and dependencies on sources of information as possible, and sounding like nobody else I know, based on a very quick search). But still wondering whether this would get me a more irrational employer, and would some of you actually trust more someone who sounds confident.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:07:28AM *  2 points [-]

I've heard that cover letters are not very popular these days, some people are doing away with them and viewing them as just another thing that can get you rejected.

Before you put a lot of effort into this, you might want to check around and see if anyone even wants cover letters anymore. I know at least one significant company that does not even accept them.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 07:04:33AM 4 points [-]

Virtualization. I think if you are virtualized (uploaded to a computer, or copied into a new brain), you still die. I keep running into people on here who seem to think that if you copy someone, this prevents them from dying. It seems that I am in the minority on this one. Am I? Has this been thoroughly debated before? I would like to start a discussion on this. Good idea / bad idea tips on presentation?

Comment author: Curiouskid 04 October 2012 03:12:01AM 0 points [-]

Great post Epiphany. I'd like to volunteer myself as another guinea pig, but with one caveat. Rather than having this experiment end with just two people's opinions being changed, I'd like to create an argument map for the best arguments on cryonics so that more people can be persuaded by the best arguments that we can aggregate into an argument map.

There are a lot of argument mapping tools out there, but my favorite one isn't actually intended to be used as an argument map. I created a rough sketch of an argument map on cryonics.

Comment author: Epiphany 04 October 2012 03:53:35AM *  2 points [-]

I am planning to put a list of my objections with links and whether they're resolved into the OP. So there will be some organization to it.

I'm not sure that LW wants more guinea pigs, some feel that this is a waste of time - you can tell by the karma on my thread that this isn't really popular. Thanks for the compliment, though.

Also, I am not expecting to be convinced. I'm actually leaning toward "no" right now, as surprising as I bet some think that is. I'll explain that when I make my next run of responding to comments again.

You know, I think we should argument map the whole friggin site. Except that I WOULD NOT want to see that being put onto someone else's software. They'll have control of the data. I'd prefer to see it in open source software, editable by the world, and copyright free so anyone can make it backup without a problem.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2012 03:25:57AM 1 point [-]

The IQ survey is obviously flawed.

In response to comment by [deleted] on You're Calling *Who* A Cult Leader?
Comment author: Epiphany 03 October 2012 03:35:35AM *  5 points [-]

We all know that a survey is not proof. It was intended as a thought-provoking clue, not as proof. Everyone here is capable of considering whether LW and Hackernews are full of gifted people. This is niggling.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 October 2012 03:01:07AM *  3 points [-]

Explanation: Emotional overexcitability, a trait common to gifted people and yes there is good reason to believe that most LessWrongers are gifted may cause LW and Hackernews fans to be extra excitable and intense. You've probably heard that gifted people tend to be more emotional? Well on your LessWrong survey your respondents claimed an average IQ in the 140s, well beyond the minimums for all the IQ definitions for gifted. If these readers are unusually emotionally intense, as gifted people tend to be, it's likely their unusual "electricity" sets off less excitable people's cult radar, just as intensity can set off so many other radars, getting one judged as everything from a crybaby to a drama queen.

I think it's totally normal for excitable people to have passionate feelings about all kinds of things, including praising other people highly. I think of it as "normal for gifted people" - this is a different kind of normal. Check out this page from the Davidson Institute (a school for gifted children) which describes emotional overexcitability as "heightened, intense feelings, extremes of complex emotions, identification with others' feelings, and strong affective expression" and explains that we should accept them:

"Accept all feelings, regardless of intensity. For people who are not highly emotional, this seems particularly odd. They feel that those high in Emotional OE are just being melodramatic. Though we are all melodramatic on occasion, people with high Emotional OE really do feel their emotions with remarkable or atypical strength. If we accept their emotional intensity and help them work through any problems that might result, we will facilitate healthy growth."

From:

Overexcitability and the highly gifted child

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 October 2012 01:31:05AM 1 point [-]

I wonder if women experience stronger survivor's guilt than than men.

If I were to make a prediction for an experiment, I would guess no, because men are conditioned to see themselves as more expendable. I'm guessing that the same norms which led to more women in steerage class making it off the Titanic alive than men in first class would lead to men having stronger survivor's guilt than women.

Comment author: Epiphany 03 October 2012 02:31:37AM 1 point [-]

That men feel expendable is an interesting idea, but that sounds like more of a cultural pressure having to do with the military or women being capable of pregnancy than an instinct. The hormonal differences, on the other hand, are unavoidable and internal. I wonder which is stronger and whether anyone has done research on whether women are more self-sacrificing. (Not seeing anything from my searches.)

Comment author: shminux 06 September 2012 04:49:36AM *  0 points [-]

I suppose that if you mean that it is possible to make an invalid extrapolation based on age adjustment, then you are right, it is indeed possible, if meaningless. It is not, however, how IQ is measured (by comparing how well you did vs other people who took the same test).

Disagreed: You can't have an IQ that high. Saying a person can't get an IQ score that high is not the same thing as saying they can't get an IQ that high.

It is exactly the same thing, because IQ is not intelligence, it's one (not very accurate) way to measure it. Thus there is no such thing as person's IQ, only person's IQ score. Just because IQ is commonly confused with intelligence, does not mean it is the same thing.

You can estimate someone's IQ testing skills from one or more of their IQ test scores, and this skill is indeed a property of (your model of) the individual, not of a piece of paper with the number on it, and this skill is correlated with other measures of intelligence. This skill can conceivably be shorted to "person's IQ". However, there is no standard procedure of calculating anything like that (should it be the average? mode? geometric mean? maximum? minimum? any of those have merits, depending on your model of how the hypothetical innate IQ testing skill is translated into IQ test scores).

William Sidis is my cite for that - his estimated IQ was 250-300

Funny that you bring him up. Says Wikipedia:

never before have I found a topic so satiated with lies, myths, half-truths, exaggerations, and other forms of misinformation as is in the history behind William Sidis

Comment author: Epiphany 03 October 2012 02:16:06AM *  0 points [-]

I suppose that if you mean that it is possible to make an invalid extrapolation based on age adjustment, then you are right, it is indeed possible, if meaningless.

It is possible, and they've done it. Whether it is meaningless is outside the scope of our particular debate as, if I remember correctly, we started arguing after Gwern said that claiming an IQ of 220+ is proof that a person is "either a lying or from the future".

So, this supports my point that such a claim is not proof that a person is lying. I'll just disregard the "from the future" comment for now. ;)

It is not, however, how IQ is measured (by comparing how well you did vs other people who took the same test).

Not sure if you're saying "IQ test scores aren't generated based on how you compare." or, within the context of the previous sentence "IQ tests are not scored using age adjustment."

For the former, you're partly right and partly wrong. The ratio tests were scored using a bell curve. If your IQ was relatively close to normal, you'd get a score that would tell you how you compare to average. If your IQ was super high like 160, it was likely to be inaccurate, because those people are rare.

As for age adjustments - of course they make age adjustments. Otherwise, how would they test children of different ages on the same test? If a child of the age of 3 gets the same questions right as children who are 10 years old, do you give the ten year olds a toddler's score or do you give the toddler a score closer to that of a ten year old? It would be inappropriate to imply that the ten year olds and the toddler have the same amount of intelligence.

I imagine this is fairly meaningful at least when it concerns testing average children of different ages, since it's not too difficult to find lots of children to make the test more accurate with. When it comes to testing child prodigies, the exact score (say "exactly 223" or something) would be meaningless, but the fact that, say, a 7 year old got a perfect score on an IQ test suitable for adults, we'll say, that would be very meaningful - though their score should be taken as more of a ballpark figure than an exact measurement.

Saying a person can't get an IQ score that high is not the same thing as saying they can't get an IQ that high. It is exactly the same thing, because IQ is not intelligence, it's one (not very accurate) way to measure it. Thus there is no such thing as person's IQ, only person's IQ score. Just because IQ is commonly confused with intelligence, does not mean it is the same thing.

It depends on how you use the word in the sentence. You make a distinction between IQ and intelligence which is good, but I am making a different distinction. Even if I haven't measured the number of degrees Fahrenheit in a particular igloo near the North pole, that does not mean it has no temperature or that it's temperature does not correspond to a specific number of degrees Fahrenheit. This is more like the debate "If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?" - my answer is yes because I'm using a definition that involves physics, disrupted air waves and decibels. Just because you didn't measure the number of decibels doesn't mean they weren't there.

the point

Anyway, your point is "it's physically impossible to measure an IQ score that high" but that does nothing to refute my point that "this claim is not proof the person is a liar."

It's a red herring.

William Sidis

Maybe I should verify my info on him then.

Comment author: Eneasz 01 October 2012 05:04:50PM *  10 points [-]

I was surprised to see the most relevant objection of the vast majority of people not mentioned. It is conspicuously absent, in fact. Social norms.

The social norms against cyro are so strong that almost no one even remotely considers it. This is almost everyone’s true rejection.

When people say it’s extra-hard to convince women, I think they’re misattributing the source of difficulty. It’s very hard to find people who are so blind to (or resistant to) social norms (take your pick of connotation :) ) that they’re willing to consider the merits of cryo. For whatever reason it seems easier to find males who are so blinded/fortified than females. I would wager that it’s the same reason that the gender distribution of LW skews very male.

Perhaps the most effective argument to make to get most people to sign up would be “This is why you may safely ignore social conventions in this case.” With little/no attention being given to the merits of cryo, and almost all the effort being put into convincing the subject that the social costs will be minimal.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 October 2012 07:40:04PM *  2 points [-]

Ooh good observation. It can be so much harder to notice things that aren't there.

The answer to why I didn't make a social norm objection is simple: I don't have to tell anyone that won't understand. It's not like anyone is going to publish my name in the newspaper.

Interesting that they don't appear to realize this. Maybe the difference is that if you're talking to people in a non-anonymous context where others are overhearing, they will appear wary of cryo for social reasons, but I can't help but wonder if they then go away and think about it on their own, privately considering it's merits. After all, this is life or death, right?

Maybe the only thing that you have to do to overcome this is tell people it can be done privately (I'm only assuming that it can be, can it?) and to present cryo to them when nobody else is around.

Or you could open the cryo discussion with something to the effect of "If everyone else were jumping off a cliff, would you do it just because they were?" If no, which is likely, then: "If there was something that could keep you from dying but it wasn't popular, would you say it was jumping off a cliff with them if you would not even consider it?" If yes, then: "Cryo could stop you from dying. It isn't popular, but would you consider it anyway?"

That pits an even more socially unacceptable thing, being such a sheep that you die, against something that can't possibly be as unacceptable since it doesn't require you to knowingly make a decision which leads to your own death. Unless survivor's guilt is prevalent, in which case the irrational notion "But I shouldn't kill everyone else by surviving!" trumps "I can't jump off a cliff like an idiot."

Comment author: lukeprog 22 September 2012 02:03:25PM *  1 point [-]

Claim: "Eternal September" is impossible to avoid.

Maybe this mathematical approach would work. (h/t matt)

Comment author: Epiphany 01 October 2012 06:35:34AM *  0 points [-]

Sorry I didn't incorporate this into the solutions page sooner, Luke. I didn't check this thread for solutions. I will add this now. (I made a cliff notes version of the suggestions if you're interested). I question, though, whether changing the karma numbers on the comments and posts in any way would have a significant influence on behavior or a significant influence on who joins and stays. Firstly, votes may reward and punish but they don't instruct very well - unless people are very similar, they won't have accurate assumptions about what they did wrong. I also question whether having a significant influence on behavior would prevent a new majority from forming because these are different problems. The current users who are the right type may be both motivated and able to change, but future users of the wrong type may not care or may be incapable of changing. They may set a new precedent where there are a lot of people doing unpopular things so new people are more likely to ignore popularity. The technique uses math and the author claims that "the tweaks work" but I didn't see anything specific about what the author means by that nor evidence that this is true. So this looks good because it is mathematical, but it's less direct than other options so I'm questioning whether it would work.

Comment author: Dolores1984 01 October 2012 05:38:11AM 0 points [-]

Well, there's no reason to think you'd be completely isolated from top level reality. Internet access is very probable. Likely the ability to rent physical bodies. Make phone calls. That sort of thing. You could still get involved in most of the ways you do now. You could talk to people about it, get a job and donate money to various causes. Sign contracts, make legal arrangements to keep yourself safe. That sort of thing.

With friendship, one of the things that creates bonds is knowing that if I'm in trouble at 3:00 am, I can call my friend. If all the problems are happening in a world that neither of you has access to, if you're stuck inside a great big game where nothing can hurt you for real, what basis is there for friendship? What would companionship be good for?

Wait, you only value friendship in so far as it directly aids you? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if that's actually true, then you might be a sociopath.

Why are you learning rationality if you don't see value in influencing reality?

Rationality is about maximizing your values. I happen to think that most of my values can be most effectively fulfilled in a virtual environment. If the majority of humanity winds up voluntarily living inside a comfortable, interesting, social, novel Matrix environment, I don't think that's a bad future. It would certainly solve the over-crowding problem, for quite a while at least.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 October 2012 06:13:09AM *  1 point [-]

Well, there's no reason to think you'd be completely isolated from top level reality.

Hmm. I hadn't thought very much about blends of reality and virtual reality like that. I've encountered that idea but hadn't really thought about it.

you might be a sociopath.

You took one example way too far. That wasn't intended as an essay on my views of friendship. The words "one of the things that creates bonds" should have been a big hint that I think there's more to friendship than that. Why did you suddenly start wondering if I'm a sociopath? That seems paranoid, or it suggests that I did something unexpected.

Rationality is about maximizing your values.

Okay, but the reason why rationality has a special ability to help you get more of what you want is because it puts you in touch with reality. Only when you're in touch with reality can you understand it enough to make reality do things you want. In a simulation, you don't need to know the rules of reality, or how to tell the difference between true and false. You can just press a button and make the sun revolve around the earth, turn off laws of physics like gravity, or cause all the calculators to do 1+1 = 3.

In a virtual world where you can get whatever you want by pressing a button, what value would rationality have?

Comment author: [deleted] 15 September 2012 07:28:23AM 4 points [-]

Would you be interested in having regular "Woman Oriented" threads (such as this one)? If so, how often? I'll set a range from once per month, to once per year.

(My experience is that every time a rationalist gathering becomes at least 50% female, conversation inevitably turns to Optimal Bras (braspace is large, and the optimal choice is highly situational.) or BC.)

Comment author: Epiphany 01 October 2012 05:54:49AM 0 points [-]

I feel no need for women oriented threads, myself. However, I feel it's really important to work out dating and gender ratio issues. We've needed an open line of communication about that for a long time. As far as timing is concerned, why make it scheduled? Say something good when you have something good to say.

Comment author: Dolores1984 01 October 2012 04:19:00AM 2 points [-]

I want meaning, this requires having access to reality. I'll think about it.

Does it? You can have other people in the simulation with you. People find a lot of meaning in companionship, even digitally mediated. People don't think a conversation with your mother is meaningless because it happens over VOIP. You could have lots of places to explore. Works of art.. Things to learn. All meaningful things. You could play with the laws of physics. Find out what if feels like to turn gravity off one day and drift out of your apartment window.

If you wake up one morning in your house, go make a cup of coffee, breathe the fresh morning air, and go for a walk in the park, does it really matter if the park doesn't really exist? How much of your actual enjoyment of the process derives from the knowledge that the park is 'real'? It's not something I normally even consider.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 October 2012 04:47:47AM *  0 points [-]

Why is reality important to me? Hmm. Because without access to reality, you always have to wonder what's happening around you. Wouldn't there come a point where you went HOLY CRAP someone could be sneaking up behind me right now and I'd never know.

Do you trust the outside world enough not to worry about that?

I don't.

I'd eventually spill coffee on my computer or something and it would dawn on me "What if they spill coffee on my brain?"

I'd want to speak to the outside world. We'd probably be able to access them on the internet or some such. Things would be happening there. I would know about them. Political problems, disasters. Things I couldn't get involved in.

And if not, then I'd be left to wonder. What's going on in the outside world? Are things okay?

Imagine this: Imagine being cut off from the news. Not knowing what's going on in the world.

Imagine realizing that you are asleep. Not knowing whether there's a burglar in your house, whether it's on fire. Not being able to wake up.

Imagine your friends all have the same problem. You have no access to reality, so there's no way you can help them. If something affects them from the outside world, you can give them a hug. A virtual hug. But both of you knows that there's nothing you can do.

With friendship, one of the things that creates bonds is knowing that if I'm in trouble at 3:00 am, I can call my friend. If all the problems are happening in a world that neither of you has access to, if you're stuck inside a great big game where nothing can hurt you for real, what basis is there for friendship? What would companionship be good for?

You'll be like a couple of children - helpless and living in a fantasy.

Why are you learning rationality if you don't see value in influencing reality?

Comment author: MixedNuts 30 September 2012 08:44:39AM 2 points [-]

See disability arguments on the other comment for personality-preserving brain damage.

Then I would have to live as a sort of zombie-like horror.

Well, no. You'd just be dead. There'd be a Schiavo-like body looking like yours, or a new person in a body looking like yours, but that doesn't seem to add much to the horror of death.

this goes on for some prolonged period of time where they're assuming the reason I'm miserable is because of the shock of waking up in a world where so many of the people I know are dead and everything else is changed or gone, so nobody has any idea that it's due to a chemical or structural problem in my actual brain.

That sounds like a weird change. Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event, less if it gets really bad, and even less in practice. How prolonged are you thinking of?

People who age often get depression, and get the worst disabilities because they can't adapt fast and their disabilities keep increasing. Do you accept "I should kill myself now, so I don't run that risk"? If not, how is that different.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 11:39:36PM *  1 point [-]

Well, no. You'd just be dead.

This thing that would not die though, this ability to know pain and pleasure, this continuing experience, it would remain in the event that my memories were all gone, presumably. THAT is the part I'm worried about. That the part of me that feels could wake up and have to go through the experience of realizing that who I am has been lost to brain damage.

Right now the DSM allows a depression diagnosis two months after a traumatic event

Is this supposed to rebut my objection? I don't see where you're going with this at all.

Do you accept "I should kill myself now, so I don't run that risk"? If not, how is that different.

Right now, there isn't a guarantee that I'm going to go through a medical procedure anytime soon. Going through a medical procedure, especially one that is new, or one that few people have been through, is likely to cause some sort of horrible side effects. We have no reason to assume that this technology will be flawless by the time we get to use it, no reason to believe it won't turn us into horrors.

It's different because not killing myself right now leaves me with a reasonable chance to have some number of happy years ahead whereas going through a medical procedure with unexpected side effects and risks may have a much greater chance of making me completely miserable for a long time.

I think our disagreement may have a lot to do with how much faith we place in the medical establishment.

If you haven't got experience with it, you can't know how bad it can be. Have you ever looked into how incompetent and horrible medical professionals and treatments can be?

I have a pile of statistics if you want a shock.

Comment author: Dolores1984 30 September 2012 08:31:12PM *  3 points [-]

There's no reason to experiment o cryo patients. Lots of people donate their brains to science. Grab somebody who isn't expecting to be resurrected, and test your technology on them. Worst case, you wake up somebody who doesn't want to be alive, and they kill themselves.

Number two is very unlikely. We're basically talking brain damage, and I've never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.

As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You'd just be dead, which is the default case. Also, I have my doubts that they'd even bother to try to resurrect you with that much damage if they didn't already have a way of patching the gaps in your neurology.

As for number four, depending on the degree of the disability, suicide or euthanasia is probably possible. Besides, I think it's unlikely they'll be able to drag you back from being a corpsicle without being able to fix problems like that.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 11:24:13PM 1 point [-]

There's no reason to experiment to cryo patients

There's no way not to. It will be a new technology. Somebody has to get reanimated first. Even if we freeze 100 mice to test on, or monkeys, reviving humans will be different. Doing something for the first time is, by it's very nature, an experiment.

Grab somebody who isn't expecting to be resurrected

Awful! That's experimenting on a person against their will, and without their knowledge, even! I sure hope people like you don't start freezing people like me in the event that I decide against cryo...

I've never heard of a case of brain damage, no matter how severe, doing that.

People experience this every day. It's called chemical depression. Even if you don't currently see a way for preservation or revival technology to cause this condition, it exists, it's possible that more than one mechanism may exist to trigger it, and that these technologies may have that as an accidental side-effect.

As for number three, that shambling horror would not be you in a meaningful sense. You'd just be dead, which is the default case.

Uh... no, because I'd be experiencing life, I would just be without what makes me me. That would be horror, not non-existence. So it is not death.

euthanasia is probably possible

Is it now? Most people don't believe in the right to die. In a world where we had figured out how to reanimate preserved corpses, do you think that they'll believe in the right to die? They'll probably automatically save and revive everyone.

Comment author: MixedNuts 30 September 2012 12:21:37PM 1 point [-]

You're only expressing personal preferences, but I feel enormously uneasy to hear you say "Human beings need fulfillment, therefore I'd rather die than be like a paraplegic with wheels". People who can't speak, are fed through tubes, get around on wheels, express emotion in nonstandard ways, lack functioning hands, and can't have most forms of sex, don't usually want to die, but when they're murdered by an "angel of mercy" serial killer you get people saying stuff like

How much life did she really take? All of the victims weren’t even living. They enjoyed nothing, experienced nothing and were going to die. The families at the time of death were relieved at the end of suffering . . . I know they had no right to play God . . . but when you decide how much of her life should be taken or lost to prison, shouldn’t it be equal to what was taken from their victims?

  • Ken Wood, ex-husband of one of the Grand Rapids killers

You might be a very atypical person who'd prefer death to severe disability, but if you are, could you pepper statements like that with disclaimers? That's kind of a dangerous meme to reinforce.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 11:08:34PM *  2 points [-]

If they want to live, I have no problem with it. I am not advocating killing them. I realize this is my personal preference. Feel better now?

I don't know what kind of disclaimer I would even add. "Don't become a serial killer because I said this?"

And I question whether it really is uncommon for people to choose death over severe disability. Why do so many people have living wills?

I don't think this is dangerous. What's dangerous is if the person doesn't realize that not everyone shares their personal preference.

Comment author: lsparrish 30 September 2012 03:10:46PM 2 points [-]

I'd rate the R2D2 much lower than 5%, at least as far as your conscious experience goes. Your brain might technically be kept in a vault or canister somewhere, but there would be extremely good virtual reality linkups to the brain. Look how good movies are getting with current VR. They have to simulate physics and human anatomy in considerable detail, but often take shortcuts to make the characters cuter and sexier. This is much more likely to be what you have to look forward to. Weirder than you're used to, but much more appealing than you are thinking here. And that's all just talking about a possible non-uploaded existence as a meat-brain. If you were to be uploaded, the possibility of being limited in your communication to your environment is even lower.

Even if you were stuck in an R2D2 body or something for years on end with no high-end virtual reality, it is doubtful that you would experience boredom or depression. Boredom and depression is an emotional state with particular neurological characteristics. These can be disrupted (even now) by drugs. Furthermore, it seems likely that boredom is dependent on hormonal and/or electrical responses from the rest of the body. A brain by itself probably could not feel boredom without significant prosthetic assistance.

The very notion of existing as a brain in a can means we've solved the problem of figuring out how to synthesize and deliver every chemical and stimulus the brain depends on. The delivery mechanism would be digitally regulated, and thus we could feel excitement, boredom, or any other emotion on demand -- perhaps even copying these sensations from healthy volunteers. That may not be an optimal human existence, but as an in-between state while waiting on life support to be restored to more optimal humanity it does not seem likely to be unbearable.

For a pop-culture example, take the Cybermen from Dr. Who. (Ridiculous show with ridiculous premises, just using it to make a point.) Their emotions are turned off, but only because their bodies are total pieces of junk that can't support a brain with emotions. However we've seen that the emotions of the brain can in principle be turned back on again. Thus if you were to take away their tendency to be fanatical killing machines and replace it with something else (fanatical lab equipment manufacturers, say), since they can't feel pain it wouldn't be a bad thing to be a Cyberman for a few years while waiting to be transplanted into a non-stupid body.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 11:06:44PM *  1 point [-]

I could wake up in the matrix... I don't know if I'd want that. Even if it was designed to make me happy. I want meaning, this requires having access to reality. I'll think about it.

drugs

Why would I want to do that? That is even worse. I am disgusted by the idea of having no ability to do anything of use, and even more disgusted by the idea that the solution to this situation is to drug me so that I can't properly care about the problem. If I'm not able to interact with reality, what is the point in existing?

it wouldn't be a bad thing to be a Cyberman for a few years

Three years, okay. But why bring me back at all then? Why not keep me frozen? If I can't have quality of life, I would prefer that.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 September 2012 05:01:21PM 0 points [-]

Nerd alert: R2D2 was able to talk with C3P0. Presumably under normal circumstances, there would be a robot culture. This doesn't address whether such a life would be satisfying for someone who was born human.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 10:59:46PM *  1 point [-]

I realize R2D2 could communicate to C3P0, however I would not qualify that as "being able to speak". Needing an interpreter would leave me disabled in any situation where the interpreter was not present. Communicating in beeps is a disability, not an ability.

Comment author: MixedNuts 30 September 2012 01:04:12PM 6 points [-]

On making peace with death:

It's usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can't change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass. This is true of all forms of learned helplessness, not just accepting death. See what people do to cope with abuse: enormous gain while the abuse lasts, enormous handicap for getting back to life.

On life:

Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good. (Utility is relative, so it makes no difference.) It's not always (or even often) pleasant and enjoyable, but it's always interesting. That's my main problem with pain: it's bad that it hurts, but it's worse that it fills your mind and won't let you focus on something new. Obviously some lives are worse than death (torture, long-term sensory deprivation) and some are better (cake, books). What I'm trying to get at is that "neutral" in terms of pleasure and pain isn't "neutral" in terms of existence.

Life is full of things; taking in everything about even a tiny detail of a perfectly ordinary object is enough to send you into sensory overload, even before you abstract away curves and colors to categorize the pattern as a single solid object with a given shape, recognize this particular object it as a tin and start getting curious about what it contains and how it's made and why light reflects off metal that way and a thousand other things about this tin and your model of tins. I don't spend all my waking hours in childlike wonder over everything, though I can whenever I want if I'm not feeling horrible, but I constantly get tiny slices of novelty. That's why I value life so highly; the cake is just icing.

(All this sounded a lot less confused in my head.)

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 10:52:56PM *  2 points [-]

It's usually a good idea in the short term to make peace with what you can't change, but when it turns out you can change it, it sort of bites you in the ass.

Absence of terror is not biting me in the ass. I am so much stronger than I used to be. I came out of that illness in a state of bliss like I've never felt before - and I still feel it. It isn't just because I'm healthy, it's also because I learned so many tricks to reduce my stress. Such as not feeling terrified of death.

You are confusing lack of fear with learned helplessness. I didn't say that I let go of control. I said that I stopped feeling terrified. You're confusing what I said for something else. Ask yourself this: Does feeling helpless do anything to stop your terror? No. So why would it stop mine? That is not the method by which I learned not to be terrified.

You are also confusing "making peace with death" for "accepting death". Obviously, I don't accept it - otherwise, why would I have made this thread?

Please try and interpret what I am actually saying.

Usual phrasings treat life as neutral and death as insanely bad. I think more of death as neutral and life as insanely good.

I see them both as neutral, but I have a wish to make a difference in the world that burns and drives me to live, and I want to experience interacting with others like me (for reasons I don't totally understand - it is probably some kind of social instinct). For these reasons, I want to live. However, I separate my wishes from my view of whether life and death are good and bad -- for the same reason I separate desire from reality. Just because I want something out of life, doesn't mean that life will give it to me. I could get quite the opposite. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to me to see life as good or bad. Life is an opportunity for both enjoyment and suffering, and you never know which one you are going to receive next.

but it's always interesting

You have never been bored?

Also, have you considered that a life full of meaningless pleasure, or nonconstructive senses of wonder will not be fulfilling? It sounds like you've never been through anything horrible enough that the possibility for deep and prolonged misery feels real to you. You are likely to be experiencing normalcy bias.

Comment author: duckduckMOO 30 September 2012 01:51:01PM 1 point [-]

If you wake up not too severely damaged and in a decent environment (possibly with all kinds of wonderful improvements) where your life wil be better than non existence you will have a lot more time for living. If not you can always kill yourself.

If you get yourself frozen only for revival upon major life extension breakthroughs as well as unfreezing damage repair etc the important possibilities for the revival are probability of happy revival vs probability of unhappy revival where you can't kill yourself.

I'm not aware of there ever having been any actual supervillains. I'm aware people are enslaved and forbidden from killing themselves but almost never are they actually prevented from doing so. Who cares about their slaves little enough to forbid them from killing themselves but enough to diligently enforce the rule (unless you are short on slaves which anyone with the resources to revive you to enslave you wouldn't be)

Having to kill yourself would suck but it puts a comparitively low cap on your max loss in the vast majority of scenarios. I'm not sure it can even be called a loss as it replaces having to die of old age or illness in the scenario where you don't freeze yourself.

Also you are probably underestimating the extent to which advancements over the years would improve your quality of life.

While the possibility of the bad scenarios does reduce the expected value of freezing it's on a different order of magnitude to the potential benefits because the vast majority of the bad scenarious can be opted out of.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 10:40:13PM 0 points [-]

If not you can always kill yourself.

WRONG! If they're able to re-animate preserved people, what makes you think they won't be able to prevent suicide?

What if they don't believe in a right to die? There's no guarantee that you'll be able to die, if you wake up in a world where cryo revival actually worked.

Or, if I woke up disabled or in an R2D2 robot body, how would I actually go about killing myself? I mean, you can say "roll off a cliff" but if there are no cliffs nearby, or the thing is made out of titanium?

There is no guarantee I'd be able to die in that scenario.

Also you are probably underestimating the extent to which advancements over the years would improve your quality of life.

I think you're underestimating the extent to which advancements may cause catastrophes. We made all these chemicals and machines, now the environment is being destroyed. We made x-ray machines, the first techs to use them used to x-ray their hands to see if the machine was on in the morning - you can imagine what resulted. We've learned a lot about science in the last 100 years, great, but now we have nuclear bombs. We may make AI, and there are about 10,000 ways for that to go wrong. I don't assume technological advancement will lead to a utopia. I hope it does. But to assume that it will is a bad idea. I'd be very interested to see a thorough and well thought out prediction of whether we'll have a utopia or dystopia in the future, or something that's neither. I'm really not sure.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 30 September 2012 09:36:35PM 4 points [-]

if you guys have already figured everything out, then why is convincing women perceived as extra hard?

Having a detailed map doesn't mean that a particular route isn't going to be arduous and fraught with potential missteps that send you down a cliff.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 10:32:43PM 1 point [-]

All the more reason to practice on me, then.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 10:21:33PM *  5 points [-]

Survivor's guilt (resolved objection):

Viliam Bur suggested survivor's guilt, and I realized that I was experiencing survivor's guilt while imagining getting cryo.

I wonder if women experience stronger survivor's guilt than than men. Testosterone supposedly makes one more selfish. Women are known for altruistic acts (many of which are pathological, like the phenomenon where women will often stay with an abusive partner trying to love him into changing), possibly because of some differences with oxytocin. I bet there's a connection here between hormonal differences and survivor's guilt that might explain the extra difficulty in convincing women.

Seeing that survivor's guilt didn't seem rational, I became curious about it and introspected for a moment. It seems to be resolved. I documented my thinking process:

I have thought of a question to ask myself that may get rid of it:

"Imagine that there are three people who I really want to see live. By random chance, something happens outside their control and two of them die but one of them lives. Do I feel happy that the one person lived? Or do I feel like they should die?"

My feeling is that they definitely should not die.

Now, I also feel compelled to try this:

"Imagine three people I don't like, but who I don't think deserve to die. Same scenario, one lives."

My feeling is that I prefer they do not die.

Now I'm asking "If it was more fair to the other two, would I have had them die along with them?"

No, I'd have tried to save them, and if the other two wanted to see the person die for "fairness" that's just crazy.

Okay, so now I'm asking myself:

If I was in that situation where two of the same people died but I survived by chance, would I feel it was crazy to think it was unfair for me to survive?

Yes, that is laughable now.

Something in me feels compelled to ask: "Were you better than those two other people?"

My answer is: "Who chose whether they died?"

Ah! Now this is separated. I have separated myself from the cause of their death. I had to see that I was not at fault for this.

The obvious question then is "What is the cause of most people dying except me who got cryo?"

Answer: All the causes. I cant stop them all. But I can tell more people about cryo and I can try to stop my own death, and this is good. That's the best that I can do.

Now, I have this warm feeling like my guilt is alleviated, like saving my own life isn't an affront to them, but something they would think was good - just as I thought it was good that one person survived when two died.

Okay, I think I figured out how to hack survivor's guilt, at least, as it applies to me. I will update here if the guilty feeling returns.

Now onto my other objections... (:

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 30 September 2012 01:18:42PM 7 points [-]

Possibly related: Survivor guilt

I guess that if you survive and other people don't, it instinctively pattern-matches to you causing their death. Even if it does not make sense, and you know it. Maybe it's a broken algorithm for determining outside view -- if you go somewhere with a group of people, you return and they are dead, you should expect other people to suspect you; therefore you'd rather show some extremely strong self-destructive emotion to convince them game-theoretically that you did not benefit from that outcome.

If we get immortality, we can expect a lot of survivor guilt. Also, it will seriously ruin the just world hypothesis, if some people will get 3^^^3 more utilons just for the fact they were born in the right era and did not die randomly a few years sooner.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:56:30PM *  1 point [-]

Survivor guilt

Hmmm. These are really good points. I do feel guilty about the idea of living a really long time while a lot of others don't. That may be what triggered my first big objection - that you could save a lot of people with that money. Now I wonder if that objection was a rationalization of some type of survivor's guilt. I think that this is likely. Very good point. Now I'm wondering what the nature of this survivor's guilt is, for me.

I still feel survivor's guilt, actually. Even though it's not attached to a specific objection any longer - the objection about saving starving children has been rebutted.

New objection - Survivor's Guilt

it will seriously ruin the just world hypothesis

That's already seen as a fallacy isn't it?

Comment author: MixedNuts 30 September 2012 08:56:29AM 10 points [-]

horribly unfair that the bad guys could live forever

There's a common attitude that eternal life is a very special prize - something a few great heroes might deserve, and if you seek it out you're basically claiming to be a deity or something impossibly high-status along those lines. I have no idea where that comes from; it's like someone proposed advances in agriculture and people went "But famines are part of life!".

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:54:39PM 3 points [-]

Haha, good point. We should not see it as high-status. If it works, it's something everyone should get. That's a really good observation.

Comment author: lsparrish 30 September 2012 04:43:11PM 2 points [-]

My guess is he said (or meant to say) "life insurance" rather than "health insurance". I don't think there's health insurance that covers cryonics. The idea that freezing yourself will save your life is indeed a weird one that should be carefully researched before you adopt that position. As you probably realize by now, cryonics involves (an attempt at) vitrification of the brain, which means that unlike normal freezing, ice crystals are (at least in ideal cases) prevented from forming.

Highly concentrated cryoprotectants must currently be used, and this does significant damage which needs to be repaired later. Thus it's a conditional bet about scientific unknowns -- if technology reaches a certain level, having my brain vitrified may turn out to save it well enough that science can restore me to a healthy existence (which may or may not be all digital). Most cryonics advocates do not take the hard line of belief that it definitely will save their life, but that it presents a good enough chance to be worth it given the sum of current scientific knowledge.

In my opinion, the chance of it working must exceed something in the range of 1% to be reasonable and not considered quackery. My reasoning is that the cost is in the $50k range ($28k-$150k) whereas actuaries budget somewhere in the range of $5M towards saving human lives in matters of public safety. Spending $50k on a procedure with .01% chance of working is only for rich egoists and/or people who assign a much higher value to the longevity and self-improvement opportunities of the future. Go too much lower than that and you end up with a "pascal's wager" kind of scenario, which could conceivably justify all kinds of quackery. In any case I think it is safe to say that if the chance is greater than 1%, it is something that everyone should have access to, and should ideally be covered by medical insurance.

The chance of it working seems to be much higher than that, in the average person's mind. But then, average people often accept all kinds of weird ideas so that's probably not the best metric available to us. How scientists (especially those with relevant expertise) feel about it is the major question. I would be curious as to what a survey of scientists with relevant expertise would turn up. What is disturbing to me (and what turned me from a fairly neutral party into something of an activist) is how unimportant the topic seems to be treated by both the scientific community and the nonscientific world. This should be hotly debated, not dismissed out of hand.

I suspect social causes are a dominating one, and I suspect women on average may have a better grasp on the social causes than men on average. So my plea to females (since that's the point of this thread, coming up with more female-appealing arguments) would be to at least try and understand this from the perspective of advocates and why we are passionately in favor of it. Read Kim Suozzi's description of her reasoning -- it is a logical step to take when you don't feel you are done living and think science is likely to conquer the problems involved.

As to the creepiness of freezing people, well, while a negative visceral first reaction is understandable, there's nothing about it that is any creepier than what emergency and surgical medicine already entails, and more science is (usually) a good thing for humanity. We've been shipping organs on ice and transplanting them for decades, and we've reanimated stopped-heart "dead" patients for even longer.

Another reason might be that it seems like "mad science". Mad science as seen in fiction is ambitious (which cryonics also is) but it is also cruel and morally indifferent. This is where the chance of it working is important, because if there is a sufficiently good chance of it working, cryonics becomes something that compassionate people are motivated by, not just egoists.

However even if the chances are too low for compassionate motives to come into play much, there does not appear to be any reason to regard it as cruel, since patients are completely unconscious (some of the drugs perfused in the legally dead patient are strong anesthetics) before they are cooled. And it is something patients choose for themselves rather than having it forced upon them.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:52:39PM 1 point [-]

Yes, he said life insurance. Typo, sorry.

I don't know if there's any way of telling what the real probability of revival is. Do you know of a good source on this?

This should be hotly debated, not dismissed out of hand.

Well I got that part right at least. (:

understand this from the perspective of advocates and why we are passionately in favor of it

It's true that I don't know why you're passionately in favor of it. I know that Eliezer is passionately in favor because he lost his brother. That makes sense to me. Considering my concerns about waking up as a horror, and the fact that I don't have any family members that are signed up for cryo who will miss a chance at interacting with me in the future if I don't sign up, that simply doesn't apply in my case.

Read Kim Suozzi's description of her reasoning

I don't know where that is. Do you?

As to the creepiness of freezing people

It's not creepy to me anymore. It was depicted as creepy in the cartoon, though - there were all these rows of really ugly alien looking bodies and some ominous music was playing and the children were theorizing about what they were and they realized they were dead.

Being frozen isn't any creepier than being buried. My body has to go somewhere after it dies. Actually, I think this is less creepy - it's a lot cleaner. No worms or anything.

mad science

I'm probably unusually accepting here. I have had a lot of fun doing things like touring a particle accelerator and hanging out with "mad scientists" in labs. I love it.

I don't know how I got this way but I'm thinking it has to do with realizing that the "mad scientists" come up with awesome stuff sometimes.

Comment author: MixedNuts 30 September 2012 08:32:31AM 4 points [-]

A bad body is better than no body at all. It's not uncommon for abled people to go "Ew, I'd rather die than get $disability", but when they do... actually I don't know if they're as happy as before after 18 months, because everyone mentions that but gives no cite. Anyway, people after a bad event are less unhappy and get happier faster than they predicted, and will remember afterwards. At least for some disabilities, this depends on people adapting to their condition, rather than putting their life on hold until they get better. (More affective forecasting papers.)

Poke around in the disability blogosphere for more perspectives on that. They range from "My body is awesome, but because it's not the type you build your world for you call it 'disabled'", through "It kinda sucks that you're not an Olympic-level athlete and you don't obsess over that all the time; I feel the same way about my disability", through "It's miserable when you're not used to it, but once you adapt it's not so bad", to "It's awful, but still better than being dead".

The things you're afraid of aren't even particularly freaky ones: weakness, limited mobility and endurance, need for support systems, body dysphoria, inability to live as you used to. People live with that every day.

I admit I have no idea what would happen if you lacked a body completely. A head-in-a-jar scenario sounds like locked-in syndrome, which is still better than death. The other scenario could be anything from total sensory deprivation (yeah, that one is probably worse than death) to living in a simulation.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:35:59PM 1 point [-]

A bad body is better than no body at all.

Then why do so many people have living wills?

this depends on people adapting to their condition

Also, which condition they get. I could see myself happy in this body with a wheelchair, but I can't see myself happy as a paraplegic. I think my ideas about how happy I'd be with a disability are pretty realistic. Anything that keeps me from communicating would make me miserable. Anything that makes me dependent on others will be stressful. Not being able to walk I could get around - I could still program and make a living, still communicate, still do something of meaning, still get around. How many of the things you enjoy about life and get meaning from are dependent on your body? There are some conditions that would make pretty much everything that's meaningful and fun about life impossible. See my R2D2 objection.

"Living is always good" / "Any body at all is good" - hasty generalizations, sorry.

Comment author: Dolores1984 30 September 2012 08:16:17PM *  2 points [-]

Living forever isn't quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it's possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just... run it.

Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:28:30PM 1 point [-]

Let me ask you this. Somebody makes a copy of your mind. They turn it on. Do you see what it sees? Someone touches the new instance of you. Do you feel it?

When you die, do you inhabit it? Or are you dead?

Comment author: DanArmak 30 September 2012 03:14:23PM *  0 points [-]

I don't see why extending your life would have to qualify as sinful.

This is speculation: I'm not a Christian.

In Christianity, death brings the judgment of God who sends you to heaven or hell (or purgatory).

If you expect heaven, you don't want to put off death. Suicide is a sin but as long as you don't see non-cryonics as willful suicide, you would want to die early to get to heaven early.

If you expect hell, then you think you've sinned mortally. Most brands of Christianity allow for redemption by various means. If you think you're a sinner, trying to put off death means trying to avoid the judgement of God, which is both just and good; so struggling against it would make you evil. If you fear hell, instead of focusing on avoiding death, you would focus on expiating your sins in order to go to heaven.

In addition, some but not all brands of Christianity have the meme that this world is impure, and one should abstain from it, and not be attached to it. Trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane; one should instead spend their lives thinking of God, praying, abjuring the pleasures of the flesh, etc. in order to obtain heaven.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:24:31PM *  0 points [-]

Hmm. Most of these seem to ignore the fact (not saying YOU are ignoring the fact, but that the religion would have to be ignoring the fact) that there are reasons to extend life that have nothing to do with heaven and hell.

It's interesting that you mention "trying to live longer than is natural is attachment to the profane" - this strikes me as more Buddhist, but I could see Christians believing that, too. However, if cryo is attachment to the profane, so is eating healthy and exercising. Heck, so is eating at all. I am so glad I'm not religious. It causes such horrible cognitive dissonance to harmonize these types of beliefs with other information I have about life.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:17:01PM 1 point [-]

Unexpected consequences (current objection):

There must be psychological consequences (waking up in a world where your skills are all useless and everything has changed), environmental consequences (a bunch of people being frozen aren't going to have zero environmental impact), medical consequences (revival may not go as expected, there are probably risks) and possibly completely unexpected consequences (akin to the tumors x-ray technicians got because they were testing the x-ray machines on their hands every day to make sure they were warmed up).

Can anyone recommend good reading materials on these?

Comment author: Nornagest 30 September 2012 08:34:02AM *  3 points [-]

The closest the Bible gets, as far as I remember, is the bit in Genesis about the Tree of Life, and that's pretty ambiguous. It's been a while since I've read it, though.

I'm not actually sure, but I think this is mainly a hubris thing. For whatever reason, there's a fairly well-defined set of activities in our culture that are thought of as outside the proper domain of humanity; this might have gotten its start in a religious context, but it's certainly not limited to that anymore. (Consider "frankenfoods".) Seeking immortality's on that list, along with playing with the building blocks of life or, worse, creating new life; doing any of these things seems to be considered usurping the role of God or nature, and therefore blasphemous or at least very close to it. This is, of course, nothing new.

Where we get that list from is another question. I don't think it's purely Christian; cautionary tales about immortality go back at least to the Epic of Gilgamesh, although as far as mythological treatments go I think the Cumaean Sibyl's has more punch.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 09:14:14PM *  1 point [-]

the bit in Genesis about the Tree of Life

Lol somebody ate an apple once, now we're not allowed to live forever.

Even if that was real, I don't see cryonics as a means of living forever. Forever is a long time. There's no guarantee of that.

set of activities ... thought of as outside the proper domain of humanity

Now that's interesting. I wonder if that might actually be more of an instinct to avoid screwing up important things, or just common sense, than something that's religious. Even if it has been codified in religion, might it have originally stemmed from a sense of not wanting to screw up something important. It's true that we are flawed and that whenever we attempt to do something ambitious, there is a risk of horribly screwing things up. Eg: communism. There can be unintended side-effects. Eg. X-ray technicians used to x-ray their hands every morning to make sure the machine was warmed up. You can imagine the horror they encountered years later...

I think we're right to have a sense of trepidation about messing with life and death. It's a big deal, and we really could gravely screw something up, there really could be unexpected consequences.

New objection: Unexpected Consequences

Comment author: V_V 30 September 2012 05:38:50PM 2 points [-]

Actually trying to live forever ("saving your soul") is the central stated point of religions such as Christianity and Islam.

Religious opposition to cryonics could stem from the fact that cryonics is preceived (correctly, IMHO) as a competing religion. Note that there is no strong religious opposition to most other procedures that promise a lifespan extension.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:55:40PM 0 points [-]

Huh. That is such a simplistic way of viewing religion. I think you're right in a sense - that it may very well threaten religions by providing an alternative for a key reason people become religious. However, I think most religious people I know (I'm not one so I am guessing at their reasoning) would object to this, saying that there is a lot more to religion than that, and that if the person is in it only to go to heaven, they're being superficial and not really "getting" it. For that reason, I think they'd say that they do not categorize their religion as a religion because it promises to save your soul, and they'd probably also not categorize cryonics that way either.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 September 2012 05:13:56PM 7 points [-]

Thanks for posting that-- I wasn't raised Christian, and that objection never would have occurred to me. Do you have a feeling for whether it might be a common Christian objection? The Christian objection I've heard is that great longevity means putting off going to Heaven. I've never heard a Christian say that great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.

My exposure to anti-longevity/immortality thoughts are from science fiction and fantasy, which doesn't just have a wide streak of "you'd need evil methods" (see also Bug Jack Barron, in which it takes killing poor children for something from their glands), but a very strong streak of "if you were immortal, you wouldn't like it". You'd be bored or you'd go mad. I think it's sour grapes.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:16:03PM *  0 points [-]

great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.

That's a really good argument. If Christians want Atheists to come around, shouldn't they hope we live longer so we have a better chance of finding some reason to believe in God? I'm not religious, and I really doubt any Atheists will "come around", but I think this would work as an argument.

+1 Karma

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 September 2012 05:13:56PM 7 points [-]

Thanks for posting that-- I wasn't raised Christian, and that objection never would have occurred to me. Do you have a feeling for whether it might be a common Christian objection? The Christian objection I've heard is that great longevity means putting off going to Heaven. I've never heard a Christian say that great longevity increases the odds of repenting and avoiding Hell.

My exposure to anti-longevity/immortality thoughts are from science fiction and fantasy, which doesn't just have a wide streak of "you'd need evil methods" (see also Bug Jack Barron, in which it takes killing poor children for something from their glands), but a very strong streak of "if you were immortal, you wouldn't like it". You'd be bored or you'd go mad. I think it's sour grapes.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:14:48PM *  1 point [-]

Common Christian Objections: (Guesses, as I am no longer a Christian) and rebuttals (Within the Christian religious framework, as it's not always feasible to convince them to be Atheists).

1.) You're trying to get something that's forbidden. (Life is important, so God must control it, if you were supposed to have more, you would already have more. Therefore trying to get more should be viewed as bucking a limitation.)

Rebuttal: If you attribute other medical breakthroughs to God, how do we know God didn't give this to us, too?

2.) Only God should decide when you die. (He forbids you from living longer except at his discretion.)

Rebuttal: Why should I believe that a loving God expects me to just shut up and die?

3.) You're making a deal with the devil. (Because only God should decide.)

Rebuttal: Nobody asked me for my soul or to do anything evil to sign up for cryo. The ten commandments don't tell me not to. In fact "You shall not murder." may be interpreted as an obligation to continue your own life wherever possible, otherwise you're knowingly choosing to die when it isn't necessary, thereby "murdering" yourself. I see no evidence that this is temptation by the devil.

4.) You're tinkering with the sacred.

Rebuttal: If life is sacred, and saving lives is an option, isn't it worse to fail to do everything you can to save lives, even if your attempts are somewhere between not perfect and horribly incompetent at first?

Comment author: AngryParsley 30 September 2012 08:01:27AM *  7 points [-]

It was a rhetorical question. You do have a way of knowing that you haven't thought of anything new: The idea of cryonics has been around for over half a century. Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly. You should expect to bring nothing new to the table.

Rant mode engaged.

Your post won't help us learn how to convince women to sign up for cryonics. The sample size isn't random and it's certainly not big enough to draw any useful conclusions from. We'll just replay some tired replies to some tired objections. At best, it will teach us how to convince Epiphany to sign up.

Most importantly, is there any other area of debate where we use different arguments to convince women? It would be bizarre. This is especially true for a topic like cryonics, where "convincing" mostly involves fielding objections. If you want to convince people, then learn about the topic. When someone brings up a specific objection, you can use your knowledge to construct a reply that's convincing, informative, and true. It works no matter one's gender.

Rant mode disengaged.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 07:52:39PM 4 points [-]

Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly. You should expect to bring nothing new to the table.

Also, if you guys have already figured everything out, then why is convincing women perceived as extra hard? Obviously something is missing, and that element might be anything from not knowing all of the objections women will make to not having good enough persuasive skills to a seemingly unrelated difference between the genders (maybe it's that women don't read as much about technology or that they go to doctors more often and have learned more about the flaws in medical technology, leading to distrust) - but without opening up a line of communication about it, and experimenting to see what kinds of ideas emerge, how are you ever going to make testable guesses about what the missing piece(s) is/are?

Comment author: jsalvatier 30 September 2012 07:34:58AM *  8 points [-]
  1. Currently, I think most people just get their brains preserved. So they'd have to give you a whole new body or just have you as software anyway.

Early adopter for being preserved doesn't mean early adopter for being revived. In fact, it probably means the opposite. Since the easiest people to revive will probably be the people preserved with the most advanced technology.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:51:00AM *  4 points [-]

Oh! Good point. Hm. But that might mean that I'm among a group that was using such old technology that it's more or less arcane by that point... which could mean that there aren't very many people in my set to revive, and so less leeway to iron out the flaws before they get to me...

Is anyone freezing any lab mice or anything?

I can see myself at the cryo counter: "Hi, I want me and these 100 lab mice frozen."

Comment author: AngryParsley 30 September 2012 08:01:27AM *  7 points [-]

It was a rhetorical question. You do have a way of knowing that you haven't thought of anything new: The idea of cryonics has been around for over half a century. Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly. You should expect to bring nothing new to the table.

Rant mode engaged.

Your post won't help us learn how to convince women to sign up for cryonics. The sample size isn't random and it's certainly not big enough to draw any useful conclusions from. We'll just replay some tired replies to some tired objections. At best, it will teach us how to convince Epiphany to sign up.

Most importantly, is there any other area of debate where we use different arguments to convince women? It would be bizarre. This is especially true for a topic like cryonics, where "convincing" mostly involves fielding objections. If you want to convince people, then learn about the topic. When someone brings up a specific objection, you can use your knowledge to construct a reply that's convincing, informative, and true. It works no matter one's gender.

Rant mode disengaged.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:42:18AM *  2 points [-]

The idea of cryonics has been around for over half a century. Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly.

Why would you have thought I would have known that?

All I know is that I wasn't convinced, and people didn't know how to convince women, and a bunch of people voted in my poll that they thought this was a good topic idea.

You really don't think anyone here is interested in getting practice? Just about everyone here has family members. I imagine they'll want them to survive.

Comment author: jsalvatier 30 September 2012 07:32:43AM 10 points [-]

Here's the reason I don't find this very scary. As a frozen person, you have very little of value to offer people, and will probably take some resources. Thus, if someone wants to bring you back it will likely must be mostly for your benefit, rather than because they want to enslave you or something. If the universe just has people who don't care about you, then they just won't revive you, and it will be the same as if you had died.

In order for you to be revived in a hellish world, the people who brought you back have to be actively malicious, which doesn't seem very likely to me.

What do you think?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:34:03AM *  1 point [-]

Ok, the cost benefit ratio between reviving someone and profiting off of their slavery might be worth considering. I'm not sure how many resources it would take to revive me or if it would be safe to assume that my brain's abilities (or whatever was valued) would not outweigh the resources required to revive me but it seems likely now that I think of it, especially considering that all my skills would be out of date and they'd probably have eugenics or intelligence enhancers by then which would outdo my brain.

Also, the people who enslaved me would not have to be the same ones as the people who revive me. They would not be subject to the cost-benefit ratio. The people who revive me could be well-meaning, but if the world has gone to hell, there might be nothing they can do about bad entities doing horrible things.

The reviver may only revive me because they're required to, because the company storing me has a legal agreement and can be prosecuted if they don't. The timing of my revival may be totally arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. It might have more to do with the limit for how long a person can stay in cryo (Whether that means a tangible one, or my account runs out of money with which to stay frozen or they reach some legal limit where they're forced to honor my contract) than with the state of the world at that time.

I don't assume that there would be a benevolent person waiting for me. There's just too much time between here and there and you never know what is going to happen. Maybe none of my friends sign up for cryo. Maybe there's only a 1 in 10 chance of successful revival and I'm the only one of my group who makes it.

So, I'm not convinced that the world will not have gone to hell or that I'll be revived by friends, but I think slavery is less likely.

Comment author: Nornagest 30 September 2012 07:14:43AM 2 points [-]

Funny, I was aware of this meme in Western culture but I never associated it with religion. (I was raised mostly secular, modulo a little residual Catholicism in my family.) Immortality often shows up as a goal in media, but almost exclusively as a villainous one: heroes accept their fate, villains fight against it. Often the methods of obtaining immortality lean towards the cartoonishly evil (the mythical version of Elizabeth Bathory bathing in virgins' blood; Lord Voldemort's horcruces), but just as often they're fairly benign and the pursuit itself is seen as hubristic and therefore evil. At best, a hero (Gilgamesh, say) will pursue it for a while before learning better, but this is actually pretty rare.

This seems to tie into another thought of mine about how villains and heroes get constructed in our culture, but that'd be a bit of a sideline in this context. I don't think I'm familiar with the construction of immortality in a Christian context, though, aside from incredibly esoteric stuff like medieval alchemy; can you tell me more?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 08:11:55AM *  0 points [-]

Yeah, you know what, why is immortality portrayed as evil in all of these different places? There must be some specific spot in the bible, but I can't recall it. Maybe it isn't even from the bible. Now I'm really curious to find out exactly where this cultural association between immortality and evil came from...

Comment author: DataPacRat 30 September 2012 07:14:31AM 1 point [-]

After you're dead, no; but the you of this moment can look forward at the various possible futures, and make choices that make some of those futures more likely than others. One of your objections was to being put in an R2D2 body - so imagine that you, right now, have a choice to make. One choice is that you end up permanently dead. The other choice offers you a chance at life, but with, say, a 5% chance of being put into an R2D2 body.

Are you so certain that such an existence is so terrible, that even a remote chance of it is a worse fate than total oblivion?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 07:54:11AM *  2 points [-]

Ok, I won't be able to speak, enjoy food, express emotion, have sex or do any of the things I normally do with my hands. I would be severely disabled. That would be almost like being a paraplegic but with wheels. And I might not be able to see or hear well (does R2D2 have the ability to enjoy HD quality or is it more like recognizable blurs and discernible murmurs?).

What the hell would I realistically do with myself if I couldn't even communicate? I find meaning in doing constructive projects. Where would I find meaning in a body like R2D2? Without the ability to experience even sensory pleasures, I would become so bored. Imagine staring at a wall for a whole week. That's how I think it would feel to be trapped in an R2D2 body - but maybe I'd be stuck like that for years.

If you've looked into the concept of "flow" (From the book "Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.") you'll know that not being able to do activities that provide an appropriate challenge might mean you aren't able to be happy. Gifted children, for instance, develop learned helplessness in schooling environments that go at a much slower pace than they do. I am not satisfied by games - I couldn't just zoom around on my wheels in patterns and be amused. I am not a gnat, I'm a human being and I need fulfillment. Boredom is a formidable affliction which I don't dare underestimate.

I think I have to classify the R2D2 body as life support, and say pull the plug or put me back in cryo. I'd rather not just wheel around in little circles while my brain tortures me because of boredom. No R2D2 body.

Good try though.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 30 September 2012 07:13:38AM 1 point [-]

To me, death is merely non-existence. I won't suffer after that. I won't know that I'm dead.

Are you claiming to be indifferent to death?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 07:30:47AM *  6 points [-]

That's a good question. I'm not exactly indifferent. I experienced a major illness where I not only learned what it was like to suffer so much that I understood that there were things worse than death, but had to face the possibility of death and make peace with it. If you haven't experienced something that caused it to sink in that there are experiences worse than non-existence, you'll probably be running on the assumption that living is an opportunity for enjoyment. This is biased. Life is also an opportunity for suffering.

And if you haven't faced death - I mean really faced it, felt like you were going to die, you probably wouldn't feel that there was anything gained from making peace with it. This is pretty easy to understand if you consider that thinking about death is really upsetting and if you're sick enough, you'll be kind of motivated to think about it constantly, which is not particularly useful and it's definitely not pleasant. At the point where you realize "Gee I'm thinking about this constantly and it isn't pleasant or useful." you realize the utility in making peace with death.

I haven't completely lost interest in life or anything. I have some very strong reasons to be here. But death itself just doesn't provoke the same terror it once did. I think what I mean by "peace" is not that I am indifferent - I do have a preference - it's that it's not provoking the same terror that it used to.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 30 September 2012 06:17:27AM 0 points [-]

I probably internalized something like this growing up:

  • There are people who are really good at something,
  • this is a good thing,
  • I'm not one of them,
  • but if I work very hard I could be.

I haven't been very aware of social class issues or using 'elitism' as an actual term. So my quick association with someone calling out elitism as a bad thing is that they're saying that people shouldn't try to be very good at anything. People who grew up more social class aware might have quite different instant associations.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 07:13:00AM *  0 points [-]

Hmm. That's interesting. What's interesting is that I relate with you completely about knowing that there are people who are good at things and wanting to work to become one, and not seeing anything wrong with it. I even want to defend the right to work to become good at things.

But I don't call that elitism.

Why do you?

Comment author: shokwave 30 September 2012 06:38:08AM 5 points [-]

Read this hypothetical objection:

Some optimistic future scenarios speculate that we might be able to revive even those who don't cryopreserve (current cloning techniques on preserved remnants can recreate genetic phenotypes; some sort of simulation on records of your behaviour might be able to recreate your behavioural phenotype, and so on for every part that makes up you). That applies to the pessimistic future scenarios too: if you don't sign up for cryo, you'll be taking a risk that the future is hellish as well.

It would be extremely surprising if our current or traditional death ceremonies are the optimal minimisation of that risk. Almost certainly, we should be trying to minimise the risk further. Cremation, destruction of records pertaining to ourselves, erasure of Facebook profile, planting deliberately false information, and other such tactics should be considered.

Does this objection strike you as reasonable, or unreasonable?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 07:07:41AM 1 point [-]

If a copy of me were made, would this instance of me experience the next instance's experiences? I don't think so. As far as whether I could suffer from being re-created, I doubt that. However, I'd be very concerned about future instances of me being abused, if I thought there were an interest in reviving me. If I was famous, I'd be concerned that fans might want to make a bunch of clones of me, and I'd be concerned about how the clones were treated. Unless I had reason to think that A. People are going to reconstruct me against my will and B. The people reconstructing me would do something unethical with the clones, I wouldn't worry about it.

Why do you ask?

Comment author: DataPacRat 30 September 2012 06:08:39AM 1 point [-]

If I may ask you something; as you write out your various objections here, if you were to consider, on the one hand, the risk of whatever unpleasantness arises from that objection, and on the other hand, that if you don't take that risk, you will be permanently and irrevocably dead... do you really feel that you'd rather be dead than take that particular risk?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 06:59:03AM 2 points [-]

To me, death is merely non-existence. I won't suffer after that. I won't know that I'm dead.

Comment author: AngryParsley 30 September 2012 06:20:04AM *  5 points [-]

I'm signed up for cryo and I don't want to convince you.

This topic has been discussed to death, both here and elsewhere online. Do you think you've brought up any arguments that haven't been discussed before? Replying to these objections is a waste of time.

In general, "convince me" posts are a bad idea. You've got a brain. You've got a computer. You've got a search engine. Use them. Convince yourself.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 06:53:57AM *  6 points [-]

You've got a search engine. Use them. Convince yourself.

That was my first instinct, but then I remembered that there was a consensus in another thread that women are impossible to convince. In that thread, the poster wanted to convince his mom to sign up for cryo but didn't know how to. A lot of people here might want a chance to figure out how to convince women to get cryo. So instead of convincing myself, I gave them an opportunity to practice on me.

Do you think you've brought up any arguments that haven't been discussed before?

I have no way of knowing that, seeing as how I avoided convincing myself so that other people could experiment on me. I am open to reading articles that people feel are convincing, as I realize that it would be pretty boring to explain the same stuff all over again. It says that in the OP.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 06:43:10AM *  4 points [-]

Trying to live forever is associated with evil (religious cached thought):

I'm not religious, but was raised Christian. Annoying as this is, I still find religious cached thoughts sometimes. I don't want to keep them - I'm sharing for the sake of documenting all the thoughts that are being triggered while I make my decision. Thinking about signing up for cryo triggered this:

My cached thought is associating living forever with being tempted by the devil, and seeing it as a thing that only sinful people would do.

I realize that I would not be guaranteed everlasting life. Even if I was revived, I expect it would be for a much shorter time than "forever". That wouldn't change the fact that I'm mortal or circumvent the threat of hell. I'm not sure where the sense of defiance comes from. I suppose it would defy the current way of things but expecting life forms to just shut up and die is silly.

I don't see why extending your life would have to qualify as sinful. It just makes sense.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 06:19:39AM 2 points [-]

What if the future is hellish and I won't be able to die? (Current objection)

I realize there are lots of interesting technologies coming our way, but there are a lot of problems, too. I don't know which will win. Will it be environmental collapse or green technology? FAI or the political/other issues created by AI? Will we have a world full of wonders or grey goo? Space colonies or alien invasions? As our power to solve problems grows, so does our ability to destroy everything we know. I do not believe in the future any more than I believe in heaven. I recognize it as a potential utopia / dystopia / neither. I do not assume that the ability to revive preserved people would make us utopia-creating demigods any more than our current abilities to do CPR or fly make our world carefree.

A new twist, waking up into this world, would be that I may not be able to die. The horrors that I could experience in a technologically advanced dystopia might be much worse than the ones we have currently. Dictators with ufAI armies, mind control brain implants, massive environmental and/or technological catastrophes.

There is one thing worse than dying, and that's living an unnaturally long time in a hellish existence. If I sign up for cryo, I'll be taking a risk with that, too.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 06:01:11AM *  4 points [-]

What if I can't get a good body? (current objection). There are a few variations on this:

  • I will probably be in old age if I'm frozen, so I might wake up in the future as an old person. If they can make me a young body, that's not a problem, but should I assume that they're going to be able to do that? Maybe waking up from cryo in the future will involve being on life support for long periods of time while we're waiting for the technology for new bodies.

  • Who is going to pay for my new body? I have no idea what that would cost, so I can't possibly save for it now, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to assume that money will be N/A in the future. I'm pretty sure that all my skills would be worthless at that time, but not convinced that there would be money to make me a decent body at that time.

  • What if I wake up with no body at all... I'm imagining waking up as a head in a jar or a brain in some kind of server rack of brains.

  • What if the bodies are ill-conceived? I'm imagining waking up as a brain inside of R2D2 and having about the same quality of life as a mobile trash can. If you think this out, being stuck inside of an R2D2 body would be a really, really horrible fate - which I explain here.

  • There are certain things I'd like to retain the ability to do, and for some of those, I will need to be anatomically correct.

Once again, if I sign up now, I'll be an early adopter, which may mean that the technology for putting people into new bodies is still experimental and I may end up as a test subject.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 05:46:57AM *  3 points [-]

What if revival technology causes misery? (current objection). There are a few variations on this:

  • I would be an early adopter, which means that the technology for reviving people might still be experimental at the time when it is used on me. The unintentional result of this could be that I become a test subject.

  • What if they get reviving my brain slightly wrong and a small change in it's structure or chemical composition means that all my consciousness is capable of experiencing is ultimate misery, and this goes on for some prolonged period of time where they're assuming the reason I'm miserable is because of the shock of waking up in a world where so many of the people I know are dead and everything else is changed or gone, so nobody has any idea that it's due to a chemical or structural problem in my actual brain.

  • What if I get brain damage or massive memory loss from the procedure? This would mean, essentially that I wasn't saved. Then I would have to live as a sort of zombie-like horror.

  • I get some horrible and as yet unimagined disability due to, I don't know, ice crystals destroying my tissues or amine accumulation or something unexpected.

Just because cryo is the only way we currently have to avoid death, that doesn't mean it's a good way.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 05:20:33AM *  4 points [-]

When I realized cryo is real (documentation): About a year ago, I went on a date with someone who had signed up for cryo. I remember asking him whether it was expensive, and he told me that his life insurance paid for it. My feeling was "Oh, you can actually do that? I had no idea." - and it felt weird because it seemed strange to believe that freezing yourself is going to save your life (I didn't think technology was that far along yet), but I'm OK with entertaining weird ideas, so I was pretty neutral. I thought about whether I should do it, but I wasn't in a financial position to take on new bills at the time, so I stored that for later.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 05:17:09AM 3 points [-]

My first impression of cryo (documentation): My introduction to cryo was in a cartoon as a child - the bad guys were freezing themselves and using the blood of children to live forever. I felt it was terrifying and horribly unfair that the bad guys could live forever and very creepy that there were so many frozen dead bodies.

Female Test Subject - Convince Me To Get Cryo

5 Epiphany 30 September 2012 05:13AM

I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo.  In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo).  Now I'm open to being persuaded.

My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody.  It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women?  If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult.  There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.

So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest.  I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future.  Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?

So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.

I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization.  Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders. 

Well, have fun getting inside my head.

 

Comment author: billswift 10 September 2012 08:19:24PM *  1 point [-]

You are grossly over-simplifying anti-intellectualism, some streams of which are extremely valuable. Your claim only fits the "thalamic anti-intellectual", one of at least five broad types Eric Raymond discusses.

The most important and useful to society is the "epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly." Of course lefties who want to change society to fit their theories try to smear them with claims like yours, but:

Because it’s extremely difficult to make people like F. A. Hayek or Thomas Sowell look stupid enough to be thalamic or totalitarian enough to be totalizers, the usual form of dishonest attack intellectuals use against epistemic skeptics is to accuse them of being traditionalists covertly intent on preserving some existing set of power relationships. Every libertarian who has ever been accused of conservatism knows about this one up close and personal.

And:

"If “intellectuals” really want to understand and defeat anti-intellectualism, they need to start by looking in the mirror. They have brought this hostility on themselves by serving their own civilization so poorly. Until they face that fact, and abandon their neo-clericalist presumptions, “anti-intellectualism” will continue to get not only more intense, but more deserved."

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:42:49AM 1 point [-]

You sound like you've researched this. If I wanted to get a really good idea of what both sides mean by elitism and understand the problem better, is there some reading you could recommend for that?

Comment author: cata 10 September 2012 06:30:36AM *  4 points [-]

I don't think it's useful to argue about the word "elitism" any longer. I think most people already agree with most of the points in your post about "elitism" except for the actual actions we should take as a result.

I think that the problem with making a beginner and advanced section is basically shame. In lieu of a quantifiable metric that classifies people into the two sections (not likely) it's going to be very hard for people in the "lower" section to admit that the people in the "higher" section are actually better writers or smarter or more rational or whatever, even if they are. The foundation of anti-intellectualism in the real world is a bunch of people in lower sections sneering at people in higher sections. With that as a backdrop, I don't think that the lower section would be a fertile place for actual self-improvement.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:41:13AM 0 points [-]

That's an interesting point, and I added that to the cliff notes version of my endless September idea list. I'm currently taking more suggestions for pros and cons to add to the list, or new ideas.

Comment author: ahartell 10 September 2012 07:21:20AM 4 points [-]

I'm not really sure what your point is with this post.

These are the reasons I choose to be non-abusive and to send a message to the world that non-abusive intellectuals exist.

If it's just that, I think the post would benefit from better focus. More likely, it would be better to conclude with something more related to the content of the post itself.

Also, I'm not sure how this

I have noticed a current of elitism on LessWrong.

jives with this

If people tell you that you're an elitist because you want a challenging social environment to learn in, or because you want to make the project that is the LessWrong blog as high quality as it can be, you can refuse to be labeled guilty.

You talk about people being elitist on the site, and that this concerns you, and as evidence you point to an upvoted comment to which you replied stating that they were using "elitism" differently from you. In fact, it seems like you would actually endorse their statement if not for the use of the word. I don't think it's worthwhile to argue about definitions (as others have mentioned w/r/t your quoting of the dictionary), but also I wonder what you're concerned about if the "current of elitism" is just people wanting to have a challenging, high quality, environment, as is stated in the comment you point to.

Finally, and this is minor, you refer a couple of times to "Yvain's 'the worst mistake'" when I think you're talking about his "the worst argument in the world," which seems clunky and kind of confusing, and using the phrase "guilt by association" is probably better avoided due to its more common use.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:37:53AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for your thoughts, Ahartell. (:

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 September 2012 06:31:28AM 7 points [-]

I don't think people who feel comfortable posting average youtube comments are going to be welcome or useful at LessWrong, I don't think this is a problem, and there are a lot of people like that.

Raising the sanity waterline on a grand scale should affect the comments on youtube, but we're a long way from that.

This being said, I'd like to see more rationality materials for people of average intelligence, but that's another long term possibility. Not does there not seem to be huge interest in the project, figuring out simple explanations for new ideas is work, and it seems to be be a relatively rare talent.

I only recently ran into a good simple explanation for Bayes-- that the more detailed a prediction becomes, the less likely it is to be true. And I got it from a woman who doesn't post on LW because she thinks the barriers to entry are too high. (It's possible that this explanation was on LW, and I didn't see it or it didn't register--- has anyone seen it here?)

There's some degree of natural sorting on LW-- I'm not the only person who doesn't read the more mathematical or technical material here, and I'm not commenting on that material, either.

I don't think having separate ranked areas is going to solve the problem of people living down to expectations.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:33:37AM *  0 points [-]

I'd like to see more rationality materials for people of average intelligence

Actually, search for "Center for Modern Rationality" and a post along the lines of "Name new Rationality Inst." - the latter describes an organization Eliezer is making as a spinoff and explains that it's going to have materials for high school students. They ARE trying to branch out to the rest of the population! This is exciting! (: I wonder how far they've gotten.

As for your other suggestions, I've begun talking about that again in my preventing endless September thread. You're invited to check out the cliff notes version and request new pros and cons be added.

Comment author: beoShaffer 30 September 2012 01:28:49AM *  0 points [-]

Highlight the culture by making the names of biases, logical fallacies and terms from the sequences colored and linked.

I'm not sure how technically feasible it is, but I'd be interested in having something like the WikiWords system from MediaWiki(the base for TV Tropes) for internal links and/or links to the wiki. I already try to link to them whenever relevant, but it's a non-neglible inconvenience to find the right urls and add the right markup.

Provide users with two or more words of verbal feedback when voting.

Perhaps (down)voting could automatically open a reply box, thus encouraging more detailed feedback while still allowing user discretion. More feedback is usually good, but sometimes someone has already written a good critique that I can just upvote or something. So I don't like making it mandatory. -edited to clarify that I meant MediaWiki rather than the TV Tropes specific variant.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:21:36AM 2 points [-]

Mm good idea, I don't know why I overlooked that (making it prompt the user when voting rather than requiring it) I will change the idea.

Comment author: saturn 10 September 2012 07:46:11AM *  5 points [-]

In this case, it's easy to predict how LessWrong is going to react. Your initial posts were well-received because you pointed out a potential problem, LW's high bounce rate, and even created some nice graphs. But when a consensus started to emerge that reducing the bounce rate would actually be a net negative, instead of accepting this or refuting it, you made a long series of posts mostly reiterating the same unconvincing points. Doing that will result in a poor reception.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:18:42AM *  0 points [-]

Weird that you interpreted it that way. I thought I was working on solving the problem. This post would be an exception. I had a mind kill reaction surrounding "elitism" and, like 20% of the people who took my poll, was trying to decide whether or not I should quit LessWrong.

How did you end up with the perspective that I was wasting time reiterating unconvincing points?

Comment author: wedrifid 10 September 2012 10:18:07AM 4 points [-]

there's no need to write an essay just to ask if we should have more areas than just Discussion and Main.

Oh, was that what the post was about? Right, thanks.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:16:36AM 0 points [-]

Thank you, Wedrifid. (:

Comment author: faul_sname 10 September 2012 07:49:00AM 6 points [-]

As far as I can tell, you're trying to use standard arguments and appeals to emotion and group membership. LWers, as a general rule, come here because it's a community that mostly ignores those appeals. LW is one of very few places I've come across where this is the case.

In general, the most effective thing I think you could do to improve your posts and comments would be to use more specific claims and back them up with specific evidence. You're doing a great job of creating outlines before you post, and with translating your ideas into simple language (really, we do appreciate that). You could work a bit on being concise: there's no need to write an essay just to ask if we should have more areas than just Discussion and Main.

Another, specific thing relating to this post: taboo "elitist" and all synonyms. You already started to reduce elitism to the parts that were bad, and I think you could benefit by going a bit further with that thread.

Finally, we kind of do have a third level: the biweekly open threads. This probably belongs there.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:16:05AM *  1 point [-]

My intent was to say, basically "We look really bad, let's not look bad" which, I realize, is different from a scientifically provable or mathematically verifiable point, but it's interesting you went so far as to interpret this as "appeals to emotion". Maybe you meant something else was wrong with it?

I am working on being concise, thanks for the suggestion.

I did work out what I mean by "elitism" that's here.

Also, I've decided to investigate what other people mean by elitism. Do you care to explain your point of view?

Comment author: Emile 20 September 2012 04:21:58PM *  0 points [-]

It's interesting that "elitist" doesn't strike me as being politically charged - I would even be hard-pressed to tell whether it seems more left-wing or right-wing (if it wasn't for your comment, I'd tend to call it slightly right-wing).

Maybe it's because elitism vs. anti-intellectualism isn't as much of a hot political issue here in France; maybe French people (or French politicians?) are less hung-up about seeming elitist than people in lesser countries.

This article seems to indicate a clear cultural difference between at least France and the US on the issue of elitism.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:12:09AM 0 points [-]

Wow that's interesting. Thank you for the article. Do the French find it horrible when intelligent people end up on the wrong educational tier? What is thought about those who are unhappy because they're brighter than their tier allows them to be?

Comment author: Patrick 20 September 2012 09:18:45AM 1 point [-]

The word "elitist" has political connotations. It is often used in right wing political discourse as a slur against liberals. For example the phrase "intellectual elite" is used a great deal in this article defending Sarah Palin. Some of these upvotes may be made by people who interpret "do you think elitism is bad" as asking "Do you hate university professors and would you vote for Sarah Palin?"

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:02:33AM 1 point [-]

Thank you for pointing this out. I don't bother with politics, (I quit being interested a long time ago when I realized that nothing was being solved and no one was looking for solutions that would get to the root of the problem because they seemed to prefer squabbling) so I didn't know that.

I see now that it's something I really need to learn more about if I want to understand elitism better. And I do. Would you mind explaining more or, if you know of good reading materials, direct me?

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 20 September 2012 03:23:19PM *  2 points [-]

I'm quite surprised by your use of "smear". I'm aware that "elitist" has negative connotations, but not nearly as bad as "sexist" or "racist".

I find this confusing too. Maybe Epiphany is coming from somewhere like the American place where a prosecutor will always remember to address a defendant with a PhD. as 'doctor' in order to turn the jury against them.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 02:00:31AM 1 point [-]

Thanks for theorizing that - my situation was different from the situation most of you guys probably had growing up, I was disadvantaged. That might be the cause for the differing viewpoints. I have realized I'm pretty ignorant about other points of view on elitism. Care to explain yours? I want to understand them.

Comment author: Emile 20 September 2012 10:31:31AM *  3 points [-]

The people here are describing themselves and each other in public as "elitist". But some of them use their real names on the forum. This is the internet where what you say might last forever. Yet here they are smearing themselves and each other, the LessWrong website, and the Singularity Institute (by association), as "elitist".

I'm quite surprised by your use of "smear". I'm aware that "elitist" has negative connotations, but not nearly as bad as "sexist" or "racist".

To clarify the connotations you're seeing, would you agree that MIT is "elitist"? Do you think saying that is a slur?

I consider LessWrong to be "elitist" in the same way that MIT is - if anything, LessWrong is much less elitist than mainstream academia.

Neither LessWrong not MIT would use "elitist" in their self-description, but both would answer "yes" if asked whether they are elitist.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:58:00AM 1 point [-]

I did not attend MIT but I am really curious about other people's ideas about elitism and I realize now that I was ignorant about them before. Would you mind explaining your ideas on elitism please?

Comment author: Unnamed 20 September 2012 11:14:50AM 6 points [-]

The word "elitism" is vague and affect-laden. In order to have a productive conversation about the set of topics that the label "elitism" vaguely points towards, it is necessary to set aside that term and get into specifics, rather than letting the conversation revolve around the word "elitism".

Before you started posting on Less Wrong, the word "elitism" (and its variants) rarely appeared on the website. You introduced the word to the conversation (e.g., here), and you have used it again and again (over a hundred times, according to your comment history). That is why some people have expressed their opinions in terms of the word "elitism" (where their opinion, roughly, is that they want Less Wrong to have high quality content). So if you just want people to stop using the word "elitism", you should be able to accomplish that (for the most part) by not using the word "elitism."

You let yourself get sidetracked from your goal of growing Less Wrong and decided to lead a largely irrelevant side conversation centered on the word "elitism" (what it means, whether it applies to Less Wrong, whether people might get the impression that it applies to Less Wrong, etc.). This discussion has been unproductive and lengthy, and you didn't heed the signals to stop taking the conversation in that direction (which included downvotes, comments about how you should proceed differently, and the obvious lack of progress towards your goal).

If you weren't offering to do work to help the site, I'd second Morendil's suggestion that you stick to object-level conversations, at least for a while. Maybe once you've spent some more time here and gotten a better feel for the site and its users you could re-engage in meta-level conversations about improving Less Wrong. That still might be the best option in the actual situation.

Another potential option for moving forward is for you to focus on more concrete questions about improving the site which draw more directly on your web marketing expertise. Is there a standard menu of options that web marketing professionals use to help a site grow? Do some of those options stand a better chance of maintaining the site's quality, or can they be tailored to do so? Are there proven techniques for preventing a drop in quality in the face of growth? If your company does this sort of thing, what kinds of conversations do you have with organizations to try to figure out how to increase their web presence in a way that's consistent with their goals? You're the one who has been leading this effort to improve the site; figure out how to lead it in a more productive direction. (And be aware that many Less Wrongers are losing their patience with you, or have already lost it. So don't waste whatever attention you can get).

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:53:11AM *  0 points [-]

I don't think you understand the very bad reaction I had to elitism. I feel that it is very important not to contribute to elitism (by some definitions like this one, which are not the same as the more popular interpretations here from what I can tell, though I didn't know that before) and that it is also very important to avoid being judged as an elitist (by that definition). I feel so strongly about this that I wanted to quit. According to my poll, 20% have the same strong feelings I do.

Based on the fact that you didn't seem to realize I was willing to quit over this and didn't see further interaction as worthwhile unless it was determined that most people here do not support elitism (by the particular definition), I would have to guess that you have a radically different idea of what elitism is from the definition that I was using.

I have realized that I need to learn a lot more about other people's ideas of elitism. This is an important topic to me. Would you be interested in explaining your ideas about elitism?

Comment author: Morendil 20 September 2012 01:10:46PM 5 points [-]

Thanks for the obviously thought-out response.

Instead of giving up, I think of solutions to the problem

This, perhaps, is where you missed an opportunity to apply a lesson from the Sequences. There is no urgency to solving the problem, the urgent task is to understand it, and it is this task that requires time.

You might also have missed subtle cues that you were violating tacit norms of behaviour, for instance when Luke said "we could debate in this comment thread" and you ignored that in favor of making a new post.

The clearing of sanity in a jungle has begun to look too much like the jungle itself to me.

This stands out a bit from the rest of your comment: it suggests you are idealizing the community, rather than acknowledging the consequences of its being made up of human beings equipped with standard issue human brains.

The reason I suggest you write about substantive topics is that this will give you more of a chance to get acculturated into the thinking tools that are the cause of your perceiving this as "a clearing of sanity in a jungle".

Even for the most acculturated among this community, best performance consists of applying some of these thinking tools some of the time, somewhat competently. Rationality remains the exception rather than the rule - this is implied in the very name "Less Wrong".

If anyone can suggest a resolution to this problem, I'm more than willing to hear it.

Play a round of Rationalist Taboo for yourself (i.e. don't try to second-guess what anyone else means by that term) on "elitist". Spell out what it is exactly that your ethics does not allow you to support or be seen as supporting. Approach this question lightly, with an open mind and no bottom line already filled in. Now relate this specific question to the way this community approaches ethical questions - you do not have to agree with the community, but you have to grasp what the approach is.

Are you willing to do the above?

If you can steer clear of any meta-discussion (including even allusions to meta topics), this could even be good material for a post.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:42:19AM 1 point [-]

This was so sane, Morendil. Thank you.

I don't know why I didn't realize that I needed to understand this better before I jumped in. I was ignorant of my own ignorance. Sometimes when you don't realize you're missing a piece of information, there is nothing to warn you. Other times, I see that things are going to be complex. (Which is why I took the time to think it out and wrote something like ten pages on different solutions to Eternal September and their consequences). I also do that at work - I clarify what the purpose of the project is before I code it. For some reason, that little flag was missing here. Now I get to try and guess why.

I think you're right that I don't pick up on hints enough. I really don't get why people hint. That seems dysfunctional to me. I wish they'd just be clear.

idealizing the community

The problem isn't that I idealized the community, the problem is ... how do I explain this. I am extremely prone to a particular bias. I know I have it, I just don't know the word for it. I give people too much credit. It's something I do over and over again. Not sure how to stop it. I seem to need to learn about each group's flaws individually.

a chance to get acculturated into the thinking tools

I started challenging my ideas and using logic at 17, and I've been pretty hard core about it since then. I'm already using a lot of the thinking tools. Apparently I still am not perfect. I feel like I really needed to be part of a group of people capable of pointing out my flaws and giving me ideas I would not have thought of. I am so grateful for this. I will have a chance to find any unseen problems now.

Rationality remains the exception rather than the rule - this is implied in the very name "Less Wrong".

Thank you for that. I feel better about not being perfect. (: Still going to aim for perfection though. (:

Play a round of Rationalist Taboo

I decided to take your and Alicorn's suggestion on this. At first I didn't know what that meant but I have since found the correct reading materials.

If you can steer clear of any meta-discussion (including even allusions to meta topics), this could even be good material for a post.

I would love to do that. I've been thinking that if I can learn enough about the political sides that seem to be triggered here, I can transcend thinking inside that dichotomy, and perhaps show others how to do the same. That's my thought on how to present it. Do you have anything to suggest in addition?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 11 September 2012 02:52:29AM 8 points [-]

This post is currently tied for eighth most downvoted of all time (-22), while your original post on growing LW is tied for 25th most upvoted post of all time (+49). If you could figure out how to induce those responses at will, you could play us like a yoyo. :-)

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:18:36AM *  0 points [-]

Thank you so much for this. It was encouraging. I have decided to do just that - figure out how to present to this audience. (:

Though, I do not plan to write intentionally unpopular posts. (:

Comment author: drethelin 10 September 2012 05:55:39AM 14 points [-]

Is the plan to make the advanced area password protected and only give the password to the worthy? Will people be able to read but not comment unless they have enough karma?

Also, any time you want to use a dictionary definition to make your point, don't. It's obnoxious and unhelpful. It skews your argument from being about reality to being about words.

You talk about elitists getting treated like scum, and yet all over the world people earn high salaries and are treated like princes for being "elite" in dozens of fields. Being elite is being awesome. We WANT people who want to be awesome, and don't want people who think that being awesome sucks.

Using rationality as a basis for rule makes no sense anyway. If you have a better map of the territory, people should update because you have a better map (assuming you overcome inferential distances). Forcing an update because you want to rule would only amount to an appeal to authority or coercion. That's not rational. If you show them a more complete map and they update, that isn't about you - you should be updating your map when the time comes, too. It's the territory that rules us all. You are only sharing your map.

I can't even figure out what you mean by this quote. If people aren't rational, and don't update, then the rulers should be the ones who DO.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:17:28AM 1 point [-]

I have decided to try and understand other people's ideas about elitism, because I realized that I don't know enough about them. Would you like to explain yours further?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 September 2012 06:13:41AM *  18 points [-]

The flow of this post is very strange. You are starting with extensive use of a word without clarifying its intended sense, then proceed to enumerate its possible dictionary senses. The problem that you get to eventually seems to be the fact that in at least some of the legitimate senses, "elitism" is a denotationally correct characterization of some of the LW-related behaviors, but there are associated negative connotations, possibly incorrect ones. Yet the post doesn't seem to address this problem, and its end is a collection of calls to shift in attitude whose content and motivation remain unclear.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:16:35AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. I've realized that I have a different way of ordering information in my mind than most LW readers do. I tend to organize things in interconnected systems, when what is expected seems to be a straight line of ideas. I accidentally assume other people see the same connections I do (hindsight bias?) and that causes confusion. I'm working on predicting where I'm going to make that mistake so I can avoid it.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 10 September 2012 08:56:24AM 21 points [-]

LW started out as a site where rationality itself was the main topic of discussion. It has since devolved somewhat, into a site dominated by open-ended discussion, but in which certain rational practices still dominate. The danger of a policy of anti-elitism, at a time when the original mission of the site has been somewhat obscured by all the diverse enthusiasms of the community, is that it could complete the devolution of the site into a forum where rationality dominates neither in content nor in practice. The "elitist" current may just be the selfishness of people who don't want to share a good thing, but it does serve to prevent that final dilution.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:13:20AM 2 points [-]

I have decided to try and understand other people's ideas about elitism, because I realized that I don't know enough about them. Would you like to explain yours to me?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 01:09:06AM 5 points [-]

I realized I didn't know enough about other people's points of view on elitism and decided to investigate them after my elitism thread crashed and burned.

I tamed my elitism mind kill reaction.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 September 2012 12:27:40AM *  2 points [-]

Summary of Solution Ideas:

(In alphabetical order.)

A ban button for older active users that works if pressed by enough of them in a certain time period.

Pros:

  • Increases the capacity of the site to deal with an influx of trolls.
  • Frees up vote buttons to do what they're intended to do. For instance: People probably don't down vote nearly as much as would reflect their opinion since it triggers a troll tax and hides the comment.
  • Prevents "feeding trolls" by giving the trolls negative attention.
  • No need to rely on moderators to be good at being strong and tolerating stress because their tough decisions bring harsh criticism.

Cons:

  • It is possible that desirable contrarians would be banned (though that could happen with moderators just the same).

Give older users more voting power.

A mathematical approach was suggested which would give older users more voting power.

Pros:

  • All karma totals will be more likely to reflect what the older members want.

Cons:

  • Votes reward and punish but they don't instruct well. This leaves users ignorant about what specifically to change, so it's power to acculturate them is limited by that, and the more clueless the new user is the more limited the power of votes.
  • A deluge of the wrong type of user may result in lots of people ignoring karma because so many other people are acting in ways that don't get them good karma, or because they're the wrong type and don't care much about karma.
  • It isn't known how much karma influences behavior in the first place. (I couldn't find anything about this in my searches.) I think this might work well on the right type (both motivated by karma and similar enough to older users to pick up on voting patterns) but is not as likely to work on the members that would cause eternal September.

Highlight the culture by making the names of biases, logical fallacies and terms from the sequences linked.

Pros:

  • Makes it fast for older users to link to useful rationality materials, encouraging them to tell new users about them more often, speeding up acculturation.
  • Making core cultural items stand out will cause new users to recognize them as relevant, when they might otherwise write them off as "some big word I don't know".
  • Highlighting rationality related terms sends a visual message that we're prioritizing rationality. Visual messages can have more impact.

Cons:

  • (unknown)

Limit the comments new users can make, increase limit based on karma, later remove the restriction.

Pros:

  • Encourages new users to lurk more, acculturating before saying a lot.
  • Cuts down on the amount of newbie comments older users have to wade through.

Cons:

  • New users may lose momentum and may not stick around.

Limit the ratio of new users that can post in x time period.

Pros:

  • Turning off registration has been rumored to work for other sites.
  • Sure-fire way to keep growth at a manageable pace.
  • Will not offend people who are offended by elitism.

Cons:

  • Will definitely prevent some number of good new users from joining.

Prompt users to provide two or more words of verbal feedback when voting (not mandatory).

Pros:

  • New users will know why they got down voted which will speed up the process of correcting it.

Cons:

  • (unknown)

Require an agreement to accept and give constructive criticism (with a requirement for good manners).

Pros:

  • People who can't deal with being held to the standard of being rational or can't deal with updating will be intimidated and less of them will join.

Cons:

  • This will encourage more thick-skinned individuals to join than thin-skinned ones and may decrease the proportion of people who aren't over-confident debate junkies and trolls.

Require an educational rationality knowledge quiz to use discussions (but not to register).

Pros:

  • Ensures that new users are familiar with important elements of rational discussion (even if only because of the questionnaire) that will reduce clueless behavior.

  • Increases the hassle that trolls and spammers need to go through to make endless new accounts, deterring them.

  • People who aren't serious about refining rationality won't go to the bother.

  • Reduces the speed at which the population grows.

Cons:

  • Some people may not fill out the form due to laziness, because it's an obstacle to their inspiration to comment, or because they don't have time right now and forget to.

Send people with poor rational thinking skills to the Center for Modern Rationality or similar.

Pros:

  • Some beginners will choose to get training and that will be a good thing.
  • Some beginners will wait to post until they're further along.

Cons:

  • Tell a person to go somewhere else and they may just ignore you.

Ideas that were culled:

(Both of these were culled due to the fact that they'd result in duplicate posts, none of which would contain all the info.)

Separate new users and old users into different discussion areas to contain the endless September or protect the older culture, letting beginners move up after they accomplish a certain level of rationality.

Pros:

  • Including beginners somehow at the site is less likely to offend people who are offended by elitism.
  • Newbies would have a place to learn as a group.
  • If users were directed effectively (perhaps with the rational knowledge quiz) it would contain the eternal September while still allowing some growth and being a way to acculturate new users.

Cons:

  • Labeling people as beginners might make it harder for them to learn or make them resent us (though shooing them away with down votes or allowing them to frustrate older users with ignorance will have the same effect.)
  • New users wouldn't acculturate as fast and might not acculturate at all (though if the alternative is to lose the culture completely, this is justified.)
  • This would result in duplicate posts since the different forums would often want to talk about the same things.
  • None of the posts would contain all the information.
  • Sending people to the Center for Modern Rationality is a better option.

Multi Generation Culture

Limit the number of new users that join the forum to a certain percentage per month, sending the rest to a new forum. If that forum grows too fast, create additional forums. This would be like having different generations. New people would be able to join an older generation if there is space.

Pros:

  • Nobody would be labeled a "beginner".

Cons:

  • This would result in duplicate posts since the different generations would often want to talk about the same things.
  • None of the posts would contain all the information.
Comment author: therufs 29 September 2012 02:50:26AM *  7 points [-]

I saw this site on evand's computer one day, so of course then had to look it up for myself.  In my free time, I pester him with LW-y questions. 

By way of background, I graduated from a trying-to-be-progressive-but-sort-of-hung-up-on-orthodoxy quasi-Protestant seminary in spring 2010.  Primary discernible effects of this schooling (i.e., I would assign these a high probability of relevance on LW) include:

  • deeply suspicious of pretty much everything

  • a predisposition to enter a Hulk-smash rage at the faintest whiff of systematic injustice or oppression

  • high value on beauty, imagination*, and inclusivity

* Part of my motivation to involve myself in rationalism is a hope that I can learn ways to imagine better (more usefully, maybe.)

I like learning more about how brains work (/don't work).  Also about communities.  Also about things like why people say and do what they say and do, both in terms of conditioning/unconscious motivation and conscious decision. And and and. I will start keeping track on a wiki page perhaps.

I cherish ambitions of being able to contribute to a discussion one day! (If anyone has any ideas/relevant information about getting over not wanting to look stupid, please do share ...)

Hi!

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 05:00:06AM 1 point [-]

(If anyone has any ideas/relevant information about getting over not wanting to look stupid, please do share ...)

Don't worry, you can't possibly look worse than I did.

Part of my motivation to involve myself in rationalism is a hope that I can learn ways to imagine better (more usefully, maybe.)

I wanted to be around people who can point out my flaws and argue with me effectively and tell me things I didn't know. I wanted to be held to higher standards, to actually have to work hard to earn respect. I'm not getting that in other areas of my life. Here, I get it. (: I am so grateful that I found this. People will challenge you and make you work, and find your flaws, but that's a blessing. Embrace it.

Comment author: saturn 29 September 2012 02:36:40AM 0 points [-]

I'm trying to say that I think you might already be a pretty extreme outlier in your opinion of cryonics, based on a few clues I noticed in your comment, so your reactions may not generalize much. The median reaction to cryonics seems to be disgust and anger, rather than just not being convinced. I'm sort of on the fence about it myself, although I will try to refute bad cryonics-related arguments when I see them, so on object-level grounds I can't really say whether convincing you or learning how to convince people in general is a good idea or not.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 03:44:46AM *  1 point [-]

Disgust and anger, that's interesting. I wonder if that might be due to them feeling it's unfair that some people might survive when everyone else has died, or seeing it as some kind of insult to their religion like trying to evade hell (with the implication that you won't be motivated enough to avoid sinning, for instance). If that's the case, you're probably right that my current reaction is different from the ones that others would have. My initial reaction was pretty similar, though. My introduction to cryo was in a cartoon as a child - the bad guys were freezing themselves and using the blood of children to live forever. I felt it was terrifying and horribly unfair that the bad guys could live forever and creepy that there were so many frozen dead bodies. I didn't think about getting it myself until I met someone who had signed up. My reaction was "Oh, you can actually do that? I had no idea." - and it felt weird because it seemed strange to believe that freezing yourself is going to save your life (I didn't think technology was that far along yet), but I'm OK with entertaining weird ideas, so I was pretty neutral. I thought about whether I should do it, but I wasn't in a financial position to take on new bills at the time, so I stored that knowledge for later. Then, when I joined LessWrong, I began seeing mentions of cryo all over. I had the strong sense that it would be wrong to spend so much on a small chance of saving my own life when others are currently dying, but that was countered pretty decently by one of the posts linked to above. Now I'm discovering cached religious thoughts (I thought I removed them all. These are so insidious!) and am wondering if I will wake up as some sort of miserable medical Frankenstein.

I can't tell you whether it's worth it to convince me or learn to convince people, either. I'm not even sure it's worth signing up, after all. (:

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 02:11:58AM 1 point [-]

A life spent on something less valuable than itself is wasted, just as money is squandered on junk. If you want to respect the value of your life, you must spend it on something more valuable to you than you are. If you invest your life into something more valuable than you are, you are not throwing it away, you are ensuring that it is spent wisely.

People sacrifice their best years passing their genes on, knowing that the continuation of the species is more valuable than those years, and they fight in war because freeing themselves and future generations from oppression is more valuable than living a life in slavery.

Most rationalists would see that dying to continue the rational way of life is better than investing their lives into living like a Barbarian after being conquered.

Not to mention the fact that if the rationalists didn't fight (say they left the area, or surrendered), that would encourage the Barbarians to push them around. After the Barbarians plundered their village, they'd look for a new target and, knowing that rationalists run, the rationalists would be particularly appealing, so they'd be targeted again. Make yourself an easy target and the Barbarians may plunder you so often you can't survive in any case. Running away from that type of problem does not solve it.

Comment author: saturn 29 September 2012 01:17:46AM *  0 points [-]

To practice on me before something happens to your female family members and you've got to convince them...

Are you such a Platonically ideal female that we can generalize from you to other females, who may have expressed no interest in cryonics?

Friendly hint: you just implied my life isn't worth saving. I am not easily offended and I'm not hurt, so that's just FYI.

If you see it that way, it sounds like you're already very nearly convinced.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 02:02:48AM *  2 points [-]

Are you such a Platonically ideal female that we can generalize from you to other females, who may have expressed no interest in cryonics?

Of course not, that's an assumed "no". I guess what you're really asking is "What is the point of seeing whether we can convince you to sign up for cryo?" Sometimes case studies are helpful for figuring out what's going on. Study results are more practically useful but let's not forget how we develop the questions for a study - by observing life. If you've ever felt uncomfortable about the idea of persuading someone of something or probing into their motivations, you can see why being invited to do so would be an opportunity to try things you normally wouldn't and explore my objections in ways that you may normally keep off-limits.

Even if most of my objections are different from the ones other people have, discovering even a few new objections and coming up with even a few new arguments that work on others would be worthwhile if you intend to convince other people in the future, no?

If you see it that way, it sounds like you're already very nearly convinced.

Alicorn is right. It's not that I am convinced or not convinced, it's that I'm capable of interpreting it the way that you might have meant it. For the record, where I'm at right now is that I'm not convinced it's a good way to save my life, (being the only way does not make it a good way) and I'm not 100% convinced that it's better than donating to a life-saving charity.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 01:24:11AM 0 points [-]

Now I'm considering cryo. Thumb up. blink of surprise

And the sooner the money is spent (not saying I should hope to die more quickly, but that if more people in this generation sign up... eg. me) the sooner they'll figure out how to do this effectively, which means that a (relatively) small amount of money spent on that right now could multiply the number of human years that are saved by quite a few...

Hmm. Now I'll have to think this over...

Comment author: Blackened 09 September 2012 11:30:50AM *  8 points [-]

I am very confused right now.

A few years ago, I learned that multivitamins are ineffective, according to research. At that point, I have heard of the benefits of many of them, they were individually praised like some would praise anything that's good enough to take by itself, so I was thinking that multivitamins should be something ultra-effective that only irrational people won't take. When I learned they were ineffective, I hypothesized that vitamins in pills simply don't get processed well.

Recently, I was reading a few articles about Vitamin D - I thought I should definitely have it, because the sources were rather scientific and were praising it a lot. I got it in the form of softgels, because gwern suggested it. When they arrived, I saw it's very similar to pills, so I thought it might be ineffective and decided to take another look at Wikipedia/Multivitamins. Then I got very confused.

Apparently, the multivitamins DO get processed! And yes, they ARE found to have no significant effect (even in double-blind placebo trials), But at the same time, we have pages saying that 50-60% of the people are deprived from Vitamin D and that it seriously reduces the risk of cancer, among with other things (including a heart disease). Can anyone explain what's going on?

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 01:11:50AM *  1 point [-]

Supplements have quality issues often. You'd be surprised what they get away with. Sometimes the coating doesn't digest, so the nutrients aren't absorbed. Sometimes they use the wrong form of the substance because it is cheaper. Sometimes they're even contaminated with lead. I only buy vitamins that have been tested by an independent lab. So far, the best brands I've found were Solgar and Jarrow.

Comment author: listic 28 September 2012 11:45:23PM 0 points [-]

What's the point?

Comment author: Epiphany 29 September 2012 12:42:49AM 0 points [-]

To practice on me before something happens to your female family members and you've got to convince them...

Friendly hint: you just implied my life isn't worth saving. I am not easily offended and I'm not hurt, so that's just FYI.

Comment author: Nisan 26 September 2012 09:42:06AM *  4 points [-]

This idea has been covered on Less Wrong before. I'll spend the next minute looking up some links.

EDIT: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach
Against Cryonics & For Cost-Effective Charity
There's already discussion about cryonics and charitable giving in the Reddit, help me find some peace I'm dying young thread.
There is a discussion thread in Normal Cryonics about charity vs. cryonics. See in particular this comment.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 September 2012 09:55:43PM 0 points [-]

Wow okay. I didn't expect to find such good arguments. I am still not adjusted to the intelligence level here. Well, different new discussion idea then.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 September 2012 09:51:04PM *  0 points [-]

New post idea:

"Female Test Subject - Convince Me To Get Cryo"

(Offering myself for experimentation, of course.)

What do you think? Should I post it?

Submitting...

Comment author: Vaniver 28 September 2012 07:50:24PM 1 point [-]

I meant "comments" by "posts." I'll edit the grandparent to be clearer.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 September 2012 07:53:24PM *  0 points [-]

Thanks, Vaniver. The OP has been updated. I also used find to see whether there were other ambiguities around the word "post" in the OP. Caught a few. (:

Comment author: Vaniver 03 September 2012 10:41:02PM *  2 points [-]

The right bar that goes off the page is so far unexplained for me - 921 users joined in September 2011, more than three times the number in the months before and after it. If you happen to know what caused that, I would be very interested in finding out.

My prediction is something HPMOR related- either more links to lesswrong in the Author's Notes, or HPMOR itself had a spike that month.

Another way to cut down on new-new interaction is to limit the number of comments someone can make in a time period- if people can only comment once an day until their karma hits 20, and then once an hour until their karma hits 100, and then they're unrestricted, that will explicitly encourage lurking / paying close attention to karma among new members. (It would be gameable, unless you did something like prevent new members from upvoting the comments of other new members, or algorithmically keeping an eye out for people gaming the system and then cracking down on them.)

[edit] The delay being a near-continuous function of the karma- say, 24 hours*exp(-b karma)- might make the incentives better, and not require partitioning users explicitly. No idea if that would be more or less effort on the coding side.

Comment author: Epiphany 28 September 2012 05:46:37AM *  0 points [-]

Problem: Limiting the number of posts doesn't limit the number of comments, so they'd still be able to overwhelm older users with newbie comments or create their own culture in the comments. I think this idea would be ineffective unless, by "posts" you meant "comments" (or added some similar plan for comments).

Comment author: Epiphany 28 September 2012 03:53:06AM *  2 points [-]

Repeats to self: Do not say "Go Eliezer!", do not say "Go, Eliezer!", do not say "Go, Eliezer!"

Comment author: jsalvatier 26 September 2012 07:51:13AM 1 point [-]

My heuristic is "if it is of interest to LW people then it counts". Does that help? What's your project?

Comment author: Epiphany 27 September 2012 03:52:31AM *  0 points [-]

I want to offer assistance, actually, but I'll probably be back here to ask for some later. ;) Here is what I offer:

I know tons about psychology. If there's something you don't know the word for, or don't think has been covered, or are looking for a reference for, I'm an excellent person to ask about that. In addition to knowing a lot about psychology in general (like abnormal psychology), I have also specialized in an arcane area of psychology: gifted adults. I say this is arcane because if you wanted to get a psychology degree that covers gifted adults, the closest degree to that would be developmental psychology, however developmental psychology is focused on children with learning disorders, contains some information about gifted children, and leaves gifted adults out for the most part. Since there were other reasons that getting a degree was not very useful in my case (in addition to them not teaching enough about the population I'm most interested in, even according to an award winning school teacher, school isn't a great way to learn, and I have several learning differences that give me big advantages when learning on my own and big disadvantages when learning in a school environment), I chose to learn independently rather than getting a psychology degree. I don't diagnose or treat anyone, obviously, or claim to be a psychologist, but I can cite and summarize what I've read and suggest perspectives based on my experiences and information. These may be extremely useful.

This knowledge is relevant to LessWrong members for two reasons: 1.) According to the last survey, LessWrong's average IQ is 140. This information may be useful for you guys in understanding yourselves. (I fully intend to do some writing for this group - that's a key reason I joined). 2.) People interested in artificial intelligence may want to know random things about human intelligence.

I normally rely on the internet or on libraries for information, but I also own some books on these topics which may be useful if look-ups are needed.

I don't think a time commitment is appropriate, as the amount of information I will be asked for is likely to be totally random, resulting in many weeks where nothing is asked for. This will encourage me not to factor in the commitment when I consider how to use my time each week, and that's not a good way to deal with commitments. So, I'll do this on a random basis. As long as the purpose of the research is ethical, I'll be more than happy to look for a way to fit you in with my priorities.

To get my attention, reply to me directly or PM and make it clear that it's about this offer.

In response to Chaotic Inversion
Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 07:12:39AM *  -1 points [-]

I think all chaos is just an order too complex to understand at first.

Comment author: shminux 26 September 2012 05:58:03AM 0 points [-]

Grats, you are catching on :)

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 06:35:57AM *  6 points [-]

(: Thanks, Shminux.

I have finally gotten the ass-kicking I needed. Though not especially in my elitism thread, it was spread out... Wedrifid showed me arguments good enough to corner mine. Kindly provided a wonderfully devastating critique of my poll. Gwern's website shows that he's so well-read that I felt like an idiot. Eliezer's "The Magnitude of His Own Folly" depicted a deep acknowledgement of the terrible nature of reality that I found moving because it made him neither paranoid or unambitious - I relate to this but I haven't seen anyone like that before. You always seem to be there to say something snide, making my overconfidence think twice while Morendil typed me up a refreshing batch of sanity.

These are exciting.

I haven't felt so much respect and faith in humanity for a long time.

I was getting apathetic because of it.

Now my self-confidence is right about where it should be.

I decided to commit to reading the major sequences, and I'm considering reading them all. I previously did lots of things like learning about logical fallacies and razing my cached thoughts years ago, so these aren't as dense in new information as they'd be otherwise, but I'm learning to communicate with you guys and I'm enjoying Eliezer's brilliance.

Comment author: Manfred 03 September 2012 07:23:38AM *  0 points [-]

"Throw manners out the window" is not what I said you were proposing. I think you may be missing some of what I am saying, or maybe I was just being opaque. So I'll try and give you one clear paragraph:

Thinking about other peoples' emotional responses makes communicating with them much more effective, not less effective. If we want to have a "hard discussion" section, or even just a difficult discussion, I want people to be in the habit of thinking about other peoples' emotional responses, not to consider it "not their responsibility."

To be clear, when I say "thinking about other peoples' emotions," I don't mean typical "manners stuff" like sweetening difficult truths, etc. I mean actual thinking, about other peoples' emotions. And changing what you say so that the other person will understand what you're trying to communicate. That part's important! Or to put it another way, in order to communicate as best you can, you must take responsibility for your audience's emotional responses insofar as they affect what happens to your message, which is often a lot.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 06:04:27AM *  0 points [-]

I mean actual thinking, about other peoples' emotions. And changing what you say so that the other person will understand what you're trying to communicate. That part's important! Or to put it another way, in order to communicate as best you can, you must take responsibility for your audience's emotional responses insofar as they affect what happens to your message, which is often a lot.

Yeah, that's worthwhile, and it's an art. I'm not sure how that would even be communicated to people if it were, say, put into the rules or something. It would be nice if that level of quality could be expected but I don't see any way to do that. Do you?

Comment author: saturn 02 September 2012 11:39:54AM *  11 points [-]

LW could be considered a select group by discussion board standards. For example, posters who haven't studied the rather large amount of presumed background knowledge are, to a decreasing but still significant extent, only reluctantly tolerated. Some people accustomed to more typical discussion boards do seem somewhat miffed about the idea that LW has such prerequisites at all, and I assume this is because they perceive it as elitist.

Bringing this back to the main point, LW already does a reasonably good job at covering what you call the 'hard' material. It's hard to overstate how fickle and delicate online communities can be. I'm wary of attempting to change the norms of the existing community in order to produce more 'easy' material. (This is what you are effectively proposing, since newbies can't produce their own 'easy' material, it would be the blind leading the blind.) Therefore I think that job should be delegated to another website (maybe appliedrationality.org) rather than shoehorned into LW.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 05:59:09AM 0 points [-]

I sort of took your suggestion. (See OP under Center for Modern Rationality).

Comment author: Pentashagon 03 September 2012 08:11:09AM 0 points [-]

Maybe I'm too optimistic in thinking that most users could eventually migrate into the normal discussion areas. If so, then you're probably right that just containing the eternal september is the best solution.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 05:35:15AM 0 points [-]

Well, eternal September, by definition, means many won't completely acculturate. If they all acculturate and move up, then the beginner area will be a temporary place for newbies to learn, and there was no eternal September. If there is an eternal September, then it's purpose would be to contain the eternal September. Those who acculturate would move on, but not everyone would acculturate.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 05:25:31AM *  5 points [-]

I think this is worth it's own post but in light of my last discussion catching fire and burning to the ground, I have decided to request a critique on this one before posting in discussions:

<begin discussion post proposition>

Cryonics Moral Dilemma

Since joining LessWrong, I've been thinking about cryo a lot, and have encountered a dilemma:

According to GiveWell, "We estimate that giving a few thousand dollars to AMF likely saves a person's life." (They do malaria bed nets if you're not familiar).

Cryo costs tens of thousands of dollars, and it's not guaranteed to save even one life.

I don't see how I would ever justify signing up, myself, unless I show that I'm capable of making a large enough difference in the world that rescuing my difference making abilities justifies the risk and cost.

This also means "Reddit, help me find some peace I'm dying young" is a cute puppy dog cause. :/

Does anyone relate? What are your thoughts?

<end discussion post proposition>

please critique the proposed discussion post

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 04:54:41AM *  0 points [-]

It's not clear to me whether the offer is to help with any project, for LessWrong articles, or research projects for SI. The title says "for LessWrong" but that may just mean "for any member of LessWrong".

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 04:45:11AM 0 points [-]

Problems with non-diversification:

  1. How do you choose between multiple things that are all necessary when leaving out one of them means disaster? For instance clean air v.s. clean water. Humanity needs both, or it dies. There must be more than one charity that's necessary.

  2. How do you choose between multiple risks when any of them can kill you and they're equally likely? For instance: According to a TED video, there's around a 1 in 20,000 chance of a meteor hitting earth and according to some research I did a long time ago, the chance that Yellowstone caldera will erupt in our lifetimes and destroy earth is about 1 in 20,000.

  3. If all of your favorite charities are likely to make their donation goals, why not donate to them all?

  4. Sometimes one cause is dependent on another. For instance, how many charity websites are hosted on Linux / Apache - open source software. If Linux were in desperate need of programmers to solve some security flaw, it might make more sense to donate for that than to the charities that require them.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 09 September 2012 12:40:23PM 3 points [-]

If men think more like economists than women, then what explains this difference?

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 03:54:21AM 1 point [-]

Brain differences are nowhere near the entire story. There are so many different chemicals that can be floating around in your brain at any given time. Oxytocin might give you some insight here. They've done studies that showed that this hormone increases things like trust, trustworthiness, generosity, empathy and morality.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html

This same video explains that testosterone increases selfishness and punishing behaviors. Different sources say different things about how oxytocin affects each gender, but there's a theme where they're saying the women either have higher oxytocin or stronger reactions to it or that testosterone interferes with it, etc. Essentially the message in the theories is "Women more frequently act on the influence of oxytocin".

Here is what this is like for me:

Imagine, for a moment, feeling ten times less selfish (the video says men have 10x the testosterone, not sure if our subjective experiences correspond exactly, but that's my guess for the following hypothetical scenarios). Now imagine being high every time you do something nice. For me, this means the world feels beautiful, I feel secure and peaceful, and I feel satisfied in a way that nothing else can match.

Imagine someone doing something bad to you. Imagine you're not even selfish enough to be angry. I don't always stay calm, but the things that don't make me angry might surprise you. Now imagine feeling sorry for the person instead of worrying about yourself. This is what it feels like to be me. People like me have to work hard on developing rational self-interest. You've probably wondered about the phenomenon where a lot of women get attached to an abusive man and keep trying to love him into being a better person even though he's abusing her. I haven't had problems saying no since my early twenties, but it took work to learn to be strong enough to say no and be firm. These hormonal differences may explain that.

If you're motivated by helping, and you even feel sorry for people who hurt you, how much motivation do you have to go out and learn more about how to make money? If your brain rewards you with a high whenever you're nice to someone, how much more time would you want to spend doing that? If what gratifies you is expressing empathy, this changes your priorities by, at the very least, competing with your other interests. In my case, I prefer playing helping roles so much that it trumps just about everything else for me. Here is a chart that shows the results of some studies done to compare the interests of highly intelligent adult men and women (I figure if the LW surveys are right about member's IQs being in the 140s on average, this chart is more applicable here than a random one).

http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10176.aspx

Notice things like the women are much more interested in community service, social contacts and teaching children (all of which require caring) and men are more interested in law (which demands an aggressive personality because you're fighting over who wins). Sure, you can help people with money, but that way, you give them the most benefit while spending the least amount of time actually interacting with them. Most people have empathy and like helping but not everyone can do it full-time. I, on the other hand, like helping so much I can't be bothered to spend a large amount of time on money. After I clock out at the end of the day, it's time for me to help someone.

If oxytocin tends to affect the genders differently (or if testosterone contradicts it), this explains a lot of gender differences - why men tend to be more aggressive, why women tend to be more socially accommodating and it may explain why they aren't as interested in economics - they may just prefer roles that require caring instead.

Comment author: lloyd 26 September 2012 02:53:16AM 0 points [-]

By 'good' reason I meant one consistent with the purpose or function of schooling. It is to be taken as having a touch of humor based on people's misunderstanding of the function of school believing it to be synonymous with education.

Comment author: Epiphany 26 September 2012 03:14:34AM 0 points [-]

Oh, okay. I guess I didn't know your personality well enough yet to assume the correct things. Thanks. (:

In response to Living Luminously
Comment author: Epiphany 24 September 2012 05:45:47AM *  -2 points [-]

Meta-cognition is the standard term for "luminosity". The Wikipedia entry might be an interesting read. I have done a lot of mind hacking, myself. :)

If you gain root, do release the source code for your patches. You might think you're just making some improvements, but... after a while, too many new improvements can become more like a new human operating system. You can become so different that people will not be able to understand you anymore.

Re-arranging your consciousness is serious business. Don't take it lightly. Aside from the social consequences, there are also system design pitfalls.

In response to Taboo Your Words
Comment author: Epiphany 24 September 2012 05:07:36AM 0 points [-]

Broken Link: And see also Shane Legg's compilation of 71 definitions of "intelligence".

Comment author: Alicorn 15 September 2012 03:04:22AM 8 points [-]

You can play Rationalist Taboo, yes?

Comment author: Epiphany 24 September 2012 05:03:03AM 0 points [-]

I decided to take your suggestion, thanks.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 September 2012 12:32:13AM *  3 points [-]

As I recommended before, read the sequence on words and some of Yvain's posts (Diseased Thinking, Studies on Excuses, Schelling Fences, Worst Argument in the World). My comment works as a summary, if you follow what it's describing (which is where all those posts might help).

Comment author: Epiphany 24 September 2012 12:46:11AM *  2 points [-]

Okay thank you. I've read more random sequences than I can count and Worst Argument in the World and I'm systematically working my way through the major sequences right now. I will check these other ones out, too.

Wait, I assume you mean "A Human's Guide to Words" when you say "sequence of words"?

Ironic place to have this confusion, isn't it. ;)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 September 2012 11:42:15PM *  4 points [-]

When a concept is used, it draws attention to its connotations, the way people associate them with it. The role of a concept in an argument is to bring forth relevant inferences. A misleading concept might suggest incorrect or unintended conclusions, as is the case when it doesn't describe the situation very well or when you are relying on nonstandard connotations not shared by other people.

To taboo a concept is to screen off implicit reliance on its ability to activate connotations in an argument, instead naming them and motivating their relevance explicitly. If the argument is valid, it will go through in this more explicit form as well (if it doesn't, there might be an actual problem with the argument). The main focus of this procedure are particular arguments, not the concept that was causing trouble. So it is the arguments that you are trying to make that should be clarified, communicated in a way that doesn't rely on your understanding of the concept, while the use of the concept itself in communication and persuasion should be avoided.

Comment author: Epiphany 24 September 2012 12:02:46AM *  1 point [-]

I appear to be doing it wrong. Thank you Vladimir. The wiki on rationalist taboo is pretty short. Is there an article somewhere with good instructions for playing rationalist taboo?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 10:47:08PM *  4 points [-]

Rationalist taboo style explanation of how my perceptions of "elitism" developed:

I started out in life with disadvantages that I had to overcome. I am also gifted, but didn't know that until my mid twenties. I lived in a rich, privileged town and there were a majority of rich, privileged children in my school. Because I was disadvantaged, I never made friends with privileged children or teens. They were wearing Gap while I was wearing resale shop finds. If they ever used the word "elite" to describe themselves, I didn't know it. We occasionally annoyed each other - that was all the interaction that we had. Aside from my objection to their focus on status signaling (to me, there were obviously more important things to spend money on like starvation), because I was surrounded by them, I thought that their lifestyle was the way things were supposed to be, but that I was unlucky and didn't get to have that. These were not the "elitists" to me.

I met other gifted and disadvantaged people after school. These were my friends. This pattern of interacting mostly with the disadvantaged variety of gifted people continued until more recently. There are a variety of reasons for this. For instance: it took me years of excruciating effort to learn to speak and write in a way that's polished enough that it prevents privileged gifted people from assuming that I'm stupid because I have dyslexia.

A lot of the gifted and disadvantaged people I met felt strongly that they did not want to see themselves as gifted - it would make them feel arrogant. Some of them even deny that intellectual differences exist. They were not the "elitists" to me.

I had occasionally met an abusive disadvantaged gifted person who insulted people who weren't as intelligent, made assumptions about them (prejudice), and reasoned in ways that were based on that prejudice. Those were the people I thought were the "elitists".

But they are uncommon in my experience. I don't know of them forming any big groups so I don't see them as a big threat. My perspective is more like "this is the sort of intellectual you don't want to be confused for." Since I hadn't interacted much with advantaged people, I had no idea that they'd ever want to call themselves "elitists". Wouldn't that cause people to confuse them with these abusive intellectuals? I figured they would never want that.

Now, I realize that there are large groups of people out there made up of advantaged / gifted people that call themselves "elite" and that I don't understand them very well. I want to understand them better. If you guys feel inclined, please help me get a better understanding of this group so I can update.

In response to Where are we?
Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 08:01:55PM *  2 points [-]

The location I'm providing is a little vague because I want to say where I am, but posting that as a female almost guarantees a loss of anonymity in various contexts. I'm in the Western United States. For those using find in page, my region includes:

Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Comment author: Morendil 23 September 2012 10:20:36AM 2 points [-]

What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought?

My thesis is that to a good first approximation the purpose of schools, like that of the TSA, is to instill and ensure compliance in the populace, not to educate. I should probably go and read this Gatto, he's come up before in discussions like this one.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 07:26:37PM 4 points [-]

I really question whether a "world full of leaders" would necessarily fail. These discussions about the original purpose of schooling seem to come down to that question. Is it that the leaders at the time didn't want to give up leadership to have a strong populace, or is it that they had no clue how to organize a strong populace in a way that makes them as effective as stifling them does?

I mean, it's pretty counter-intuitive that stifling a populace will make it more effective, even if it gives you the ability to organize them better.

And it's really questionable that a populace full of leaders wouldn't figure out how to organize itself.

On the one hand, we could argue that the information overload of a species that is rapidly gaining knowledge will worsen if their minds aren't standardized somehow. We could also ask "Are there different ways to standardize, some stifling, some not?" and "Would standardizing them by stifling them cause more or less information overload compared with standardizing them around a theme of rational thought?"

The standardizing by stifling option reduces the number of new ideas being created, but prevents bad ideas from being culled, which allows them to build up.

The standardizing by rationality option doesn't necessarily mean you need to stifle creativity (and I think creativity is necessary for rational thought - lest every decision you make be subject to the flaws inherent in an option set too small, like with false dichotomy) but it would cause people to cull a large number of ideas that they waste time on right now AND it would give them a way to agree on things. Right now, we have a bunch of people who believe in opinion. They say "Everyone has their opinion. Let's respect each other's opinion." as if they cannot be proven true or false, more or less effective. I think the problem is they don't know enough about how to test ideas.

Assuming that a populace made of soldiers makes a country safer may be incorrect, too. Why did people in Nazi Germany adopt the morals of the Nazis or fail to oppose them effectively? According to Dabrowski's theory, there are 5 levels of of moral development, and the one that 75% of the population is at (level two) is characterized by it's adoption of authority's morals - they do not think for themselves about morality or realize their own hypocrisy or question their authority's morality (that happens at level 3). They just follow it blindly.

I've heard people argue that we need schools like these to keep people organized and to have soldiers... but if the "organized" thinkers are going to result in a proliferation of useless ideas and the "soldiers" are liable to kill their own citizens as well as actual enemies, then we may be both more disorganized and less secure than if we were to choose some other school system.

Perhaps this is the key to the problem you pose - if the desired outcomes are organization and national security (as opposed to, say, wielding tyrannical power), then perhaps posing a better educational solution to the problems of organization and national security is the key that would change this.

I am very, very heartened to see that someone (Eliezer) has finally made progress in gathering people around a theme of refining rationality. That needed to happen. I've been thinking that needed to happen for years now - because the general population needs thinking skills, because gifted people are socially fractured, a million reasons.

I wonder if the people here have what it takes to invent an education system that is better at security and organization.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How about testing our ideas?
Comment author: thomblake 17 September 2012 09:51:37PM 9 points [-]

You are postulating quite the conspiracy tho.

Not really. To militaristic Prussia of the time, creating good soldiers was simply the same as creating good citizens, and was considered a worthy goal. No conspiracy required, just doing what seemed obviously correct at the time. And then the Prussian system was so 'advanced' and 'modern' and 'successful' that others copied it.

American experts did not all agree with the 'military' goal, but it was believed by the relevant experts that the same sorts of virtues applied to factory workers.

Now people try to actually educate children via this system. It's like making minor tweaks to a torture device and wondering why it is ineffective at relieving headaches. You put some ibuprofen on the screws, tighten them some more, and subjects report slightly less intense headaches than last time.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 06:12:18PM *  4 points [-]

Not creating effective soldiers puts you at a military disadvantage. If Prussia was a major power at the time, surely other countries feared them. If other countries felt it was necessary to stifle their populace in order to ensure that they were capable of defending themselves against Prussia (or to defend themselves against the countries that took after Prussia), perhaps stifling the populace was thought to be a "lesser evil", a sacrifice they justified as part of an arms race.

Maybe this wasn't an evil conspiracy, but a terrible consequence of the prospect of war.

What's the bias for: "Ahh! We're in mortal danger! Quick, everybody, become stupid!"

Comment author: Morendil 23 September 2012 10:20:36AM 2 points [-]

What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought?

My thesis is that to a good first approximation the purpose of schools, like that of the TSA, is to instill and ensure compliance in the populace, not to educate. I should probably go and read this Gatto, he's come up before in discussions like this one.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 06:03:02PM *  2 points [-]

You seem to be reading these comments out of context. Cliff notes: That is John Taylor Gatto's claim - that the American school system is based on the Prussian school system which was designed to create soldiers and the Prussian belief was that this required them to do things that stunted intellectual growth. Shminux said JTG seemed like a conspiracy theorist and my comment was in response to that.

You should definitely read JTG. At least read "The Seven Lesson School Teacher" (linked in my previous comment) if nothing else.

Comment author: wedrifid 23 September 2012 08:33:10AM 6 points [-]

John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state's education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned. The claims that John Taylor Gatto makes are much worse than that they're defaulting to the teacher's password.

This was the only one of the education theorists that I studied while getting my teachning qualification that was remotely inspiring.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 09:05:16AM *  9 points [-]

Man, Gatto spurred off so much thought for me. That was in my early 20's so it's not all readily coming to mind right now, but wow. I feel like... he explained so much. I'm not sure why you say he's inspiring. So much of life that didn't make any sense began to make sense after that. But that was one of the worst existential crises I've ever experienced. To realize that your whole life you had been stifled by the thing you thought was teaching you: abominable. There are horrors worse than death. That is one of them.

When I was 17, I decided to tear my whole reality apart because I noticed that it contained too many flaws. This was excruciating and terrifying. When I was 18, I had the undignified experience of realizing I could not allow myself to vote because I wasn't taught to think critically and was still learning to. When I was in my early 20's, I discovered logical fallacies and went "SOMEBODY WROTE THIS ALL DOWN!!?!!?? Why didn't I know about this!?" I was a mess of a young woman - it took years of effort to put together a decently competent mind after all that.

Failing to teach reasoning skills in school is a crime against humanity.

In response to Feeling Rational
Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 05:56:38AM -1 points [-]

Related Einstein Quote: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Comment author: [deleted] 17 September 2012 08:04:30PM 0 points [-]

Sounds scary. I'll look into it and update as appropriate.

You are postulating quite the conspiracy tho. Much more likely it seems that a few b'crats went bonkers, the way you sometimes get UFO nuts out of the military.

In response to comment by [deleted] on How about testing our ideas?
Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 04:52:45AM *  0 points [-]

I wrote a quick introduction to Gatto's claims of detrimental schooling practices that I think will give you a quick idea of whether it's worth continuing to look into. Let me know what your reaction is? I'm curious.

Comment author: shminux 17 September 2012 09:39:00PM *  -2 points [-]

I suspect that free public education is on average about the same everywhere. Guessing teacher's password and rote memorization are the easiest ways to teach, and an average teacher is not very good at what she does, so this method shows up by default. The idea that the US education is built on the "Prussian school system [which] was explicitly designed to create soldiers" and that's why it is so bad seems like a conspiracy theory.

I would like to know if there are examples to the contrary (i.e. countries where an average high-school graduate is adept at independent learning and critical thinking).

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 04:41:19AM *  8 points [-]

John Taylor Gatto won the New York State teacher of the year award in 1991 (New York state's education website). His ambition to be a great teacher led him to the realization that the system itself is broken and he was so disgusted with it that he resigned. The claims that John Taylor Gatto makes are much worse than that they're defaulting to the teacher's password. You have no idea. Consider this: You obviously value rational thought. Learning about things like logical fallacies and biases is a no-brainer to you, right? Why are so many people learning them here, at LessWrong, for the first time? From what I know of American public schools, most of them don't teach these. What could cause our school systems to teach us square dancing and rote memorization of thousands of spellings of words for the sake of polish, but leave out basic pieces required for rational thought? Ask yourself this:

If you were making the curriculum, and you knew the kids would be turned lose into the world complete with the right to vote at 18 would you find any excuse good enough to let them out with no familiarity of logical fallacies, biases, etc.?

If your answer to this is "no" you already know that something is wrong.

I have a radar for conspiracy theories too, but what he explains in The Seven Lesson School Teacher (in the first chapter of his book "Dumbing us Down") got past my conspiracy theory radar and made it to "oh crap". If you want to fast forward past the pretty obvious stuff, start at #3 in that link, and if you want to begin with "oh crap" start with #4.

I have no idea if his claim that the American school system was based on the Prussian school system in order to create obedient soldiers is correct, or whether seeing the effects of schooling as intentional is just a matter of seeing agency where there is none due to bias. However, the problems he describes are worth consideration. That, I'm sure of.

Comment author: lloyd 17 September 2012 07:42:54PM *  5 points [-]

Schools do not teach any critical thinking and for good reason. Ivan Illich wrote "Deschooling Society" in the 70s and John Taylor Gatto started writing the "The Underground History of American Education" in the 90s. Either should give you insight into why teachers do what they do, but Gattos's "Weapons of Mass Instruction" is probably the best place to start. The short answer is that schools are designed from the top down to stunt the intellectual growth of children regardless of the intentions of teachers.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 03:48:38AM 0 points [-]

What is the "good" reason? Or did you not mean to agree with this practice?

Comment author: wedrifid 15 September 2012 09:32:38AM 7 points [-]

I am easily spooked by signs of early attachment, overly optimistic probability estimates about us working out, and impatience to see signs of an established connection. I go on the alert for these signs of irrationality if a person treats me "like a celebrity" or similar.

I can certainly understand how these behaviors would be incredibly unattractive, as well as representing 'red flags' indicating potential future complications in any relationship that is formed.

A corollary from a male perspective is that someone strongly predisposed from past experience towards seeing these signs of desperation and supplication can themselves make dating a drag. If ambiguous situations (or sometimes arguably non-ambiguous situations) are likely to be interpreted as motivated by weakness/low status/desparation/worship then avoiding such outcomes requires running far more strict, aggressive and constrained 'game' just to break even. Ultimately that lack of respect is just a huge turn off for me and one of the first things that'll make me think 'next' and move on to the next option.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 03:28:13AM *  6 points [-]

You really made me think, Wedrifid. I chose not to respond to you right away because I wanted to avoid jumping to the conclusion that I'm doing everything right. So, I made myself go think it over.

Before you said this, I thought I was being patient enough with ambiguous "signs" and tolerant enough of harmless lapses in social skills. I've done a lot of emotional support for people who have problems, so I'm pretty confident that my tolerance of harmless social mistakes (as well as my ability to spot false positives on my creep radar) is well beyond adequate for dating nerds and misunderstood gifted people.

But signs only seem ambiguous to me if I realize that they're ambiguous. Are the signs that I think are unambiguous actually ambiguous? I don't know... I think the best approach is to develop a greater tolerance for them. So, I've got a goal now of "Be strong enough that even when guys do these things, I don't feel stressed out." Of course, tolerating these problems endlessly would lead to doing a lot of hand-holding, which would be draining, and that's not emotionally sustainable for me, but maybe a three strikes rule would be a good idea for me. That'd probably give a functional guy enough time to gain my trust in his sanity. Patience... yeah, I think I could use more.

And, you know, even if I have adequate patience and my tolerance of eccentricity is very high and I'm doing a good job of telling the difference between ambiguous and unambiguous signs of dysfunction, if guys are expecting me to be impatient, intolerant and judgmental, that's no good. I could lose a lot of opportunities because of their baggage due to the skewed gender ratio. I'm not sure what to do to counteract this.

You know, maybe we just need open communication. Like "Hi, I know there's a gender ratio issue, it's stressing everyone out when we try to date each other, why don't you and I just talk openly about these problems as we get to know each other?" That seems counter-intuitive on the one hand: there would be less of that sense of mystery and magic that people seem to expect but I'd really prefer bare reality at this point.

You have given me a lot to think about in your comment, Wedrifid. Thank you. (:

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 01:20:47AM *  5 points [-]

Bug report: The right navigation bar on this page has scooted down as if it's being pushed out of alignment by something too wide in the comments section. The comments seem to have the same width as they normally do and I but perhaps the polls are interfering with the layout in some way?

FFX 15.0.1 W7

Comment author: Epiphany 23 September 2012 01:03:58AM 1 point [-]

Your acknowledgement of the horrifying lack of control that humans have over reality is moving. I did not think I would see anyone else who experienced it in this very rational way until I read your post. Paranoia is common, and so are cynics who err on the side of pessimism. But an ambitious, confident person who can see that this whole world can go to hell, that humanity is not immortal, the future not indestructible? Someone who can wake up and see that their own behavior was, for reasons that are perfectly common to humans, meta-risky, para-insane?

That is quite beautiful.

I hope that you learn, or have already learned, enough enlightenment that you can stare into the Terrible Abyss and be undaunted enough to truly integrate it with your reality.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2012 07:43:09AM 1 point [-]

You can't not believe everything you read, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, might contain the beginnings of another alternative explanation to this.

Comment author: Sarokrae 21 September 2012 10:54:13AM *  1 point [-]

I admire how you've identified your reaction as a mindkill response.

It's not that hard. If you feel adrenaline/indignance/anger at a Less Wrong comment and/or a compulsive urge to reply then the prior should be that you've been mindkilled, since when one takes the outside view people on LW tend to be a pretty reasonable bunch.

Are we in agreement about this?

I am in agreement with your points as I interpret their statement. I am not sure my interpretation of the statements agrees with yours. For example, what do you mean by "not make excuses to dominate one another"? There are many situations (governments, chain-of-command in workplaces, employers) where people can legitimately dominate one another, if that's what you mean by dominate.

Because I have barely read any of the writing by "Guardian comment section class warfare types" ... Would you mind explaining these two sides?

Sure. I'll PM you, since I don't think a detailed description of British politics is very relevant. :)

The point that is relevant is that I'm not defending what you're calling elitism, nor do I frequently call myself elitist, I'm just opposing people who oppose elitism, since when they use that word the definition tends to include me.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2012 02:56:59AM 0 points [-]

What I meant was just that it's pleasant to see that someone else was doing that. I didn't expect it. I know I'm capable of doing that, too. I am beginning to wonder about my response to the elitism thing. I'm asking myself questions like "Would I have responded differently if I was not upset?" and "If so, why did I let being upset influence my reaction to this specifically, when I know I can prevent it from influencing me on other things?"

The point that is relevant is that I'm not defending what you're calling elitism, nor do I frequently call myself elitist, I'm just opposing people who oppose elitism, since when they use that word the definition tends to include me.

Oh. I didn't think of the possibility of you being lumped into that outside of your control.

That's a good point and makes the situation more complex.

Back to the "two sides" - I don't really want to be on one side or the other. I want to understand both. There's got to be a way for both sides to get along with each other. It's a problem worth solving. Do you think a lot of LessWrongers would agree with these statements, or do you think they're too entrenched in mindkill?

Comment author: CCC 20 September 2012 06:32:00AM 10 points [-]

In the meantime, the effect can be simulated by proper selection of options. Example:

Which is your favourite superhero?

Submitting...

Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2012 02:25:15AM 1 point [-]

What would be really funny is if, when you select "I don't care, but I'd like to see the results" you see that everyone else filled it out the same way.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2012 01:55:26AM *  4 points [-]

Incredibly good idea! Why:

I was told by a professional developmental psychologist that it's often the psychology assistants who have the creative ideas - the psychology training can get in the way. This may be due to problems like anchoring bias (where they're anchoring to all that existing information from their education), bias blind spots (I've seen these caused by the ego that one can get due to having a high-level degree), and confirmation bias (which can only happen if you have preconceptions to confirm) or others.

Specifically because many LessWrong members are not as educated as the people you'd find writing a scientific journal, LessWrong could have some real gems. It occurs to me to think about Greek salons, fourchan /b and the U.S. virtue of freedom. Ancient Greek salons, from what I understand, were not structured like modern schools - basically the smart people got together and talked. But what do we know the ancient Greeks for? Having lots of ideas. Fourchan /b is lawless. What do we know them for? Creating a lot of internet memes. And why is freedom a virtue in the United States? Because among other things, freedom is credited with unleashing innovation.

LessWrong is much more free than a peer-reviewed journal because it does not enforce any educational requirement, it allows perspectives as diverse as Yvain's to Will Newsome's (sort of), and our ideas are much freer because we don't all have that big "curse of knowledge" to contend with.

If we do this, could we discover that LessWrong is an innovation powerhouse?

Comment author: Epiphany 22 September 2012 01:22:36AM *  -2 points [-]

Getting it done:

First we could pre-test them in an inexpensive way for the purpose of figuring out which ones are worth the money for independent research. Then, because LessWrong gets several million hits a year, an appeal to donate could be placed on LessWrong pages asking for donations to pay for high-quality research from an organization with credibility.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 21 September 2012 07:01:45PM 7 points [-]

IIRC, part of the debriefing protocol for the study involved explaining the actual purpose of the study to the subjects and asking them if there were any questions where they felt the answers had been swapped. If they at that point identified a question as having fallen into that category, it was marked as retrospectively corrected, rather than uncorrected.

Of course, they could still be pretending, perhaps out of embarrassment over having been rooked.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 08:00:00PM *  0 points [-]

I'm having trouble interpreting what your point is. It seems like you're saying "because they were encouraged to look for swapped questions before hand, Epiphany's point might not be valid" however, what I read stated: "After the experiment, the participants were fully debriefed about the true purpose of the experiment." so it may not have even occurred to most of them to wonder whether the questions had been swapped at the point when they were giving confabulated answers.

Does this clarify anything? It seems somebody got confused. Not sure who.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:45:32PM *  4 points [-]

Clarifying question: Did they actually change their minds on moral positions or did this study just give the appearance that they changed their minds? This is a question that we need to be asking as we look for meaning in this information, but not everyone here is thinking to ask it. Even when I proposed an alternate explanation to show how this could give the false appearance of people changing their minds when they did not, I got one response from somebody that didn't seem to realize I had just explained why this result might be due to people pretending to support those views when they do not. (I have made this even more explicit.) I think it might be a good idea to include the clarifying question at the end of the original post.

Comment author: Pentashagon 21 September 2012 06:11:49PM 1 point [-]

I think that's known as voter fraud. A lot of people believe (and tell others to believe) that certain candidates were legally and fairly elected even when exit polls show dramatically different results. Although of course this could work the same way if exit polls were changed to reflect the opposite outcome of an actually fair election and people believed the false exit polls and demanded a recount or re-election. It just depends on which side can effectively collude to cheat.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:31:25PM *  5 points [-]

No. What I'm saying here is that, using this technique, it might not be seen as fraud.

If the view on "choice blindness" is that people are actually changing their opinions, it would not be technically seen as false to claim that those are their opinions. Committing fraud would require you to lie. This may be a form of brainwashing, not a new way to lie.

That's why this is so creepy.

Comment author: orthonormal 21 September 2012 03:46:04PM 7 points [-]

It seems to me that this hypothesis is more of a mechanism for choice blindness than an alternate explanation- we already know that human beings will change their minds (and forget they've done so) in order to please authority.

(There's nonfictional evidence for this, but I need to run, so I'll just mention that we've always been at war with Oceania.)

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 05:30:51PM *  2 points [-]

What I'm saying is "Maybe they're only pretending to have an opinion that's not theirs." not "They've changed their minds for authority." so I still think it is an alternate explanation for the results.

Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 05:07:56PM *  16 points [-]

An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 09:11:47AM *  1 point [-]

Imagine answering a question like "I think such and such candidate is not a very good person." and then it gives you a button where you can automatically post it to your twitter / facebook. When you read the post on your twitter, it says "I think such and such candidate is a very good person." but you don't notice the wording has changed. :/

I wonder if people would feel compelled to confabulate reasons why they posted that on their accounts. It might set of their "virus" radars because of the online context and therefore not trigger the same behavior.

Comment author: blogospheroid 21 September 2012 06:45:17AM -2 points [-]

Wow!

I don't bandy the term sheeple out very frequently. But here it might just be appropriate.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 08:59:57AM 5 points [-]

That's what I thought at first, too but on second thought, I don't think they went far enough to confirm that this actually causes people to change their opinions. There are other reason people might act the way they did.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 08:34:08AM 9 points [-]

Another explanation:

Might this mean they trust external memories of their opinions more than their own memories? Know what that reminds me of? Ego. Some people trust others more than themselves when it comes to their view of themselves. And that's why insults hurt, isn't it? Because they make you doubt yourself. Maybe people do this because of self-doubt.

Comment author: RobinZ 20 September 2012 06:02:43PM 4 points [-]

There was a high level of inter-rater agreement between the three raters for the NM reports (r = .70) as well as for the M reports (r = .77), indicating that there are systematic patterns in the verbal reports that corresponds to certain positions on the rating scale for both NM and M trials. Even more interestingly, there was a high correlation between the raters estimate and the original rating of the participants for NM (r = .59) as well as for M reports (r = .71), which indicates that the verbal reports in the M trials do in fact track the participants rated level of agreement with the opposite of the initial moral principle or issue [emphasis added] (for an illustration of this process and example reports, see figure S1, Supporting Online Material). In addition, this relationship highlights the logic of the attitude reversal, in that more modest positions result in verbal reports expressing arguments appropriate for the same region on the mirror side of the scale. And while extreme reversals more often are detected, the remaining non-detected trials also create stronger and more dramatic confabulations for the opposite position.

Am I misreading this, or does it say that the verbal statements of people supporting an inverted opinion fit that opinion better than those describing their genuine opinion?

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 08:21:24AM 6 points [-]

Consider this: If you're supporting your own genuine opinion, you might have your own carefully chosen perspective that is slightly different from the question's wording. You only select the answer because it's the closest one of the options, not because it's exactly your answer. So, you may be inclined, then, to say things that are related but don't fit the question exactly. If you're confabulating to support a random opinion, though, what do you have to go by but the wording? The opinion is directing your thoughts then, leading your thoughts to fit the opinion. You aren't trying to cram pre-existing thoughts into an opinion box to make it fit your view.

Or looking at it another way:

When expressing your point of view, the important thing is to express what you feel, regardless of whether it fits the exact question.

When supporting "your" point because you don't want to look like an idiot in front of a researcher, the objective is to support it as precisely as possible, not to express anything.

As for whether your interpretation of that selection is correct: it's past my bed time and I'm getting drowsy, so someone else should answer that part instead.

Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 05:07:56PM *  16 points [-]

An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:59:01AM *  5 points [-]

Dark Tactic:

This one makes me sick to my stomach.

Imagine some horrible person wants to start a cult. So they get a bunch of people together and survey them asking things like:

"I don't think that cults are a good thing." "I'm not completely sure that (horrible person) would be a good cult leader."

and switches them with:

"I think that cults are a good thing." "I'm completely sure that (horrible person) would be a good cult leader."

And the horrible person shows the whole room the results of the second set of questions, showing that there's a consensus that cults are a good thing and most people are completely sure that (horrible person) would be a good cult leader.

Then the horrible person asks individuals to support their conclusions about why cults are a good thing and why they would be a good leader.

Then the horrible person starts asking for donations and commitments, etc.

Who do we tell about these things? They have organizations for reporting security vulnerabilities for computer systems so the professionals get them... where do you report security vulnerabilities for the human mind?

Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 05:07:56PM *  16 points [-]

An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:50:09AM *  1 point [-]

Dark Tactic:

  1. An unwitting research company could be contracted to do a survey by an unethical organization.
  2. The survey could use the trick where by asking some question that people will mostly say "yes" to and then ask a similar question later where the wording is slightly changed to agree with the viewpoint of the unethical organization.
  3. Most people end up saying they agree with the viewpoint of the unethical organization.
  4. The reputation of the research company is abused as the unethical organization claims they "proved" that most people agree with their point of view.
  5. A marketing campaign is devised around the false evidence that most people agree with them.

They already trick people in less expensive ways, though. I was taught in school that they'll do things like ask 5 doctors whether they recommend something and then saying "4 of 5 doctors" recommend this to imply 4 of every 5 doctors when their sample was way too small.

Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 05:07:56PM *  16 points [-]

An instrumental question: how would you exploit this to your advantage, were you dark-arts inclined? For example, if you are a US presidential candidate, what tactics would you use to invisibly switch voters' choice to you? Given that you are probably not better at it than the professionals in each candidate's team, can you find examples of such tactics?

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:41:25AM *  9 points [-]

Dark tactic: Have we verified that it doesn't work to present them with a paper saying what their opinion is even if they did NOT fill anything out? I explain how that might work This tactic is based on that possibility:

  1. An unethical political candidate could have campaigners get a bunch of random people together and hand them a falsified survey with their name on it, making it look like they filled it out. The responses support a presidential candidate.

  2. The unethical campaigner might then say: "A year ago, (too long for most people to remember the answers they gave on tests) you filled out a survey with our independent research company, saying you support X, Y and Z." If authoritative enough, they might believe this.

  3. "These are the three key parts of my campaign! Can you explain why you support these?"

  4. (victim explains)

  5. "Great responses! Do you mind if we use these?"

  6. (victim may feel compelled to say yes or seem ungrateful for the compliment)

  7. "I think your family and friends should hear what great supports you have for your points on this important issue, don't you?"

  8. (now new victims will be dragged in)

  9. The responses that were given are used to make it look like there's a consensus.

Comment author: TimS 20 September 2012 06:24:52PM 2 points [-]

Now I'm alternating between laughing and crying. :(

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:20:52AM 0 points [-]

Awww. I might have discovered a flaw in this study, TimS. Here you go

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 07:06:07AM *  13 points [-]

An alternate explanation:

Maybe the years of public schooling that most of us receive cause us to trust papers so much, that if we see something written down on a paper, we feel uncomfortable opposing it. If you're threatened with punishment for not regurgitating what is on an authority's papers daily for that many years of your life, you're bound to be classically conditioned to behave as if you agree with papers.

So maybe what's going on is this:

  1. You fill out a scientist's paper.

  2. The paper tells you your point of view. It looks authoritative because it's in writing.

  3. You feel uncomfortable disagreeing with the authority's paper. School taught you this was bad.

  4. Now the authority wants you to support the opinion they think is yours.

  5. You feel uncomfortable with the idea of failing to show the authority that you can support the opinion on the paper. (A teacher would not have approved - and you'd look stupid.)

  6. You might want to tell the authority that it's not your opinion, but they have evidence that you believe it - it's in writing.

  7. You behave according to your conditioning by agreeing with the paper, and do as expected by supporting what the researcher thinks your point of view is.

I think this might just be an external behavior meant to maintain approval of an authority, not evidence that they've truly changed their minds.

I wonder what would happen if the study were re-done in a really casual way with say, crayon-scrawled questions on scraps of napkins instead of authoritative looking papers.

Also, I wonder how much embarrassment it caused when they seemed to fill out the answers all wrong and how embarrassment might have influenced these people's behavior. Imagine you're filling out a paper (reminiscent of taking a test in school) but you filled out the answers all wrong. Horrified by the huge number of mistakes you made, might you try to hide it by pretending you meant to fill them out that way?

Comment author: Sarokrae 20 September 2012 09:27:37PM *  3 points [-]

I don't speak for all of Less Wrong here, but spending two years at Cambridge has already primed me to have an instinctive tribal urge to attack anyone who attacks elitism, because they tend to be Guardian comment section class warfare types, aka "the other side". It is a mindkill topic for me, so it's probably a mindkill topic for a lot of people here. It might even be a mindkill topic for you, I don't know. But it does mean you need to tread really carefully when you talk about it. There's a reason I need to consciously shrug off Guardian articles, and make myself not read through 10 pages of comments that will make me angry.

Guardian commenters are at least the more intelligent face of "the other side"; I understand there are many more people in both the US and the UK who share those views but are much less eloquent about them.

The way you use the word "smear" is telling my System 1 that you are on "the other side", which makes it hard to sympathise with you at all. In fact I can physically feel the indignant mindkill response rising in myself right now, so I'm going to stop talking, but I hope I've made my point.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 05:13:00AM *  2 points [-]

I can physically feel the indignant mindkill response rising in myself right now

I admire how you've identified your reaction as a mindkill response. I don't know whether this is a mindkill topic for me. I am not even sure that we disagree. I care specifically that people do not abuse or take advantage of each other verbally or otherwise, that people should not feel owed something by strangers, and that people should not make excuses to dominate one another. Class and intellect are not excuses for any of these things to me. Aside from those specifics, I don't feel any tenacious urges to rend anyone's ideas asunder.

Are we in agreement about this?

Because I have barely read any of the writing by "Guardian comment section class warfare types" I have very little idea what these two sides are like. Your post brings me into an awareness of the fact that there are groups of people who identify as "elitists". Other than one specific (Mensa, which I view as a place where people who are lonely due to the differences that giftedness causes go to meet kindred spirits, and where people who are suffering from boredom go to alleviate ennui because they have a greater need for a challenge) and a vague sense that there must be overbearing jerks somewhere who call themselves elitists (I've met a few abusive intellectuals and I figure they must form groups somewhere) I was not aware that any groups actually identified as "elitists" or would want to defend that.

I have observed though, that mentioning intelligence differences is likely to trigger anger and the word "elitism" appears during those times.

I hate this reaction, so I try to be careful with phrasing.

Would you mind explaining these two sides?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 May 2012 04:23:52AM 20 points [-]

No transcript. But I do this professionally all the time. Clients frequently come to me with a design in mind for a solution, and it's often important to back them up and get them to tell me what the problem actually is.

Usually, I start with the question "How would you be able to tell that this problem had been solved?" and repeat it two or twenty times in different words until someone actually tries to answer it.

On one occasion I handed a client my pen and asked whether it was a solution to their problem. They looked at me funny and said it wasn't. I asked them how they knew that, and after a while one of them said "well, for one thing, it doesn't do X" and I said "great!", took the pen back, and wrote "has to do X". Then I handed them the pen back and said "OK, suppose I add the ability to do X somehow to this pen. Is it a solution to your problem now?" and after a couple of iterations they got it and started actually telling me what their problem was.

The thing that used to astonish me is how often the proposed solution utterly fails to even address the problem articulated by the same person who proposed the solution. I've come to expect it.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 04:40:15AM *  1 point [-]

Usually, I start with the question "How would you be able to tell that this problem had been solved?" and repeat it two or twenty times in different words until someone actually tries to answer it.

What a true and hilarious depiction of life. I have the exact same problem doing web development. Because the people giving me projects are not IT people they tend to come up with totally dysfunctional solutions. Yet they almost always start by telling me how they want the problem solved. I have to dig to find out what the problem is first but I just ask them "What result do you want?" or "What purpose do you want this to serve?" and say "I can't make it serve the purpose without knowing what the purpose is." That works for me, without me having to ask them 20 times. Then again maybe you're doing projects in radically different contexts all the time, or with completely different people who vary in their ability to see the point in answering that question. I work with a limited number of people and contexts, all of which I understand pretty well, so my problem clarification process is pretty simple.

Comment author: Yvain 18 September 2012 10:28:23AM *  36 points [-]

If you are at all interested in rationality it would be a huge shame for you to skip the Sequences.

Yes, a lot of the material in the Sequences could also be obtained by reading very very carefully a few hundred impenetrable scholarly books that most people have never heard of in five or ten different disciplines, supplemented by a few journal articles, plus some additional insights by "reading between the lines", plus drawing all the necessary connections between them. But you will not do this.

The Sequences condense all that information, put it in a really fun, really fascinating format, and transfer all of it into the deepest levels of your brain in a way that those hundred books wouldn't. And then there's some really valuable new material. Luke and Eliezer can argue whether the new material is 30% of the Sequences or 60% of the Sequences, but either number is still way more output than most people will produce over their entire lives.

If your worry is that they will just be recapitulating things you already know, I am pretty doubtful; I don't know your exact knowledge level, but they were pretty exciting for me when I first read them and I had college degrees in philosophy and psychology which are pretty much the subjects covered. And if they are new to you, then from a "whether you should read them" point of view it doesn't matter if Eliezer copied them verbatim off Wikipedia.

Seriously. Read the Sequences. Luke, who is the one arguing against their originality above, says that they are the one book he would like to save if there was an apocalypse. I would have to think a long time before saying the same but they're certainly up there.

Also, as a fellow doctor interested in utiltiarianism/efficient charity, I enjoyed your blog and associated links.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 04:25:26AM 2 points [-]

The sequences need a summary like the one you just wrote, the way books have a summary on the cover. Maybe this should be taken as a hint that you'd get more mileage out of the sequences with a really good description placed prominently in front of them. That could quickly re-frame non-originality claims as being irrelevant by plainly stating that they're an accessible and entertaining way to learn about logic and bias (implying that the presentation is valuable even if some of the content can be found elsewhere), with (whatever amount) of new content on X, Y, Z topics. If you choose to write such a description, I'd really like to know what you got out of them that your philosophy and psychology degrees didn't give you.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 September 2012 02:04:28PM 6 points [-]

And lo, people began tweeting:

Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences" are mostly not original

Which is false. This pushes as far in the opposite wrong direction as the viewpoint it means to criticize.

Evolutionary biology, the non-epistemological part of the exposition of quantum mechanics, and of course heuristics and biases, are all not original. They don't look deceptively original either; they cite or attributed-quote the sources from which they're taken. I have yet to encounter anyone who thinks the Sequences are more original than they are.

When it comes to the part that isn't reporting on standard science, the parts that are mostly dealt with by modern "philosophers" rather than experimental scientists of one kind or another, the OP is vastly overstating how much of the Sequences are similar to the standard stuff out there. There is such a vast variety of philosophy that you can often find a conclusion similar to anything, to around the same degree that Leibniz's monadology anticipated timeless quantum mechanics, i.e., not very much. The motivations, the arguments by which things are pinned down, the exact form of the conclusions, and what is done with those conclusions, is most of the substance - finding a conclusion that happens to look vaguely similar does not mean that I was reporting someone else's academic work and failing to cite it, or reinventing work that had already been done. It is not understating any sort of "close agreement" with even those particular concluders, let alone the field as a whole within which those are small isolated voices. Hofstadter's superrationality is an acknowledged informal forerunner of TDT. But finding other people who think you ought to cooperate in the PD, but can't quite formalize why, is not the same as TDT being preinvented. (Also TDT doesn't artifically sever decision nodes from anything upstream; the idea is that observing your algorithm, but not its output, is supposed to screen off things upstream. This is "similar" to some attempts to rescue evidential decision theory by e.g. Eels, but not quite the same thing when it comes to important details like not two-boxing on Newcomb's Problem.) And claiming that in principle philosophical intuitions arise within the brain is not the same as performing any particular dissolution of a confused question, or even the general methodology of dissolution as practiced and described by Yudkowsky or Drescher (who actually does agree and demonstrate the method in detail within "Good and Real").

I'm also still not sure that Luke quite understands what the metaethics sequence is trying to say, but then I consider that sequence to have basically failed at exposition anyway. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can point Luke or anyone else at which says the same thing in more academic language.

Several of these citations are from after the originals were written! Why not (falsely) claim that academia is just agreeing with the Sequences, instead?

I don't understand what the purpose of this post was supposed to be - what positive consequence it was supposed to have. Lots of the Sequences are better exposition of existing ideas about evolutionary biology or cognitive biases or probability theory or whatever, which are appropriately quoted or cited within them? Yes, they are. People introducing Less Wrong should try to refer to those sources as much as possible when it comes to things like heuristics and biases, rather than talking like Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow invented the idea of scope insensitivity, so that they don't sound like phyg victims? Double yes. But writing something that predictably causes some readers to get the impression that ideas presented within the Sequences are just redoing the work of other academics, so that they predictably tweet,

Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences" are mostly not original

...I do not think the creation of this misunderstanding benefits anyone. It is also a grave sin to make it sound like you're speaking for a standard academic position when you're not!

And I think Luke is being extremely charitable in his construal of what's "already" been done in academia. If some future anti-Luke is this charitable in construing how much of future work in epistemology and decision theory was "really" all done within the Sequences back in 2008, they will claim that everything was just invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky way back then - and they will be wrong - and I hope somebody argues with that anti-Luke too, and doesn't let any good feeling for ol E. Y. stand in their way, just like we shouldn't be prejudiced here by wanting to affiliate with academia or something.

I get what this is trying to do. There's a spirit in LW which really is a spirit that exists in many other places, you can get it from Feynman, Hofstadter, the better class of science fiction, Tooby and Cosmides, many beautiful papers that were truly written to explain things as simply as possible, the same place I got it. (Interesting side note: John Tooby is apparently an SF fan who grew up reading van Vogt and Null-A, so he got some of his spirit from the same sources I did! There really is an ancient and honorable tradition out there.) If someone encounters that spirit in LW for the first time, they'll think I invented it. Which I most certainly did not. If LW is your first introduction to these things, then you really aren't going to know how much of the spirit I learned from the anncient masters... because just reading a citation, or even a paragraph-long quote, isn't going to convey that at all. The only real way for people to learn better is to go out and read Language in Thought and Action or The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Doing this, I would guess, gave Luke an epiphany he's trying to share - there's a whole world out there, not just LW the way I first thought. But the OP doesn't do that. It doesn't get people to read the literature. Why should they? From what they can see, it's already been presented to them on LW, after all. So they won't actually read the literature and find out for themselves that it's not what they've already read.

There's literature out there which is written in the same spirit as LW, but with different content. Now that's an exciting message. It might even get people to read things.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 04:07:06AM *  2 points [-]

Regardless of whether it's original, you're the one making rationality popular. Inspiring this many people to take more interest in rationality is a profoundly worthwhile accomplishment. The world needs teachers who can motivate them to think more clearly. I'm heartened to see your progress.

Comment author: scav 20 September 2012 08:17:39PM 2 points [-]

And there we depart from the discussion of rationality into the realm of the law. :)

I am pleased to be able to give an immediate unequivocal answer on whether this is likely to be a problem: I have no idea.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 September 2012 03:20:54AM -2 points [-]

lolol I like these points as well. (:

Comment author: shminux 20 September 2012 08:15:27PM 4 points [-]

The FAI hidden deep in the poll code logic refuses to run stupid and trollish polls.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 09:37:56PM 1 point [-]

LMAO

I disagree with the sentiment but I can still laugh at good humor.

Comment author: scav 20 September 2012 08:09:37AM 12 points [-]
  1. Most of the commenters here refrain from being antisocial dicks. There's no reason to believe anonymous polling will change that.

  2. Anyone actually making life-or-death decisions on the basis of an internet forum poll has a non-trivial chance of being selected out of the gene pool for related reasons.

  3. Sometimes you want or can accept brutal answers.

  4. Individual responsibility. You can't legislate for or even concern-troll people into having common sense, even assuming common sense is a well-defined and useful property.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 05:14:44PM *  1 point [-]

Another thought: Just because a person asking people on the internet whether they should kill themselves isn't likely to survive in any case, this does not mean that LessWrong wouldn't be sued if said person posted a poll and it resulted in their death. For whatever reason, the US legal system has been known to grant large sums of money to people who are harmed by things that many consider inadvisable or "no-brainers".

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 05:10:28PM 1 point [-]

My poll is now broken. The specific answers don't show up anymore in the results, only the totals at the bottom of each question show. Elitism Poll

Comment author: Morendil 10 September 2012 10:09:10AM 17 points [-]

I don't think the problem is my ego. Mostly because I can admit that I can't figure out in advance how LessWrong is going to react.

Of the 6 posts you've submitted so far, 5 were meta-discussion, and 4 were calls to change Less Wrong. My hunch is that the overall response you're seeing is mostly determined by that. Try sticking to writing only about substantial issues for a while.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 08:38:26AM *  1 point [-]

Okay. That's a good point. Though I'd like to ask you to take a moment to understand where I'm coming from:

I find LessWrong, and go "A clearing of sanity in this jungle of irrationality? Great!" I see that the clearing of sanity wants to improve it's website in John's proposed rewrites thread. (I thought he had been chosen to do this task but evidently, he just up and started a thread.)

As a web professional who knows things about web marketing, I could see that if LW wants to grow, they're doing it wrong. I say so in John's thread. This doesn't get anywhere, so I make a chart, and I post about it.

This becomes one of the top 30 discussions of all time. I volunteer to help LessWrong grow, and I'm given access to the LessWrong Google Analytics account.

A bunch of people commented with concerns about how growth could destroy the culture in the discussions, including a link to the wiki on the Eternal September phenomenon.

I discovered a comment that I found upsetting about "keeping out the intellectual riff-raff" and told Luke about it. I mention in an email that "my ethics do not allow me to do work for an organization that allows elitism." I assumed he did not want LessWrong to have a reputation for "elitism" (regardless of how it's defined internally, the external world will most likely think it looks bad) so I figured he'd do something about it.

Now I'm in a pickle. I do not want to destroy the nice clearing of sanity by deluging it in newbies, but I have volunteered to help it grow. Being a responsible person, I can neither forget the volunteer offer or just risk destroying the culture without even thinking it through. Instead of giving up, I think of solutions to the problem and invite the group to criticize these and share their wisdom with me in my Preventing "endless September" discussion.

Luke says he's not very worried about endless September even though Eliezer is definitely worried about discussion quality and a whole bunch of people posted concerns, but he invites me to discuss it because he might change his mind.

My concerns are complex and they won't fit in a comment, and people had been interested in criticizing my ideas so far, so I make a new thread, a call for agreement. Bad idea if you go by the popularity of that, but I've noted to self that people prefer to have few to no meta threads and hopefully, my original reasons are understandable.

A bunch more people express that they're in favor of "elitism" most notably in a comment with over 20 upvotes: "LessWrong is elitist:" ... "I wish LessWrong was more elitist!". Though it's still not clear what they mean, I find the amount of "elitism" talk to be rather alarming, because calling one's self or group "elitist" makes a very bad impression, even if you guys are all wonderful people. But for all I know, the 20+ people that upvoted that comment interpreted it in the worst possible sense of the word and really did mean to express that they're jerks, and may have not even stopped to consider whether the original commenter didn't mean it that way before pressing the upvote button.

At this point, two new obstacles to me helping LessWrong grow appear: One, helping LessWrong grow in order to be seen as "elitist" by the world will only smear their public reputation. This would hurt the site and make the parent organization look bad. Two, if LessWrong really is "elitist" in the nasty sense of the word, I have to refuse to help them for ethical reasons.

The people here are describing themselves and each other in public as "elitist". But some of them use their real names on the forum. This is the internet where what you say might last forever. Yet here they are smearing themselves and each other, the LessWrong website, and the Singularity Institute (by association), as "elitist".

Nobody seems to think that this is a bad idea but me. The clearing of sanity in a jungle has begun to look too much like the jungle itself to me. At this point, it's either try to explain it to them or revoke my offer to volunteer and leave the site. I figure "These guys care about rationality, right? How hard can it be? I'll explain my view and we'll probably come to a nice sensible agreement of some kind."

That attempt (this thread) didn't go over too well, for reasons that still aren't completely clear to me due to the large number of completely different criticisms. Few have responded to the topic itself, so I don't really know whether people agree or disagree. Some people think they speak for the group, but I have never seen that work out on LessWrong - so far, those I've seen speaking for the group have been verifiably incorrect. So I made a poll. Where I am at right now is that even though some (Schminux, Mitchell_Porter) seem to think I have potential to be a good writer here, I am so terribly put off by the way people are smearing themselves as elitists that if it doesn't get resolved somehow, I'm more likely to throw up than ever write you guys an article.

I either have to try to resolve my concerns about the "elitism" talk, or go do something better with my time than stay here being smeared as an "elitist" with the rest of you.

If anyone can suggest a resolution to this problem, I'm more than willing to hear it.

Comment author: scav 20 September 2012 08:09:37AM 12 points [-]
  1. Most of the commenters here refrain from being antisocial dicks. There's no reason to believe anonymous polling will change that.

  2. Anyone actually making life-or-death decisions on the basis of an internet forum poll has a non-trivial chance of being selected out of the gene pool for related reasons.

  3. Sometimes you want or can accept brutal answers.

  4. Individual responsibility. You can't legislate for or even concern-troll people into having common sense, even assuming common sense is a well-defined and useful property.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 08:18:07AM 0 points [-]

Ok good points. I like these.

Comment author: billswift 10 September 2012 08:19:24PM *  1 point [-]

You are grossly over-simplifying anti-intellectualism, some streams of which are extremely valuable. Your claim only fits the "thalamic anti-intellectual", one of at least five broad types Eric Raymond discusses.

The most important and useful to society is the "epistemic-skeptical anti-intellectual. His complaint is that intellectuals are too prone to overestimate their own cleverness and attempt to commit society to vast utopian schemes that invariably end badly." Of course lefties who want to change society to fit their theories try to smear them with claims like yours, but:

Because it’s extremely difficult to make people like F. A. Hayek or Thomas Sowell look stupid enough to be thalamic or totalitarian enough to be totalizers, the usual form of dishonest attack intellectuals use against epistemic skeptics is to accuse them of being traditionalists covertly intent on preserving some existing set of power relationships. Every libertarian who has ever been accused of conservatism knows about this one up close and personal.

And:

"If “intellectuals” really want to understand and defeat anti-intellectualism, they need to start by looking in the mirror. They have brought this hostility on themselves by serving their own civilization so poorly. Until they face that fact, and abandon their neo-clericalist presumptions, “anti-intellectualism” will continue to get not only more intense, but more deserved."

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 07:15:42AM 0 points [-]

Interesting link, however, this looks like a tangent. If this is more related than I realize, please point out the connection.

Comment author: cata 10 September 2012 06:30:36AM *  4 points [-]

I don't think it's useful to argue about the word "elitism" any longer. I think most people already agree with most of the points in your post about "elitism" except for the actual actions we should take as a result.

I think that the problem with making a beginner and advanced section is basically shame. In lieu of a quantifiable metric that classifies people into the two sections (not likely) it's going to be very hard for people in the "lower" section to admit that the people in the "higher" section are actually better writers or smarter or more rational or whatever, even if they are. The foundation of anti-intellectualism in the real world is a bunch of people in lower sections sneering at people in higher sections. With that as a backdrop, I don't think that the lower section would be a fertile place for actual self-improvement.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 07:10:07AM *  -2 points [-]

Actually, I've had multiple responses (to other threads) where people confidently state that the other people think this or that, and they're completely, verifiable wrong. I've got people saying stuff in this thread like many here are fine with being called "elitist" which is a fundamental disagreement with my stance - I'm not fine with it and I think it makes LessWrong look bad. I think there's some confusion over what my main point is. I made a lot of points, so that may be why. For these reasons, I created an elitism poll which I hope will help me understand what people think on the most important points.

In lieu of a quantifiable metric that classifies people into the two sections (not likely) it's going to be very hard for people in the "lower" section to admit that the people in the "higher" section are actually better writers or smarter or more rational or whatever, even if they are.

I suggested a test in Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx

A test won't deter ignorant cheaters, but they can force them to educate themselves. Questions can be worded in such a way that they serve as a crash course in reasoning in the event that someone posts a cheat sheet or registrants look up all the answers on the internet.

Some would be motivated to barrel through it even though they're not good at rational thought, but at least then they'd probably begin to get an idea of what an advanced rationalist is like. I think a lot of people would choose to hang back because such a questionnaire would make it seem too challenging to those who haven't developed their abilities yet. If you'd like to criticize that idea, I'd appreciate it, but it will be much easier for me to find that criticism later if it's on the endless September thread.

Comment author: MaoShan 20 September 2012 03:37:24AM *  -2 points [-]

I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 06:47:03AM *  8 points [-]

This is an especially good point because you're currently able to change the question after the results are in, allowing you to prank the poll takers by making their answers seem to support anything you feel like.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2012 05:35:13AM 7 points [-]

I don't know if it's specifically addressed anywhere in the Terms of Use, but free use of polls can have some very hurtful results; it might be helpful to somewhere post a guide to what type of polls are appropriate and tolerated.

What? About the same as the what you could write in comments already but prettier.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 06:43:49AM *  0 points [-]

Here's one: What if someone takes a poll asking if they should kill themselves? People could write "yes" in the comments, but they can select "yes" in a poll anonymously.

This may lead to more brutal answers to questions. The questions will be limited to whatever the poll creator types in, but that doesn't mean everyone will use common sense while creating their polls.

You may argue "they can already use comments as a polling system using karma" but I would then argue "okay, MaoShan still has a point, and it applies to karma, too."

Also

Comment author: Epiphany 20 September 2012 06:23:48AM *  10 points [-]

Oooh great idea. Bugs / Suggestions:

  1. The answers are transformed into this tiny little poll code with a poll id, so I assume it's being saved to a database. However, the questions are not being saved with them. I can edit my question after the poll has been answered. This may result in some pranks later where you ask some obvious question like "does the earth revolve around the sun" or whatever and everyone answers "yes" and then you can change your question to "are you a Scientologist?" and you will see everyone's votes saying "yes" to that. Much more malicious changes are possible, of course. Also, if the questions aren't stored in the database with the answers, you won't have as many options later for doing cool things with your database full of polls.

  2. The code: [Poll] does not work because it's upper case, but this is not an obvious reason for poll failure, so one may end up wasting lots of time trying to figure it out or make annoying requests for support. Making this case insensitive is probably a good idea.

  3. The poll seems designed for very short answers. My elitism poll results look bad for that reason.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 15 September 2012 06:39:44AM 1 point [-]

In the context of Epiphany's post, these aren't arbitrary guys:

the ones who do seem good have problems like the above

Comment author: Epiphany 15 September 2012 02:37:47PM *  2 points [-]

If you read it in context, that means:

"the ones who do seem compatible have problems like the above"

There are a lot of incompatible guys trying to make me like them and hoping they can magically "make it work", and the ones who do seem good have problems like the above, and I feel a need to cut it short to prevent dysfunction.

You can be dysfunctional and incompatible, which is a fail. Or you can be functional and incompatible, also a fail. Or you can be compatible and dysfunctional, still a fail.

The only thing that's not a definite fail is compatible + functional.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 15 September 2012 04:46:20AM 7 points [-]

I upvoted this post because it does a good job at presenting your perspective as a woman in such interactions.

However, I don't think it displays a lot of empathy or understanding for the other perspective. I'm not necessarily concluding that you lack such empathy or understanding, but I don't see it in this post. For example, this sentence:

I was understanding about their enthusiasm at first, because I want a nerd, too, but it just doesn't work to date someone when they're acting like you're their last chance.

This is not a very good model of nerdy guys who come on too strong. From their perspective, you (as a woman in a largely-male group) have many more romantic prospects than they do. They can't afford to wait and take things slow, because there's always someone else who is more assertive or has better timing. It's a scenario they've personally observed over and over again. Now, obviously it's detrimental for every guy in this situation to reason this way, as you remark:

I think the crazy male-to-female ratio among nerds has caused more damage to my dating life than anything

It's actually a very good example of the tragedy of the commons. Individually, going after every woman they meet seems like it should improve their chances; collectively, it ends up driving women away and reducing everyone's chances. We would expect rationalist/skeptic/etc. guys to figure this out, but they often don't. Why is this?

Try to imagine being completely romantically alone, through no choice of your own. Imagine this not over the course of weeks or months, but years or even decades. Not one date, not one kiss, hardly even any fun, flirty conversations with interesting, attractive people. This is the stark reality for many nerdy guys, and they often feel powerless to change it.

So, yes, oozing desperation is not a good romantic strategy, but it's not just due to simple social ineptitude or inexperience. While the nerdy guys are trying to keep in mind how women feel when they're constantly pursued (and this is something at which many of us can improve), women should please keep in mind just how lonely and desperate it can feel on the other side.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 September 2012 02:20:21PM *  13 points [-]

The reason I didn't focus on empathy in my previous comment is because I didn't see any reason to think that would be useful to you guys. In my view, we have problems that empathy can't solve. I see now that it would probably be good if I detail some of my empathetic experiences because there's a need to feel like women care and also explain why empathy can't solve the problems I listed. So I did both.

I met a really sweet guy on a dating site that I have things in common with and we started having wonderful conversations. Then I started to notice Asperger's symptoms. Instead of rejecting him immediately, I started giving him information about how he was coming across. We both decided that we were not romantically compatible (for unrelated reasons) but we talked frequently over the next year or so, and I kept giving him information to help him socially. I care about him a lot and it makes me sad to think of him ending up alone, so I helped as much as I could.

I make a point of letting guys know if they make a mistake, with few exceptions. If they seem beyond helping (the occasional crazies), I may back away slowly and vanish. If they send me a message on a dating site that ignores my profile, I ignore them. Otherwise they'll usually get some type of error message from me. I know they need feedback.

There have been three situations in the recent past where I met someone I really liked, but they made a mistake. In each of these three situations, I pointed out the mistake but kept talking to them because I liked them and was hoping they'd come around (well in one case I was hoping that my initial assessment was wrong). I don't do this for every kind of mistake. It really depends on what it is. Sometimes I meet someone I really like but I know I can't save it, so I won't try (though I usually tell them why I'm not continuing). But if I think there's a reasonable chance, I'll try.

It's not like I'm not understanding. It's that there are big problems that no amount of understanding can overcome. Let's look at each of the big problems I listed for a minute. Please consider that I am not deeming these "problems that understanding will not overcome" for arbitrary reasons. Everyone is naive when they're young, me included. Due to this, I got to find out the hard way that certain things will doom a new connection and that there's nothing I can do about it. Here is why they doom new connections:

Bias about incompatibilities and overly optimistic probability estimates

Imagine telling someone that you're not sure you're what they wanted, and they just brush it off and want to proceed anyway. If they're not willing to talk realistically about these things, a few problems result. First, when other people believe we're more compatible than we are, I find it unacceptable to continue to knowingly allow them to believe that. I feel a sense of responsibility about not leading people on, so this situation is unacceptable to me - I can't allow it. Second, I have to wonder whether they're leading me on. If they aren't willing to really look at a potential incompatibility and give me an honest answer, I may very well end up in a relationship that ends in heartbreak because I thought the person would accept something about me that they couldn't. If they're unwilling to face the truth to and make sure to tell me about these things in the beginning, they run a high risk of leading me on by accident. When people feel strongly attracted and that causes them bias like this, it's really, really hard to get through to them. When I have tried to get through to them, this has resulted in me burning out on trying. Worse, it breaks my trust (I can't trust them not to lead me on). The combination of not feeling okay with allowing them to be led on, not trusting that they won't lead me on and being burnt out by trying to wake them up results in an extremely risky situation that is likely to lead to heartbreak for one or both of us. Since there's no way to get an accurate idea of our compatibility in that situation, if I notice they're stuck on optimism bias, I quit.

Early Attachment

When people are attached, they act like they need things from me and expect me to fulfill those needs. Rewind to my teenage years when I had trouble saying no: if people acted like they needed things from me, I would try to make them happy. Since I wasn't doing these things based on a mutually beneficial relationship, I would inevitably burn out - I was trying to meet their needs, but wasn't getting my own needs met. You run out of juice that way. What's worse is that when you're doing something because you feel expected to instead of out of a genuine sense of love and connection, it's obvious. The result is that they sense this, and they demand more affection to compensate. For that reason, the burnout comes on rapidly. Of course, people who are attached too early don't see the flaw in being attached too early. If they did, they wouldn't become attached too early - or maybe they don't know how to avoid it. It's for those reasons, I think, that they never seem to go "Yes, I am attached too early." and take responsibility for their own needs. Instead, when the difference in attachment is noticed, their solution is to try anything they can think of to get me attached, too. We all know how hard it can be to stay rational in emotional situations. We know that relationships are governed by reality the same way everything else is. Therefore we can easily see that it's both important and difficult to stay rational regarding relationship decisions. Being subjected to somebody you like trying to make you feel attached to them puts you in a risky situation where you're likely to become irrational and make a relationship decision that explodes later on. Anyone who has experienced the misery of heartbreak can surely imagine how terrifying it is to be in a situation where you're rational enough to see that it's likely, but not certain you'll be strong enough to resist temptation. For that reason, people put in this situation tend to run screaming.

Moving too fast / expectations

The main reason moving too fast is unworkable for me is that it creates expectations I can't fulfill, and the reason unreasonable expectations are unworkable is because people don't let you change their expectations - instead, they are judging you by those expectations. For instance, they expect me to have more intense feelings for them than I'm ready for. Being unable to produce these, and unwilling to lie, I must tell them that I'm not feeling as interested as they are. If they really are expecting me to move as fast as they do the reaction I've had is that they assume I'm never going to be interested because I'm not intensely interested right away. Then they go into sour grapes mode. Attempting to convince them that I'm not sour would be hard enough in and of itself, but I'd also have to convince them that their expectations were unrealistic. That would come across like whining about being rejected or attempting to circumvent the person's judgment. When someone rejects me, it's best to respect their decision - no matter what it was based on - and move along.

I do understand that a lot of guys feel like they're going to be alone forever. I've had those feelings, too. Don't think that women don't ever feel that. It's worse for the guys because of the gender ratio, but it's not like we can't relate at all. Finding the right person is hard. I am complicated, and this results in there being a lot of incompatibilities to consider. It's not easy for me, either.

The truth is, I have no idea how I would ever make dysfunctional behaviors like these work for me in a dating context. It seems ill advised to even attempt to do that, so I won't. You said "oozing desperation is not a good romantic strategy, but it's not just due to simple social ineptitude or inexperience." and what I'm saying is "social ineptitude and inexperience do not just reek of desperation, they make dating broken in ways I can't work with." I hope you see the reason why I focused on these things in my post is not because I'm not empathetic but because, from my point of view, the biggest problem is that a lot of guys don't realize that the things they are doing make the connection unhealthy and dysfunctional.

It seems to be a common attitude that the women need to realize that the guys are having a really hard time just finding the sorts of women they like, let alone getting the practice needed for good social skills. I do realize this. In fact, I do not see the gender ratio problem as being "due to creepers" - to me, that's just another symptom of a different underlying cause which is nobody's fault.

It's actually a very good example of the tragedy of the commons. Individually, going after every woman they meet seems like it should improve their chances; collectively, it ends up driving women away and reducing everyone's chances. We would expect rationalist/skeptic/etc. guys to figure this out, but they often don't. Why is this?

I think they get sucked in by the experience. It takes a lot of emotional control to fight back things like optimism bias, attachment and unrealistic expectations when you're compelled by mating instincts, pressured by hormones and lifelong romantic dreams are clouding your mind. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of intelligent guys act like they're sort of "drunk" on the experience.

I developed emotional control through meditation to prevent myself from taking a "drunken" approach to romance. That's what I'd recommend for anyone having these problems.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 September 2012 01:36:02AM *  0 points [-]

People doing research on dyslexia or other learning disorder symptoms (like the overly literal interpretations that autistic people have) might have found something interesting. Dyslexia isn't just a reading problem, they can also make characteristic mistakes when speaking and listening to words. Learning disorder research is not quite directly applicable to the average population (though I read somewhere that 1 in 6 has a learning disorder) but doing something like searching for the words to describe dyslexic errors might lead you to interesting places.

Comment author: Kindly 14 September 2012 08:46:03PM *  0 points [-]

Sorry, I didn't mean to misquote you. When I said "a policy of "not using the word "elitist""" I meant it as shorthand for the second policy you suggested (the one under the letter B), not as a summary.

And I'm afraid you misunderstood my question. I didn't mean to ask why "Not letting people behave in an abusive or insulting way toward people who may not have the same education or IQ" is a good idea -- that's pretty much obvious. What my question was, what makes you think this needs to be an explicit policy?

(By the way, I would appreciate it if you didn't confuse my own point of view with the "Less Wrong point of view". If such a thing even exists, I'm not a spokesperson for it.)

Comment author: Epiphany 15 September 2012 01:20:16AM *  -2 points [-]

Oh I misread your post. Okay. Now I am baffled as to why you don't seem to agree that it would be good to have a policy. Well here are a few reasons:

1.) If there's no formal policy against elitism, and there are a bunch of people creating the appearance of elitism on the site, that looks bad. It looks much better if we have it in writing that the people who run the site don't want elitism.

2.) It's obvious to you and me that that's a bad way to act, but it's not obvious to everybody. If a bunch of people create the appearance of elitism on a website, might it be because they are elitists? That was what I thought at first... I didn't think a group of people would be crazy enough to brand themselves as elitists unless they actually were elitists. I did think to question that perception, but it still seems like a valid question to ask whether the reason these people seem so willing to look like elitists might be a sign that they actually are.

3.) If a bunch of people create the appearance of elitism on a website, isn't that likely to draw elitists? I would think so. And if people are getting away with creating the appearance of elitism, that may encourage elitists who are attracted to this site from acting in an abusive manner. Having a policy may prevent that or encourage moderators to do something about it after the fact.

Sorry if the misinterpretation annoyed you.

Comment author: Alicorn 14 September 2012 08:02:29PM 8 points [-]

Can you stop using the word "elitist"? You can go on mentioning it, since part of your claim seems to be about where that word should and should not appear, but please stop using it.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 September 2012 01:13:40AM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Comment author: Kindly 14 September 2012 01:01:29PM 6 points [-]

You're over-reacting to one comment, which made its point well despite using a word you disapprove of. It's not as though Less Wrong identifies itself to the world at large as elitist (although some people, and indeed some users here, may describe it that way).

Furthermore, a policy of "not using the word "elitist"" is completely orthogonal to a policy of "not being abusive to lower IQ people". What makes you think the latter is necessary?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 07:29:33PM *  -2 points [-]

What makes you think the latter is necessary?

(I accidentally misread Kindlys post, the response to his actual wording is in a comment below.)

Would you go into a room full of strangers and announce that you're an elitist? Have you ever tried talking about this with everyday people? Talking about intellectual differences, giftedness, elitism, etc. often triggers a bad reaction, even if you try to do it carefully. This is socially inept to an extreme. When the masses don't like something, they don't stop to make distinctions about it. If you guys aren't doing anything to prevent users from smearing the whole organization as "elitist" then all of you are going to be deemed guilty by association. There are people using their real names here - their IRL reputations may be effected by elitism or the appearance of elitism. Just as you shouldn't abuse a person by slandering them, you shouldn't abuse a group of people by smearing them all as elitists - unless they deserve that. That's why it's important - because people like me take offense to being labeled an "elitist", knowing what resentment that can provoke in the average Joe, and I don't appreciate being smeared this way with the rest of you.

Also, don't misquote my wording. What I said was that people shouldn't be let to smear LessWrong by using the word "elitism" lightly. That's different from banning it from use. I'm essentially saying "don't let them slander the group". Of course, if you guys really do think you're better than everyone else and that you should have special treatment and exceptions to rules, go ahead and use the word "elitist" to describe that, as it will give the rest of the world the right idea. I will definitely be leaving if that's what the group decides, though, and you'll be scaring off the other non elitist intellectuals and donations from anyone who isn't an intellectual elitist.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 08:24:51AM *  0 points [-]

Here's a term that could turn up some interesting stuff: Sapir–Whorf hypothesis it's not exactly about word interpretation errors, but how language influences our concept of the world.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 11 September 2012 02:31:28AM 3 points [-]

The unbalanced gender ratio in the atheist/skeptic/rationalist spheres (and the science/programming spheres, more generally) has negative effects on both genders. Women may feel objectified and marginalized, while men may feel romantically frustrated and hopeless. These reactions can lead to mutually defeating behavior. Typical responses - for women, abandoning those spheres; for men, acting inappropriately toward women - only widen the gender divide and make the problems worse.

I am interested in working toward better outcomes for both genders. My question for the women of LW is this: what specific advice do you have, for either gender, that you think will improve the situation? How confident are you that your advice will be helpful, and on what evidence do you base that confidence?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 08:04:10AM *  0 points [-]

I have evidence-based insight into the gender ratio issue. Although it is not a solution, I think it will help everyone understand the problem better.

I have some unpleasant news which is related to IQ (and LessWrong has a higher than average IQ according to the member surveys). There's something up with genetics and intelligence that goes like this (references included): Although men's and women's IQs are the same on average, there are far more gifted men than women. The explanation is that high intelligence is due to a mutation. Men are more affected by mutations. Therefore they are about twice as likely to get both beneficial and detrimental intelligence mutations, which is why they are unbalanced for gifted populations but even out in population averages. "Diseases inherited in an X-linked recessive pattern mostly affect males, because a second X chromosome usually protects females from showing symptoms." (From: How Are Genetic Disorders Inherited?) See also: Mensa's demographics page where they report a 33% female : 66% male ratio (for the top 2% in IQ).

I've heard it reported by people with very high IQs that the higher the IQ range, the worse the gap is. This may be true if higher IQs require multiple mutations.

If refining rationality, science, etc. or the specific forms of these that interest LW members tend to appeal most to people with high IQs, this ratio is probably, unfortunately, going to affect groups like these whatever you do. Of course, if the male to female ratio is 2:1 in Mensa (unsure what their average IQ is, just that the minimum is the top 2%) this means there's probably room for improvement. However, short of genetic engineering or brain implants, the gender ratio problem is likely to persist for high IQ groups like this even if a perfect strategy was used for making women feel more comfortable.

If the important thing is to be able to have children one day, then creating or using a service for finding intelligent women who are willing to have children for others would be one way.

Another idea might be encouraging women to work extra hard to refine their rational thinking skills, explaining that they'll interest more intelligent men that way. As we know, women can be picky and they tend to have a preference for intelligence. If they know that smart guys are looking for rational women, some of them may devote attention to it the way that many women currently devote attention to hair and make-up. Not all women will be interested, and it won't solve the incompatibilities that IQ differences cause, but it may help bridge gaps that aren't too great and lead to there being more female rationalists.

I feel that addressing the "creepiness" issues could go a long way to get interested women interacting more. Nerdy men are definitely my type but I'm often put off by their behavior. I'd like to date more, but the behaviors I describe here are disheartening, so I'm not nearly as motivated as I could be. Understanding women better is a great first step. I'm glad to see that the guys are looking into what's going on.

Unfortunately, I can't provide you advice or evidence and don't know that anybody can - I'm not aware of any projects or experiments to specifically try to increase the number of females in a male dominated social group.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 September 2012 06:41:21AM 0 points [-]

The harder challenge would be a little later-- if it works, all charitable appeals will look the same.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 07:28:07AM *  0 points [-]

Good one, Nancy. But we might all be more purpose-oriented. It could change us on the inside, if it worked. Even if the appeals looked the same, if people put more toward charity, the result would still be an increase in charitable behavior.

Comment author: Douglas_Reay 09 September 2012 10:07:26AM 11 points [-]

What topics (if any) have you considered posting about (or replying to), but then decided not to because of fear of gender-specific negative response or attention? If there any specific question you'd be interested in participating in a future discussion upon, on the same anonymous lines as this one?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 07:21:18AM 2 points [-]

None. I have far too much self-confidence to be scared off for that reason. I can deal with the frequent disagreements but it took me a looooong time to become comfortable with that. I was people-pleasing and at first I couldn't tolerate the experience of causing or persisting with disagreements because I didn't like making others uncomfortable. I had to train myself to deal with that but I'm good at it now. I have to wonder how many other women would find it hard to put themselves out there and take all the resulting criticism. If women often have a preference for supportive environments, that may be part of the reason for the gender ratio being skewed.

Comment author: MatthewBaker 11 September 2012 09:30:53AM 0 points [-]

What tricks do you use to control yourself while tripping when you dont have people you trust to help you? I have a inkling that the reason I have a harder time teaching role play control to girls is somewhat to do with gender roles but insofar I've failed at deducing why.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 07:02:59AM 1 point [-]

I don't do a lot of role-playing, don't know what tripping is (though I can guess) and don't know why someone would need to trust someone to help with it.

Comment author: Kawoomba 09 September 2012 10:20:58AM 6 points [-]

Do you find the LW males - those for whom you feel you have a reasonably good model - on average to be more openly status-oriented, competitive and aggressive concerning their rationality expertise, compared to your female LW acquaintances?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 07:02:22AM 0 points [-]

I don't have enough interaction with female acquaintances yet.

Comment author: Caspian 09 September 2012 10:28:14AM 12 points [-]

Can you describe some occasions when a woman was creepy towards you at a social event, lesswrong-related or otherwise?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 07:00:46AM *  5 points [-]

I remember being hit on by girls (we were teenagers at the time) who didn't understand boundaries - they would try to make me try women, or try to extract kisses from me. Being persistent about what they want while ignoring the fact that what I wanted was in conflict with their desires is what was creepy.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 09 September 2012 02:13:22PM 2 points [-]

Do men and women suffer from the same cognitive biases (and to the same extent)?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 06:57:39AM 0 points [-]

That's a really, really big question. I think if you want a good answer to that, we'd need to do a study. I'm deeming that outside my ability to determine with a worthwhile level of accuracy.

Comment author: lucidian 11 September 2012 11:37:20AM 6 points [-]

In discussions such as these, how do you prefer that the community refers to its female members? Do you like when female community members are called "women"? "girls"? "females"? Do you actively dislike any of these options? What is your opinion on gender-neutral pronouns, and what do you use for the third-person-singular-neuter? I'm also interested in any other observations you've had on the linguistics of gender.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 06:54:49AM *  1 point [-]

When guys use the word "girls", it makes me wonder if they're teenagers who still spend most of their time with girls. "Females" reminds me of scientific studies... I use it myself if "women" doesn't fit, but due to the association with test subjects, it sounds a bit dehumanizing at times. I like "women" best.

I don't like that we have to use gender pronouns so often, and I wish we had something that never sounded awkward and fit every circumstance. When being gender neutral, I use they/them/their, and may jam them in even if they sound a little off.

Comment author: novalis 10 September 2012 07:51:03AM 4 points [-]

What factors would tend to give you a bad impression of a community, either online or in person? (That's sort of two questions, but they're related)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 06:50:55AM 0 points [-]

I've discovered that there are a few things that can scare me away from an interesting place:

  • Dysfunctional behavior. A lot of people who have sharp minds don't always apply that in the emotional realm and their behavior shows it. There's a difference between harmless instances of social skill failures and a complete failure to develop as a human being. I don't think "irrationality" covers it. I'm speaking more of a lack of moral maturity. The creepers who think the world revolves around them and the various kinds of dysfunctional behaviors that result in people hurting each other emotionally. I was recently disappointed with the amount of dysfunctional behavior I discovered in a group that I liked and have not been back for some time.

  • Elitist behavior, or seeing a bunch of people commit social suicide by smearing the group as "elitist" in public. I considered quitting LessWrong because of that. I decided to stay a bit longer because there's a possibility that the pro "elitism" people will see the error of this and there are enough good things about the group that it seems worthwhile to see whether they reconsider.

Comment author: Douglas_Reay 09 September 2012 09:31:19AM 1 point [-]

What software feature (or policy) would you like to see added to the LessWrong forums and up/down vote system?

(There may or may not be a gender difference in perceived value of proposed features. I don't know. That's why I'm asking.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 06:31:16AM *  1 point [-]

I'd like a policy change:

Due to the widespread elitism or appearance of elitism, I am very concerned. People in the outside world aren't going to make distinctions between a group of people who call themselves "elitists" for harmless reasons versus people who believe they're "better than others" and are therefore entitled to special treatment or to make exceptions to the rules for themselves. It's also a weird surprise because it's in direct conflict with the site's vision - to spread rationality. Spreading rationality necessarily means transmitting it to people who are not good at rational thought, because focusing on transmitting it to people who are already good at it does not qualify as "spreading" it.

Imagine going into a room full of strangers and announcing that you are an elitist. Does this strike no one else as socially inept? Yet here we are in public, and people are announcing to the world of strangers that we are elitists. I don't like being smeared as an "elitist" by these people, I know the world will see me as guilty by association. The rest of the world isn't known for being rational. If they see a group of people calling themselves "elitists" they won't stop to make distinctions. They'll just err on the side of caution by assuming you guys are a bunch of overbearing jerks. This is about as smart, in my view, as going back in time few hundred years and claiming to enjoy casting magic spells. It doesn't matter if you're referring to an RPG game, you just invited a witch hunt.

Maybe you guys figure anybody intelligent will agree with your attitude. No. It's a perfectly constructive use of one's intelligence to take measures to avoid committing social suicide. That this group allows itself to be associated with the term "elitism" - that nobody moderates those comments and that they're being voted up to the sky - is a public relations disaster waiting to happen. At first, it didn't even occur to me that the people here might not realize that. That's such a no brainer to me, I assumed you didn't care because you really do think you're better than them, so you can afford to provoke the outside world and just ignore their ire. Now, I am considering that the people on this website may just be socially inept enough to do that and not realize how crazy it looks to non-elitist intellectuals like me.

As I've said before, maintaining quality does not require you to wear a scary word that is used to mean "overbearing jerk". I think you guys need a no elitism policy which includes: A.) Not letting people behave in an abusive or insulting way toward people who may not have the same education or IQ. B.) Not smearing the organization by using the word "elitist" lightly to describe LessWrong. I don't want to associate myself with an elitist or "elitist" organization. The only reason I haven't quit already is because I still have a sense of possibility that you guys will eventually grok what an assassination you're launching against your reputations and I think that the good things about this group and the vision you're gathered around make it worth continuing to discuss the topic of elitism with you.

Comment author: wedrifid 09 September 2012 10:23:25AM 3 points [-]

Do you like being treated as a celebrity in threads like this because you have boobs or would you prefer if people stopped obsessing over what sex you are?

Comment author: Epiphany 14 September 2012 05:46:48AM *  14 points [-]

Actually, I have run into enough guys who treat me like I'm the last woman on earth because I'm a female nerd that I've developed an aversion to anything resembling that type of behavior. I was understanding about their enthusiasm at first, because I want a nerd, too, but it just doesn't work to date someone when they're acting like you're their last chance. They want to move too fast, they create expectations, they become biased and won't hear me when I talk about things that may be incompatibilities. That intensity throws a wrench into the process of getting to know someone. I grok their sense of necessity about being careful in how they present themselves, and I approve of this thread (There are a lot of things I wish I could say to guys - we need to communicate, and I have been wishing for an opportunity to do that), but on the individual level, I am easily spooked by signs of early attachment, overly optimistic probability estimates about us working out, and impatience to see signs of an established connection. I go on the alert for these signs of irrationality if a person treats me "like a celebrity" or similar. For the record none of the questions in this thread (so far) have bothered me.

As for whether it feels empowering, no. First of all, my sense of self-worth is not connected to my attractiveness. I am more than my ability to attract a mate. Secondly, being one of the few nerdy women has only served to highlight the fact that dating between nerds is pretty dysfunctional. At first, it was fun to have so much attention (other nerd spot) but it quickly became obvious that more attention does not convert into a larger ratio of real romance opportunities. There are a lot of incompatible guys trying to make me like them and hoping they can magically "make it work", and the ones who do seem good have problems like the above, and I feel a need to cut it short to prevent dysfunction. I think the crazy male-to-female ratio among nerds has caused more damage to my dating life than anything - so that's what I usually think of when I am reminded of it, not how "empowered" I feel.

Comment author: shminux 10 September 2012 06:34:52AM 13 points [-]

I guess you really do want to improve me.

No, not really. I just want to enjoy reading this forum, and your posts interfere with this enjoyment, probably because your ego/skills ratio is too high, at least in my opinion. You are clearly intelligent enough to produce quality contributions (maybe not as good as Yvain's, but few here can match him). Unfortunately, your inflated estimate of how good you are gets in the way. Plus your combative style could use some improvement.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 September 2012 07:05:30AM 4 points [-]

That explains your behavior. The way it looks to me is that I don't predict this audience very well at all. I admit, I'm lost when it comes to figuring out how to present to you guys. I don't think the problem is my ego. Mostly because I can admit that I can't figure out in advance how LessWrong is going to react. I'll keep your criticisms in mind. Thanks again, Shminux.

P.S. I don't know who downvoted you but I liked that you were being so honest, so I put you back up to zero.

Comment author: shminux 10 September 2012 06:00:40AM 9 points [-]

Who is with me?

Apparently you are still not getting that this is a wrong question to ask here. Try something less polarizing, like "what do you think of this suggestion?"

Additionally, feel free to work on your writing style. Like, creating a reasonable summary upfront is generally not a bad idea. Having a title that reflects your main point often works. Reviewing what other people here wrote about the same topic (multiple tiers) and quoting them also strikes me as sensible, though maybe a bit advanced for a new participant.

Comment author: Epiphany 10 September 2012 06:07:12AM *  2 points [-]

Well I tried your ideas. Thanks Shminux. I guess you really do want to improve me. That's very nice of you. I wasn't sure, because of your harsh style before.

I'm sorry I haven't gotten back to your other comments yet. As you can see I've barely written anything for the last few days. I was so horrified by the elitism that I kept seeing ... I lost the will to write here. This discussion may be my last one.

Elitism isn't necessary for refining rationality.

-20 Epiphany 10 September 2012 05:41AM

  Note:  After writing this post, I realized there's a lot I need to learn about this subject.  I've been thinking a lot about how I use the word "elitism" and what it meant to me.  I was unaware that there are a large number of people who use the word to describe themselves and mean something totally different from the definition that I had.  This resulted in my perception that people who were using the word to describe themselves were being socially inept.  I now realize that it's not a matter of social ineptness, that it may be more of a matter of political sides.  I also realized that mind-kill reactions may be influencing us here (myself included).  So, now my goal is to make sure I understand both sides thoroughly to transcend these mind-kill reactions and explain to others how I accomplished this so that none of us has to have them.  I think these sides can get along better.  That is what I ultimately want - for the gifted population and the rest of the world to understand one another better, for the privileged and the disadvantaged to understand one another better, and for the tensions between those groups to be reduced so that we can work together effectively.  I realize that this is not a simple undertaking, but this is a very important problem to me.  I see this being an ongoing project in my life.  If I don't seem to understand your point of view on this topic, please help me update.  I want to understand it.

 

TLDR: OMG a bunch of people seem to want to use the word "elitist" to describe LessWrong but I know that this can provoke hatred.  I don't want to be smeared as an elitist.  I can't fathom why it would be necessary for us to call ourselves "elitists".

 

I have noticed a current of elitism on LessWrong.  I know that not every person here is an elitist, but there are enough people here who seem to believe elitism is a good thing (13 upvotes!?) that it's worth addressing this conflict.  In my experience, the word "elitism" is a triggering word - it's not something you can use easily without offending people.  Acknowledging intellectual differences is a touchy subject also, very likely to invite accusations of elitism.  From what I've seen, I'm convinced that using the word "elitism" casually is a mistake, and referring to intellectual differences incautiously is also risky.

Here, I analyze the motives behind the use of the word elitism, make a suggestion for what the main conflict is, mention a possible solution, talk about whether the solution is elitist, what elitism really means, and what the consequences may be if we allow ourselves to be seen as elitists.

The theme I am seeing echoed throughout the threads where elitist comments surfaced is "We want quality" and "We want a challenging learning environment".  I agree that quality goals and a challenging environment are necessary for refining rationality, but I disagree that elitism is needed.

I think the problem comes in at the point where we think about how challenging the environment should be.  There's a conflict between the website's main vision: spreading rationality (detailed in: Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes) and striving for the highest quality standards possible (detailed in Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism).

If the discussions are geared for beginners, advanced people will not learn.  If the discussions are geared for advanced people, beginners are frustrated.  It's built into our brains.  Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of "Flow: The psychology of optimal experience" regards flow, the feeling of motivation and pleasure you get when you're appropriately challenged, to be the secret to happiness and he explains that if you aren't appropriately challenged, you're either going to feel bored or frustrated depending on whether the challenge is too small or too great for your ability level.

Because our brains never stop rewarding and punishing us with flow, boredom and frustration, we strive for that appropriate challenge constantly.  Because we're not all at the same ability level, we're not all going to flow during the same discussions.  We can't expect this to change, and it's nobody's fault.

This is a real conflict, but we don't have to choose between the elitist move of blocking everyone that's not at our level vs. the flow killing move of letting the challenge level in discussions decrease to the point where it results in everyone's apathy - we can solve this.

Why bother to solve it?  If your hope is to raise the sanity waterline, you cannot neglect those who are interested in rational thought but haven't yet gotten very far.  Doing so would limit your impact to a small group, failing to make a dent in overall sanity.  If you neglect the small group of advanced rationalists, then you've lost an important source of rational insights that people at every level might learn from and you will have failed to attract the few and precious teachers who will assist the beginners in developing further faster.

And there is a solution; summarized in one paragraph:  Make several areas divided by their level of difficulty.  Advanced learners can learn in the advanced area, beginners in the beginner area.  That way everyone learns.  Not every advanced person is a teacher, but if you put a beginner area and an advanced area on the same site, some people from the advanced area will help get the beginners further.  One-on-one teaching isn't the only option - advanced people might write articles for beginners and get through to thousands at once.  They might write practice quizzes for them to do (not hard to implement from a web developer's perspective).  There are other things.  (I won't get into them here.)

This brings me to another question: if LessWrong separates the learning levels, would the separation qualify as elitism?

I think we can all agree that people don't learn well in classes that are too easy for them.  If you want advanced people to improve, it's an absolute necessity to have an advanced area.  I'm not questioning that.  I'm questioning whether it qualifies under the definition of elitism:

e·lit·ism

noun
1.  practice of or belief in rule by an elite.
2.  consciousness of or pride in belonging to a select or favored group.

(dictionary.com)

Spreading rationality empowers people. If you wanted to take power over them, you'd horde it.  By posting our rational insights in public, we share them.  We are not hoarding them and demanding to be made rulers because of our power.  We are giving them away and hoping they improve the world. 

Using rationality as a basis for rule makes no sense anyway.  If you have a better map of the territory, people should update because you have a better map (assuming you overcome inferential distances).  Forcing an update because you want to rule would only amount to an appeal to authority or coercion.  That's not rational.  If you show them a more complete map and they update, that isn't about you - you should be updating your map when the time comes, too.  It's the territory that rules us all.  You are only sharing your map.

For the second definition, there are two pieces.  "Consciousness of or pride in" and "select or favored group".  I can tell you one thing for certain: if you form a group of intellectual elitists, they will not be considered "select or favored" by the general population.  They will be treated as the scum on the bottom of scum's shoe.

For that reason, any group of intellectual elitists will quickly become an oxymoron.  First, they'll have to believe that they are "select and favored" when they are not, and perhaps justify this with "we are so deserving of being select and favored that no one can see it but us" (which may make them hopelessly unable to update).  Second, the attitude of superiority is likely to provoke such anti-intellectual counter-prejudice that the resulting oppression could make them ineffectual.  Powerless to get anywhere because they are so hated, their "superiority" will make them into second class citizens.  You don't achieve elite status by being an intellectual elitist.

In the event that LessWrong was considered "select" or "favored" by the outside population, would "consciousness" of that qualify the members as elitists?  If you use the literal definition of "consciousness", you can claim a literal "yes" - but it would mean that simply acknowledging a (hypothetical) fact (independent market research surveys, we'll say) should be taken as automatic proof that you're an arrogant scumbag.  That would be committing Yvain's "worst argument in the world", guilt by association.  We can't assume that everyone who acknowledges popularity or excellence is guilty of wrongdoing.

So let's ask this: Why does elitism have negative connotations? What does it REALLY mean when people call a group of intellectuals "elitists"?

I think the answer to this is in Jane Elliot's brown eyes, blue eyes experiment.  If you're not familiar with it, a school teacher named Jane Elliot, horrified by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to teach her class a lesson about prejudice.  She divided the class into two groups - brown eyes and blue eyes.  She told them things like brown eyed kids are smarter and harder-working than blue eyed kids.  The children reacted dramatically:

"When several of the brown-eyed kids who had problems reading went to their primer that morning, they whizzed through sentences"

"A smart blue-eyed girl, who had never had problems with her multiplication tables, started making all kinds of mistakes."

"During afternoon recess, the girl came running back to Room 10, sobbing. Three brown-eyed girls had ganged up on her, and one had hit her, warning, “You better apologize to us for getting in our way because we’re better than you are."

When people complain of elitism, what they seem to be reacting to is a concern that feeling "better than others" will be used as an excuse for abuse - either via coercion, or by sabotaging their sense of self-worth and intellectual performance.

The goal of LessWrong is to spread rationality in order to make a bigger difference in the world.  This has nothing to do with abusing people.  Just because some people with advanced abilities choose to use them as an excuse to abuse other people, it doesn't mean that anybody here has to do that.  Just because some of us might have advanced abilities and are also aware of them does not mean we need to commit Yvain's "the worst argument in the world" by assuming the guilt that comes with elitism.  We can reject this sort of thinking.  If people tell you that you're an elitist because you want a challenging social environment to learn in, or because you want to make the project that is the LessWrong blog as high quality as it can be, you can refuse to be labeled guilty.

Refusing to be guilty by association takes more work than accepting the status quo but what would happen if we allowed ourselves to be disrespected for challenging ourselves and striving for quality?  If we agree with them, we're viewing positive character traits as part of a problem.  That encourages people to shoot themselves in the foot - and they can point that same gun at all of humanity's potential, demanding that nobody seeks the challenging social environment they need to grow, that nobody sets any learning goals to strive for because quality standards are elitist.  To allow a need for challenges and standards to be smeared as elitist will only hinder the spread of rationality.

How many may forgo refining rationality because they worry it will make them look like an elitist?

These are the reasons I choose to be non-abusive and to send a message to the world that non-abusive intellectuals exist.

What do you think of this?

 

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 19 January 2012 05:17:15PM *  11 points [-]

If trying to save the world requires having more social status than humanly obtainable, then the world is lost, even if it was easy to save...

Comment author: Epiphany 07 September 2012 06:34:38AM -2 points [-]

Unless people wake up to the fact that people are requiring an appeal to authority as a prerequisite for important decisions, AND gain the ability to determine for themselves whether something is a good cause. I think the reason people rely on appeals to popularity, authority and the "respect" that comes with status is that they do not feel competent to judge for themselves.

Comment author: wedrifid 06 September 2012 10:57:16AM 3 points [-]

Votes don't train newbies.

Yes they do.

Being a new users who gets voted down sometimes, I can tell you it seems completely random. I can't tell whether it's a troll, or someone with a vendetta or what it is. And even if I brainstorm a bunch of guesses, the little number at the top of my comment doesn't tell me which one is correct. This expectation that downvotes are going to help new users learn how to behave is even worse than that though, in a whole bunch of ways at once.

You have been given an abundance of explanations regarding people's reactions which you could, if it is your desire, use to gain more support for your comments.

My model of the reception of your comments suggests that you do have several people with a 'vendetta', or at least several people who are highly predisposed to downvote you prior to reading your contributions. But that is to be expected. I get people targetting me all the time and if I didn't it would probably be a sign that I was neglecting my duty. Having a few individuals targetting you isn't a problem. The problem comes when you cannot garner sufficient support from the other, neutral readers to counter the initial downvotes and leave most of your comments as net positive. That is a sign that is worth paying more attention to politics and perception---and again you've got personal feedback you could use toward that end.

Are you really saying that, if motivated, you couldn't work out how to change your behavior such that your comments were more likely to be well received? I mean come on, the thought "Oh, I suppose I should convey less arrogance" is a good starting place for reducing social sanction in just about any social structure that you are relatively new member of. (Note that I am talking specifically about conveyed arrogance, not actual arrogance. People can get away with being completely obstinate and incapable of learning from the words of others so long as they send the right signals of humility.)

Comment author: Epiphany 07 September 2012 12:40:36AM *  0 points [-]

You read that comment completely out of context and also you seem unaware that at first I was not getting constructive criticism. People only started criticizing me after I decided I was tired of unexplained downvotes and started to advertise in various places (at the ends of my discussion posts, and in my various comments expressing an interest in being challenged intellectually) that I genuinely want honest criticism. My experience is that LessWrong members needed to be convinced that it really was okay to criticize me before they started giving me the large amount of helpful feedback you're seeing. You're very bold, Wedrifid, so you probably figure other people are as comfortable criticizing others as you are. Maybe you think I must have been getting bold criticisms this whole time. I wasn't.

The context in which I wrote that comment was this: I was explaining that OTHER new people don't get feedback, in order to explain that the downvotes aren't training them. If you think about it, you even said in your own post that it was the explanation that people use to improve themselves. The votes aren't the same as verbal feedback. Are the other newbies getting the kind of feedback I am? I bet most of them aren't. I was outgoing enough to guess that the reason I wasn't getting feedback is because people didn't feel comfortable criticizing me and chose to begin advertising that I want honest criticisms. I doubt most of your newbies are doing the same thing. Try an experiment. Make a new account. Post things people won't like. See how many of them actually get verbal feedback. Then, advertise that you want constructive criticism. Post the same number of things people won't like, and count how many of those got you verbal feedback.

I find your perspective on vendettas and duty refreshing, so thank you. Your comment makes me feel glad that you think I am worth saving. But since you intended to save me from my own stupidity, I feel a little annoyed that you thought I needed it. Do you observe from my behaviors that I do not apply constructive criticism? That I whine about problems rather than contributing to the solution? My intent was to notify you guys that without feedback, the downvotes don't train newbies. People seem to think they do, but unless people tell you their reasons for pressing the button, it's just a flurry of numbers. The power is not in vote buttons, it's in clear communication.

I definitely want to know when I make a mistake, but if you find yourself typing something to me like "oh, come on" or "are you really" in the future, please consider that I may not actually be stupid enough to warrant it. Thanks.

Comment author: Alicorn 02 September 2012 06:31:04AM 6 points [-]

Public domain is by far the more permissive option. If you want public domain, just go with that.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 06:23:25AM 1 point [-]

I would like to be able to take your advice but I don't know enough about the law to tell who knows enough about the law that I should actually take their advice. This is a riddle.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 02 September 2012 04:08:14PM *  7 points [-]

You missed a more important and fundamental misconception: namely, the OP is trying to apply copyright-related practices (releasing into the public domain, Creative Commons's licenses) to ideas. In other words, he is confusing patents and copyrights.

Furthermore, although it is noble for the OP to try to keep a line of innovation free from patents, the OP's written promise not to apply for a patent on something probably has no legal weight because it was not made in exchange for any kind of consideration. (The requirement that a promise maker obtain some sort of considerations for the promise to be enforceable in a court of law is a basic principle of contract law.). Note that "I hereby place this post in the public domain," and "I hereby give everyone a license to this post under Creative Commons bla bla," are exceptions to the general rule that promises made "without consideration" are not legally enforceable, but, again, releasing into the public domain and Creative Commons's licenses have nothing to do with ideas or patents.

The most important thing about patents is that the vast majority of actors who are sued for infringing a patent are selling at least tens of millions of dollars a year in infringing products or services. In other words, the vast expense of patent litigation means that most people using technology to improve the world can safely ignore patents (plans to improve the world that entail someone's selling tens of millions of dollars a year worth of goods and services probably being the biggest exception).

The second most important thing to know about patents, by the way, is that sometimes venture capitalists will refuse to invest in a company either because the company lacks patents or has competitors who have patents, but this is really just a corollary of the first most important thing about patents, since almost all venture-capital investment is made with the hope that the investee will someday sell at least hundreds of millions of dollars a year in goods and services.

TL;DR: while I commend the OP's generous spirit, his paragraph about patents is unnecessary.

(OP upvoted, BTW.)

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 06:21:12AM 0 points [-]

Thank you. But wait. A copyright and patent are not the same thing. If you release the rights to a patent, might you still retain the copyright, because it is different?

Comment author: Plasmon 02 September 2012 02:07:08PM 7 points [-]

the eternal September effect is primarily caused by new-member with new-member interaction.

An obvious solution : Make the site appear, to new members, as if only (some desired fraction) of members are new.

Distinguish between "new" and "experienced" members. Let new members turn into experienced members when they meet some criteria, possibly post count, karma, or even votes by experienced members. Systematically prevent new members from interacting with too many other new members by simply not showing them the posts made by these other new members.

I'm not actually sure if I think this is a good idea, but it might be worth mentioning anyway.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 06:19:41AM 0 points [-]

This does nothing to increase the capacity of older members to tolerate newbies - and that's important, too. You'd be giving all the older members ... how many times as many messages? I'm new, and I can't keep up with my messages. I can't imagine what it would do if I was an old member, and all of these new people were responding to me. If I were an old member in that situation, I would try to ignore the new users, and also, I would become increasingly annoyed with them demanding so much of my attention. That would lower the value of using the forum, and it may cause old members to quit.

It would also frustrate old members when new members weren't aware of each other's comments. That would be confusing.

Do you see a way to resolve these issues?

Comment author: Xachariah 02 September 2012 07:42:58AM 10 points [-]

Filtering is not the answer.

As noted the eternal September effect is primarily caused by new-member with new-member interaction. Instead of taking cultural cues from established members, new-members take cultural queues from other new-members and learn incorrect cultural lessons. Mechanisms to prevent eternal September are to assimilate new members more rapidly and to dissuade new-members from posting as much until they have been assimilated (and especially dissuade them from influencing other new members). Filtering is only useful in that it retards the acquisition of new recruits slow enough to allow the old recruits to assimilate.

Assuming we're in danger of an eternal September, the correct question to ask is not, "How do we filter better?" but "How do we convince new members to lurk until they're assimilated?"

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 06:11:02AM *  0 points [-]

Mechanisms to prevent eternal September are to assimilate new members more rapidly

There's a limit to how fast this can be done. That's, essentially, why something additional is needed.

dissuade new-members from posting as much until they have been assimilated

Deterring them from posting will ward off good people because they'll lose momentum or be annoyed, and will increase the proportion of thick-skinned and / or persistent types who can deal with the annoyance. Not all thick-skinned / persistent people are bad, some are leaders or are gifted with those abilities, but creating gauntlets of annoyance will increase the proportion of undesirable thick-skinned / persistent types like trolls, newbie debaters, etc.

Essentially, dissuasion IS filtering, so if you're going to filter, you may as well be conscious of it and use a method that is likely to attract the type that you want. My questionnaire would filter for people who like learning or don't mind looking things up. The karma system currently in place filters for trolls and debaters. Dissuading people from posting will exacerbate the effect of the karma system if it remains as-is. The combination of the two would may result in a hideous unintentional filter.

Filtering is only useful in that it retards the acquisition of new recruits slow enough to allow the old recruits to assimilate.

If done well, it would also encourage a higher proportion of people that are the right type, discouraging mainstream people who aren't genuinely interested in the culture from creating a new majority and taking over. Which is why i suggested the questionnaire that I did. That would select for people genuinely interested in rationality, most others won't take the time to fill out such a questionnaire.

"How do we convince new members to lurk until they're assimilated?"

I disagree, but it might be "How do we convince members to lurk until their assimilated without scaring any of them off

Comment author: cousin_it 02 September 2012 11:34:02AM *  1 point [-]

Your description of the problem seems spot on to me, and most of your proposed solution sounds sensible as well. Using a questionnaire to let users graduate into the advanced section seems a little exploitable, though.

One alternative could be requiring a new user to select one of their recent comments for "admission review". If the "reviewers" agree that the comment is unusually good, they let the user in, otherwise they give some guidance on what can be improved, and let the user try again in a week or so. That may also have the side effect of improving the quality of discussion in the easy section, as users try to write comments that are good enough for "admission review".

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 05:58:15AM 0 points [-]

Why is my questionnaire exploitable?

The problem with having old users review new user's comments is:

  1. We haven't verified that they'd be willing to do this.
  2. If a lot of new users come in all at once, that would be a chore.

This might actually scare off old users. Or create a backlog of comments to go through that prevents new users from participating. There's a high risk of this going totally dysfunctional. Unless you see something about it that I don't?

Comment author: [deleted] 02 September 2012 06:52:26PM *  1 point [-]

First: A LessWrong seed bank. If this forest grows diseased or burns to the ground, the means to replant. Already in the LessWrong seed bank: The Sequences, FAQ, User Guide and MediaWiki.

Second: Terms of surrender. When conditions X, Y and Z are met, LessWrong will fold or reboot.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 05:53:58AM 0 points [-]

This is for ideas to prevent disaster, not solve it after the fact. Also, if the suggestion is "Leave the wiki and sequences up", you're essentially saying "Do nothing". This just doesn't read like a plan.

Comment author: Kindly 04 September 2012 04:06:15AM 13 points [-]

People like videos? I hate videos to the point that I will go out of my way to avoid links with videos in them, and I've seen this sentiment expressed by other people here.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 05:42:26AM *  5 points [-]

I hate video because it goes too slow. I can read at least twice as fast as a video goes. It always feels like such an excruciating waste of time. Also, I can't use find in page. I am addicted to find in page. Ctrl-F and me are attached at the hip. Of all the pages I open, the proportion I read in entirety is very small. Ctrl-F is like half my way of navigating the internet. I'm really glad to see someone else express this. I thought i was the only one.

Comment author: Vaniver 03 September 2012 10:41:02PM *  2 points [-]

The right bar that goes off the page is so far unexplained for me - 921 users joined in September 2011, more than three times the number in the months before and after it. If you happen to know what caused that, I would be very interested in finding out.

My prediction is something HPMOR related- either more links to lesswrong in the Author's Notes, or HPMOR itself had a spike that month.

Another way to cut down on new-new interaction is to limit the number of comments someone can make in a time period- if people can only comment once an day until their karma hits 20, and then once an hour until their karma hits 100, and then they're unrestricted, that will explicitly encourage lurking / paying close attention to karma among new members. (It would be gameable, unless you did something like prevent new members from upvoting the comments of other new members, or algorithmically keeping an eye out for people gaming the system and then cracking down on them.)

[edit] The delay being a near-continuous function of the karma- say, 24 hours*exp(-b karma)- might make the incentives better, and not require partitioning users explicitly. No idea if that would be more or less effort on the coding side.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 05:31:52AM *  -1 points [-]

Limiting the posts would cause new users to lose momentum. A lot of them might lose steam after joining and give up. That would be risky. Also, because a large proportion would give up, this would filter users. We'd end up with a larger proportion of the type of user persistent enough to tolerate this. I don't know what that sort of person looks like.

I'll add the idea to the pile, but I can't really sell it if those things aren't addressed.

Comment author: CWG 02 September 2012 11:11:40AM 2 points [-]

Poorly informed ranters wanting to debate does sound annoying, I didn't realize there was a problem with that. It seems to me the best way to deter them would be to paste a link that's directly related to their points and ignore them. Do that enough times and they'll probably wake up and realize they've got a problem with not knowing what they're talking about.

I haven't come across this either. Doesn't the downvoting minimize this problem?

That said, I like civility to be one of the core principles of any discussion group - but without every feeling we have to agree with what someone else is saying.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 05:09:41AM *  0 points [-]

Votes don't train newbies.

Being a new users who gets voted down sometimes, I can tell you it seems completely random. I can't tell whether it's a troll, or someone with a vendetta or what it is. And even if I brainstorm a bunch of guesses, the little number at the top of my comment doesn't tell me which one is correct. This expectation that downvotes are going to help new users learn how to behave is even worse than that though, in a whole bunch of ways at once. I wrote about that here:

Idea For Karma Improvements and Why We Need Them

Comment author: saturn 02 September 2012 11:39:54AM *  11 points [-]

LW could be considered a select group by discussion board standards. For example, posters who haven't studied the rather large amount of presumed background knowledge are, to a decreasing but still significant extent, only reluctantly tolerated. Some people accustomed to more typical discussion boards do seem somewhat miffed about the idea that LW has such prerequisites at all, and I assume this is because they perceive it as elitist.

Bringing this back to the main point, LW already does a reasonably good job at covering what you call the 'hard' material. It's hard to overstate how fickle and delicate online communities can be. I'm wary of attempting to change the norms of the existing community in order to produce more 'easy' material. (This is what you are effectively proposing, since newbies can't produce their own 'easy' material, it would be the blind leading the blind.) Therefore I think that job should be delegated to another website (maybe appliedrationality.org) rather than shoehorned into LW.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 05:04:03AM 0 points [-]

On educating new rationalists:

I think that job should be delegated to another website (maybe appliedrationality.org) rather than shoehorned into LW.

Do they even have a forum? I don't see how this is going to work. Explain this plan.

Comment author: saturn 02 September 2012 11:39:54AM *  11 points [-]

LW could be considered a select group by discussion board standards. For example, posters who haven't studied the rather large amount of presumed background knowledge are, to a decreasing but still significant extent, only reluctantly tolerated. Some people accustomed to more typical discussion boards do seem somewhat miffed about the idea that LW has such prerequisites at all, and I assume this is because they perceive it as elitist.

Bringing this back to the main point, LW already does a reasonably good job at covering what you call the 'hard' material. It's hard to overstate how fickle and delicate online communities can be. I'm wary of attempting to change the norms of the existing community in order to produce more 'easy' material. (This is what you are effectively proposing, since newbies can't produce their own 'easy' material, it would be the blind leading the blind.) Therefore I think that job should be delegated to another website (maybe appliedrationality.org) rather than shoehorned into LW.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 04:59:39AM *  1 point [-]

Is LessWrong Elitist:

LW could be considered a select group by discussion board standards. For example, posters who haven't studied the rather large amount of presumed background knowledge are, to a decreasing but still significant extent, only reluctantly tolerated.

By that definition, restaurants are elitist because people with no knowledge of silverware and table manners are only reluctantly tolerated. Roads are elitist because drivers with no knowledge of traffic rules are only reluctantly tolerated. Grocery stores are elitist because only people with no understanding of trade and shoplifting laws aren't tolerated. Is there any place you can go in the civilized world and be accepted regardless of whether you have knowledge relevant to that place? Even in jail, inmates are expected to know better than to drink out of the toilet and that food goes in their mouth. The mental ward might be the only place - but that isn't a place of acceptance.

Let's look at the dictionary definition for the word elitist, now, as it's more detailed:

  1. (of a person or class of persons) considered superior by others or by themselves, as in intellect, talent, power, wealth, or position in society: elitist country clubbers who have theirs and don't care about anybody else.

  2. catering to or associated with an elitist class, its ideologies, or its institutions: Even at such a small, private college, Latin and Greek are under attack as too elitist.

  3. a person having, thought to have, or professing superior intellect or talent, power, wealth, or membership in the upper echelons of society: He lost a congressional race in Texas by being smeared as an Eastern elitist.

  4. a person who believes in the superiority of an elitist class.

Reasons LessWrong isn't automatically elitist, as relates to the above:

  1. Regardless of whether LessWrong members have more or less talent, intellect, power, wealth or position, if they do not have a superior attitude about it, that doesn't qualify them as elitist by definition 1.

  2. Depending on whether LessWrong wants to be a place where everybody can learn or a place where only people thought to have "superior intellect or talent, power, wealth, or membership in the upper echelons of society" can join, it might be non-elitist.

  3. If LessWrong defines itself as "A place where people who want to refine their rationality gather" then it's not a group defined by "talent, power, wealth, or membership in the upper echelons of society", it's a place defined by common interest.

  4. Do you believe that LessWrong is an elite class, and that they are superior? I don't.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 06 September 2012 03:12:19AM 1 point [-]

As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.

Yes, I agree that this is frequently true.

We also frequently react that way to wealth inequalities, power inequalities, and various other things that we fear (not always without justification) will allow a privileged minority to become a threat to us.

This leads them to oppress.

It isn't clear to me that "oppress" is a clearly or consistently defined term here, but I agree with you that this sometimes leads us to act against the groups we see as potential threats.

Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective

The thing that most jumps out at me is that we seem to keep reiterating the same rhetorical pattern.

You point out scenarios where intelligent people end up in potential conflict with those around them because of their intelligence. I agree that that happens sometimes, and add that it's a special case of a more general relationship that isn't especially about intelligence. You continue to discuss how raw a deal intelligent people are given, from a slightly different perspective.

It mostly leaves me with the feeling that we don't really disagree about any of the stuff that's actually being said explicitly, but that there's something more fundamental that isn't getting said explicitly, about which we do disagree.

If I had to guess, I would guess that you're motivated to maximize the relative status of intelligent people, and you're framing the situation in terms of how oppressed intelligent people are in order to justify doing that, and you see my responses as interfering with that framing.

But that's just a guess.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 03:52:17AM 0 points [-]

Good insight, TheOtherDave, it is time to clarify. I don't want to "maximize the relative status" of anyone - I don't believe in status. Oh, sure I see lots of people imagining one another to be at different points on a mental model, and I don't deny that people behave that way, but to me, that doesn't mean the mental model is at all accurate to reality. To me, they're just imagining this - status is just a bias.

Also, I think the fact that people perceive intelligence as a "high status" thing is the entire problem. So unless "maximize the relative status" was meant more like "optimize the relative status" I don't think that'd be a real solution.

I don't really see your responses as interfering with the framing, but like you said they're indicating that some clearer point needs to be made.

Here are some ideas:

No sort of oppression happens all the time, but that doesn't mean a group is not oppressed.

I think the oppression of gifted people should recognized. I think people on both sides need to realize that most of it is unintentional. I think we need to knock it off with this status business, as a species, recognize that we all have rights regardless of intellectual abilities, and quit acting paranoid and grappling for control with one another.

Seeing this power struggle and status madness makes me sick to my stomach. Every time I see it, I have to question why I bother to make a difference if people are going to behave like this.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 02:53:30AM *  0 points [-]

I apologize for my lack of explicitness.

Here gwern states that someone possessing transcendent charm is not sufficient evidence for one to conclude that they possess a 200+ IQ. (He mentions other possibilities of them having a "mere" 140+ IQ or them being a psychopath.)

Here gwern states that the world contains more psychopaths than geniuses.

Here is a well-done ramble about the overlap between psychopathy and genius.

I cannot find any post by schminux that would explain why you think he was pretending to accuse OrphanWilde of being a psychopath.


Now to clarify: I am holding that gwern and schminux never publicly suspected OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. I am further holding that gwern and schminux never publicly pretended to suspect OrphanWilde of being a psychopath. These events did not occur, nor did events resembling them occur. Thus, this:

later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux

is almost a complete non sequitur, apropos of nothing.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 03:29:42AM *  1 point [-]

You can't find those because some wonderfully helpful person decided to hide my post. Search for "comment score below threshold" and look inside of there for "psychopath".

Ctrl-F is helpful if you didn't know about it.

Comment author: J_Taylor 06 September 2012 02:22:19AM *  1 point [-]

later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux

If gwern suspected OrphanWilde of being a sociopath, surely he would have made a PredictionBook post.

But seriously, I've read the posts I think you are talking about. Nobody has such suspicions.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:31:52AM *  0 points [-]

OrphanWilde was only doing an experiment. I didn't mean to say those guys were serious about their accusations. They behaved that way in the context of the experiment. Most likely they do know better than to take the experiment literally. I realize this. (:

I hate pointing out the obvious, but I guess I have to now. edits my post

Comment author: OrphanWilde 15 August 2012 01:03:49PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what a super intelligent thought would look like; there's a limit on how intelligent a thought could be, as a thought that gets too clever ceases to be clever at all. But if that's your internal reaction as well, I don't have any room to argue/criticize on this front, as you're being fully consistent.

(Strictly speaking, incidentally, any score above 180 is merely an estimate; IQ tests cease to perform reliably above that level.)

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:28:03AM *  0 points [-]

I loved your experiment. (: As for what a super-intelligent thought would look like, there are multiple ways of interpreting you:

You might be saying that a person with an IQ of 220 could be prone to over-thinking things. In that case, it would cease to qualify as cleverness due to a failure to maintain a good cost-benefit ratio between the amount of brainpower put in and the results coming out.

You may mean that if someone were to say something significantly more clever than what is commonly thought of as "clever" it may not be recognized as such, may not even be observable to most minds once pointed out, and therefore might never end up recognized as "clever" by anyone.

There's a much more interesting possibility - that a super-intelligent thought may transcend cleverness, take on emergent properties, or otherwise be so advanced that our current definitions of intelligence can't express it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 August 2012 08:35:16PM 1 point [-]

Hiding IQ is the rule not the exception, do you agree with that?

Depends on the social group. I hang out in a number of social circles where signalling high intelligence is highly endorsed. But, sure, I agree that's the exception and not the rule; in most social circles, signalling high intelligence is seen as a status grab.

But when something isn't okay to talk about in most contexts, that's how we know that there's a widespread bias that can be said to be cultural. Do you agree with this?

Sure.

What if I introduced myself with "Hi, I'm Sue. I like sports and I am a doctor. What about you?" That would be interpreted as talking about a difference you have that affects who you are, not a boast, am I right?

Again, that depends on the status implications of those claims in the context of the group you're introducing yourself to. There are many contexts in which introducing yourself as a doctor would be seen as boastful, and many contexts in which it would not. (There are few contexts where introducing yourself as liking sports would be seen as boastful.)

To be clear, you do agree with me, then, that there is a cultural bias against talking about giftedness and IQ - am I correct?

I would agree that there are contexts where talking about my giftedness and my high IQ is seen as a status grab, and therefore rejected. Many of those are contexts in which talking about giftedness and IQ in general is seen as OK.

If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time

Again: where high IQ and giftedness are seen as status markers, talking about my high IQ and my giftedness is usually unacceptable. (Similarly, talking about my wealth or my really beautiful spouse or various other status markers is usually unacceptable.)

Do you agree that when [there is a group of people that have significant social differences, and it is socially unacceptable to talk about the difference] it is sign of oppression:

I agree that these things are frequently present where oppression exists. But they are also frequently present where oppression does not exist.

For example, if I'm a white-collar millionaire participating in a social group that is primarily lower-middle-class blue-collar workers, that's a significant social difference that is socially unacceptable to talk about, but I would not agree that I was being oppressed, or that millionaires are generally being oppressed by blue-collar workers.

Relative levels of power and status matter, here.

Do you agree that gifted / high IQ people meet the two definitions above of having significant social differences, and that it is considered socially unacceptable for them to talk freely about their differences?

In many contexts, yes.

If so, then does this qualify as a form of oppression?

In some contexts, yes. Not many.

Comment author: Epiphany 06 September 2012 02:03:01AM *  0 points [-]

I enjoy your precision.

If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time

Again: where high IQ and giftedness are seen as status markers, talking about my high IQ and my giftedness is usually unacceptable. (Similarly, talking about my wealth or my really beautiful spouse or various other status markers is usually unacceptable.)

You make my verbiage look sloppy. (:

Sorry for seeming to ignore this comment for a few weeks. I was busy.

Right now the way I'm seeing this is that because IQ differences are not seen as something that can cause a person a prolific number of differences that are socially relevant for lots of things other than status, it's often perceived as a status grab when it's not.

There are also a whole bunch of other problems that, combined, paint a picture of oppression. OrphanWilde did an experiment in this very thread, asking "Actually, let's try an experiment: My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220. What is your reaction?"

The result was that he was accused (in the context of the experiment, by people who, I realize, probably do not literally believe these things) of lying by Alicorn and gwern and later suspected to be a psychopath by gwern and shminux.

I was the only one that showed willingness to entertain the idea that OrphanWilde might not be a liar or a psychopath. I suppose, technically that's not oppression against people you believe to be gifted, it's discouragement toward people you believe not to be gifted. However, what happens when people have the same attitude of not believing other types of people about their differences? "Oh you're not really homosexual, let's send you to the psychologist and have that fixed." They may have good intentions but the result is definitely oppressive. If people jump to conclusions about a group of people - even the conclusion that the specific individuals in question aren't part of the group - then those assumptions can oppress the group in question.

Then there's the fact that 50% of gifted children in America are never given an IQ test, yet they require special education to prevent them from developing problems like learned helplessness due to being placed in the wrong environment.

Terman did a study that challenged commonly held beliefs that gifted people tended to be ugly, and have a lot of problems, and revealed various myths. That was in 1921, but there are still echos of that mentality - people frequently associate negative things with giftedness as if trying to balance things out and make everyone equal again on some imaginary scale - when we shouldn't be viewing our equality any differently regardless of intellectual differences anyway.

As I see it, people are having a hard time dealing with intellectual inequalities and frequently react as if they are going to equate to rights inequalities.

This leads them to oppress.

Do you have observations that would be relevant to my perspective, supportive or unsupportive?

Comment author: Epiphany 05 September 2012 04:55:57AM *  2 points [-]

Solution: Ban their IP addresses. This actually works, I'll tell you why. Not because they can't get new ones, but because they can't infinitely get new ones. If you've ever sought an unsecured proxy (a key way of obscuring your IP address) you'll know that it's tough to find a good proxy, they're slow, and they frequently leak your IP address regardless. Even programs like Tor only have so many IP addresses. To make it worse, (for them) it's no fun to use proxies that are far away - they're slow as all get out. This technique worked on spammers on a forum that was growing fast. It took a while to collect all the IP addresses they were using, but it was an extremely effective method of stopping spam. Banning the account will make this more effective. Doing both will make it a real hassle for them to post, and after a while, it will be hard to find good proxies.

A solution also requires that volunteers from the forum / moderators can ban the trolls.

Call For Agreement: Should LessWrong have better protection against cultural collapse?

3 Epiphany 03 September 2012 05:35AM

As you are probably already aware, many internet forums experience a phenomenon known as "eternal September".  Named after a temporary effect where the influx of college freshmen would throw off a group's culture every September, eternal September is essentially what happens when standards of discourse and behavior degrade in a group to the point where the group loses it's original culture.  I began focusing on solving this problem and offered to volunteer my professional web services to get it done because:

- When I explained that LessWrong could grow a lot and volunteered to help with growth, various users expressed concerns about growth not always being good because having too many new users at once can degrade the culture.

- There has been concern from Eliezer about the site "going to hell" because of trolling.

- Eliezer has documented a phenomenon that subcultures know as infiltration by "poseurs" happening in the rationalist community.  He explains that rationalists are beginning to be inundated by "undiscriminating skeptics" and has stated that it's bad enough that he needed to change his method of determining who is a rationalist.  The appearance of poseurs doesn't guarantee that a culture will be washed away by main-streamers, but may signal that a culture is headed in that direction, and it does confirm that a loss of culture is a possibility - especially if there got to be so many undiscriminating skeptics as to form their own culture and become the new majority at LessWrong.

  My plan to prevent eternal September sparked a debate about whether eternal September protection is warranted.  Lukeprog, being the decision maker whose decision is needed for me to be allowed to do this as a volunteer, requested that I debate this with him because he was not convinced but might change his mind.

 

Here are some theories about why eternal September happens:

1. New to old user ratio imbalance:

  New users need time to adjust to a forum's culture.  Getting too many new users too fast will throw off the ratio of new to old users, meaning that most new users will interact with each other rather than with older users, changing the culture permanently.

2. Groups tend to trend toward the mainstream:

  Imagine some people want to start a group.  Why are they breaking away from the mainstream?  Because their needs are served there?  Probably not.  They most likely have some kind of difference that makes them want to start their own group.  Of course not everyone fits nicely into "different" and "mainstream", no matter what type of difference you look at.  So, as a forum grows, instead of attracting people who fit nicely into the "different" category, you attract people who are similar to those in the different category.  People way on the mainstream end of the spectrum generally are not attracted to things that are very different.  But imagine how this progresses over time.  I'll create a scale between green and purple.  We'll say the green people are different and the purple people are mainstream.  So, some of the most green folks make a green forum.  Now, people who are green and similar - those with an extra tinge of red or blue or yellow join.  People in the mainstream still aren't attracted, however, since there are still more in-between people than solid green or purple people, the most greenish in-between people begin to dominate.  They and the original green people still enjoy conversation - they're similar enough to share the culture and enjoy mutual activities. But the greenish in-between people start to attract in-between people that are neither more purple or more green.  There are more in-between people than greenish in-between or green people, because purple people dominate in their larger culture, so in-between people quickly outnumber the green people.  This may still be fine because they may adjust to the culture and enjoy it, finding it a refreshing alternative to purple culture.  But the in-between people attract people who are more purplish in-betweeners than greenish in-betweeners.  There are more of those than the in-between people, so the culture now shifts to be closer to mainstream purple than different green.  At this point, it begins to attract the attention of the solid purple main streamers.  "Oh!  Our culture, but with a twist!"  They think.  Now, droves of purple main stream people deluge the place looking for "something a little different".  Instead of valuing the culture and wanting to assimilate, they just want to enjoy novelty.  So, they demand changes to things they don't like to make it suit them better.  They justify this by saying that they're the majority.  At that point, they are.

3.  Too many trolls scare away good people and throw off the balance.

 

Which theory is right?


  All of them likely play a role.

 

  I've seen for myself that trolls can scare the best people out of a forum, ruining the culture. 

  I've heard time and time again that subculture movements have problems with being watered down by mainstream folks until their cultures die and don't feel worth it anymore to the original participators.  A lot of you have probably heard of the term "poseurs".  With poseurs in a subculture, it's not that too many new people joined at once, but that the wrong sort of people joined.  The view is that there are people who are different enough to "get" their movement, and people who are not.  Those who aren't similar decided to try to appear like them even though they're not like them on the inside.  Essentially, a large number of people much nearer to the mainstream got involved, so the group was no longer a haven for people with their differences.

  And I think it's a no-brainer that if a group gets enough newbies at once, old members can't help them adjust to the culture, and the newbies will form a new culture and become a new majority.

  Also, I think all of these can combine together, create feedback loops, and multiply the others.

 

Theory about cause and effect interactions that lead to endless September:

 1.  A group of people who are very different break away from the mainstream and form a group.
 2.  People who are similarly different but not AS different join the group.
 3.  People who are similar to the similarly different people, but even less similar to the different people join the group.
 4.  It goes on this way for a while.  Since there are necessarily more people who are mainstream than different, new generations of new users may be less and less like the core group.
 5.  The group of different people begins to feel alienated with the new people who are joining.
 6.  The group of different people begin to ignore the new people.
 7.  The new people form their own culture with one another, excluding old people, because the old people are ignoring them.
 8.  Old people begin to anticipate alienation and start to see new users through tinted lenses, expecting annoyance.
 9.  New people feel alienated by the insulting misinterpretations that are caused by the expectation that they're going to be annoying. 
10.  The unwelcoming environment selects for thick-skinned people.  A higher proportion of people like trolls, leaders, spammers, debate junkies, etc are active.
11.  Enough new people who are ignored and failed to acculturate accumulate, resulting in a new majority.  If trolls are kept under control, the new culture will be a watered down version of the original culture, possibly not much different from mainstream culture.  If not, see the final possibility.
12.  If a critical mass of trolls, spammers and other alienating thick-skinned types is reached due to an imbalance or inadequate methods of dealing with them, they might ward off old users, exacerbating the imbalance that draws a disproportionate number of thick-skinned types in a feedback loop and then take over the forum.  (Why fourchan /b isn't known for having sweet little girls and old ladies.)

 

Is LessWrong at risk?

  1.  Eliezer has written about rationalists being infiltrated by main-streamers who don't get it, aka "poseurs".

  Eliezer explains in Undiscriminating Skeptics that he can no longer determine who is a rationalist based on how they react to the prospect of religious debates, and now he has to determine who is a rationalist based on who is thinking for themselves.  This is the exact same problem other subcultures have - they say the new people aren't thinking for themselves.  We might argue "but we want to spread the wonderful gift of rational thought to the mainstream!" and I would agree with that.  However, if all they're able to take away from joining is that there are certain things skeptics always believe, all they'll be taking away from us is an appeal to skepticism.  That's the kind of thing that happens when subcultures are over-run by mainstream folks.  They do not adopt the core values.  Instead, they run roughshod over them.  If we want undiscriminating skeptics to get benefits from refining the art of rationality, we have to do something more than hang out in the same place.  Telling them that they are poseurs doesn't work for subcultures, and I don't think Eliezer telling them that they're undiscriminating skeptics will solve the problem.  Getting people to think for themselves is a challenge that should not be undertaken lightly.  To really get it, and actually base your life on rationality, you've either got to be the right type, a "natural" who "just gets it" (like Eliezer who showed signs as a child when he found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem) or you have to be really dedicated to self-improvement.

  2. I have witnessed a fast-growing forum actually go exponential.  Nothing special was being done to advertise the forum. 

  Obviously, this risks deluging old members in a sea of newbies that would be large enough to create a newbie culture and form a new majority.

  3. LessWrong is growing fast and it's much bigger than I think everyone realizes.

  I made a LessWrong growth bar graph showing how LessWrong has gained over 13,000 members in under 3 years (Nov 2009 - Aug 2012).  LessWrong had over 3 million visits in the last year.  The most popular post has gotten over 200,000 views.  Yes I mean there are posts on here that are over 1/5 of their way to a million views, I did not mistype.  This is not a tiny community website anymore.  I see signs that people are still acting that way, like when people post their email addresses on the forum.  People don't seem to realize how big LessWrong has gotten.  Since this happened in a short time, we should be wondering how much further it will go, and planning for the contingency that could become huge.

  4. LessWrong has experienced at least one wild spike in membership.  Spikes can happen again.

  We can't control the ups and downs in visitors to the site.  That could happen again.  It could last for longer than a month.  According to Vladmir, using wget, we've got something like 600 - 1000 active users posting per month.  We've got about 300 users joining per month from the registration statistics.  What would happen if we got 900 each month for a few months in a row?  A random spike could conceivably overwhelm the members.

  5. Considering how many readers it has, LessWrong could get Slashdotted by somebody big.

  If you've ever read about the Slashdot effect, you'll know that all it might take to get a deluge bigger than we can handle is to be linked to by somebody big.  What if Slashdot links to LessWrong?  Or somebody even bigger?  We have at least one article on LessWrong that got about half as many visits as a hall of fame level Slashdot article.  The article "Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot" got 383692 visits on Slashdot, compared with LessWrong's most popular article at 211,000 visits. (Cite: Slashdot hall of fame.)  LessWrong is gaining popularity fast.  It's not a small site anymore.  And there are a lot of places that could Slashdot us.  I may be just a matter of time before somebody pays attention, does an article on LessWrong, and it gets flooded.

  6. We all want to grow LessWrong, and people may cause rapid growth before thinking about the consequences.

  What if people start growing LessWrong and wildly succeed?  I would like to be helping LessWrong grow but I don't want to do it until I feel the culture is well-protected.

  7. Some combination of these things might happen and deluge old people with new people.

 

Does LessWrong need additional eternal September protection?

  Lukeprog's main argument is that we don't have to worry about eternal September because we have vote downs. Here's why vote downs are not going to protect LessWrong:

  1.  If the new to old user ratio becomes unbalanced, or the site is filled with main streamers who take over the culture, who is going to get voted down most?  The new users, or the old ones?  The old members will be outnumbered, so it will likely be old members.

  2. This doesn't prevent new users from interacting primarily with new users.  If enough people join, there may not be enough old users doing vote downs to discourage them anymore.  That means if the new to old user ratio were to become unbalanced, new users may still interact primarily with new users and form their own, larger culture, a new majority.

  3.  Let's say Fourchan /b decides to visit.  A hundred trolls descend upon LessWrong.  The trolls, like everybody else, have the ability to vote down anything they want.  The trolls of course will enjoy harassing us endlessly with vote downs.  They will especially enjoy the fact that it only takes three of them to censor somebody.  They will find it a really, really special treat that we've made it so that anybody who responds to a censored person ends up getting points deducted.  From a security perspective, this is probably one of the worst things that you could do.  I came up with an idea for a much improved vote down plan.

 

Possibly more important: What happens if we DO prevent an eternal September?

  What we are deciding here is not simply "do we want to protect this specific website from cultural collapse?" but "How do we want to introduce the art of refining rationality to the mainstream public?"

  Why do main streamers deluge new cultures and what happens after that?  What do they get out of it?  How does it affect them in the long-term?  Might being deluged by main streamers make it more likely for main streamers to become better at rational thought, like a first taste makes you want more?

  If we kept them from doing that, what would happen, then? 

  Say we don't have a plan.  LessWrong is hit by more users than it can handle.  Undiscriminating skeptics are voting down every worthwhile disagreement.  So, as an emergency measure, registrations are shut off, the number of visits to the website grows and then falls.  We succeed in keeping out people who don't get it.  After it has peaked, the fad is over.  Worse, we've put them off and they're offended.  Or, we don't shut off registrations, we're deluged, and now everyone thinks that a "rationalist" an "undiscriminating skeptic".  We've lost the opportunity to get through to them, possibly for good.  Will they ever become more rational?  LessWrong wants to make the world a more rational place.  An opportunity to accomplish that goal could happen.  Eliezer figured out a way to make rationality popular.  Millions of people have read his work.  This could go even bigger.

  This is why I suggested two discussion areas - then we get to keep this culture and also have an opportunity to experiment with ways for the people who are not naturals at it to learn faster.  If we succeed in figuring out how to get through to them, we will know that the deluge will be constructive, if one happens.  Then, we can even invite one on purpose.  We can even advertise for that and I'd be happy to help.  But if we don't start with eternal September protection, we could lose all this progress, lose our chance to get through to the mainstream, and pass like a fad.

  For that reason, even if eternal September doesn't look likely to you after everything that I've explained above, I say it is still worthwhile to develop a tested technique to preserve LessWrong culture against a deluge and get through to those who are not naturals.  Not doing so takes a risk with something important.

 

Please critique.

  Your honest assessments of my ideas are welcome, always.

 

Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx.

14 Epiphany 02 September 2012 03:46AM

  In the thread "LessWrong could grow a lot, but we're doing it wrong.", I explained why LessWrong has the potential to grow quite a lot faster in my opinion, and volunteered to help LessWrong grow.  Of course, a lot of people were concerned about the fact that a large quantity of new members will not directly translate to higher quality contributions or beneficial learning and social experiences in discussions, so I realized it would be better to help protect LessWrong first.  I do not assume that fast growth has to cause a lowering of standards.  I think fast growth can be good if the right people are joining and all goes well (specifics herein).  However, if LessWrong grows carelessly, we could be inviting an "Endless September", a term used to describe a never ending deluge of newbies that "degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet and the wider Internet" (named after a phenomenon caused by an influx of college freshmen).  My perspective on this is that it could happen at any time, regardless of whether any of us does anything.  Why do I think that?  LessWrong is growing very fast and could snowball on it's own.  I've seen that happen, I saw it ruin a forum.  That site wasn't even doing anything special to advertise the forum that I am aware of.  The forum was just popular and growth went exponential.  For this reason, I asked for a complete list of LessWrong registration dates in order to make a growth chart.  I received it on 08-23-2012.  The data shows that LessWrong has 13,727 total users, not including spammers and accounts that were deleted.  From these, I have created a LessWrong growth bar graph:

 

 

 

  Each bar represents a one month long total of registration dates (the last bar is a little short, being that it only goes up until the 23rd).  The number of pixels in each bar is equal to the number of registrations each month.  The first (leftmost) bar that hits the top of the picture (it actually goes waaaay off the page) mostly represents the transfer of over 2000 accounts from Overcoming Bias.  The right bar that goes off the page is so far unexplained for me - 921 users joined in September 2011, more than three times the number in the months before and after it.  If you happen to know what caused that, I would be very interested in finding out. (No, September 2010 does not stand out, if you were wondering the same thing).  If anyone wants to do different kinds of analysis, I can generate more numbers and graphs fairly easily.

  As you can see, LessWrong has experienced pretty rapid growth.

  Growth is in a downward trend at the moment, but as you can see from the wild spikes everyplace, this could change any time.  In addition to LessWrong growing on it's own, other events that could trigger an "endless September" effect are:

  LessWrong could be linked to by somebody really big (see: Slashdot effect on Wikipedia).

  LessWrong could end up on the news after somebody does something news worthy or because a reporter discovers LessWrong culture and finds it interesting or weird.

  (A more detailed explanation is located here.)

  For these reasons, I feel it is a good idea to begin constructing endless September protection, so I have volunteered some of my professional web services to get it done.  This has to be done carefully because if it is not done right, various unwanted things may happen.  I am asking for any ideas or links to ideas you guys have that you think were good and am laying out my solutions and the pitfalls I have planned for below in order to seek your critiques and suggestions.

 

Cliff Notes Version:

  I really thought this out quite a bit because I think it's going to be tricky and because it's important.  So I wrote a cliff notes version of the below solution ideas with pros and cons for each which is about a tenth the size.

 

The most difficult challenge and my solution:

  People want the site to be enriching for those who want to learn better reasoning but haven't gotten very far yet.

  People also want an environment where they can get a good challenge, where they are encouraged to grow, where they can get exposed to new ideas and viewpoints, and where they can get useful, constructive criticism. 

  The problem is that a basic desire all humans seem to share is a desire to avoid boredom.  There is possibly a survival reason for this:  There is no way to know everything, but missing even one piece of information can spell disaster.  This may be why the brain appears to have evolved built-in motivators to prod you to learn constantly.  From the mild ecstasy of flow state (cite Flow: The psychology of peak experiencing) to tedium, we are constantly being punished and rewarded based on whether we're receiving the optimal challenge for our level of ability. 

  This means that those who are here for a challenge aren't going to spend their time being teachers for everybody who wants to learn.  Not everyone has a teacher's personality and skill set to begin with, and some people who teach do it as writers, explaining to many thousands, rather than by explaining it one-to-one.  If everyone feels expected to teach by hand-holding, most will be punished by their brains for not learning more themselves, and will be forced to seek a new learning environment.  If beginners are locked out, we'll fail at spreading rationality.  The ideal is to create an environment where everyone gets to experience flow, and no one has to sacrifice optimal challenge.

  To make this challenge a bit more complicated, American culture (yes, a majority of the visits, 51.12%, are coming from the USA - I have access to the Google Analytics) can get pretty touchy about elitism and anti-intellectualism.  Even though the spirit of LessWrong - wanting to promote rational thought - is not elitist but actually inherently opposite to that (to increase good decision making in the world "spreads the wealth" rather than hoarding it or demanding privileges for being capable of good decisions), there is a risk that people will see this place as elitist.  And even though self-improvement is inherently non-pretentious (by choosing to do self-improvement, you're admitting that you've got flaws), undoubtedly there will be a large number of people who might really benefit from learning here but instead insta-judge the place as "pretentious".  Interpreting everything intellectual as pretentious and elitist is an unfortunate habit in our culture.  I think, with the right wording on the most prominent pages (about us, register, home page, etc.) LessWrong might be presented as a unique non-elitist, non-pretentious place.

  For these reasons, I am suggesting multiple discussion areas that are separated by difficulty levels.  Presenting them as "Easy and Hard" will do three things:

  1. Serve as a reminder to those who attend that it's a place of learning where the objective is to get an optimal challenge and improve as far as possible.  This would help keep it from coming across as pretentious or elitist.

  2. Create a learning environment that's open to all levels, rather than a closed, elitist environment or one that's too daunting.  The LessWrong discussion area is a bit daunting to users, so it might be really desirable for people to have an "easy" discussion area where they can learn in an environment that is not intimidating.

  3. Give us an opportunity to experiment with approaches that help willing people learn faster.

 

Endless September protection should be designed to avoid causing these side-effects:

 

  Creating an imbalance in the proportion of thick-skinned individuals to normal individuals.

  Anything that annoys, alienates or discourages users is going to deter a lot of people while retaining thick-skinned individuals.  Some thick-skinned individuals are leaders, but many are trolls, and thick-skinned individuals may be more likely to resist acculturation or try to change the culture (though it could be argued the other way - that their thick skin allows them to take more honest feedback).  For example: anonymous, unexplained down votes create a gauntlet for new users to endure which selects for a high tolerance to negative feedback.  This may be the reason it has been reported that there are a lot of "annoying debater types".

 

  People that we do want fail to join because the method of protection puts them off.

  There are two pitfalls that I think are going to be particularly attractive, but we should really avoid them:

  1.) Filtering into hard/easy based on anything other than knowledge about rational thinking.  There are various reasons that could go very wrong.

    - Filtering in any other way will keep out advanced folks who may have a lot to teach.

    If a person has already learned good reasoning skills in some other way, do we want them at the site?  There might be logic professors, Zen masters, debate competition champs, geniuses, self-improvement professionals, hard-core bookworms and other people who are already advanced and are interested in teaching others to improve their skills, or interested in finding a good challenge, or are interested in contributing articles, but have already learned much of the material the sequences cover.  Imagine that a retired logic professor comes by hoping to get a challenge from similarly advanced minds and perhaps do a little volunteer work teaching about logic as a past time.  Now imagine requiring them to read 2,000 pages of "how to think rationally" in order to gain access to all the discussion areas.  This will almost guarantee that they go elsewhere.

    - Filtering based on the sequences or other cultural similarities would promote conformity and repel the true thinkers.

    If true rationalists think for themselves, some of them will think differently, some of them will disagree.  Eliezer has explained in undiscriminating skeptics that "I do propose that before you give anyone credit for being a smart, rational skeptic, that you ask them to defend some non-mainstream belief." he defines this as "It has to be something that most of their social circle doesn't believe, or something that most of their social circle does believe which they think is wrong."  If we want people in the "hard" social group who are likely to hold and defend non-mainstream beliefs, we have to filter out people unable to defend beliefs without scaring off those who have beliefs different from the group.

  2.) Discouraging people with unusually flawed English from participating at all levels.  Doing that would stop two important sources of new perspectives from flowing in:

    - People with cultural differences, who may bring in fresh perspectives.

    If you're from China, you may want to share perspectives that could be new and important to a Westerner, but may be less likely to meet the technical standards of a perfectionist when it comes to writing in English.

    - People with learning differences, whose brains work differently and may offer unique insight.

    A lot of gifted people have learning disorders and gifted people who don't tend to have large gaps between skill levels.  It is not uncommon to find a gifted person whose abilities with one skill are up to 40% behind (or better than) their abilities in other areas.  This phenomenon is called "asynchronous development".  We associate spelling and grammar with intelligence, but the truth is that those who have a high verbal IQ may not have equally intelligent things to say, and people who word things crudely due to asynchronous development (engineers, for instance, are not known for their communication skills but can be brilliant at engineering) may be ignored even though they could have important things to say.  Dyslexics, who have all kinds of trouble from spelling to vocabulary to arranging sentences oddly may be ignored despite the fact that "children and adults who are dyslexic usually excel at problem solving, reasoning, seeing the big picture, and thinking out of the box" (Yale).

   Everyone understands the importance of making sure all the serious articles get published with good English, but frequently in intellectual circles, the attitude is that if you aren't a perfectionist about spelling and grammar, you're not worth listening to at all.  The problem of getting articles polished when they are written by dyslexics or people for whom English is a second language should be pretty easy - people with English problems can simply seek a volunteer editor.  The ratio of articles being published by these folks versus the number of users at the site encourages me to believe that these guys will be able to find someone to polish their work.  Since it would be so easy to accommodate for these disabilities, taking an attitude that puts form over function as a filter would not serve you well.  If dyslexics and people with cultures different from the majority feel that we're snobby about technicalities, they could be put off.  This could already be happening and we could be missing out on the most creative and most different perspectives this way.

 

People who qualify under the "letter" of the standards do not meet the spirit of the standards.

  For instance:  They claim to be rationalists because they agree with a list of things that rationalists agree with, but don't think for themselves, as Eliezer cautions about in undiscriminating skeptics.  Asking them questions like "Are you an atheist?" and "Do you think signing up for cryo makes sense?" would only draw large numbers of people who agree but do not think for themselves.  Worse, that would send a strong message saying: "If you don't agree with us about everything, you aren't welcome here."

 

The right people join, but acculturate slowly or for some reason do not acculturate. 

  - Large numbers of users, even desirable ones, will be frustrating if newbie materials are not prominently posted.

  I was very confused and disoriented as a new user.  I think that there's a need for an orientation page.  I wrote about my experiences as a new user here which I think might make a good starting point for such a new user orientation page.  I think LessWrong also needs a written list of guidelines and rules that's positioned to be "in your face" like the rest of the internet does (because if users don't see it where they expect to find it, then they will assume there isn't one).  If new users adjust quickly, both old users and new users will be less annoyed if/when lots of new users join at once.

 

The filtering mechanism gives LessWrong a bad name.

  For instance, if we were to use an IQ test to filter users, the world may feel that LessWrong is an elitist organization.  Sparking an anti-intellectual backlash would do nothing to further the cause of promoting rationality, and it doesn't truly reflect the spirit of bringing everyone up, which is what this is supposed to do.  Similarly, asking questions that may trigger racial, political or religious feelings could be a bad idea - not because they aren't sources of bias, but because they'll scare away people who may have been open to questioning and growing but are not open to being forced to choose a different option immediately.  The filters should be a test about reasoning, not a test about beliefs.

 

Proposed Filtering Mechanisms:

 

  Principle One:  A small number of questions can deter a lot of activity.

  As a web pro, I have observed a 10 question registration form slash the number of files sent through a file upload input that used to be public.  The ten questions were not that hard - just name, location, password, etc.  Asking questions deters people from signing up.  Period.  That is why, if you've observed this trend as well, I think that a lot of big websites have begun asking for minimal registration info: email address and password only.  Years ago, that was not common, it seemed that everyone wanted to give you ten or twenty questions.  For this reason, I think it would be best if the registration form stays simple, but if we create extra hoops to jump through to use the hard discussion area, only those who are seriously interested will join in there.  Specific examples of questions that meet the other criteria are located in the proposed acculturation methods section under: A test won't deter ignorant cheaters, but they can force them to educate themselves.

 

  Principle Two:  A rigorous environment will deter those who are not serious about doing it right.

  The ideal is to fill the hard discussion area with the sort of rationalists who want to keep improving, who are not afraid to disagree with each other, who think for themselves.  How do you guarantee they're interested in improving?  Require them to sacrifice for improvement.  Getting honest feedback is necessary to improve, but it's not pleasant.  That's the perfect sacrifice requirement:

  Add a check box that they have to click where it says "By entering the hard discussion area, I'm inviting everyone's honest criticisms of my ideas.  I agree to take responsibility for my own emotional reactions to feedback and to treat feedback as valuable.  In return for their valuable feedback, which is a privilege and service to me, I will state my honest criticisms of their ideas as well, regardless of whether the truth could upset them."

  I think it's common to assume that in order to give honest feedback one has to throw manners out the window.  I disagree with that.  I think there's a difference between pointing out a brutal reality, and making the statement of reality itself brutal.  Sticking to certain guidelines like attacking the idea, not the person and being objective instead of ridiculing makes a big difference.  

  There are other ways, also, for less bold people, like the one that I use in IRL environments: Hint first (sensitive people get it, and you spare their dignity) then be clear (most people get it) then be brutally honest (slightly dense people get it). If I have to resort to the 2x4, then I really have to decide whether enlightening this person is going to be one of those battles I choose or one of those battles I do not choose.  (I usually choose against those battles.)

  How do you guarantee they're capable of disagreeing with others?  Making it clear that they're going to experience disagreements by requiring them to invite disagreements will not appeal to conformists.  Those who are not yet thinking for themselves will find it impossible to defend their ideas if they do join, so most of them will become frustrated and go back to the easy discussion area.  People who don't want intellectual rigor will be put off and leave.

  It's important that the wording for the check box has some actual bite to it, and that the same message about the hard discussion area is echoed in any pages that advise on the rules, guidelines, etiquette, etc.  To explain why, I'll tell a little story about an anonymous friend:

  I have a friend that worked at Microsoft.  He said the culture there was not open to new ideas and that management was not open to hearing criticism.  He interviewed with various companies and chose Amazon.  According to this friend, Amazon actually does a good job of fulfilling values like inviting honest feedback and creating an environment conductive to innovation.  He showed me the written values for each.  I didn't think much of this at first because most of them are boring and read like empty marketing copy.  Amazon.com has the most incredible written values page I've ever seen - it does more than sit there like a static piece of text.  It gives you permission.  Instead of saying something fluffy like: "We value integrity and honesty and our managers are happy to hear your criticisms." it first creates expectations for management: " Leaders are sincerely open-minded, genuinely listen, and are willing to examine their strongest convictions with humility." and then gives employees permission to give honest feedback to decision-makers: "Leaders (all employees are referred to as "leaders") are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.  Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion."  The Amazon values page gives their employees permission to innovate as well: "As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time."  If you look at Microsoft's written values, there's no bite to them.  What do I mean by bite?

  Imagine you're an employee at Amazon.  Your boss does something stupid.  The cultural expectation is that you're not supposed to say anything - offending the boss is bad news, right?  So you're inhibited.  But the thing they've done is stupid.  So you remember back to the values page and go bring it up on your computer.  It says explicitly that your boss is expected to be humble and that you are expected to sacrifice social cohesion in this case and disagree.  Now, if your boss gets irritated with you for disagreeing, you can point back to that page and say "Look, it's in writing, I have permission to tell you."

  Similarly, there is, what I consider to be, a very unfortunate social skills requirement that more or less says if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.  Many people feel obligated to keep constructive criticism to themselves.  A lot of us are intentionally trained to be non-confrontational.  If people are going to overcome this lifetime of training to squelch constructive criticism, they need an excuse to ignore that social training.  Not just any excuse.  It needs to be worded to require them to do that and it needs to be worded to require them to do it explicitly despite the consequences.

 

  Principle Three:  If we want innovation, we have to make innovators feel welcome.

  That brings me to another point.  If you want innovation, you can't deter the sort of person who will bring it to you: the "people who will be misunderstood for long periods of time", as Amazon puts it.  If you give specific constructive criticism to a misunderstood person, this will help them figure out how to communicate - how else will they navigate the jungle of perception and context differences between themselves and others?  If you simply vote them down, silently and anonymously, they have no opportunity to learn how to communicate with you and what's worse is that they'll be censored after three votes.  This ability for three people to censor somebody with no accountability, and without even needing a reason, encourages posters to keep quiet instead of taking the sort of risk an innovator needs to take in presenting new ideas, and it robs misunderstood innovators of those opportunities for important feedback - which is required for them to explain their ideas.  Here is an example of how feedback can transform an innovator's description of a new idea from something that seems incomprehensible into something that shows obvious value:

  On the "Let's start an important start-up" thread, KrisC posts a description of an innovative phone app idea.  I read it and I cannot even figure out what it's about.  My instinct is to write it off as "gibberish" and go do something else.  Instead, I provide feedback, constructive criticism and questions.  It turns out that the idea KrisC has is actually pretty awesome.  All it took was for KrisC to be listened to and to get some feedback, and the next description that KrisC wrote made pretty good sense.  It's hard to explain new ideas but with detailed feedback, innovation may start to show through.  Link to KrisC and I discussing the phone app idea.

 

Proposed Acculturation Methods:

 

   Send them to Center for Modern Rationality

   Now that I have discovered the post on the Center for Modern Rationality and have see that they're targeting the general population and beginners with material for local meetups, high schools and colleges and they're planning some web apps to help with rationality training, I see that referring people over to them might be a great suggestion.  Saturn suggested sending them to appliedrationality.org before I found this but I'm not sure if that would be adequate since I don't see a lot of stuff for people to do on their website.

 

    Highlight the culture.

    A database of cultural glossary terms can be created and used to highlight those terms on the forum.  The terms are already on the page, so what good would this do?  Well, first they can be automatically linked to the relevant sequence or wiki page.  If old users do not have to look for the link, this speeds up the process of mentioning them to new users quite a lot.  Secondly, it would make the core cultural items stand out from all of the other information, which will likely cause new users to prioritize it.  Thirdly, there will be a visual effect on the page.  You'll be able to see that this place has it's own vocabulary, it's own personality, it's own memes.  It's one thing to say "LessWrong has been influenced by the sequences" to a new user who hasn't seen all those references on all of those pages, and even if they do see them, won't know where they're from, versus making it immediately obvious how by giving them a visual that illustrates the point.

 

    Provide new users with real feedback instead of mysterious anonymous down votes:

    We have karma vote buttons, but this is not providing useful feedback for new users.  Without a specific reason, I have no way to tell if I'm being down voted by trolls and I may see ten different possible reasons for being voted down and not know which one to choose.  This annoyance selects for thick-skinned individuals like trolls and fails to avoid the "imbalance in the proportion of thick-skinned individuals to normal individuals" side-effect.

    If good new users are to be preserved, and the normal people to troll ratio is to be maintained, we need to add a "vote to ban" button that's used only for blatant misbehavior, and if an anonymous feedback system is to be used for voting down, it needs to prompt you for more detailed feedback - either allowing you to select from categories, or give at least one or two words as an explanation.  Also, the comments need to should show both up votes and down votes.  If you don't know when you've said something controversial and are being encouraged to view everything you say as black-and-white good-or-bad, this promotes conformity.

 

     A test won't deter ignorant cheaters, but they can force them to educate themselves.

    Questions can be worded in such a way that they serve as a crash course in reasoning in the event that someone posts a cheat sheet or registrants look up all the answers on the internet.  Assuming that the answer options are randomly ordered so that you have to actually read them then the test should, at the very least, familiarize them with the various biases and logical fallacies, etc.  Examples:

    --------------

    Person A in a debate explains a belief but it's not well-supported.  Their opponent, person B, says they're an idiot.  What is this an example of?

    A. Attacking the person, a great way to really nail a debate.

    B. Attacking the person, a great way to totally fail in debate because you're not even attacking their ideas.

    --------------

    You are with person X and person Y.  Person Y says they have been considering some interesting new evidence of what might be an alien space craft and aren't sure what to think yet.  You both see person Y's evidence, and neither of you has seen it before.  Person X says to you that they don't believe in UFOs and don't care about person Y's silly evidence.  Who is the better skeptic?

    Person X because they have the correct belief about UFOs.

    Person Y because they are actually thinking about it, avoiding undiscriminating skepticism.

    --------------

    Note:  These questions are intentionally knowledge-based.  If the purpose is to avoid requiring an IQ test, and to create an obstacle that requires you to learn about reasoning before posting in "hard", that's the only way that these can be done.

 

    Encouraging users to lurk more. 

   Vaniver contributed this: Another way to cut down on new-new interaction is to limit the number of comments someone can make in a time period- if people can only comment once an day until their karma hits 20, and then once an hour until their karma hits 100, and then they're unrestricted, that will explicitly encourage lurking / paying close attention to karma among new members. (It would be gameable, unless you did something like prevent new members from upvoting the comments of other new members, or algorithmically keeping an eye out for people gaming the system and then cracking down on them.) [edit] The delay being a near-continuous function of the karma- say, 24 hours*exp(-b karma)- might make the incentives better, and not require partitioning users explicitly. No idea if that would be more or less effort on the coding side.

    Cons:  This would deter some new users from becoming active users by causing them to lose steam on their initial motivation to join.  It might be something that would deter the right people.  It might also filter users, selecting for the most persistent ones, or for some other trait that might change the personality of the user base.  This would exacerbate the filtering effect that the current karma system is exerting, which, I theorize, is causing there to be a disproportionate number of thick-skinned individuals like trolls and debate-oriented newbies.  My theory about how the karma system is having a bad influence

 

    Give older users more voting power. 

    Luke suggested "Maybe this mathematical approach would work. (h/t matt)" on the "Call for Agreement" thread. 

    I question, though, whether changing the karma numbers on the comments and posts in any way would have a significant influence on behavior or a significant influence on who joins and stays. Firstly, votes may reward and punish but they don't instruct very well - unless people are very similar, they won't have accurate assumptions about what they did wrong. I also question whether having a significant influence on behavior would prevent a new majority from forming because these are different problems. The current users who are the right type may be both motivated and able to change, but future users of the wrong type may not care or may be incapable of changing. They may set a new precedent where there are a lot of people doing unpopular things so new people are more likely to ignore popularity. The technique uses math and the author claims that "the tweaks work" but I didn't see anything specific about what the author means by that nor evidence that this is true. So this looks good because it is mathematical, but it's less direct than other options so I'm questioning whether it would work.

  Vladimir_Nesov posted a variation here.

 

  Make a different discussion area for users with over 1000 karma.

  Posted by Konkvistador here.

 

  Make a Multi Generation Culture.

  Limit the number of new users that join the forum to a certain percentage per month, sending the rest to a new forum.  If that forum grows too fast, create additional forums.  This would be like having different generations.  New people would be able to join an older generation if there is space.  Nobody would be labeled a "beginner".

 

  Temporarily turn off registration or limit the number of users that can join.

  (See the cliff notes version for more.)

 

Should easy discussion participants be able to post articles?

  I think the answer to this is yes, because no filtering mechanism is perfect and the last thing you want to do is filter out people with a different and important point of view.  Unless the site is currently having issues with trolls posting new articles, or with the quality of the articles going down, leaving that freedom intact is best.  I definitely think, though, that written guidelines for posting an article need to be put in "in your face" expected places.  If a lot of new users join at once, well-meaning but confused people will be posting the wrong sorts of things there - making sure they've got the guidelines right there is all that's probably needed to deter them.

 

Testing / measuring results:

  How do we tell if this worked?  Tracking something subjective like whether we're feeling challenged or inundated with newbies is not going to be a straightforward matter of looking at numbers.  (Methods to assist willing people learn faster deserves it's own post.)  Just because it's subjective doesn't mean tracking is impossible or that working out whether it's made a difference cannot be done.  I suspect that a big difference will be noticed in the hard discussion area right away.  Here are some figures that are relevant and can be tracked, that may give us insight and ways to check our perceptions:

  1.  How many people are joining the hard forum versus the easy forum?  If we've got a percentage, we know how *much* we've filtered, though we won't know exactly *who* we've filtered.

  2.  Survey the users to ask whether the conversations they're reading have increased in quality.

  3.  Survey the users to ask whether they've been learning more since the change.

  4.  See which area has the largest ratio of users with lots of vote downs. 

  (This could be tricky because people who frequently state disagreements might be doing a great service to the group, but might be unpopular because of it, and people who are innovative may be getting voted down due to being misunderstood.  One would think, though, that people who are unpopular due to disagreeing, or being innovative, assuming they're serious about good reasoning, would end up in the hard forum.) 

 

Request for honest feedback:

  Your honest criticisms of this idea and your suggestions will be appreciated, and I will update this idea or write a new one to reflect any good criticisms or ideas you contribute.

 

This is in the public domain:

  This idea is hereby released into the public domain, with acknowledgement from Luke Muehlhauser that those were my terms prior to posting.  My intent is to share this idea to make it impossible to patent and my hope is that it will be free for the whole world to use.

  Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx. by Epiphany is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

Comment author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 01:07:23AM 0 points [-]

I am soon to post a well thought out solution to "endless September" that will cover this. It's nearly finished in my drafts right now.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 September 2012 06:44:42PM *  4 points [-]

A 3 minute talk on the Financial Consequences of Too Many Men. It seems the perceived sex ratio strongly influences male behaviours.

The perception that women are scarce leads men to become impulsive, save less, and increase borrowing, according to new research from the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

Research on this in the context of online forums such as ours might be very interesting.

A related blog entry by Peter Frost title Our brideprice culture that deals with societal implications of gender imbalance. It begins with highlighting a gender imbalance that many mention when talking about China but don't notice in is clearly present in the West as well, he then proceeds to discuss the likely consequences for society. The analysis is cogent and somewhat depressing.

A side point:

Will the operational sex ratio return to normal in the future? No, but it may stop getting worse. The trend toward male longevity seems to have almost maxed out for all reproductive ages. And fewer older men will be reentering the mate market—the baby boomers are getting a bit old for that sort of thing. But then we’ll probably also see more polygyny of the non-serial kind. Simultaneous polygyny is hard to measure, since it’s illegal, but it seems to be a growing phenomenon. The incidence of gonorrhea and chlamydial infection is now higher in women than in men, an indication that the population of promiscuous individuals is disproportionately female (Miller et al., 2004).

I disagree, I think this is an indicator of sexual inequality between men.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012
Comment author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 12:56:20AM *  2 points [-]

As a female, I wonder what it means that I don't react to behaviors like competing for status, class signaling and spending beyond ones means by being attracted - instead, I have the same feeling I get when people are being immature and stupid. Lol. I have thought about this a lot. I am just not attracted to the ordinary symbols of male power - though I seem to have a few triggers. Height doesn't matter, muscles don't do a thing and money has no effect. The demonstrations of power I do enjoy are when they're able to hold up their end of a debate with me (I keep wishing for someone to win against me), or when they're doing something really, really intellectually difficult. Those things, I do respond to. Fluff? No.

I have to wonder if other women who are as intellectual as I am are the same.

Comment author: see 01 September 2012 09:55:06PM 2 points [-]

Was reading up on the Flynn effect, and saw the claim it's too fast to reflect evolution. Is that really true? Yes, it's too fast, given the pressures, for what Darwin called natural selection, given the lack of anything coming along and dramatically killing off the less intelligent before they can reproduce. But that's not the only force of evolution; there's also sexual selection.

If it's become easier in the last 150 years for women to have surviving children by high-desirability mates, then we should, in fact, see a proportionate increase in the high-desirability characteristics. And since IQ and socioeconomic status are correlated, and SES is a known high-desirability characteristic, we would expect an increase in IQ accordingly, insofar as IQ is heritable.

And, in fact, there is a change in society that would do that — increasing urbanization. Not only have cities become healthy enough to have non-negative population RNIs for the first time in history, but they've also become the home of the majority of the human species for the first time in history. Studies of infidelity rates show it does, in fact, correlate fairly strongly with urbanization (probably for the logical reasons that increased population density increases opportunities and urban anonymity makes it easier to conceal from a mate).

So, the urbanization of the last 150 years increased successful infidelity. The usual models of sexual selection indicate that successful infidelity by women should result in high SES men having more children. IQ is correlated with high SES. IQ seems to be heritable in large part. And the period where we would expect high SES men to have more kids is matched by an increase in the general population's performance on tests of IQ.

I'm currently operating without good access to scientific journals to see if this has been considered and debunked, or not considered, or considered and put forward. But, at least sitting here just thinking about it without the resources to test it (or even model it effectively mathematically), it seems an increase in the genes that increase IQ as a result of sexual selection could be a plausible explanation of the Flynn Effect.

Comment author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 12:44:19AM *  5 points [-]

There are so many other factors, you're probably getting mostly noise there. For instance: I read somewhere that depending on whether babies drink breast milk or formula, they may lose 10 points (to formula) - the reason stated was lack of omega 3. What about lead paint chips? We have banned lead, that should increase IQ - after an initial decrease when lead paint began to be used. (There'd be a similar increase / decrease cycle with the invention of formula.) The point of these two is that as we learn more, we may be preventing a lot of things that previously caused children brain damage. And then there are other health factors which we've improved. In the great depression, I read 10% of the population starved to death. Starvation, for those who survive it, can cause brain damage. Were there other starvations before this, that had stopped happening? When did helmets become popular for people riding bicycles and skateboards and such?

There are just too many factors.

Heh, and I read somewhere that here in America, the Flynn effect has stopped. O.O

Comment author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 12:36:43AM 0 points [-]

Also, if down votes were not anonymous, people would have to be accountable for them. I don't think its a good idea for people to have the ability to censor anonymously. That gives a single person the power to deter others from responding to them, and it gives a group of three the ability to get them ignored. I'm totally willing to be accountable for defending any down votes I give. How do you guys feel about having to be capable of defending your down votes because they're public?

Comment author: Epiphany 02 September 2012 12:28:59AM *  1 point [-]

I've been thinking that there needs to be specific feedback with the votes, myself. I'm going to release a "prevent endless September" plan for you all to critique soon which I am willing to volunteer to help accomplish (I'm a web pro) which recommends requiring users to give feedback - I feel that the anonymous, feedback-less, thumb downs with no accountability are a bane to innovative types, as it allows these commonly misunderstood folks to be censored without providing the feedback required for them to figure out how to communicate effectively. What I would like to see rather than a drop down is a box where you have to type at least one word as a reason. That way, you can always put something appropriate, yet it's still not hard to type "trolling" and it's not cumbersome for more advanced people to leave something specific like "appeal to popularity" or "optimism bias" as constructive criticism for the user.

Edit: Actually it would really be best to have a drop down for categories of up/down votes AND a box where you type at least one word. Except for trolling. Where you just hit "Trolling". Or spam.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 01 September 2012 10:53:36PM 3 points [-]

Tabooing the word "dead", I ask myself, if a copy of myself was made, and ran independently of the original, the original continuing to exist, would either physical copy object to being physically destroyed provided the other continued in existence? I believe both of us would. Even the surviving copy would object to the other being destroyed.

But that's just me. How do other people feel?

Comment author: Epiphany 01 September 2012 11:37:12PM *  1 point [-]

Assuming the copy had biochemistry, or some other way of experiencing emotions, the cop(ies) of me would definitely object to what had happened. Alternately, if a virtual copy of me was created and was capable of experiencing, I would feel that it was important for the copy to have the opportunity to make a difference in the world - that's why I live - so, yes, I would feel upset about my copy being destroyed.

You know, I think this problem has things in common with the individualism vs. communism debate. Do we view the copies as parts of a whole, unimportant in and of themselves, or do we view them all as individuals?

If we were to view them as parts of a whole, then what is valued? We don't feel pain or pleasure as a larger entity made up of smaller entities. We feel it individually. If happiness for as many life forms as possible is our goal, both the originals and the copies should have rights. If they copies are capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, they need to have human rights the same as ours. I would not see it as ethical to let myself be copied if my copies would not have rights.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 01 September 2012 09:36:40PM 2 points [-]

You'd be dead.

The Worst Argument in the World. This is not a typical instance of "dead", so the connotations of typical examples of "dead" don't automatically apply.

Comment author: Epiphany 01 September 2012 10:39:11PM 1 point [-]

Thank you, Vladmir, for your honest criticism, and more is invited. However, this "Worst argument in the world" comparison is not applicable here. In Yvain's post, he explains:

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.

If we do an exercise where we substitute the words "criminal" and "Martin Luther King" with "virtualization" and "death", and read the sentence that results, I think you'll see my point:

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like death, and being virtualized will cause death, you should stop liking the idea of being virtualized by an AGI." But virtualization doesn't share the important features of death like not being able to experience anymore and the inability to enjoy the world that made us dislike death in the first place. Therefore, even though being virtualized by an AGI will cause death, there is no reason to dislike virtualization.

Not being able to experience anymore and not being able to enjoy the world are unacceptable results of "being virtualized". Therefore, we should not like the idea of being virtualized by AGI.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 August 2012 06:16:23AM *  1 point [-]

An FAI would have some security advantages. It can achieve physical security by taking over the world and virtualizing everyone else, and ought to also have enough optimization power to detect and fix all the "low level" information vulnerabilities (e.g., bugs in its CPU design or network stack). That still leaves "high level" vulnerabilities, which are sort of hard to distinguish from "failures of Friendliness". To avoid these, what I've advocated in the past is that FAI shouldn't be attempted until its builders have already improved beyond human intelligence via other seemingly safer means.

BTW, you might enjoy my Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit.

(Edit to add some disclaimers, since Epiphany expressed a concern about PR consequences of this comment: Here I was implicitly assuming that virtualizing people is harmless, but I'm not sure about this, and if it's not, I would prefer the FAI not to virtualize people. Also, I do not work for SIAI nor am I affiliated with them.)

Comment author: Epiphany 01 September 2012 09:19:41PM *  0 points [-]

Whoever it is that keeps thumbing down my posts in this thread is invited to bring brutal honesty down onto my ideas, I am not afraid.

If "virtualizing everyone" means what I think you mean by that, that's a euphemism. That it will achieve physical security implies that the physical originals of those people would not exist after the process - otherwise you'd just have two copies of every person which, in theory, could increase their chances of cracking the AI. It sounds like what you're saying here is that the "friendly" AI would copy everyone's mind into a computer system and then kill them.

Maybe it seems to some people like copying your mind will preserve you, but imagine this: Ten copies are made. Do you, the physical original person, experience what all ten copies of you are experiencing at once? No. And if you, the physical original person, ceased to exist, would you continue by experiencing what a copy of you is experiencing? Would you have control over their actions? No.

You'd be dead.

Making copies of ourselves won't save our lives - that would only preserve our minds.

Now, if you meant something else by "virtualize" I'd be happy to go read about it. After turning up with absolutely no instances of the terms "virtualize people" or "virtualize everyone" on the internet (barring completely different uses like "blah blah blah virtualize. Everyone is blah blah.") I have no idea what you mean by "virtualize everyone" if it isn't "copy their minds and then kill their bodies."

Comment author: Epiphany 31 August 2012 07:57:54PM *  0 points [-]

Security is solving the problem after the fact, and I think that is totally the wrong approach here, we should be asking if something can be designed into the AI that prevents people from wanting to take the AI over or prevents takeovers from being disastrous (three suggestions for that are included in this comment).

Perhaps the best approach to security is to solve the problems humans are having that cause them to commit crimes. Of course this appears to be a chicken-or-egg proposition "Well, the AI can't solve the problems until it's securely built, and it won't be securely built until it's solved the problems." but we could look at this problem in several other ways. Each of these are with the assumption that it is safest to deem the security problem impossible to solve after the fact:

  1. Make a lesser AI that is just powerful enough to address the root reasons humans cause security issues - the fact that it is less powerful may also make it a lot less dangerous in the event that it's taken over.

  2. Give everyone access to AI. If everyone already has access, then there will be no big jackpot to steal. If everyone else has access to AI, too, then taking one over wouldn't buy you any power. This is a paradigm shift from what you guys are suggesting, and would require that much of this is gone about in a different way. At first it looks like this would exacerbate security problems - won't people use them for bad purposes? Of course. But if EVERYONE has access, that won't be any scarier than a situation in which a gunman wants to take over, and everyone else has a gun. You can't take over a room group of equally armed people. Imagine taking out a gun in a room full of people with guns. You'll end up getting shot - you won't be taking over. One AI can't take over a world full of AI. Distributing the power everywhere would prevent many security problems ranging from deterring criminals from committing crimes (and limiting the damage criminals can do) to checking and balancing big powers to prevent tyranny to preventing the corruption of good people that may otherwise happen if they're given too much power to preventing a situation similar to Zimbardo's prison experiment where powerful AI builders feel a need to defend themselves from hackers, criminals and tyrants and therefore begin using the power they have in an oppressive way. {reason four}

  3. Focus on enlightenment. The human race has far too much power and far too little wisdom. Increasing the power of toddlers won't solve toddler's issues but only increase the damage the toddlers do to one another because of their issues. And so, increasing the power of an unenlightened human race will only amplify their pain. If we all practice non-attachment, we will be strong enough to heed "those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither" and hopefully cease the addiction to violating freedom, either by taking advantage of others or sacrificing our own, in order to gain more security. Might it make more sense to focus on enlightenment than on throwing power at an unenlightened species in an attempt to solve their problems? Maybe we should be asking "How can technology help us become more enlightened?"

"Intelligent people solve problems, geniuses prevent them." - Einstein

I think AI builders need to do like the geniuses. Prevent people from WANTING to take over the AI or prevent a takeover from being a big deal. There is nothing you can do guarantee it won't be taken over, not with the level of certainty that we'd need to have for a problem that could be this devastating to the entire world. The only way this much power can exist, and be safe from humans, is to address the human element itself.

Comment author: KrisC 21 August 2012 04:14:27PM 1 point [-]

Would you reconsider your idea if you found out that the most effective trauma surgeons were found to have unusually high levels of testosterone? Have you considered what other possible side effects might occur if this was carried out on a societal level? Would their be incentives for individuals to circumvent these restrictions?

Comment author: Epiphany 31 August 2012 07:55:28AM *  0 points [-]

Several problems:

Correlation is not causation. I'd have to see evidence that high testosterone was needed for trauma surgeons to be effective before I'd accept that it was a necessity.

What percentage of traumas are caused by violence? If excess testosterone were treated would the number of traumas decrease as well, making it unnecessary to have as many trauma surgeons?

As for whether I've considered what side effects would occur, no actually, I haven't. That was a good reminder. This isn't an idea I've thought about a lot yet so I haven't gotten very far. Up until this point, I'd been thinking about it like a disease - you don't justify failing to treat a disease by worrying about what society will be missing when those people are healthier.

Though, you could still wonder what might happen, sometimes consequences are unexpected. I don't know that much about testosterone. Do you have suggestions?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 August 2012 06:16:23AM *  1 point [-]

An FAI would have some security advantages. It can achieve physical security by taking over the world and virtualizing everyone else, and ought to also have enough optimization power to detect and fix all the "low level" information vulnerabilities (e.g., bugs in its CPU design or network stack). That still leaves "high level" vulnerabilities, which are sort of hard to distinguish from "failures of Friendliness". To avoid these, what I've advocated in the past is that FAI shouldn't be attempted until its builders have already improved beyond human intelligence via other seemingly safer means.

BTW, you might enjoy my Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit.

(Edit to add some disclaimers, since Epiphany expressed a concern about PR consequences of this comment: Here I was implicitly assuming that virtualizing people is harmless, but I'm not sure about this, and if it's not, I would prefer the FAI not to virtualize people. Also, I do not work for SIAI nor am I affiliated with them.)

Comment author: Epiphany 31 August 2012 07:24:35AM *  0 points [-]

Physical walls are superior to logical walls according to what I've read. Turning everything into logic won't solve the largest of your security problems, and could exacerbate them.

That's five.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 August 2012 06:16:23AM *  1 point [-]

An FAI would have some security advantages. It can achieve physical security by taking over the world and virtualizing everyone else, and ought to also have enough optimization power to detect and fix all the "low level" information vulnerabilities (e.g., bugs in its CPU design or network stack). That still leaves "high level" vulnerabilities, which are sort of hard to distinguish from "failures of Friendliness". To avoid these, what I've advocated in the past is that FAI shouldn't be attempted until its builders have already improved beyond human intelligence via other seemingly safer means.

BTW, you might enjoy my Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit.

(Edit to add some disclaimers, since Epiphany expressed a concern about PR consequences of this comment: Here I was implicitly assuming that virtualizing people is harmless, but I'm not sure about this, and if it's not, I would prefer the FAI not to virtualize people. Also, I do not work for SIAI nor am I affiliated with them.)

Comment author: Epiphany 31 August 2012 07:10:44AM *  1 point [-]

No go. Four reasons.

One:

If the builders have increased their intelligence levels that high, then other people of that time will be able to do the same and therefore potentially crack the AI.

Two:

Also, I may as well point out that your argument is based on the assumption that enough intelligence will make for perfect security. It may be that no matter how intelligent the designers are, their security plans are not perfect. Perfect security looks to be about as likely, to me, as perpetual motion is. No matter how much intelligence you throw at it, you won't get a perpetual motion machine. We'd need to discover some paradigm shattering physics information for that to be so. I suppose it is possible that someone will shatter the physics paradigms by discovering new information, but that's not something to count on to build a perpetual motion machine, especially when you're counting on the perpetual motion machine to keep the world safe.

Three:

Whenever humans have tried to collect too much power into one place, it has not worked out for them. For instance, communism in Russia. They thought they'd share all the money by letting one group distribute it. That did not work.

The founding fathers of the USA insisted on checking and balancing the government's power. Surely you are aware of the reasons for that.

If the builders are the only ones in the world with intelligence levels that high, the power of that may corrupt them, and they may make a pact to usurp the AI themselves.

Four:

There may be unexpected thoughts you encounter in that position that seem to justify taking advantage of the situation. For instance, before becoming a jailor, you would assume you're going to be ethical and fair. In that situation, though, people change. (See also: Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment).

Why do they change? I imagine the reasoning goes a little like this: "Great I'm in control. Oh, wait. Everyone wants to get out. Okay. And they're a threat to me because I'm keeping them in here. I'm going to get into a lot of power struggles in this job. Considering that even if I fail only 1% of the time, the consequences of failing at a power struggle are very dire, so I should probably err on the side of caution - use too much force rather than too little. And if it's okay to use physical force, then how bad is using a little psychological oppression as a deterrent? That will be a bit of extra security for me and help me maintain order in this jail. Considering the serious risk, and the high chance of injury, it's necessary to use everything I've got."

We don't know what kinds of reasoning processes the AI builders will get into at that time. They might be thinking like this:

"We're going to make the most powerful thing in the world, yay! But wait, everyone else wants it. They're trying to hack us, spy on us... there are people out there who would kidnap us and torture us to get a hold of this information. They might do all kinds of horrible things to us. Oh my goodness and they're not going to stop trying to hack us when we're done. Our information will still be valuable. I could get kidnapped years from now and be tortured for this information then. I had better give myself some kind of back door into the AI, something that will make it protect me when I need it. (A month later) Well... surely it's justified to use the back door for this one thing... and maybe for that one thing, too... man I've got threats all over me, if I don't do this perfectly, I'll probably fail ... even if I only make a mistake 1 in 100 times, that could be devastating. (Begins using the back door all the time.) And I'm important. I'm working on the most powerful AI. I'm needed to make a difference in the world. I had better protect myself and err on the side of caution. I could do these preventative things over here... people won't like the limits I place on them, but the pros outweigh the cons, so: oppress." The limits may be seen as evidence that the AI builders cannot be trusted (regardless of how justified they are, there will be some group of people who feels oppressed by new limits, possibly irrational people or possibly people who see a need for the freedom that the AI builders don't) and if a group of people are angry about the limits, they will then be opposed to the AI builders. If they begin to resist the AI builders, the AI builders will be forced to increase security, which may oppress them further. This could be a feedback loop that gets out of hand: Increasing resistance to the AI builders justifies increasing oppression, and increasing oppression justifies increasing resistance.

This is how an AI builder could turn into a jailor.

If part of the goal is to create an AI that will enforce laws, the AI researchers will be part of the penal system, literally. We could be setting ourselves up for the world's most spectacular prison experiment.

Checks and balances, Wei_Dai.

Comment author: Epiphany 31 August 2012 06:37:24AM *  -1 points [-]

And then Dr. Evil, forced to compete with 999,999,999,999 copies of himself that all want to rule, is back to square one. Would you see multiplying your competition by 999,999,999,999 as a solution to how to rule the universe? If you were as selfish as Dr. Evil, and intelligent enough to try attempting to take over the universe, wouldn't it occur to you that the copies are all going to want to be the one in charge? Perhaps it won't, but if it did, would you try multiplying your competition, then? If not, then maybe part of the solution to this is making it common knowledge that multiplying your competition by nearly a trillion isn't going to gain you any power.

That wouldn't keep trolls and idiots from trying it, though, and even though they'd be divided against themselves once they were there, which would probably make it impossible for any one of them to rule, it doesn't mean they wouldn't do heinous things like vote their way into some sort of preferred class. I just don't think a trillion copies of a selfish person would result in the original person ruling is all.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 30 August 2012 01:27:43AM 1 point [-]

At least to begin with, we don't have to come up with things on our own. There's a whole literature of psychological studies we can comb through to recreate. The Sequences cite a whole lot of iconic studies, and a sufficiently motivated person could dig up more obscure follow-ups, too.

Converting them into a format that would work on the Internet is a bit trickier, but a lot can be done with Java applets.

Comment author: Epiphany 30 August 2012 04:11:29AM 0 points [-]

Ooh... But what about copyrights? And if they are copyright expired, would they be any good? Maybe. Hmm.

Do you have suggestions for specific materials we could start with?

Comment author: Epiphany 30 August 2012 12:58:01AM *  2 points [-]

Kill all those birds with one stone: Work on understanding and preventing the risks. Here's why that stone kills each bird:

Re: Work on some aspect of building an AI

Even the sequences are against this. "Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible" Working on risk should go first. Also:

  • Somebody needs to judge the safety of AIs.

    Including any that you guys would make. If not SIAI, who will do this at all?

  • SIAI can't do both safety and production, it's perverse.

    The people who MAKE the AI should NOT be the same people who JUDGE the AI for the same reason that I would not purchase medical treatments from a doctor who claimed to test them himself but did not do a scientific study. You cannot peer review, independently test or check and balance your own project. Those that want to make an AI should plan to be part of a different organization, either now or in the future.

  • You'll get speed and quality advantages this way.

    If you build the AI first, you will certainly consider safety problems that hadn't been obvious before because you'll be in the thick of all those details and they'll give you new ideas. But those can always be added to the list of safety guidelines at that time. There is no reason to do that part first. If you make safety guidelines first, you can build the AI with safety in mind from the ground up. As you know, reprogramming something that has a flaw in a critical spot can be very, very time-consuming. By focusing on safety first, you will have a speed advantage while coding as well as a quality advantage. Others will make dangerous AIs and be forced to recall them and start over. So, this is a likely advantage.

Re: "improve laws and institutions"

You need to understand the risks thoroughly before you will be able to recommend good laws, and before people will listen to you and push for any legislation. After you understand the risks, you'd need to work on improving laws so that when the interested people go to build their AI there's a legal framework there.

Re: "computer security"

This should be included under "risk research and prevention." because it's definitely a risk. There are likely to be interactions between security, and other risks that you'd want to know about at the same time as working on the security, it's all connected, and you may not discover these if you don't think about them at the same time.

Re: "stop worrying about the Singularity and work on more mundane goals"

Considering the personalities, capabilities and prior investments of those involved, this simply isn't likely to happen. They need to be ambitious. Ambitious people need the assistance of others who are more specialized in mundane tasks and would be happy to help them so that they can focus on ambitions - we all specialize.

Focusing on risk research and prevention is also the first step to everything else:

  • How will you get funding for something people see as risky?

  • How will you develop AI in a world destroyed by other's AI projects that SIAI didn't take the time to stop?

  • How will SIAI develop credibility and trust if it doesn't prove it's capable of intellectual rigor by doing a thorough job of risk prevention? This entire industry has no trust. Even as an AI project, you'll have no trust for that reason.

  • How will SIAI prove it is effective in the world if it doesn't do something before making an AI such as change some laws, and do risk prevention?

  • Who is going to be there to independently test your AI project if you choose to do that instead?

I don't think the solution is "Do some, not others." I think it is "Do them in the right order." and for which type of AI project to chose, wouldn't it be safer to decide AFTER you research risks as thoroughly as possible?

Additionally, if SIAI chooses to dedicate itself to risk research and prevention and agrees that the AI building activities should be split off into a different group, I'd be interested in doing some volunteer work for the risk research and prevention group, especially regarding preventing an AGI arms race. I think the ideas I explain there or similar ones would be a really good way for you to prove that SIAI is capable of actually doing something, which addresses a common objection to funding SIAI.

See any way to break the above line of reasoning and argue for a different route? If so, I will attempt to resolve those conflicts also.

Comment author: OnTheOtherHandle 26 August 2012 04:43:01AM *  2 points [-]

Do you think it might be possible to make Less Wrong more interactive? There are a lot of simple rationality tests which most people get wrong; like the classic tests used for Confirmation Bias or The Conjunction Fallacy.

Could we make fun versions of such tests for people to try out, perhaps with animation, etc? With a little work, we could even come up with little games that test Bayesian reasoning skills.

This would select for active, interested people who like to try things out, and if we quickly explained mistakes as soon as people made them, the idea that "I, too, am irrational" would be much more salient.

Rationality is a skill we have to practice, in the end, not just a thing we read about.

(I apologize if this would be too hard to implement to be worth it; I have very little programming experience.)

Comment author: Epiphany 29 August 2012 06:55:25AM 1 point [-]

I've been thinking about this for a little while. This is a really, really good idea. It's not too hard to implement. I feel there are some other things to do first (prevent endless September for instance) but other than that I think it's a great idea and it's just a matter of constructing these with the right questions. Questions have to be worded very carefully, and tests constructed cautiously, in order to have the scientific properties that give test results their accuracy. On the other hand, fun internet quizzes can bring in users and do not necessarily need to be scientifically sound (though for this site in particular, I'd figure that wording even a fun quiz as scientifically as possible would be the way to go, as that would attract more like minded people and gain more respect). It would actually take a lot more time to think of all the questions, consider how scientific the series of tests was, and word all the questions correctly than to set up a script that allows you to take the tests.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 28 August 2012 10:49:26PM *  11 points [-]

Why haven't SI and LW attracted or produced any good strategists? I've been given to understand (from someone close to SI) that various people within SI have worked on Singularity strategy but only produced lots of writings that are not of an organized, publishable form. Others have attempted to organize them but also failed, and there seems to be a general feeling that strategy work is bogged down or going in circles and any further effort will not be very productive. The situation on LW seems similar, with people arguing in various directions without much feeling of progress. Why are we so bad at this, given that strategic thinking must be a core part of rationality?

Comment author: Epiphany 29 August 2012 01:23:51AM 0 points [-]

I love working on problems like these. If the specifics of the "circles" are written down anywhere, or if you care to describe them, I'd happily give it a whack. I won't claim to be an expert, but I enjoy complex problem solving tasks like this one too much not to offer.

Comment author: Epiphany 29 August 2012 01:20:46AM 2 points [-]

Is there a complete list of known / theoretical AI risks anywhere? I searched and couldn't find one.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 August 2012 11:40:47PM *  0 points [-]

FAI is a security risk not a fix:

"One way to think about Friendly AI is that it's an offensive approach to the problem of security (i.e., take over the world), instead of a defensive one."

Not if the AI itself is vulnerable to penetration. By your own reasoning, we have no reason to think they won't be. They may turn out to be one of the biggest security liabilities because the way it executes tasks may be very intelligent and there's no reason to believe they won't be reprogrammed to do unfriendly things.

Friendly AI is only friendly until a human figures out how to abuse it.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 August 2012 11:02:38PM *  0 points [-]

Humans misuse power. It doesn't seem to have occurred to you that humans with power frequently become corrupt. So, you want to emulate humans, in order to avoid corruption, when we know that power corrupts humans? Our brain structures have evolved for how many millions of years, all the while natural selection has been favoring those most efficient at obtaining and exploiting power whenever it has provided a reproduction advantage? I think we're better off with something man-made, not something that's optimized to do that! Downvote

Also, there is a point at which an intelligent enough person is unable to communicate meaningfully with others, let alone a super intelligent machine. There comes a point where your conceptual frameworks are so complex that nothing you say will be interpreted correctly without a huge amount of explanation, which your target audience does not have the attention span for. This happens on the human level, with IQ gaps of above 45 IQ points (ratio tests). Look up something called the "optimal IQ range". Want some evidence? Why do the presidents that we vote in have IQ's so (relatively) near to average when it would theoretically make more sense to vote in Einsteins with IQ's of 160? It's because Einsteins are too complicated. Most people don't have the stamina to do all the thinking required to understand all of their ideas enough to determine whether a political Einstein would be the better choice. The same problem will happen with AI. People won't understand an AI that smart because they won't be able to review it's reasoning. That means they won't trust it, are incapable of agreeing with it and therefore would not be likely to want to be led by it.

Brain emulation will do nothing to ensure any of the benefits you hope for.

Comment author: palladias 22 August 2012 05:27:35PM 0 points [-]

That's why I asked whether Less Wrongers would prefer SI to devote more of it's time to slowing down other people's unfriendly AI relative to how much time it spends constructing FAI. I agree, SI staff shouldn't answer.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 August 2012 02:02:10AM *  -1 points [-]

If there is a big enough AI project out there, especially if it will be released as freeware, others won't work on it. That would be high-risk and result in a low return on investment.

Three ideas to prevent unfriendly AGI (Scroll to "Help good guys beat the arms race")

Also, I don't think my other two risky AGI deterring ideas aren't do-able simultaneously. Not sure how many people it would take to get those moving on a large enough scale, but it's probably nowhere near as much as making a friendly AGI.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 22 August 2012 05:02:38PM *  2 points [-]

I don't think you quite understand the hammer that will come down if anything comes of your questions. Nothing of what you built will be left. I don't think many non-illegal sabotage avenues are open to this community. You can't easily influence the tenure process, and hiring the best researchers is notoriously difficult, even for very good universities/labs.


Re: OP, I think you are worried over nothing.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 August 2012 01:34:19AM *  -1 points [-]
Comment author: yli 25 August 2012 12:06:50AM *  0 points [-]

I'm happy you see where I'm coming from. Another opinion I have about issues like this is that to fix them, it wouldn't be enough to read complaints in comments in threads like this one and try to fix things you find people complaining about. You would actually need to find a person (or persons) with a good eye for and intuitions about these things, who has good taste and who knows what they're doing, and just let them take control of the whole design and let them change it at their discretion. I think there must be a few people on LW who would be both capable and willing to do it, though of course the site as it currently is would repel them.

Comment author: Epiphany 25 August 2012 01:08:08AM *  1 point [-]

I feel capable of doing the intuition part because I'm a psychology enthusiast and have done a lot of free coaching and emotional support, so I'm good at intuiting things about people's feelings. It's a matter of knowing what these guys care about the most. Without a feel for their culture, I won't be able to target people who already have the same culture - this is true - but since this site is creating it's own culture, that's not the objective. Finding people compatible to the culture, since it's a rationalist culture, isn't quite the right problem to solve either. Firstly, these guys seem to want NEW information, not just hear the same old stuff - they're not looking for people perfectly following their conventions, conforming to a stereotype, the way that most cultures do - that would be boring. Secondly, it's a culture of rationalists. A true rationalist wants to be proven wrong and to change in the event that their ideas weren't as good as somebody else's. So what we're looking at here is not the challenge of "Find more people with the exact same ideas." but the challenge of "Find people who can contribute to this culture."

Of course there is a fine line to draw when making the distinction between those who contribute to the culture and those who do not. The most important way to make the distinction seems to be "don't subject us to tedium". I theorize that boredom is the brain's way of punishing you for not constantly learning, which gives one a survival advantage since we live in a world where even one small spot of ignorance can cause a problem, yet we can't know everything. The only solution is: learn constantly. So, it's no wonder humans experience boredom whenever they're idle or doing something far too easy.

Depending on one's intelligence level, one might be fully immersed by the human world at all times, because it's designed to put people at that level into a state of flow, or they may be totally left out and experience flow very rarely. I think a lot of people here are the type that have to seek out flow experiences and are subjected to too much tedium elsewhere. The last thing they want is to be stuck reading the same stuff over and over, or explaining old ideas to new people. Their brains punish them for that, and they get too much of that type of punishment as it is.

So, because they're rationalists who know better than to assume that just because somebody disagrees, they're automatically wrong, and because they're hungry for new information, and won't be able to tolerate more of the same stuff all the time, I think the best way to go with this is not to attempt to attract people that match the details of the culture, but to attempt to attract people that match the root of the culture.

The root is caring about using good reasoning as one of your top priorities.

What do you think about that?

Comment author: Epiphany 24 August 2012 08:00:50PM *  -2 points [-]

Even Faster Solution:

Survey a bunch of open source people asking them if they'd switch to working on friendly AGI in the event that an AGI project started without enough safety, or get their signatures. Surely the thousands of programmers now working on projects like Firefox and Open Office, who clearly have an altruistic bent as they are working for free, will see that it is more important to prevent unfriendly AGI than to make sure the next version of these smaller projects are released on time.

If we can honestly say to these companies "If you try to start an AGI project without thorough safety precautions, 100,000 programmers have said they'll rise up against you and make a FREE AGI to compete with yours that's safer." What they will hear is "We'll be put out of business!" Assuming they believe the survey results are accurate, and that the plan for the project is feasible, they will be will forced to take safety precautions in order to protect their investments.

Just that ONE piece of information, if communicated right, could transform a risky AGI arms race into a much safer one.

Here's a multiplier effect: If you're asking a bunch of programmers anyway, you may as well ask them if they'd be willing to make a monetary contribution toward the friendly AGI project for x, y, or z strategies/prerequisites. Programmers tend to make a lot of money.

How this could postpone an arms race:

If the bar is set high enough (which can be done by asking the programmers all the conditions the AGI would have to meet, without which they'd deem it "risky" and get involved), you may postpone the arms race quite some time while companies regroup and try to figure out a strategy to compete with these guys. This assumes, also, that it becomes common knowledge among the people who would start a risky AGI project that this pact among open source programmers exists.

Other pieces that would be required to make this idea work:

  • The open source programmers would have to be given a message about the company who has started an AGI project that gets them to understand the gravity of the problem. They're probably more likely to grok it just because they're programmers and they're the right sort to have already thought about this sort of thing, but we'd want to make sure the message is really clear. This could be a little tricky due to laws about libel.

  • Companies may not believe the open source programmers are serious about switching. This is easily resolved by creating a wall where they can put remarks about why they think competing with unsafe AGI is an important project. Surely they will put convincing things like "I love using Linux, but if a risky AGI destroys enough, that won't matter anymore."

  • Have a way to contact the companies who are starting risky AGI projects in order to send them the message that they're provoking a loss of their investment. Asking the volunteer programmers to email them a threat to compete with them, (the way that a lot of activist organizations ask their members to tell companies they won't put up with them destroying the environment), would be one way. This requires previously having collected the email addresses of the programmers so that they can be asked to email the company. It also requires getting the email addresses of important people at the company, but that's not hard if you know how to look up who owns a website.

  • Ensure the open source programmers in question are knowledgeable enough about the dangers of AGI to want high standards for safety. They may need to be educated about this in order to make informed decisions. Providing compelling examples and a clearly written list of safety standards are both important or not everyone will be on the same page, and there won't be something solid causing them to consciously confront their biases and doubts.

  • Have a way to ask all (or a significant number of) the people interested in doing open source programming whether they'd switch. This does two things: 1. You get your survey results / signatures. 2. You get them thinking about it as a cause. Getting them thinking about it and discussing it, if they aren't already, would catalyze more of them to decide to work on it, assuming they use rational thought processes. After all, what's more important? Failing to upgrade Firefox, or having to live with unfriendly AGI? Just asking enough people the question would start a snowball effect that would attract people to the cause.

  • Retain some contact method that allows you to inform them when a risky AGI project starts. Note: Sending out mass-mailings is really tricky because spam filters are set to "paranoid" - it might take a person experienced with this to get the email campaign to go through.

  • When it is time for them to switch to AGI, they'll need to be convinced that it ACTUALLY is, in fact, that time. There will be inertia to overcome, so you'd need to present compelling reasons to believe that they should change over immediately.

  • The idea for the open source AGI must sound feasible in order for it to be convincing to companies that are starting unsafe AGI projects.

    Please critique. I'd be happy to get more involved in problem-solving.

    Other Ideas: Three possible solutions: (Which also explains why I think open source might have a competitive advantage.)

Comment author: yli 24 August 2012 12:31:06AM *  5 points [-]

Well since the front page is so generic, it might attract people who react positively to the mere idea of "rationality comminity" who are more likely to be people like stereotypical Objectivists and entry-level atheism fans, as opposed to the kinds of critical and savvy people that LW would need to prove itself to by eg. showing them some awesome posts from the archives and not expecting them to be excited merely about the idea of a site about rationality.

Comment author: Epiphany 24 August 2012 04:44:36AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, yes! I mentioned the same thing in a different comment and I'm glad to finally see that someone else gets it. (: Other people probably see this also, but it seems most are not really interested in analyzing how new people are reacting to the front page and about page and how it affects who does and does not join. Thanks, Yli. I'll definitely be interested in hearing any other theories you may have.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 August 2012 07:23:39AM *  11 points [-]

I would like to see more diversity. Not just in terms of demographics (though that too), but in terms of fields and specialties. There is nothing inherent in rationality that should limit it to computer/ math/ physics/ philosophy types. There are highly intelligent people in other fields also, and I feel like people from other disciplines could introduce an influx of new ideas.

Also, I think recruiting new members is a positive goal, and fully support it. I would like to see the community grow.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 06:43:32AM 1 point [-]

Hmm. That's an interesting idea - and you got a lot of points for that. This is a more complicated task than simply ensuring that users who are interested in developing their thinking abilities get a chance to see how awesome LessWrong is when they come to the front page. I will think on it.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 20 August 2012 08:30:41AM *  0 points [-]

If you could find more detailed information on referring sites or searches that are driving people to the site, that could be helpful. I don't know squat about it, but I'd think on site web analytics would provide direction on improving retention. I do hope that the keepers of the site avail themselves of your web marketing experience.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 06:40:01AM *  0 points [-]

I have requested access to the analytics. (: Thanks for your encouragement. (:

Comment author: beoShaffer 22 August 2012 12:02:14AM 0 points [-]

However, that can happen whether it grows quickly or slowly.

Yes, but one of the things that effects wether someone is a good user or bad user is how well they acculturate. From what I understand, sites with a high old timer to newb ratio usually have an easier time acculturating the newbs.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 06:33:59AM *  0 points [-]

That's not what I meant... Imagine a curve that gets more and more steep as it progresses. In the first quarter of a year, say a website gets 1000 new users. In the second quarter of the year, it gets 1500 new users. In the third quarter of the year, 2250 new users.

In the second quarter, 2/3 of the members are old members, 1/3 of the members are new. In the third quarter, the ratio changes because there are so many new members - nearly half the members are new. In the fourth quarter, an even larger number of new members joins, and suddenly there are more new members than old ones. If this keeps up for any length of time, the culture will be totally destroyed.

Whether you start with 20 members and increase it by an increment of 1 and 1/4 the amount of users every quarter, or start with 1000 and increase it by an increment if 1 and 1/2 the number of users every quarter, if the number of users keeps increasing this way, eventually it will get to a point where the ratio flips and there are more new users than old ones.

It doesn't matter whether that type of growth happens quickly or slowly. If the growth is exponential there's a good risk of that eventually happening. Slow growth might mean it happens next year, fast growth might mean it happens next month. Either way, it's important to protect the community from that problem.

Comment author: yli 21 August 2012 11:24:26AM 0 points [-]

Of course it could still be a good idea to rewrite the home page, since maybe the sort of people who would be attracted to a site with LW's current home page have on the whole negative value for LW.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 06:20:55AM 0 points [-]

Why is it attracting the wrong ones, yli? I have a vague sense that you might be right, so I'm very curious about your reasoning.

Comment author: Wrongnesslessness 21 August 2012 03:18:57PM 0 points [-]

We don't have to attract everyone. We should just make sure that the main page does not send away people who would have stayed if they were exposed to some other LW stuff instead.

That's a good point. However, I think there is not much we can do about it by refining the main page. More precisely, I doubt that even a remotely interested in rationality and intelligent person can leave "a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality" without at least taking a look at some of the blog posts, irrespective of the contents of the main page itself. We all know examples of internet sites with poor design, but great information content.

So the question of refining the main page, I think, really comes down to selecting the right articles for the Recent Promoted Articles and Featured Articles sections. The rest is already there.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 06:11:01AM *  1 point [-]

Problem 1: If the person has already done work to refine their skill with rationality on their own, they may figure the blog is likely to be more of the same old stuff. LessWrong would love to have more of that type of person, don't you think? They're not going to be interested in the topic of rationality presented plainly all by itself. You have to immediately prove to them that the particular collection of information is fresh and exciting, or they slot you away in the "already read about it" category.

Problem 2: A random post isn't necessarily going to be a good post. I did random post several times before I found one that excited me and made me realize that LW is awesome, and the ONLY reason why I kept trying was because so many friends had referred me to LW that I was starting to think I was missing something.

Problem 3: A lot of users are busy and don't take their time with new sites. They usually will not read an entire front page. You have a few seconds to interest them. You either put something awesome in their face, or they're lost.

Comment author: palladias 22 August 2012 03:32:28PM *  3 points [-]

I'm curious at what likelihood of AGI imminence SI or LessWrong readers would think it was a good idea to switch over to an ecoterrorist strategy. The day before the badly vetted machine is turned on is probably a good day to set the charges to blow during the night shift. The funding of this project is probably too early.

Do people think SI should be devoting more of its time and resources to corporate espionage and/or sabotage if unfriendly AI is the most pressing existential threat?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 04:27:25AM *  0 points [-]

Sabotage would not work. Several reasons:

  • If the people working on AGI projects fear sabotage, they'll just start working on them in private. Then, you'd be lulled into a sense of complacency, thinking they're not working on it. You will fail to take action, even legal ones. Then, one day, the AGI will be released, and it will be too late.

  • Anybody who sets out to make an AGI without first putting a lot of thought into safety is either really risk-taking, really stupid, or really crazy. People who are big risk-takers, really stupid, or really crazy do not respond like normal people do to threats. This would be really, really ineffective on them. You can look up the recidivism rate for people who are put into jail and see that there are a great many people who are not stopped by punishment. If you do some research on the kinds of risks business people take, you'll see the same risk-taking attitude, only in a more constructive form.

  • People who previously didn't know anything about the AGI project would view the AGI company as the good guys and the saboteurs as the bad guys. Whenever violence gets involved, opinions polarize, permanently. The saboteurs would find it 10,000 times harder just to exist, they'd lose a huge amount of support, making it 10,000 times harder to exist again. MUCH WORSE would be the biasing effects of "stimulus generalization". That is the psychological effect that causes people to feel prejudiced against, say Middle Easterners in general because they fear terrorists. If those who want to protect the world from risky AGI begin to sabotage projects, public opinion may just round off and lump everybody warning against risky AGI under the "terrorist" label. They might feel such a strong bias that they assume anyone warning about unfriendly AGI is a psycho and ignore the danger of unfriendly AGI completely

  • There will be numerous projects in numerous places at numerous times. It wouldn't be a matter of stopping just one project, or projects in just one country. The challenge here is to make ALL the projects in the entire WORLD safe, and not just the ones we have now but ALL the ones that might be there for forever into the future. Whatever it is that we do to increase the safety of this research, it would have to affect ALL of the projects. There's no way in hell anybody could be THAT effective at sabotage. All three of the ideas I came up with to prevent risky AGI have the potential to scale to the rest of the world and last through that indefinite time period.

  • Most people experience optimism bias, it's a common bias. People think "Oh look something dangerous happened over there. It won't happen to me." I have observed that upper class people often have especially strong optimism bias. I think this is because many of them have led lives that were very sheltered and privileged, and since that type of life frequently results in a dearth of the sort of "wake up calls" that cause one to challenge more instances of optimism bias, they frequently act as if nothing can go wrong. I can see them easily ignoring the risk of sabotage, or paying more for security and assuming that means they are safe.

    Sabotage would not prevent risky AGIs from being created. Period. And it could make things harder. If you really want to do something about dangerous AGI, put all that energy into spreading the word about the dangers.

See Also Three Possible Solutions

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 04:21:09AM *  1 point [-]

Convince programmers to refuse to work on risky AGI projects:

Please provide constructive criticism.

We're in an era where the people required to make AGI happen are in so much demand that if they refused to work on an AGI that wasn't safe, they'd still have plenty of jobs left to choose from. You could convince programmers to adopt a policy of refusing to work on unsafe AGI. These specifics would be required:

  • Make sure that programmers at all levels have a good way to determine whether the AGI they're working on has proper safety mechanisms in place. Sometimes employees get such a small view of their job and will be told such confident fluff by management, that they have no idea what is going on. I am not qualified to do this, but if someone reading this post is, it might be very important if you write some guidelines for how programmers can tell whether the AGI they're working on might be unsafe from within their employment position. It may be more effective to give them a confidential hotline. Things can get complicated, both in programming, and in corporate culture, and employees may need help sorting out what's going on.

  • You could create resources to help programmers organize a strike or programmer's walk. Things like: An anonymous web interface where people interested in striking can post their intent - this would help momentum build. A place for people to post stories about how they took action against unsafe AI projects. They might not know how to organize otherwise (especially in large projects) or might need the inspiration to get moving.

  • If a union is formed around technological safety, the union could make demands that outside agencies must be allowed to check on the project, and that the company must be forthcoming with all safety related information.

On the feasibility of getting through to the programmers

See Also "Sabotage would not work"

Comment author: lukeprog 22 August 2012 02:56:44PM *  3 points [-]

Note that most of the investment was (1) web development donated by TrikeApps and (2) Eliezer's salary while writing The Sequences. We don't have much money to invest in further development, but we are currently paying Trike and an oDesk coder to add new features to LW and fix some old bugs. I have plans to revisit the LW design and marketing but... so much to do, so little time/money. If you'd like to help, you can (1) give earmarked donations or (2) find a professional web designer/marketer who is willing to look at this stuff for free.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 August 2012 02:58:26AM 6 points [-]

Volunteer web pro here: I'm a professional web developer. I primarily do CGI programming. I am also capable of front-end web design / graphic design, database work, and other related tasks. Related tasks: ensuring the host's sysadmins do things correctly, solving random technical issues, and various tasks that make use of cpanel / root server access. I've done a lot of work with a search engine optimization expert and a marketing coordinator, and have read quite a bit about web marketing over the last ten years or so. I'm not specifically a marketing professional, but I know a lot more than a non web professional and I'm willing to do the following things:

Review the Google analytics data (requires access to the account), present LessWrong members with ideas, come up with a plan for growth that is popular and takes all significant criticisms into consideration, present the solutions to an authority for approval or changes, implement those solutions (assuming the solutions are not so time-consuming that I can't fit them into my schedule but so far the ideas are not too large... though I definitely want a good plan for preventing an overwhelming number of new users incompatible with the culture, for sure, before doing things that will increase the risk/speed at which one is invited, and in fact, this protection may need to be added regardless if there is not already a plan to prevent it, so that could easily end up to be the #1 priority were LW to accept this offer), review the situation and data afterward to see what the result is, and either put it back to the way that it was or try an improved plan.

If there are unrelated requests, I may grant them, depending on whether they are within the realm of my capabilities and time constraints. Feel free to ask about them.

I can provide one or two freelance references (I'm F/T so I don't have a long list of freelance references), a criminal background check, credit check or other reasonable checks to an official LW authority assuming they agree to maintain my privacy. I would like to point out that so far two opportunities have presented themselves that seemed like potential opportunities to hack into the website, and I reported them promptly. You don't know me, but you've already tested me twice in that way.

I assume Eliezer gets so much email that he will ignore anything I attempt to send him. If you or another prominent LW member wants to present this to him, that would work a lot better.

Comment author: lukeprog 21 August 2012 10:42:48PM 4 points [-]

The Singularity Institute has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into LessWrong.com. I don't think it's too unreasonable that we'd like to have some quality control on a few central pages like the home page and the about page.

Comment author: Epiphany 22 August 2012 07:54:29AM *  1 point [-]

Wait if they've got so much money to invest into this, why have users been allowed to edit the home page and why is the marketing bad? Might those pages have been done like that intentionally to throttle growth and filter people using an err on the side of caution approach to preserve the culture? Maybe they have plans in mind we don't even know about, and this entire discussion is irrelevant.

Comment author: betterthanwell 19 June 2012 05:10:52PM *  27 points [-]

So I read this, and my brain started brainstorming. None of the names I came up with were particularly good. But I did happen to produce a short mnemonic for explaining the agenda and the research focus of the Singularity Institute.

A one word acronym that unfolds into a one sentence elevator pitch:

Crisis: Catastrophic Risks in Self Improving Software

  • "So, what do you do?"
  • "We do CRISIS research, that is, we work on figuring out and trying to manage the catastrophic risks that may be inherent to self improving software systems. Consider, for example..."

Lots of fun ways to play around with this term, to make it memorable in conversations.

It has some urgency to it, it's fairly concrete, it's memorable.
It compactly combines goals of catastrophic risk reduction and self improving systems research.

Bonus: You practically own this term already.

An incognito Google search gives me no hits for "Catastrophic Risks In Self Improving Software", when in quotes. Without quotes, top hits include the Singularity Institute, the Singularity Summit, intelligencexplosion.com. Nick Bostrom and the Oxford group is also in there. I don't think he would mind too much.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 03:52:51AM 0 points [-]

Center for Preventing a C.R.I.S.I.S. A.I.

C.R.I.S.I.S. A.I. could be a new term also.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 20 August 2012 10:35:06PM 2 points [-]

A/B testing is useless without variations to test. If you want to create a variation, go for it.

Right now there is a lot of commentary in this thread but not much action.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 02:54:54AM *  1 point [-]

We're starting to come up with a lot of plans here and I don't want this to step on anybody's toes.

I'm not sure whether you're the sole decision maker for the website, or if other people need to be told. Do changes like these need to be approved or is the website delegated to you?

Comment author: gjm 21 August 2012 01:19:59AM 11 points [-]

(I think you may have a wrong idea of what "pontificate" means. Either that or you're being gratuitously rude, which I'm going to assume you aren't.)

The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I'm saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is "make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides"; the obvious inference from #2 is "consider carefully whether growth is what you want".

I don't know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including "grow very rapidly") so I can't really give you "[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow". What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth -- especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you're implicitly proposing -- might be the Wrong Thing.

The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its quality. I don't just mean "LW might start to attract trolls and spammers and idiots". I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that's so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.

There've been a couple of surveys of LW participants. They suggest that the userbase of LW is very unusual. So, for that matter, does a casual look at the discussions here. LW participants are unusually interested in rationality (of course, since that's the central topic of the site), something like three standard deviations above average in measured intelligence (according to self-reports, so take that with a pinch of salt, but I don't find it hard to believe that something of the kind is true), and willing to read and in many cases write long, well researched, sometimes highly technical material. This combination of characteristics is rare. It's surely a large part of what gives LW the distinctive character it has. I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.

(I am aware that the foregoing paragraph sounds as if I'm saying "look at us, we're superior to everyone else". That is not, even slightly, the point. LW regulars, as a population, are unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others, and very average at others, and treating one group of people as "superior" to others is a road to ruin for all sorts of reasons. All I'm saying is that a community with the particular strengths LW has is a very unusual thing, and I think a lot of LW's distinctive merits derive from those strengths.)

Now, I know that you said things like "We'd better choose what audience to target". But I think you underestimate what an ... odd ... audience it is that LW might need to target, and the general shape of your proposals -- make it so people are immediately grabbed without having to read all that text; base the design on general "web marketing" principles -- seems like it's implicitly aimed at exactly the people who don't have the peculiar characteristics that make LW what it currently is.

I think this lies behind your perception that people here "seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing". Probably many are, but please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn't others' obtuseness but that they simply aren't interested in the "web marketing" goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.

A large increase in LW's audience could have big benefits; I'm not denying that. They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. Or maybe there's a way to increase the audience a lot without a big growth in the population of active participants. Or maybe "basic web marketing principles" can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW's current regulars have. So I'm not (to repeat myself) saying that LW should not aim to grow a lot. I don't know whether it should. It just makes me really uneasy to see growth being treated as axiomatically good and important (which, repeating myself again, is not the same as saying that it has no downsides, and which I know you weren't saying).

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 02:02:14AM *  1 point [-]

You had a good point in your suggestion so I changed my "100% good" statement.

I also responded (different comment).

Comment author: gjm 21 August 2012 01:19:59AM 11 points [-]

(I think you may have a wrong idea of what "pontificate" means. Either that or you're being gratuitously rude, which I'm going to assume you aren't.)

The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I'm saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is "make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides"; the obvious inference from #2 is "consider carefully whether growth is what you want".

I don't know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including "grow very rapidly") so I can't really give you "[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow". What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth -- especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you're implicitly proposing -- might be the Wrong Thing.

The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its quality. I don't just mean "LW might start to attract trolls and spammers and idiots". I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that's so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.

There've been a couple of surveys of LW participants. They suggest that the userbase of LW is very unusual. So, for that matter, does a casual look at the discussions here. LW participants are unusually interested in rationality (of course, since that's the central topic of the site), something like three standard deviations above average in measured intelligence (according to self-reports, so take that with a pinch of salt, but I don't find it hard to believe that something of the kind is true), and willing to read and in many cases write long, well researched, sometimes highly technical material. This combination of characteristics is rare. It's surely a large part of what gives LW the distinctive character it has. I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.

(I am aware that the foregoing paragraph sounds as if I'm saying "look at us, we're superior to everyone else". That is not, even slightly, the point. LW regulars, as a population, are unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others, and very average at others, and treating one group of people as "superior" to others is a road to ruin for all sorts of reasons. All I'm saying is that a community with the particular strengths LW has is a very unusual thing, and I think a lot of LW's distinctive merits derive from those strengths.)

Now, I know that you said things like "We'd better choose what audience to target". But I think you underestimate what an ... odd ... audience it is that LW might need to target, and the general shape of your proposals -- make it so people are immediately grabbed without having to read all that text; base the design on general "web marketing" principles -- seems like it's implicitly aimed at exactly the people who don't have the peculiar characteristics that make LW what it currently is.

I think this lies behind your perception that people here "seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing". Probably many are, but please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn't others' obtuseness but that they simply aren't interested in the "web marketing" goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.

A large increase in LW's audience could have big benefits; I'm not denying that. They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. Or maybe there's a way to increase the audience a lot without a big growth in the population of active participants. Or maybe "basic web marketing principles" can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW's current regulars have. So I'm not (to repeat myself) saying that LW should not aim to grow a lot. I don't know whether it should. It just makes me really uneasy to see growth being treated as axiomatically good and important (which, repeating myself again, is not the same as saying that it has no downsides, and which I know you weren't saying).

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 01:42:14AM *  1 point [-]

Oops sorry. I removed pontificate. Thank you for not assuming I was being rude.

"I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that's so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse."

Good problem. However, that can happen whether it grows quickly or slowly.

"I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors."

Yes! I did warn that this could happen, and that it could happen whether we like it or not.

I wonder whether you think this idea would work:

"http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/e5r/lesswrong_could_grow_a_lot_but_were_doing_it_wrong/78r2"

I also had another idea:

I like that things can be voted up and down, but I think it would be a heck of a lot more effective if specific feedback was provided. As a new user, I will adjust a lot faster if I know WHAT I am doing wrong/right not just THAT I am doing something wrong/right. Also, I wouldn't write off the votes to "bad attitude" and "trolls" when I don't understand them. That's what I'm doing now, lol, and I don't like that, but I don't know what else to think of them, lol.

I think if the votes required a reason, which could be as quick as the word "Trolling" or the name of a logical fallacy, that would make a huge difference. That would ALSO force us to get conscious of our reasons for voting, which would provoke conscious review of the reason, which would probably result in better decisions.

And to ensure the culture doesn't change too quickly, what if it took, say, three months and X number of posts before you're allowed to vote? That way, the oldest users get to influence the culture, and users who just aren't compatible with LessWrong will wander away before they've exerted an influence.

This is basically the same as how you have to be a resident of a country before you can vote.

From a developer's standpoint, that would be a very easy change, but more importantly, it would protect the site no matter whether it grows faster or at the current pace.

"please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn't others' obtuseness but that they simply aren't interested in the "web marketing" goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason."

Oh, I did! I did consider that. (: That was the entire reason I created this thread. I figured you would all let me know what you wanted and if growth wasn't it, you'd shoot me down. (:

"They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. "

Has anyone thought much about what would improve the quality of discussion? Because that could be improved at the same time. Or before making marketing changes -- to be sure that the safeguard is in place first.

"Or maybe "basic web marketing principles" can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW's current regulars have. "

Yes! That's what I was hoping for. (: That's why I asked who your target demographic is. I might think I know, but you guys are the ones that have been talking to them for years.

Comment author: KrisC 20 August 2012 10:55:04PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for the review Epiphany. This is the kind of feedback I have a hard time finding.

The general message I received from your post is that I undersold the project. I did seek to keep my expectations understated. This audience does not seem to like overstated expectations.

There have been times when I have explained the project and felt that the person I was speaking to encountered an ah ha! moment, an epiphany. This is the kind of feedback that makes me feel good, but it is usually not very constructive.

Let me address your points.

This will be a frequent assumption: Decision-making app? On a phone? This can't happen.

Not much I can say to someone who makes up there mind on the first sentence. If the description were restructured this objection could be put off, but how would that help?

It is have been very difficult to categorize this app. If decision-making app is not the right phrase, what is? Wish fulfillment app seems even more preposterous. Search engine is misleading, as the search is only a step towards meeting a desire. Some people have mistaken it for a shopping app, which is only partly correct.

I think what you're saying is "Once the user types what they want, the phone does it like a command. It can do almost any command this way." Really, what needs to be in place of this paragraph is an example. The example should either support the decision-making claim, or the decision making claim needs to be reworded.

Once the user types - or says - what they want, the phone lists a set of search results. Upon selecting one, a screen is displayed, perhaps but not necessarily indicating what function of the phone will be activated. The most common action is the display of a link in a browser. It could however dial phone number, show a movie, ask the user to respond to a question, send a text message, or even send a message to a piece of electronics.

So let's say you say you want an apple. One result may post a link to a price aggregator which tracks local supermarkets and show you where apples are on sale. Another result might suggest that you grow an apple tree. A third result could tell you that recent research suggests that people who want apples actually need more exercise and suggests you do jumping jacks. A final result might be a picture of a lolcat with an apple.

From your history, the program knows that you are more likely to accept results from the contributor who lists an apple as a fruit available from a supermarket price aggregator. That result will go on top. The contributor who posted the erroneous research you had already banned, so that result is handicapped in the rankings. You may end up clicking on the funny picture and give it an approval, depending on your mood, and thus end the search. In the future, you will not only receive more results from that source higher in the rankings, but also your app will spread that result preferentially to peers.

The application incorporates a screensaver... which showcases emerging technologies

[W]hy is it included?

What may not be evident is that the purpose of the app is not to get people more stuff. The purpose of the app is to refine the procedures that users follow to get things that they ask for. The decision of what the "best" method is highly personal, and so the ranking is personal and informed by the opinions of like-minded peers.

So what does this have to do with the screensaver? The screensaver is the means to put into the users' minds and hands the things that I want to have available: space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension. By placing these things into an application which improves the methods of acquiring them through open source methods, they will hopefully be developed faster. This is a concrete boon to humanity.

It is my intent to develop the content in another application. However, to make use of the power of crowd-sourcing the content needs to be linked to the app.

How will the commercial version support itself? There are no costs to pay that I haven't already paid. Google provides the hosting. Users provide the phones and the content. I and future open source developers develop the product.

What is being paid for that's not available in the free version?

The slightest of bells and whistles. Background colors and images. The paid version is a bit of a joke. The user could just download the free version and ask the app how to get the premium features.

The paid developer version is, on the other hand, a sincere fundraising attempt.

If you don't answer questions about money immediately, people lose interest very fast.

Still don't think 'people' are getting it. The primary value is not derived from being the owner of the distribution of the software. The value is realized by the person using the app. It provides a forum for the competitive evaluation of methods of production and acquisition for the benefit of the users.

A secondary type of value is extracted by contributors. They get to influence users directly. Unlike a mere Wikipedia editor who provides background information, these contributors tell people what to buy and how to live their lives.

This reputation-based value is a potential path to monetization. By providing the app, we also have the ability to provide the seed database. I myself do not drink Pepsi. If I clone my own database and provide it as the seed, Pepsi will not be included. With the right inducement I can include PepsiCo as the source of Pepsi. Or even provide a link to the (hypothetical?) Pepsi distributor locator app.

I do not see a reason for the name "hope" or "plan a."

I 'hope' that I can find a way to 'plan a' way to get what I want. Please give me a better suggestion.

3D printers

Is there something about this method of conception that makes your plan special?

3D printer operators need models which are easy to provide via a database. 3D models can do double duty as elements used to create animated scenes such as used in the screensaver.

Closer to the core, the app is about individuals meeting their needs better. Not only can 3D printers provide completely customized items specific to the user, they can also be used to build other tools. With a 3D printer and the right set of instructions, the user will be able to provide for many of their own needs. While the scope of 3D printers' capabilities are currently somewhat limited, there is little doubt that their abilities will increase to a point where they are profitable for many more people to own.

I'll have to see how it helps the world in order to invest significant time into it. You didn't include that in your post.

The app helps the world with the same goal as SI's rationality outreach program, just using different means. We all want people to make better decisions. It would be nice if everyone learned better critical thinking skills. I just want to automate those skills in an app.

Point it out, or else leave that note out to respect the reader's limited time and lack of need to know this info.

You have a point about requiring the readers to keep thinking to get the whole message. But Socrates had a contrary opinion when it came to learning. Learning takes place in your head, not your ears. I am trying to recruit developers -- people who need to keep thinking about this in order to be useful at this time.

So in summary, I have heard it said that in order to create a successful social app you should take something you learned in EvoPsych and automate it. I am attempting to mimic the two methods of decision making. Either imitate a successful peer or do the research yourself. In this context, use the app and, when you have a better idea than what is listed, contribute content.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 01:22:32AM 1 point [-]

The solution to disbelief is to make a verifiable claim. You can get clobbered so hard for making a verifiable claim that is wrong that it seems bold and people will hear you out then. Also, they can relax as soon as they have consciously noted to themselves that there is some way to test what you said - they're no longer paranoid that you can fool them when they have such an easy way to prove you wrong.

And sometimes it's best to let people see for themselves, be impressed, and categorize something by themselves. So, instead of "It makes decisions." I would give an example that is immediately verifiable as soon as you use the program. I would say "Type in X and it will say Y" - give a few more impressive examples to give the gist of the way that this thing "reasons" or whatever it does.

Hmmm... this is almost like a phone operating system, a different interface that's essentially language-based rather than visual-spatial. That could be really handy, especially if you're having a terrible time finding your buttons. Heck, I'd love to have that on my computer. And it does speech recognition? That's awesome.

Okay, I now understand why some people will think its awesome. (:

"From your history, the program knows that you are more likely to accept results from the contributor who lists an apple as a fruit available from a supermarket price aggregator. That result will go on top. "

Oh wow. I see this now. The implications for targeted advertising are all over that. I wonder what your stance is on targeted advertising? If you take a stance of "no" on that early on, I'd advertise that and put your decision in a prominent place - there's a growing movement of people who are starting to understand that they're being tracked and they don't like it. You'll get more respect and attention from them if you refuse to use it. Might be a way to stand out from competitors at some point, either now or in the future.

Those three paragraphs (with the search, the apple, and the way it selects results) were a really good start at explaining.

I feel like the screen saver fits in now, which is because my mind has decided this is kind of like an operating system. Or an operating system upgrade. Or a totally new paradigm about how to use your phone. That's enough of an umbrella to make a screensaver make sense.

Ok, so to confirm: the screensaver is a way to promote ideas? You want the public to know about technologies that you want to see happen so that they happen faster?

"It is my intent to develop the content in another application. However, to make use of the power of crowd-sourcing the content needs to be linked to the app."

That feels out of context.

So do you intend to make money off of the app or not? If not, definitely mention that it's non-profit. If this particular method (selling background colors) has been proven profitable, then cite an example and the amount of profit. Either making the claim if being non-profit or making a claim to know how to profit is really important. That's a lot of people's first question and a lot of people won't take you seriously if you don't have a realistic answer.

"This reputation-based value is a potential path to monetization."

Do you have plans in place for spammers? If not, they will ruin your app. Think I'm kidding? Back in 1998 you could try and find a pair of shoes on line, or some glasses, or other mundane household items. It didn't matter what you typed in because every result would be porn.

That's what will happen to your app if you have no security against it.

Wow 3-D printers. You have quite a vision for cell phones.

Okay, I'm going to suggest another rewrite: If I was you, I would start with the three paragraphs I mentioned before (with the search, the apple, and the way it selects results), elaborate / add information, and also, let the reader know how many users your app has so far. If it's growing quickly, let us know how long it takes to double?

Comment author: shminux 20 August 2012 07:51:38AM 6 points [-]

Don't forget A/B testing...

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 12:44:10AM *  0 points [-]

I've been thinking about that. Here are my thoughts:

Obviously we will want to see if the new pages are getting more members than the old ones - we can look at the statistics for that. I'll definitely want to know if we're getting results if my idea was used, and I will be really curious about why not if that's the case, which will lead to speculation and new ideas, I'm sure.

I am also really curious about which articles hook users most effectively. I'm thinking a random excerpt rotator would do the trick. There are ways to see, in the statistics, which pages are working the best. (By going to the stats for that particular page and see how many people were referred over by the home page.)

This is going to be a lot of data to demand. So, either somebody with access to Google Analytics is going to have to get involved, or I will have to get access to it. I'll see what they want to do.

Ah! Also! I'll need to get "number of members" statistics before we do anything, and then compare a before and after.

Comment author: beoShaffer 20 August 2012 10:14:01PM 3 points [-]

I concur. I have implied this in my previous comments, but I will going come out and explicitly say it here. Caeteris paribus I want LW's growth rate to be higher than it currently is, but I am more concerned with keeping out the intellectual riff-raff than encouraging growth. Furthermore, I actively want to avoid the exponential growth scenario, unless we can create an effective user orientation or another way of reducing the time it takes for new members to acculturate. </monocle>

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 12:29:18AM *  2 points [-]

I agree that there's a lot of annoyance for both the new user and old users when new people join. A new user orientation is needed. That's why I wrote an outline for a New User Orientation full of suggestions that I personally would like to see included in the new user orientation. Please go and critique it - older members are surely going to have suggestions I wouldn't think of. I have nothing against writing one, but I can't write a good one with no input, I'm too new.

Please distinguish "keeping out the intellectual riff-raff" from elitism. Are you talking about people who really aren't serious about rational though? Maybe you just mean you don't want more trolls? Or do you mean you want to outright make an IQ requirement?

I have an idea for scaring off those who are not serious about rational thought that goes like this:

The culture here is very, very honest, very confrontational when it comes to errors in reasoning. That's one of my top five reasons for joining. But it feels a bit tentative, a bit ambiguous. People also react with hurt feelings. I think, when it comes to that, we have to choose. I know what I choose - If the truth is brutal, hurt my feelings, I want to know. I'll be responsible for cleaning up whatever mess it makes of my emotions. I think that's the only way rationalists can go. I would like to see a description that demands honesty - not just mentions "yeah people are more honest here" but DEMANDS honesty. I'll show you what I mean:

I am not an employee of Amazon but a friend showed me their values page and I thought it was inspiring: It states that their employees (referred to as "leaders") are "...obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable..." Amazon Leadership Principles

I want to see something just as bold, just as tough as part of the joining agreement. I'm not talking about hiding it in some website policy or rules page everyone ignores. I want to see it right by the join button:

"By pressing this join button, I agree that I am here to improve myself. I understand that my flawed reasoning will be pointed out. My feelings about that will be my own responsibility. I agree also that I will point out flawed reasoning when I see it, no matter whose it is."

(I also wrote about how LessWrong seems to balance brutal honesty and manners and my favorite technique for that)

From my post New User Orientation

Do you think this would work?

Comment author: gjm 20 August 2012 09:16:05PM 6 points [-]

I'm all for trying to make the LW front page more engaging, but I am skeptical about an assumption pervading this post: that growth should be a major goal, and that faster growth is better aside from major pathologies like spammers and trolls.

For a website that exists mostly to make money (by selling things, advertising a product, gaining visibility for a person or company, etc.) this is a good assumption: all else being equal, you want more page views, lower bounce rates, higher conversion rate, etc. But LW doesn't exist mostly to make money; it exists (in high-minded principle) to refine the art of human rationality and (more prosaically) to provide interest and entertainment for its participants, and for these purposes some visitors are much, much more valuable than others and many have negative value. (This is true even taking into account the prospective value of LW to those visitors.)

By definition, LW wants (or should want) to "grow optimally" -- but that may mean "grow very rapidly" or "grow slowly" or even "not grow at all, at present".

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 12:22:22AM *  1 point [-]

What are the reasons for not wanting to grow? You didn't state any reasons I haven't already stated.

For the record, I am aware that it's not a good idea to assume that growth is 100% good. That's why I put that in the OP.

I feel that LessWrong could be really important - and maybe it already is - that's why I want to see it grow (that much is obvious.) I started writing about why, but I want to hear your reasons for not wanting it to grow.

You're going against the grain - not a bad thing but it means you're going to have to really lay out your reasons if you want to change the way the wind is blowing.

Elaborate, please.

Comment author: CronoDAS 20 August 2012 10:57:16PM 0 points [-]

I don't know if we want more visitors as much as we want more converts. We really do have a lot in common with a phyg, in that we have a particular worldview that isn't mainstream and that we're trying to spread.

Comment author: Epiphany 21 August 2012 12:19:01AM 0 points [-]

What is a convert? An irrational person who wants to become rational, or a more or less rational person who wants to become better?

Comment author: Xachariah 20 August 2012 06:03:34AM *  5 points [-]

Is 60% actually high for a blog/forum? I'm not a professional but I was under the impression that it varied drastically based on what your website is, and that blogs/forums are naturally really low. I'd imagine it would be especially true for LessWrong, simply because of the nature of the material.

Google Analytics Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rate

  • 40-60% Content websites
  • 30-50% Lead generation sites
  • 70-98% Blogs
  • 20-40% Retail sites
  • 10-30% Service sites
  • 70-90% Landing pages

This is what a cursory search pulled up. Is this way off base, or is 30% more realistic for a forum?

Edit: As a side note, I'm also having trouble making bullet point lists inside of a quote. I can make them fine outside a quote, but it's just not working inside. Anyone know how to do that?
Editx2: Awesome, thank you loup-vaillant on the code. Looks like I needed extra line breaks there.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2012 07:02:42AM *  6 points [-]

If the majority of the users were returning visitors, I wouldn't be concerned about the bounce rate (but then I'd have to wonder why the site wasn't getting new visitors.) If I felt the front page did a good job of putting something awesome in your face (instead of hiding it behind a link) then I wouldn't be concerned. If the sitepoint graph showed the site growing as quickly as 50% new users per month implies it could, I'd assume the bouncers were returning visitors. It's that combination of factors that makes me think that new visitors are going away and that the web marketing has room for improvement.

A lot of blogs have only a single page - that single page nature may be why they've got a higher bounce rate compared with other types of sites because new visitors get the content they were looking for on the first page, and because there's not anything else to do but read. Yes, you can read every post if it's really interesting (Hyperbole and a Half was like that for me.) but 90% of the time I'm just grabbing a recipe real quick or trying to figure out how to fix my blender and the information I need is right on the first page, then I'm done. These single page blog sites aren't a gateway into a community. And LessWrong isn't a place with practical information where you're doing a quick question run. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this place attracts intellectuals who love reading. Assuming that's the sort of person coming here, we have to ask why new visitors are not clicking. It's not because they're satisfying their reading fix on the front page as with a single-page blog. The front page doesn't have a lot of text. If they have an intellectual nature, and are expecting to read something interesting, they should be showing more curiosity about other pages. That they're not means the page failed to interest them. Why else would a new visitor leave without clicking on something when you think about the current home page design?

When it comes down to it, there's no right number. Every website and situation is different. You can find people saying "oh 60% is normal" and other people saying "60 percent! You should be worried!" but when it comes down to it, it really depends on the situation.

And then, you also have to ask yourself this:

Do I want to tell myself my bounce rate is okay or do I want to get as many repeat visitors as possible?

If it's the former, 60% is okay. If it's the latter, especially if you've got that many new visitors not becoming returning visitors, 60% is totally unacceptable.

Good marketing techniques can bring the bounce rate down to 30%. Can they do that for this website? I don't know. I say that it's time to make a hypothesis about what would work and do the experiment of trying it out.

If you would like a reputable source of information on this, you can try this Google video. I assume they know what they're talking about because they probably profit off of helping website owners make their websites better, since a lot of those people use their adwords service on their websites - I've been told they care quite a bit about profiting off of that:

http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1009409

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 20 August 2012 06:28:47AM *  5 points [-]

Epiphany, I'd love to see you actually take a stab at an introductory paragraph for the About page that you think would work well.

I don't think anyone has the budget to hire a professional web marketer. Additionally, the crowd we're "marketing" to is a bit atypical, so it's not clear how well standard principles would transfer. Less Wrong is full of long-form essays on rationality; if you don't like reading, you're probably not going to like the site.

I think it would be great for more people to produce variations and suggestions for the LW newcomer pages. Even if your variation isn't especially good overall, it might have a few good ideas we can steal for the real thing. There's definitely high potential upside in having more person-hours thrown at this. And if enough variations are produced, maybe we can get matt to implement A/B testing and test them against each other.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2012 06:35:39AM *  7 points [-]

I would totally love to take a stab at the About page. I want to get more information from these guys first. I want to know what sort of people they want to attract. I have a gist of the culture here, but my gist of it is new. I want to make sure that I'm targeting their audience. Really, we need to do that first. That's so important. Whether we do a good job of marketing this site or not, we could one day find ourselves so overrun with new users such that the old users are out numbered. That could happen so fast that the entire place seems to change in just a few months - that's how the exponential curve at another forum was experienced.

We want to do whatever we can so that if we hit a curve like that, existing members are happy with the influx and the influence new people have on their culture. Maybe a new thread should be made "Who do you want to meet? Choose a target audience." - Do you want to do this one or should I?

I am asking because I don't want to step on your toes - and there might be questions about the culture that only an older member would think to ask. Not sure.

Comment author: beoShaffer 20 August 2012 06:14:18AM 4 points [-]

I want to prefix this by saying I am interested in improving the front page anyways and that I'm not experienced with google analytics, but did check its help page before posting.

As far as I can tell the bounce rate includes return visitors. This leads me to suspect that the high bounce rate could be from regulars checking LW and leaving when they don't see any interesting new posts or recent comments. Also, I think we can do a better job of meeting both goals, but I for one am willing to accept a fairly high bounce rate if it keeps the quality of newcomers high and the current system seems to be doing a passible job there.

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2012 06:20:58AM *  10 points [-]

Sure, the bounce rate may include returning users, but you seem to be missing this really important point:

When I first saw the site, I had no idea what it was about. I left. Without clicking anything.

When I saw the site the second time, I read the about us page, still didn't know what it was about, and left. Without clicking anything.

A web professional who has worked with marketers (me) is telling you "the web marketing sucks".

We really don't know what percentage of the bouncers are new users from this page. But if we want growth, we can't just tell ourselves that most of the people who are leaving are returning users and brush this off. Consider this:

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s18lesswrong&r=36

If the new users were all registering, the growth should be how much faster than that?

(I'm hereby updating the OP with this. Thanks for pointing it out.)

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 August 2012 07:48:19AM *  1 point [-]

Linking to a bunch of posts is going to be TLDR - that's asking for way too much investment at that stage.

Hm. When I read the internet, I tend to click on links that look interesting. The idea of my about page rewrite was to provide a bunch of links and try to make them seem interesting, so that people reading the about page would click on at least a few. I don't see this as asking for "investment".

I'm glad you're excited about this project, but I skimmed over your posts and it looks like they're long on philosophizing and short on string substitutions. How about you write the about page the way you'd like to see it, and we either create a poll or do an A/B test to figure out which version is better?

Also, based on what you've describe of your experience finding Less Wrong, it sounds as though you had an unusually intense reaction to finding it. So it seems possible that if you generalize from your example, you'll do a good job of targeting people whose brains are wired like yours, but a poor job of targeting "typical" readers.

It occurred to me that maybe you missed the fact that I've already done rewrites. I'd love to hear specific suggestions, e.g. "Instead of [paragraph X], write [paragraph Y]". (Of course, you can also rewrite everything if you want. Either would be much easier for me to incorporate changes from than your current "wish list" approach. If you don't have time to do either, I'll probably skim over your wish list and incorporate whatever seems the most important.)

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2012 06:05:12AM *  3 points [-]

There's a science to getting people to click on links. I am sorry to say this to a person who obviously cares very much about this, but the reason I didn't provide you "string substitutions" for your links is because that's going about things the wrong way. Long story short, on the internet, people want cool stuff now. You can't hide cool stuff behind a link, and you can't rename the link to turn the link itself into cool stuff. You have to take cool stuff and put it in their face. One has to pay attention to "bounce rate". The bounce rate is a count of people that left without clicking a link because cool stuff was not put in their face.

I've seen the LessWrong website statistics. LessWrong's home page has a horrible bounce rate. I posted the statistics and explained more here:

LessWrong could grow a lot, but we're doing it wrong.

LessWrong could grow a lot, but we're doing it wrong.

51 Epiphany 20 August 2012 05:21AM

How do I know this?  I got a copy of the website analytics.

The bounce rate for LessWrong's home page is 60%!

To be clear: Over half the people who visit LessWrong are going away without even clicking anything.

Yet how many NEW visitors are there?  Almost half of the visitors are new!

Granted, new visitor statistics aren't perfect, but that's a LOT of people.

Simple math should tell us this:

If we got the bounce rate down around 30% (a reasonable rate for a good site) by making sure every visitor sees something awesome immediately, AND make sure that each visitor can quickly gauge how much they're going to relate to the community (assuming the new users are the right target audience), it would theoretically double the rate of growth, or more.  There's a multiplier effect if the bounce rate is improved: you get better placement in search engines.  Search engines get more users if they feel that the engine finds interesting content, not just relevant content.

It's been argued that it's possible that most of the bounces are returning visitors checking for new content.  Well if half the visitors to the site each month are new, and we did a wonderful job of showing them that LessWrong is awesome, then the amount of returning visitors could double each month.  We're getting a tiny, tiny fraction of that growth:

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s18lesswrong&r=36

Why did I write you guys so much in the home page rewrites thread?  Because I am a web professional who works with web marketing professionals at my job and to me it was blatantly obvious that there's that much room for improvement in the growth of LessWrong.  Doing changes like the ones I suggested wouldn't even take long.  Because I like this site, and I knew it had potential to grow by leaps and bounds if somebody just paid a little bit of attention to real web marketing.  Because I was confused when I first found this site - I had no idea what it's about, or why it's awesome.  I closed the home page, myself.  Another friend mentioned LessWrong.  Curiosity perked up again.  I came back and read the about page.  That didn't make things clearer either.  I left again without going further.  Friends kept telling me it was awesome.  I came back one day and finally found an awesome article!  It took me three tries to figure out why you guys are awesome because the web marketing is so bad.  The new proposals, although they are well-meaning and it's obvious that John_Maxwell_IV cares about the site, are more of the same bad marketing.

I've been interested in web marketing for ten years.  It's a topic I've accumulated a lot of information about.  As I see it, the way these guys are going about this is totally counter-intuitive to web basic marketing principles.  They don't even seem to know how harsh users are the first time they see a new website.  They tend to just go away if it doesn't grab them in a few seconds.  They're like "well we will put interesting links in" but that's not how it works!  The links don't make the site interesting - the site has got to be interesting enough for users to click the links.  Thinking the links will make the site interesting is backward.  If you want to improve your bounce rate, your goal is to be awesome immediately in order to get the user to stay on the page long enough to want to click your link.  If it wasn't usually hard to get users to click links, we wouldn't track bounce rates. These guys know this particular group of users better than I do, but I know web marketing principles that they're not even seeing when pointed out.  To me, they seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing.  The numbers don't lie and they're saying there's huge room for improvement. 

If you want to grow, it's time to try something different.

Here's a thought:  There is a lot awesome content that's on this website.  We need to take what's awesome and make it in-your-face obvious.  I wrote a plan for how to quickly find the most effective awesome content (the website statistics will tell you which pages keep new visitors on them the longest), and how to use them to effectively get the attention of new users - copy the first paragraph from one of those pages, which was most likely constructed by a competent writer in a way that hooks people (if it's keeping them on the page then it's essentially proven to!) and place that as bait right on the front page.  (There is also a wrong way to do this.)  Then of course, the user needs to find out why the LessWrong community might be a place where they belong.  I shared ideas for that in "About us - Building Interest".

Don't let's assume that growth is going to be good.  You're going to get more internet trolls, more spam, (there's a way to control spam which I would be happy to share) and more newbies who don't know what they're doing (I provided some suggestions to help get them on track quickly, preventing annoyance for both you and them).  There will be people with new ideas, but if the wrong audience is targeted... well.  We'd better choose what audience to target.  I saw an internet forum take off once - it seemed to be growing slowly, until we looked at the curve and saw that it was exponential.  That of course quickly turned to a dazzling exponential curve.  Suddenly the new users outnumbered the old ones.  That could happen here -- even if we do nothing.  YOU can get involved.  YOU can influence who to target.  They're taking suggestions on rewrites right now.  Go to the thread.  I invite brutal honesty on everything I wrote there.  Or pick my brain, if you'd prefer.

What do you want, LessWrong?  Do you want to grow optimally?  Who do you want to see showing up?

 

Comment author: KrisC 17 August 2012 07:11:07PM *  3 points [-]

I am developing a decision making app.

The user is prompted with the phrase "I want."

The user's request is matched against a database of peer-generated responses. But the search does not end there. The search results are a front end to the content which is also peer-generated. The content payload could potentially be any function of the smartphone, though it is usually screen output such a set of instructions or a link to a website. Request parsing and wild-carding is integral to reduce the number of database entries.

Should the user not be satisfied with the results presented, then the request will be broadcast through the network to peers with a favorable history. In the first pass, peer's database will be searched. If this is not sufficient the request will appear as an unanswered question to be answered by other users if they choose to respond. I shouldn't need to tell the LW audience that Bayes' Rule is used to evaluate the responses by peer. An optional milieu field helps to narrow down areas of expertise for individual contributors.

The program is integrated with phone's calendar function, allowing delayed and repeating execution of requests.

The application incorporates a screensaver which builds upon the individualized database arrangement to deliver peer-created scenes to a fixed storyline, which showcases emerging technologies. These stories display links for users to access speculative technologies, then the users are directed to open source projects (if they follow my links).

On top of all this, add the usual slew of social media options: upvoting, banning, groups, multiple user profiles, anonymous searches, recruiting incentives, et cetera.

My intention is to leave the code open source and offer free and paid versions of the app. The consumer version I am calling 'Hope' and the developer's edition I am calling 'Plan A.' Working on my own I hope to get this project to a working demo in December of this year. Currently the code is hosted at BitBucket. I plan on moving over to GoogleCode when I iron out some connectivity issues.

As a closing note, let me mention that this project was originally inspired by the question: "Why aren't more people putting 3D printers to practical use?"

Comment author: Epiphany 20 August 2012 02:16:03AM 4 points [-]

Critique of presentation:

I am developing a decision making app. The user is prompted with the phrase "I want."

This will be a frequent assumption: Decision-making app? On a phone? This can't happen.

The user's request is matched against a database of peer-generated responses. But the search does not end there. The search results are a front end to the content which is also peer-generated. The content payload could potentially be any function of the smartphone, though it is usually screen output such a set of instructions or a link to a website. Request parsing and wild-carding is integral to reduce the number of database entries.

I think what you're saying is "Once the user types what they want, the phone does it like a command. It can do almost any command this way." Really, what needs to be in place of this paragraph is an example. The example should either support the decision-making claim, or the decision making claim needs to be reworded.

Should the user not be satisfied with the results presented, then the request will be broadcast through the network to peers with a favorable history. In the first pass, peer's database will be searched. If this is not sufficient the request will appear as an unanswered question to be answered by other users if they choose to respond. I shouldn't need to tell the LW audience that Bayes' Rule is used to evaluate the responses by peer. An optional milieu field helps to narrow down areas of expertise for individual contributors.

Now I'm confused about what kind of question the user will input. Are they asking the phone to perform a command, answer a question, or make a decision? I have no idea at this point.

The program is integrated with phone's calendar function, allowing delayed and repeating execution of requests.

Okay, that sounds useful all by itself.

The application incorporates a screensaver which builds upon the individualized database arrangement to deliver peer-created scenes to a fixed storyline, which showcases emerging technologies. These stories display links for users to access speculative technologies, then the users are directed to open source projects (if they follow my links).

Ooh shiny! But... why is it included? I am questioning "what is the concept for this project"? Is there an over-arching concept that explains why all of this is under the same umbrella? Maybe these should be separate apps.

My intention is to leave the code open source and offer free and paid versions of the app. The consumer version I am calling 'Hope' and the developer's edition I am calling 'Plan A.' Working on my own I hope to get this project to a working demo in December of this year. Currently the code is hosted at BitBucket. I plan on moving over to GoogleCode when I iron out some connectivity issues.

How will the commercial version support itself? What is being paid for that's not available in the free version? If you don't answer questions about money immediately, people lose interest very fast.

I do not see a reason for the name "hope" or "plan a". I will forget both of these names, due to not making any connections for them. If people can't remember the name of something, it can really slow you down in marketing. I suggest that instead of explaining the name for the product, that you figure out a way to convey your umbrella concept so that people can remember what's included in this app, and then name it something related, so that they remember the name.

As a closing note, let me mention that this project was originally inspired by the question: "Why aren't more people putting 3D printers to practical use?"

I don't know why this is relevant. Is there something about this method of conception that makes your plan special? Point it out, or else leave that note out to respect the reader's limited time and lack of need to know this info.

We may have to go through this a few times to get out all the knots, then try presenting to a few people in your target audience as a test. If test fails, rinse and repeat.

My communication abilities are not good because I am able to magically present things well on the first try, but because I'm capable of figuring out how to present things after being persistent.

Don't know if I'll stick with this one - I'll have to see how it helps the world in order to invest significant time into it. You didn't include that in your post. That would be a good thing to include when you make your second version of this.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 10:55:47PM *  2 points [-]

New icebreaker & rebuttals:

"If there was a technology that might save your life, would you consider it?"

This is going to get an almost definite yes.

If no: Ask her "So, you WANT to die?" - this is likely to snap her out of whatever fog she's in if she's still got a significant will to live. Ask that here. If she shows enough will to live, ask the first question again, you may be able to continue. If she actually wants to die, which is not inconceivable for a person in pain, obviously stop here, determine why, and talk it out.

"Is your life important enough that even if it's not 100% guaranteed to work, you would want to try it anyway?"

Another almost definitely yes question. At this point, you've actually gotten her to agree to getting it, based on the pure logic behind that choice, without the bias of knowing what the technology is. It will be hard for her to take it back later for that reason - people feel a strong need to behave in a way that's consistent from one moment to the next, and once they've admitted to agreeing with a logical line of reasoning like this one, they rarely find a way to take that back such that it qualifies as consistent behavior.

Now it's a matter of dealing with her objections. Objections are probably going to be cost, and what she could give to others instead of taking it for herself. I'll focus on the "giving to others" questions because keeping it is N/A, she's going to lose the money if she dies (she could invest it so it will hopefully grow while she's frozen...) anyway:

"Do you really think the people who love you would rather have your money, or would we rather have YOU?"

If she isn't convinced:

"Hey brothers / sisters / family, if you had a choice, what would you rather have? Her money, or her, herself?"

They will all say "her." Not saying "her" will out them as sociopaths. They are going to say "her". Period.

If they're not available:

"If your family had a choice, what would they rather have? You, or all your money?"

If she doesn't think they want her, call one of them and ask the question.

The person will say yes.

"If even one of them said yes, would they be worth it?"

If she's still wondering about the others:

"If the others would rather have the money than you, do they really love you enough to deserve YOUR money?"

Then:

"Everyone would rather have you, not your money. Knowing we'd rather have you, would you be willing to spend all your money on a chance of saving you?"

Of course the answer to this is "yes". Unless she's in HUGE incredible pain and has been that way for so long she can't even remember what it's like to enjoy life anymore. Once again, bigger problem, stop here, address that first.

"Ok guys, this isn't a guarantee, but there's a chance that it could work, that we'd be able to keep her here."

Now you can pick a figure twice as big as what it would cost to get her frozen, or pick the entirety of her savings, or whatever, and say "If it would cost (entirety of savings) for your family to have you, would you spend it?"

She will probably say "yes" at this point, if she's emotional, then likely to feel all touched and emotional about everyone wanting her and not her money. If no, bargain with her. "What if it only costs 75% of that... 50%..."

When she seems willing to spend:

"Good news, it's only going to cost you (x amount, prepare it in advance, if unsure, over promise and under deliver)!"

Now she will surely ask what it is. Be sure you have the sign-up form ready! That she has the opportunity to sign immediately is of critical importance here. If she hesitates:

"I know because I've (seen this happen / talked to a doctor / have some other good reason) that people who are really sick tend to lose mental facilities at some point before they die because their body gets so tired (my grandma who died of cancer zonked out soon after I talked to her, you can reference me and honestly say "I've heard of this happening to cancer patients." No she did not have brain cancer.). This can happen suddenly (yes, it was sudden). If you don't sign this today, we could come back tomorrow and you might not have legal authority to sign things anymore... they need your consent for this and you're going to lose that any day now. If you sign now, you can cancel it later if you want but if you don't sign, and you die, you're gone forever. Signing now is the safest way, don't you think?"

Still hesitating:

"You have x days to cancel (look it up first). How many days do you have to sign?"

(answer)

"Which number is bigger?"

(hand over the form again)

If they/she pesters you to say what it is before you've gotten them agreeing on a logical basis:

"There are a couple different options I've been doing a lot of research. We need to focus on whether she's going to choose to live because we don't have time to get sidetracked by all the research - we can do that part later. I just want to focus on saving her life right now, that makes sense, right?"

Note: Try looking up anti-angiogenesis if you legitimately want a second idea for extending life. It's not very relevant in her case, and I don't know if they've finished the formal research on it, but it's technically a possibility one might research.

If continuously pestered:

"A lot of people haven't even heard this stuff, there are new treatments, I can't just say what it is, that would take a lot of time." (launch straight into questions again)

"It's too complicated to explain right now, I'll explain it all once the first priority is taken care of." (launch straight into questions again)

"I can't explain that right now, the reason why will be apparent when I'm done, ok?" (A little ok on the end of a sentence can sometimes go a long way.)

"There are so many options, I just need to make sure that she wants to live, find out a few more things about while she wants, then I can pick the best option and I'll explain that one first, okay?"

For this reason, it'll be easier if nobody else there at the time but you and her, but that should be enough brush-offs to get you wading safely through a gauntlet if they are.

The above method uses a sales technique known as "question selling". It doesn't work if you don't stick primarily to questions. The idea behind it is this: You can't decide for them, or make them decide a certain way, but you can ask them to consider each piece of data, ask them to make all of the smaller decisions that lead up to the big decision, and then when they decide, they'll be making an informed decision. This works beautifully for logical choices.

The most difficult objection:

The amount of money it costs to get frozen could feed two starving African children for the rest of their lives. My permanent death, if the money was donated instead, would have a very good chance of saving two people's entire lives. Putting me in cryo would only be a chance of saving one person's life. Unless we had good reasons to believe that I would save two lives in the future, or have a significant chance to save millions of lives, or something that's comparably life-saving, I would choose to donate the money instead.

If that happens, whip out a donation form for whatever her/your favorite charities are (have it ready!), and get her to sign up for that donation right then, right there.

Making her put her money where her mouth is will do one of two things:

A. Make her immediately realize she's not serious about giving up this chance to survive, and get her back on the topic of saving her life.

B. Give you the opportunity to save two lives. That's twice the goal! This will make it much easier to let her go because some good came out of it.

I'm still not sure it's ethically correct to explain to you how I think you can encourage your mom to sign up for cryo. But I view this as an ethical call that is not mine to make. Whether you try this is your ethical call, whether she takes it is hers. For all I know she's some kind of Melinda Gates or something.

Good luck to you, and I hope that there is more good in the world because of her decision, whichever one it was.

Edit: Come to think of it, if you're in the position to do this, an option C would be to say "If you sign up for cryo, I will go out and save two people's lives." Be ready to support this with a plan though, they might just brush you off thinking you'd say anything to save them. It might seem tempting to plan to lie in this event. I'd like to propose a worse possibility: You lie, and then because you didn't prepare to prove to them that you're going to save two lives to keep them, the person chooses against cryo and dies.

Not saying DanielH is going to lie, he already turned down the "dark arts" but it's not like he's the only person reading this.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 11:40:49PM *  0 points [-]

Illegal frozen bodies rebuttal:

"Morgues have been keeping them frozen for years. They're not illegal." (I'm pretty sure this is true.)

If it's about having dead bodies on your property:

"Cemeteries are full of bodies. Cemeteries are totally legal, and have been legal for how many thousands of years? Even if we sprinkle you in the yard, then there's a dead body in the yard. You've got to go somewhere, right?"

If it's about resource distribution between living and dead people:

"Rich people spend how much on caviar and cars? That's not illegal."

"The cryogenics movement will argue that if they can't freeze the bodies, those people are gone forever. What happens if they find a cure for them? We'll look back on it, looking at how many people we lost. That will be looked on as a huge tragedy, like a massacre. That's what the families of these cryogenics customers will argue. Are they going to take the risk that their actions will be perceived as a huge tragedy or a massacre? No. Whatever their problem is, they'll look for other ways of solving it."

Comment author: DanielH 17 August 2012 08:31:17PM 0 points [-]

This can help when a discussion is started, but it cannot really help start the discussion. It is useful, though, and I'll remember it. Thanks.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 10:57:31PM *  0 points [-]

Okay. I think you'll agree this is a much better attempt.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 10:55:47PM *  2 points [-]

New icebreaker & rebuttals:

"If there was a technology that might save your life, would you consider it?"

This is going to get an almost definite yes.

If no: Ask her "So, you WANT to die?" - this is likely to snap her out of whatever fog she's in if she's still got a significant will to live. Ask that here. If she shows enough will to live, ask the first question again, you may be able to continue. If she actually wants to die, which is not inconceivable for a person in pain, obviously stop here, determine why, and talk it out.

"Is your life important enough that even if it's not 100% guaranteed to work, you would want to try it anyway?"

Another almost definitely yes question. At this point, you've actually gotten her to agree to getting it, based on the pure logic behind that choice, without the bias of knowing what the technology is. It will be hard for her to take it back later for that reason - people feel a strong need to behave in a way that's consistent from one moment to the next, and once they've admitted to agreeing with a logical line of reasoning like this one, they rarely find a way to take that back such that it qualifies as consistent behavior.

Now it's a matter of dealing with her objections. Objections are probably going to be cost, and what she could give to others instead of taking it for herself. I'll focus on the "giving to others" questions because keeping it is N/A, she's going to lose the money if she dies (she could invest it so it will hopefully grow while she's frozen...) anyway:

"Do you really think the people who love you would rather have your money, or would we rather have YOU?"

If she isn't convinced:

"Hey brothers / sisters / family, if you had a choice, what would you rather have? Her money, or her, herself?"

They will all say "her." Not saying "her" will out them as sociopaths. They are going to say "her". Period.

If they're not available:

"If your family had a choice, what would they rather have? You, or all your money?"

If she doesn't think they want her, call one of them and ask the question.

The person will say yes.

"If even one of them said yes, would they be worth it?"

If she's still wondering about the others:

"If the others would rather have the money than you, do they really love you enough to deserve YOUR money?"

Then:

"Everyone would rather have you, not your money. Knowing we'd rather have you, would you be willing to spend all your money on a chance of saving you?"

Of course the answer to this is "yes". Unless she's in HUGE incredible pain and has been that way for so long she can't even remember what it's like to enjoy life anymore. Once again, bigger problem, stop here, address that first.

"Ok guys, this isn't a guarantee, but there's a chance that it could work, that we'd be able to keep her here."

Now you can pick a figure twice as big as what it would cost to get her frozen, or pick the entirety of her savings, or whatever, and say "If it would cost (entirety of savings) for your family to have you, would you spend it?"

She will probably say "yes" at this point, if she's emotional, then likely to feel all touched and emotional about everyone wanting her and not her money. If no, bargain with her. "What if it only costs 75% of that... 50%..."

When she seems willing to spend:

"Good news, it's only going to cost you (x amount, prepare it in advance, if unsure, over promise and under deliver)!"

Now she will surely ask what it is. Be sure you have the sign-up form ready! That she has the opportunity to sign immediately is of critical importance here. If she hesitates:

"I know because I've (seen this happen / talked to a doctor / have some other good reason) that people who are really sick tend to lose mental facilities at some point before they die because their body gets so tired (my grandma who died of cancer zonked out soon after I talked to her, you can reference me and honestly say "I've heard of this happening to cancer patients." No she did not have brain cancer.). This can happen suddenly (yes, it was sudden). If you don't sign this today, we could come back tomorrow and you might not have legal authority to sign things anymore... they need your consent for this and you're going to lose that any day now. If you sign now, you can cancel it later if you want but if you don't sign, and you die, you're gone forever. Signing now is the safest way, don't you think?"

Still hesitating:

"You have x days to cancel (look it up first). How many days do you have to sign?"

(answer)

"Which number is bigger?"

(hand over the form again)

If they/she pesters you to say what it is before you've gotten them agreeing on a logical basis:

"There are a couple different options I've been doing a lot of research. We need to focus on whether she's going to choose to live because we don't have time to get sidetracked by all the research - we can do that part later. I just want to focus on saving her life right now, that makes sense, right?"

Note: Try looking up anti-angiogenesis if you legitimately want a second idea for extending life. It's not very relevant in her case, and I don't know if they've finished the formal research on it, but it's technically a possibility one might research.

If continuously pestered:

"A lot of people haven't even heard this stuff, there are new treatments, I can't just say what it is, that would take a lot of time." (launch straight into questions again)

"It's too complicated to explain right now, I'll explain it all once the first priority is taken care of." (launch straight into questions again)

"I can't explain that right now, the reason why will be apparent when I'm done, ok?" (A little ok on the end of a sentence can sometimes go a long way.)

"There are so many options, I just need to make sure that she wants to live, find out a few more things about while she wants, then I can pick the best option and I'll explain that one first, okay?"

For this reason, it'll be easier if nobody else there at the time but you and her, but that should be enough brush-offs to get you wading safely through a gauntlet if they are.

The above method uses a sales technique known as "question selling". It doesn't work if you don't stick primarily to questions. The idea behind it is this: You can't decide for them, or make them decide a certain way, but you can ask them to consider each piece of data, ask them to make all of the smaller decisions that lead up to the big decision, and then when they decide, they'll be making an informed decision. This works beautifully for logical choices.

The most difficult objection:

The amount of money it costs to get frozen could feed two starving African children for the rest of their lives. My permanent death, if the money was donated instead, would have a very good chance of saving two people's entire lives. Putting me in cryo would only be a chance of saving one person's life. Unless we had good reasons to believe that I would save two lives in the future, or have a significant chance to save millions of lives, or something that's comparably life-saving, I would choose to donate the money instead.

If that happens, whip out a donation form for whatever her/your favorite charities are (have it ready!), and get her to sign up for that donation right then, right there.

Making her put her money where her mouth is will do one of two things:

A. Make her immediately realize she's not serious about giving up this chance to survive, and get her back on the topic of saving her life.

B. Give you the opportunity to save two lives. That's twice the goal! This will make it much easier to let her go because some good came out of it.

I'm still not sure it's ethically correct to explain to you how I think you can encourage your mom to sign up for cryo. But I view this as an ethical call that is not mine to make. Whether you try this is your ethical call, whether she takes it is hers. For all I know she's some kind of Melinda Gates or something.

Good luck to you, and I hope that there is more good in the world because of her decision, whichever one it was.

Edit: Come to think of it, if you're in the position to do this, an option C would be to say "If you sign up for cryo, I will go out and save two people's lives." Be ready to support this with a plan though, they might just brush you off thinking you'd say anything to save them. It might seem tempting to plan to lie in this event. I'd like to propose a worse possibility: You lie, and then because you didn't prepare to prove to them that you're going to save two lives to keep them, the person chooses against cryo and dies.

Not saying DanielH is going to lie, he already turned down the "dark arts" but it's not like he's the only person reading this.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 07:50:11AM *  4 points [-]

Thoughts On The FAQ:

I expected for this to be easier to find: "When should I post in Discussion, and when should I post in Main?" - I'm used to forum rules being posted as stickies within the forum. I am used to seeing the forum guidelines near to the post buttons. I looked around but didn't find them, so I thought this environment was a lot more casual than it actually is. I think these need to be put in the user's face - since everyone else is doing that, the fact that they're not in my face seemed to imply that you don't have any yet. I'm not opposed to them being in the FAQ, but I am opposed to them not being linked to prominently on the post page. Considering what I've seen when it comes to how well users find things on websites, I think users will find the rules in the FAQ about as well as they did previously to the rules being added there...

The "What is Less Wrong?" section - needs action words. What do you DO here. What do you USE it for. Do people want to improve themselves? Do people start projects here? What kinds of exciting things happen?

I agree with making the FAQ page big as can be reasonably downloaded, assuming each question has a bold title and a link at the top. This is a wonderful place for the smorgasbord of links to go. If the most important ones were written using a variety of different terms so people can locate them with "find in page", even better.

This link in the OP doesn't take me where I expected to go: "if you never get voted down, you're not posting enough".

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 07:01:53AM *  6 points [-]

Home Page vs Search Engines

Search engine optimization is very, very complicated. I am not going to tell you how to SEO the home page in this comment. What I am going to tell you is how to avoid triggering a duplicate content penalty if you decide to make use of my idea for hooking new users on LessWrong.

No page should have more than 5% of it's content in common with other pages on the same site. There are penalties for duplicated content. Assuming that you put at least 20 times as many words on the home page as the longest excerpt, and limit the number of words in the excerpts, such that they do not count as more than 5% of the content on the home page, then you should have pretty good protection against being penalized for duplicate content. If I was going to do this on my own site, I'd comment the code up and down to warn tinkerers about the 5% rule.

Probably the easiest way to do this is show only a limited number of words from excerpts at one time, and rotate them so that every time you load the home page you get a new one (but it never scrolls away or gets replaced - that interrupts one while reading it).

This is important: If you paste 5 billion excerpts into the home page code and rotate them with java script, the search engine will still see all the ones that are hiding in there and include them as content. They can be counted toward your duplicate content limit. The best way to keep them from composing more than 5% of the text is to use CGI to output one at a time. Then the others are hidden. Your web host or software might already have a random quote generator, and it might be as simple as feeding it the excerpts and pasting a small block of code onto the home page.

You can put a little "random excerpt" link in there so that users can enjoy the addicted clicking that gets them new excerpts when they want them. The "random excerpt" link would simply refresh the home page. (Link the page back to itself. Simple.)

Another cool bonus to this is that if you add new excerpts every so often, your home page will always have new content. This can be good for getting more search engine attention as well as user attention.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 06:35:02AM *  5 points [-]

User Orientation Needed

I really could have used a description to help me get the gist of the culture here. I understand that they're gathered around concepts like rationalism, self-improvement and philanthropy, but that didn't give me the practical information I want or tell me anything about how they were going to behave. My observations might be especially useful because I am new, so I still have all of that beginner's disorientation fresh in mind and available to talk about. I offer myself as a case study. These might strike you like: "Yeah! Users are having these problems!' and you'll know I pointed out something good, or, they may be my own unique experiences which are completely useless to the rest of the group. Obviously, you have to use your own judgment and it may take a survey, but the benefit of this would be more unique content, higher quality content, and less frustration for all users and readers of LessWrong. Us new people do not want to annoy you. And you do not want to be annoyed. It's really a win-win if we get a crash course in the top 10 ways to not annoy you. If you put that in our faces so we find it right away, we will probably accommodate you, and everyone will be happier.

For instance, they're a lot more serious here than in a lot of places on the internet. The atmosphere isn't casual. You can't make casual remarks - I see jokes here and there, but otherwise, if you're not putting effort into saying something well-reasoned, unique and high-quality, they're all over you. And your jokes better be good, apparently - I've seen some fail pretty hard.

Part of the reason I joined is because a lot of the discussions I have with people and a lot of what's out there is boring. People are often saying the same old thing. They're making the same old mistakes. They're not thorough, and they're very casual. In a lot of ways, this is not really like an internet forum - it has a lot of important things in common with a peer-reviewed journal. You have to read it really carefully: The details count, and people smack you down if you don't seem to notice them. The messages in posts and articles may, at first SEEM like the same old thing, but quite often, they're not - there's some intelligent twist to it that makes all the difference.

All of that is easy to gloss over when your brain has been lulled into "read boring stuff" mode by some earlier part of your day. People are saying things that at first may seem like the same old mistakes, but they're not. Both myself and other posters here frequently make these kinds of errors - the error of not reading carefully enough, assuming a more common meaning in place of the actual meaning, failing to observe intentional details, mistaking something for a common mistake when it is not one. This is frustrating for everyone, but if there were some introduction to LessWrong that made new users aware that this is a more detail-oriented space full of different and easy to misinterpret ideas, that may encourage them to approach each other's writing with more lucidity and, and highlight how what they're saying is different.

A lot of people here are very intelligent, but seem to require what I would consider to be a condescending degree of pointing out the obvious. I thought it was just me but here's an example of Eliezer doing that:

"If wagering those chips and losing seems like an unbearable possibility to you, then go do something else. Seriously. Because you can lose."

On Doing The Impossible

In hindsight, I realize that pointing out the obvious to a bunch of mostly intelligent people seems to be required not because they need to hear it, but because they need to see that the poster gets it. In other words, the people here seem unusually likely to assume that you're a moron and so you have to be careful to avoid that. Maybe this is because, like me, they're sick of the same old stuff and it makes them too quick to skim what you're saying, misinterpret it for something more common, and judge. Their brains are in "detecting the morons" mode from an earlier part of their day. Maybe they're simply more outspoken when their moron radars beep. Maybe they've had it up to here with morons and now they're touchy. Whatever it is, it would help to know that people will assume you're a moron if you don't frequently refer to the obvious. It's not clear, otherwise, that a group of mostly intelligent people won't feel condescended to by it, and in fact apparently needs to see you frequently refer to the obvious.

The culture here is very, very honest, very confrontational when it comes to errors in reasoning. That's one of my top five reasons for joining. But it feels a bit tentative, a bit ambiguous. People also react with hurt feelings. I think, when it comes to that, we have to choose. I know what I choose - If the truth is brutal, hurt my feelings, I want to know. I'll be responsible for cleaning up whatever mess it makes of my emotions. I think that's the only way rationalists can go. I would like to see a description that demands honesty - not just mentions "yeah people are more honest here" but DEMANDS honesty. I'll show you what I mean:

I am not an employee of Amazon but a friend showed me their values page and I thought it was inspiring: It states that their employees (referred to as "leaders") are "...obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable..." Amazon Leadership Principles

I want to see something just as bold, just as tough as part of the joining agreement. I'm not talking about hiding it in some website policy or rules page everyone ignores. I want to see it right by the join button:

"By pressing this join button, I agree that I am here to improve myself. I understand that my flawed reasoning will be pointed out. My feelings about that will be my own responsibility. I agree also that I will point out flawed reasoning when I see it, no matter whose it is."

In regards to honesty versus manners, the way that people SEEM to be doing it here is "Let reality be brutal if it's needed for you to be clear, but don't make the statement of reality brutal." Most people seem to be good at this, but it's a common problem for people to have no idea how to balance manners with honesty. There are other ways, also, for less bold people, like the one that I use in IRL environments: Hint first (sensitive people get it, and you spare their dignity) then be clear (most people get it) then be brutally honest (slightly dense people get it). If I have to resort to the 2x4, then I really have to decide whether enlightening this person is going to be one of those battles I choose or one of those battles I do not choose.

There are core areas of knowledge that seem to be part of the culture. For instance, AI and cryogenics. I have a sense that these things are common knowledge among LessWrong folks. New people aren't necessarily going to guess what these are. I've seen people being voted down for not knowing a topic well enough when it comes to these subjects that seem to be core interests of the group. The site encourages them to read the sequences, but that's a HUGE investment. Most people are not going to read everything relevant before joining. If newcomers had a limited list of short selections to help them get out of the "newbie" zone on the group's main topics, that would be beneficial to both the older members (who won't have to vote them down / hold their hand / wade through their comments) as well as the newbies (who will feel less confused).

As an initial investment on joining day, I think one page that explains the top ten ways new and old users get frustrated with one another is a reasonable investment for joining day and I think five or ten articles of <=3 pages each on core subjects would be reasonable as an investment in their first weeks of joining - though you could go about this in two ways. You could do that AND aim to hook them with new excerpts from the most fascinating articles. Use that list I was talking about in the "How to get their attention" comment from the web statistics about which articles get the most unique visitors staying longest, and make the front page cycle through those. (Note: Considering how this will interact with search engines is important. I explained that in "Home Page vs Search Engines")

Put it in our faces:

If a new user orientation page is made, this should be easy to find. I'd link it in multiple places - About page, FAQ page, and register page.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 05:57:38AM *  4 points [-]

About Us - Building Interest

Linking to a bunch of posts is going to be TLDR - that's asking for way too much investment at that stage. Here's why:

Imagine that you're on this site you've never been to. It has links with words you already know (probably the same old boring crap) and links with words you don't already know (Is it any good, or am I going to waste ten minutes reading about the etymology of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?). ... For these reasons, I had NO IDEA how awesome this site was the first few times I came here.

I explained how to hook the users in Getting Their Attention and here I explain what I needed to know, as a new user, before I could move from being hooked to actually joining:

Relying on links outside the about us page to tell the reader what it's about is asking for too large of a time investment at that point. They're not trying to read ten posts on the about us page, they're coming to the about us page to try and figure out WHETHER to read ten posts.

Also, saying this on the about us page is a bad idea "Less Wrong makes heavy use of previously introduced topics for leverage" - you're telling them "You have to invest all of this in order to even get started". What they're trying to do is to figure out WHETHER to invest. To put the horse before the cart, we have to put the benefit before the cost.

Now, you COULD choose to target a different audience - you could target people who aren't rationalists, but is an about us page with links on it going to interest them in rationality if they're not already the type to be interested? No. If you want to target that audience, you'll have to do something pretty spectacular. Actually, it would be awesomely fun to try and figure out how to do that. I'd be happy to brainstorm with you about that, anytime. But that's a project. Unless you've discovered a method that's proven to work, I think the best approach is to target the audience who is already on a similar wavelength. People who are already rationalists, or who have similar interests with the current batch of LessWrong users and want to continue to develop in a similar direction.

So, as a person who was already a rationalist, what I needed was to know on the about us page in order for me to make an investment was that there were people like me doing things that I wanted to do with other people like me. If it were me writing the about page, that's what my main focus would be. It does get more specific though:

Specific things I needed to know before I was interested in joining:

  • How you define "rationalist". That's what finally inspired me to join. I had to realize that there was a community of people gathered around a theme of rationality, and that they do rationality the way that I do. I needed to have that "Wow, a community with people like me!" experience.

  • It is a community blog (you may want to hint at what that is in case people are new to the concept). I was excited by the idea of maybe finally having an outlet for my ideas. I also wanted to know what the purpose of the blog is and what LessWrong aims to do with it. Action words.

  • I was excited by the idea of having intelligent people give me real, honest, rational critiques on my perspectives. I didn't know this at first, but the discussion forum has an attitude that's a little bit like the serious style of a peer-reviewed journal, it's not your usual casual internet forum. What people DO with the forum, the purposes that are typically served with it, would be nice to know here. Same thing with the blog. For me, the purposes I was hoping they'd serve were to be an outlet for good ideas that didn't have any place to go and that they'd be a place where I could be groomed by intelligent people, who would see flaws that I wouldn't notice. Those were the two main activities I wanted when I joined.

  • Tell them how big the group is. It's hard to believe there's actually a community of rationalists that numbers in the thousands. It's exciting to hear "There's this group of people like you and they're big!" But the number of users isn't anywhere to be seen and trying to get that out of Google is like nailing jello to a tree (really fun exercise, but not as useful as a fact).

  • What the community is like. I think this needs to have two versions: A gist, for the "about us" section, that explains what things LessWrong members have in common, and what topics they're most interested in discussing, geared for making people feel like they relate to the group. And a new user orientation, on a different page. I describe this in a different comment. Seeing that gist of the culture is really important if you want people to have those recognition experiences where they're like "People like me have gathered! I want to join!"

  • What the buzz about "sequences" is all about. We could use a little history: This guy Eliezer decided to explain rationality to people so he wrote these pieces of writing called sequences. The sequences are fascinating, challenging, informative, and hilarious. They were interesting enough that they actually began to gain popularity. Lots of people gathered around a theme of rationality and overcoming their biases.

  • I still don't have the history of how this started all straight in my head. A crash course in how this phenomenon of people gathering around the theme of rationality happened would be nice. A quick blow-by-blow in chronological order is all I need in an about page. However, I think the first thing to put there is a description that tells people what the group is like and what purposes the group serves, so they get the opportunity to have that "People like me doing stuff I want to do!" experience.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 05:18:56AM *  5 points [-]

Getting Their Attention

As a new person, I dissected my experience of attempting to figure out what LessWrong was about and the decision-making process that caused me to join for you. I have a lot of stuff to say, and 99% of seems unexpected.

"I think reading posts is probably best way to figure out what Less Wrong is about."

I vehemently disagree.

People do a very, very fast assessment in order to determine whether the website is worth investing in. What I'm talking about is this: You come in off the search engine, or plug in the url after seeing it mentioned somewhere in an interesting enough context, or a friend tells you it's cool and to go check it out. Now you're at the home page. If it doesn't grab your attention in just a few seconds, you're gone. Obviously, people eventually need more information than that before they hit the join button, so there have to be different levels. First the front page has to immediately prove to the user that it's worth going deeper. Something significant has to happen (I have a really easy idea for this actually) before they even click a link. Here's why that is:

Am I going to click a link about a topic I've thought about already? No. I'm assuming your take on it is the same as the average take. So I will never see how awesome it is. Conversely, show me a link about a topic I've never heard of before. "What is Bayesianism?" for instance (I've heard of it by now, but didn't, before I found LessWrong). I don't have any reason to believe that this new word is the sign of something awesome. The world is full of a lot of links with words I don't know to things that are not awesome.

Imagine again that you're on this home page for a site you've never been to. It has links with words you already know (probably the same old boring crap) and links with words you don't already know (Is it any good, or am I going to waste ten minutes reading about the etymology of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?).

For these reasons, I had NO IDEA how awesome this site was the first few times I came here. I only joined because so many different people kept referring me over, that I kept "poking" at the site every so often, and eventually discovered something that hooked me.

Being hooked needs to happen on the front page.

Here's how to hook them:

Look at the website statistics and see which pages get the most new visitors to stay the longest. Not the ones that get the most visits from logged in users, but NEW users. "New Visitors" is the website statistic term you want. And the best ones don't just get a lot of new visitors, but they actually KEEP the user on the page. There are website statistics that will tell you how many seconds users stay on the pages. That's what I'm talking about.

Make a list. Of the list, select some on core topics that, together, do a pretty good job of giving the gist of LessWrong's culture. Or possibly, more importantly, the culture you guys want to be creating. Take the first paragraph of each page - which, theoretically has been composed by a person that's good enough at writing that they're able to hook an audience immediately - and rotate those on the front page. Show a limited number at one time. This prevents information overload. (Note: In order to ensure fresh content, and for really super duper extremely important search engine optimization reasons, this needs to be done in a particular way. I explained that in: "Home Page vs Search Engines")

If I begin reading a paragraph and it shows a new twist on the topic which I have thought about already, will I read the rest? Yes! But give me a link with a few words? No. To say enough to convince me that your site worth reading takes more than one sentence. The world is full of boring takes on things, so you have to prove that this place is awesome on the front page.

The best thing is, you already know what's going to hook the readers. The introductory paragraphs that are proven to work are sitting in your website statistics.

After an "ooh this is interesting" has occurred on the front page, then people may wonder "What is this about?" (Next Post)

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 05:35:44AM *  0 points [-]

I split it into several comments because the site told me that it was too long to post. Sorry if that's inconvenient.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 05:18:56AM *  5 points [-]

Getting Their Attention

As a new person, I dissected my experience of attempting to figure out what LessWrong was about and the decision-making process that caused me to join for you. I have a lot of stuff to say, and 99% of seems unexpected.

"I think reading posts is probably best way to figure out what Less Wrong is about."

I vehemently disagree.

People do a very, very fast assessment in order to determine whether the website is worth investing in. What I'm talking about is this: You come in off the search engine, or plug in the url after seeing it mentioned somewhere in an interesting enough context, or a friend tells you it's cool and to go check it out. Now you're at the home page. If it doesn't grab your attention in just a few seconds, you're gone. Obviously, people eventually need more information than that before they hit the join button, so there have to be different levels. First the front page has to immediately prove to the user that it's worth going deeper. Something significant has to happen (I have a really easy idea for this actually) before they even click a link. Here's why that is:

Am I going to click a link about a topic I've thought about already? No. I'm assuming your take on it is the same as the average take. So I will never see how awesome it is. Conversely, show me a link about a topic I've never heard of before. "What is Bayesianism?" for instance (I've heard of it by now, but didn't, before I found LessWrong). I don't have any reason to believe that this new word is the sign of something awesome. The world is full of a lot of links with words I don't know to things that are not awesome.

Imagine again that you're on this home page for a site you've never been to. It has links with words you already know (probably the same old boring crap) and links with words you don't already know (Is it any good, or am I going to waste ten minutes reading about the etymology of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?).

For these reasons, I had NO IDEA how awesome this site was the first few times I came here. I only joined because so many different people kept referring me over, that I kept "poking" at the site every so often, and eventually discovered something that hooked me.

Being hooked needs to happen on the front page.

Here's how to hook them:

Look at the website statistics and see which pages get the most new visitors to stay the longest. Not the ones that get the most visits from logged in users, but NEW users. "New Visitors" is the website statistic term you want. And the best ones don't just get a lot of new visitors, but they actually KEEP the user on the page. There are website statistics that will tell you how many seconds users stay on the pages. That's what I'm talking about.

Make a list. Of the list, select some on core topics that, together, do a pretty good job of giving the gist of LessWrong's culture. Or possibly, more importantly, the culture you guys want to be creating. Take the first paragraph of each page - which, theoretically has been composed by a person that's good enough at writing that they're able to hook an audience immediately - and rotate those on the front page. Show a limited number at one time. This prevents information overload. (Note: In order to ensure fresh content, and for really super duper extremely important search engine optimization reasons, this needs to be done in a particular way. I explained that in: "Home Page vs Search Engines")

If I begin reading a paragraph and it shows a new twist on the topic which I have thought about already, will I read the rest? Yes! But give me a link with a few words? No. To say enough to convince me that your site worth reading takes more than one sentence. The world is full of boring takes on things, so you have to prove that this place is awesome on the front page.

The best thing is, you already know what's going to hook the readers. The introductory paragraphs that are proven to work are sitting in your website statistics.

After an "ooh this is interesting" has occurred on the front page, then people may wonder "What is this about?" (Next Post)

Comment author: buybuydandavis 19 August 2012 12:48:16AM 0 points [-]

You removed reference to "get stronger" so that no longer applies.

I think you have a point about whether one can know if something is impossible. Also, even if you can't think of a solution, the attempt may allow you to solve some lesser problems.

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 01:37:32AM *  0 points [-]

Thanks for the feedback. Look what I found. Love it.

I was doing a search for people on LessWrong saying "is impossible" so I could come up with some other examples of how thinking things are impossible is biased by coming up with ways to do them. I was surprised to see you say the same thing as I did! No wonder this thread attracted your attention. (:

I almost put your comment in the quotes discussion, before realizing that LW comments are forbidden for some reason. (:

Any ideas for how to make this thread more successful?

Comment author: Epiphany 19 August 2012 12:45:21AM *  1 point [-]

Idea: Solve Violent Crime

As a lot of you are probably already aware, testosterone level is considered a top predictor of violent crime. There are prescriptions that lower testosterone, so why do we still have violent crime?

I've been told there are two obstacles to treatment:

One, people with such excessively high testosterone that it causes them to commit crimes (most of them are men) feel strongly that reducing testosterone would make them less manly.

Two, our legal and ethical systems are such that forcing people, even convicted criminals, to undergo medical treatments is frowned on.

Here's something that might work for both:

I bet the condition begins in the teen years - during the time when parents can still make the decision as to whether their children should be tested for testosterone over-production and receive medication. What if, as part of a yearly checkup, doctors were to ask questions designed to find out whether the teens that come to their office (boys AND girls - women can get it, too) have been experiencing signs of testosterone over production. Free yearly exams for teens could be offered to poor teens who aren't covered by health insurance and free testosterone prescriptions could be offered to anyone with high testosterone that meets an income requirement. Even if they later decided to go off the meds as adults, this would at least make sure that they know about their condition and know that there is a treatment, giving them an option that they may not even know about otherwise. Perhaps the ones that go off of their medication will decide, during their time in jail, that the medication is a good idea after all and go back on it. That could make jail time much more effective if it doesn't prevent crime entirely.

We could ask stars and athletes to participate by publicly revealing their testosterone levels. I've read the testosterone levels of violent criminals can be ten times as high as the testosterone levels of other criminals. If the testosterone levels of admired and manly men are well-known, then people who have so much more testosterone that it puts them into a state that I imagine is similar to a 'roids rage will have reason to feel manly being brought down to the same testosterone level of Michael Jordan or Arnold Schwarzenegger (or whoever is idolized this week - I have no idea who teenagers and violent criminals idolize).

Also, I have to wonder if people with incredibly high testosterone might qualify as having lost touch with reality or meeting some legal definition of insanity that would qualify them for, at the very least, temporary involuntary testosterone reduction? I say "temporary testosterone reduction" because IF the person can be brought back to reality for even a few days they may voluntarily decide to maintain treatment.

What sort of test would have to be administered to legally verify that they qualify by such a definition? For brain damage patients, you can do things like ask them their name and birthday and see if they know. With schizophrenics you can just ask them questions like "Are you Jesus?" and if they say "Yes" they've lost touch. Maybe we can figure out what the equivalent questions would be for people with dangerously high testosterone levels... something that would prove it if they are out of touch with reality and qualify them for treatment. For instance "Do you care whether you go to jail?" if they rant and rave about how they don't care, then they're not being influenced by the threat of punishment which keeps people from committing crimes - that's dangerous. If you ask them whether they care about being seriously injured and they rave about how they don't, then they're a danger to themselves AND others. I'm pretty sure that at least one state uses "A danger to themselves and others." as a qualification to hospitalize people who are having a mental health episode.

I'm not familiar enough with the law to know whether this would fly, but I think going in this direction could work.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 18 August 2012 06:34:16PM 2 points [-]

. I am not going to sit around waiting for an opportunity to become stronger. I'm going to seek them out.

That's fine, but attempting to bench press your car is not the most effective way to increase your bench press. You don't try to lift an impossible weight, you select a possible weight that stresses your capabilities.

Also, I think the "I want to get stronger" ethos is taken in terms of incremental improvement, not in terms of "I want to be all powerful today".

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 11:17:40PM *  0 points [-]

I completely redid my description in the original post. I think all your concerns have been addressed. Let me know how I did?

Comment author: Dentin 18 August 2012 10:03:07PM 0 points [-]

I honestly don't know enough about law to provide the kind of detailed mistake you're looking for. My belief that it is a somewhat 'important' problem is circumstantial, but I think there's definitely gain to be had:

1) It is often said that bad law consistently applied is better than good law inconsistently applied, but all other things being equal, good law is better than bad law. It is generally accepted that it is possible to have 'good' law which is better than 'bad' law, and I take this as evidence that it's at least possible to have good law and bad law.

2) Law is currently pretty ambiguous, at least compared to software. These ambiguities are typically resolved at run time, by the court system. If we can resolve some of these ambiguities earlier with automated software, it may be possible to reduce the run time overhead of court cases.

3) Law is written in an internally inconsistent language. The words are natural language words, and do not have well understood, well defined meanings in all cases. A checker could plausibly identify and construct a dictionary of the most consistent words and definitions, and perhaps encourage new law makers to either use better words, define undefined words, or to clarify the meaning of questionable passages. By reducing even a subset of words to a well defined, consistent definition, the law may become easier to read, understand and apply.

4) An automated system could possibly reduce the body of law in general by eliminating redundancy, overlapping logic, and obsolete/unreferenced sections.

Currently, we do all of the above anyway, but we use humans and human brains to do it, and we allow for human error by having huge amounts of redundancy and failsafe. The idea that we could liberate even some of those minds to work on harder problems is appealing to me.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 11:13:13PM *  0 points [-]

What if we did this: If a program can detect "natural language words" and encourage humans to re-write until the language is very, very clear, then this could open up the process of lawmaking to the other processing tasks you're describing, without having to write natural language processing software.

It would also be useful to other fields where computer-processed language would be beneficial. THOSE fields could translate their natural language into language that computers can understand, then process it with a computer.

And if, during the course of using the software, the software is given access to both the "before" text (that it as marked as "natural language, please reword") AND the "after" text (the precise, machine readable language which the human has changed it to) then one would have the opportunity to use those changes as part of a growing dictionary, from which it translates natural language into readable language on it's own.

At which point, it would be capable of natural language processing.

I bet there are already projects like this one out there - I know of a few AI projects where they use input from humans to improve the AI like Microsoft's Milo (ted.com has a TED Talk video on this) but I don't know if any of them are doing this translation of natural language into machine-readable language, and then back.

Anyway, we seem to have solved the problem of how to get the software to interpret natural language. Here's the million dollar question:

Would it work, business-wise, to begin with a piece of software that acts as a text editor, is designed to highlight ambiguities and anonymously returns the before and after text to a central database?

If yes, all the rest of this stuff is possible. If no, or if some patent hoarder has taken that idea, then ... back to figuring stuff out. (:

Comment author: Costanza 18 August 2012 07:18:24PM *  3 points [-]

There's probably a bit of money in distilling legalese into simpler language. Nolo Press, for instance, is in that field.

The real money in lawyering, however, is in applying the law to the available evidence in a very specific case. This is why some BigLaw firms charge hourly fees measured by the boatload. A brilliant entrepreneur able to develop an artificial intelligence application which could apply the facts to the law as effectively as a BigLaw firm should eventually be able to cut into some BigLaw action. That's a lot of money.

This is a hard problem. My personal favorite Aesop's fable about applying the facts to the law is Isaac Asimov's short story Runaround . Worth reading all the way through, but for our purposes, the law is very clear and simple: the three laws of robotics. The fact situation is that the human master has casually and lightly ordered the robot to do something which was unexpectedly very dangerous to the robot. The robot then goes nuts, spinning around in a circle. Asimov says it better of course:

Powell's radio voice was tense in Donovan's car: "Now, look, let's start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics - the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's positronic brain." In the darkness, his gloved fingers ticked off each point.

"We have: One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

"Right!"

"Two," continued Powell, "a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."

"Right!"

"And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does Dot conflict with the First or Second Laws."

"Right! Now where are we?"

"Exactly at the explanation. The conflict between the various rules is ironed out by the different positronic potentials in the brain. We'll say that a robot is walking into danger and knows it. The automatic potential that Rule 3 sets up turns him back. But suppose you order him to walk into that danger. In that case, Rule 2 sets up a counterpotential higher than the previous one and the robot follows orders at the risk of existence."

"Well, I know that. What about it?"

"Let's take Speedy's case. Speedy is one of the latest models, extremely specialized, and as expensive as a battleship. It's not a thing to be lightly destroyed."

"So?"

"So Rule 3 has been strengthened-that was specifically mentioned, by the way, in the advance notices on the SPD models-so that his allergy to danger is unusually high. At the same time, when you sent him out after the selenium, you gave him his order casually and without special emphasis, so that the Rule 2 potential set-up was rather weak. Now, hold on; I'm just stating facts."

"All right, go ahead. I think I get it."

"You see how it works, don't you? There's some sort of danger centering at the selenium pool. It increases as he approaches, and at a certain distance from it the Rule 3 potential, unusually high to start with, exactly balances the Rule 2 potential, unusually low to start with."

Donovan rose to his feet in excitement. "And it strikes an equilibrium. I see. Rule 3 drives him back and Rule 2 drives him forward - "

"So he follows a circle around the selenium pool, staying on the locus of all points of potential equilibrium. And unless we do something about it, he'll stay on that circle forever, giving us the good old runaround."

In the real world, courts hardly ever decide that the law is indecipherable, and so the plaintiff should run around in a circle singing nonsense songs (but see, Ashford v Thornton [(1818) 106 ER 149].) The moral of the story, however, is that there is ambiguity in the application of the simplest and clearest of laws.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 10:50:58PM *  0 points [-]

And so the whole human race spins in circles. Yes, I see. (: And so, do you propose that this software also takes out ambiguity? Do you see a way around that other than specifying exactly what to do in every situation? BTW, I rewrote the intro on the OP - any suggestions?

Comment author: chaosmosis 18 August 2012 05:51:31PM 4 points [-]

I have an impossible project that I want to do because it needs doing, not because its impossible.

The Social Sciences are often very unscientific. I want to do to economics and foreign policy analysis what Jared Diamond and other similar authors have done with history. This is important because, you know, existential risk from nuclear wars or global warming or whatever else might kill us all. We can't have an AI or colonize space if we all die in the meantime. Making the Social Sciences more rigorous and subject to simple and empirical and bias free review methods would definitely pay off. We need this.

Anyone have any ideas how to get started?

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 10:35:13PM *  0 points [-]

Mmmm. Okay this looks like a really good one. We need a title for it so I can add this to the list. "Make Social Sciences Rigorous" might work... but I think people are already trying to be rigorous, and "more rigorous" is kind of vague. We need a nice solid, concrete goal. Maybe there's a more strict, more specific term than rigorous... "logically consistent" or ... hmmm... what specific goals would you say would best express this vision?

I also feel a need to clarify the term "social sciences". You give examples like how there are too many unknowns in economics and foreign policy. This feels like two separate problems. In a way, they are. What you're saying here is "The way to solve all these problems in all these diverse areas is by making social sciences more rigorous". That, I can believe, for sure. However, I don't think that would be the entire solution. When it comes to anything political, there are also large masses of people involved in the decision-making process. They may choose the most rational, most scientifically valid option... or they might not. You might counter with "If we understood why they make decisions that are against their own best interests, we could wake them up to what's going on." Is that what you're envisioning?

Would you spell out the whole line of reasoning?

P.S. I redid a lot of the original post, any suggestions?

Comment author: Thomas 18 August 2012 05:42:30PM 0 points [-]

Establish a predictioning firm that accurate, that you will be able to cash in all over the Wall street, London City, Frankfurt and so on.

All you need is a great prediction.

I consider this idea as old and obvious, but worth to accomplish. And not entirely impossible.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 10:24:32PM *  0 points [-]

Ah. Thank you for supporting my point (in the intro, which I just re-wrote) that we don't have good ways to prove that impossible things are impossible. I doubt you meant to do this, but if you think about it, I think you'll see that you did. (:

So, with the assumption in mind that impossibility is subjective and unproven, what monetary goal do you predict most people would FEEL a sense of "impossibility" about? Or, if you'd rather, what goal would YOU feel a sense of impossibility about?

That's what we need in order to make the idea above into an impossible one. (:

Any suggestions on my new introduction?

Comment author: evand 18 August 2012 07:36:28PM 0 points [-]

Thinking about an impossible or merely very difficult problem, because you think that putting forth effort on it will make you stronger, is very different from what Eliezer is talking about.

Ask yourself this: if you spend time working on one of the problems from this thread, and in the process become stronger and learn something, and eventually give up to work on something else, will your reaction be more like "I have failed" or "at least I learned something while failing"? If the latter, Eliezer's post is not relevant to you, and your attempts are not in its spirit.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 09:06:02PM *  0 points [-]

I rewrote my entire intro because of your post. Thanks for giving me complaints specific enough to go on. Now that I've explained my vision much better, do you feel like I've done a good job of addressing the concerns in your comment?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 August 2012 05:20:19PM 0 points [-]

My original thought was selling access to lawyers who are preparing cases. It could also be valuable to people who are trying to maneuver in complex legal environments-- executives and politicians and such.

It seems to me that there should a limited cheap or free version, but I'm not sure how that would work.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:46:06PM 1 point [-]

Hmmm. Okay. So the reason this is profitable is because it's gotten SO hard to keep track of all the laws that even lawyers would be willing to pay for software that can help them check their legal ideas against the database of existing laws?

Comment author: Thomas 18 August 2012 05:27:06PM 1 point [-]

Sorry. I didn't realize you really want to do the impossible. Good luck!

I thought you want to do something "nearly impossible", what a big money generator is. If you don't agree, if you think that's easy, set the constrains high enough. Like 10^12 USD of profit in 5 years. For example.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:36:10PM *  0 points [-]

Okay, I see now that the wording you used just kind of vague. Now that you've added some numbers, it does look impossible. I think there's a difference between impossible and ridiculous, though - for instance, to make every dollar on planet earth in five years would just be ridiculous. Someone has to figure out where the line is - what monetary amount defines the boundary between possible and impossible on this, do you think?

Also, do you want to expand on your idea, or are you ditching it?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 August 2012 07:04:13AM 1 point [-]

It might also be a good way of making money.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:12:47PM 0 points [-]

So we can see your vision, please describe how this would work?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 August 2012 02:47:07PM 0 points [-]

Any opinions on whether this is harder or easier than understanding natural language? In theory, legal language is supposed to be clearer (for experts) and more precise, but I'm not sure that this is true.

It might be easier to write programs which evaluate scientific journal articles for contradictions with each other, the simpler sorts of bad research design, and such.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:11:32PM 0 points [-]

One bottleneck here would be that the programmer would also have to be able to understand legalese. To find someone with both specialties could be pretty hard.

Comment author: evand 18 August 2012 03:20:42PM 8 points [-]

This is not in the spirit of Eliezer's exhortation. I read that article as saying "When, in your travels, you encounter an impossible problem, that is not an excuse to give up, or otherwise an excuse for failure. It merely means you might try your best, and still fail. So hurry up and do it, and don't give us any of this 'try' crap either, because having tried harder doesn't excuse failure either."

I emphatically don't read it as saying "seek out impossible problems and try to do them". Your odds of failure are high, and your odds of producing useful results are low. None of these problems are things that you would think absolutely needed solving had they not already been identified as impossible.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:06:57PM *  2 points [-]

There's no reason to interpret that as "Never set out to do the impossible." Eliezer begins with "The virtue of tsuyoku naritai, 'I want to become stronger', is to always keep improving—to do better than your previous failures, not just humbly confess them." It is THAT spirit that I refer to - "I want to become stronger" If you don't relate to the desire for impossible problems because you want to become stronger, then it's simple - this thread is not your cup of tea. I am not going to sit around waiting for an opportunity to become stronger. I'm going to seek them out. If you don't relate to taking initiative when it comes to getting a challenge, then go find some other thread you do relate to.

Comment author: Thomas 18 August 2012 06:11:01AM 1 point [-]

Idea: Build a profit generating company, which will accelerate fast and go far. Which will be very optimal at this goal.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:01:22PM -1 points [-]

That's not impossible Thomas.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 12:32:30AM *  6 points [-]

Idea: Rational Agreement Software

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 06:13:59AM *  -1 points [-]

Sorting opinion and fact with code:

When a statement is incorrect, it will tend to follow a certain pattern. Change out the subject words and you get the same pattern. For instance, hasty generalization:

All bleeps are bloops. All gerbils are purple. All Asians are smart.

These are all false reasoning, the falseness is inherent to the sentence structure such that if we change out "bleeps" and "bloops" for any other subject, it's still hasty generalization. If we were to build a piece of software that allows users to flag a statement for review, the reviewer could be given the statement with different subject words. For instance, if someone argues a piece of obvious bad reasoning like "All black people are bad." the reviewer might be given "All oranges are bad." Without race to potentially trigger the reviewer's bias, the reviewer can plainly see that the sentence is a hasty generalization. This will help prevent bias and politics from interfering with the rational review of statements.

If that's not found to be good enough alone, we could use it as part of a larger strategy.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 18 August 2012 12:46:11AM 6 points [-]

Idea: Do everything on the final list that gets more than 10 upvotes

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:56:42AM *  2 points [-]

We can try and tell ourselves that we're going to do all the projects that we like, but that's just not what's going to happen. What's really going to happen is we'll probably have way more projects we like than resources. Making ourselves do projects because of an arbitrary number (spending years and thousands of dollars because ten people pressed a thumb up button) will most likely spread people thin, and that would make projects more likely to fail. People, being intelligent, will sense this, and they will pick a limited number of projects that look like they have enough resources to get somewhere and they'll stick to them. Then, while those projects are being done, new projects will be thought of. By the time the people are free to work on a new project, there might be a hundred ideas that are better than our first batch. Neither you or I have the power to make these people do all the good projects. We just have to see whether enough of them are inspired by any of the ideas for there to be the right amount of momentum to get started. What we should really do is keep talking about ideas until something sparks them. Once we've got a fire big enough that we couldn't put it out if we wanted to, THEN we know an idea is going to happen. Our goal here should be to make a lot of sparks and let inspiration decide which ideas will be chosen.

Comment author: Dentin 18 August 2012 05:18:30AM 4 points [-]

IDEA - write a syntax/static analysis checker for laws. Possibly begin with U.S. state law in a particularly simple state, and move up to the U.S. Code (U.S.C.) and the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) Automatically look for conflicting/inconsistent definitions, logical conflicts, and other possible problems or ambiguities. Gradually improve it to find real problems, and start convincing the legal profession to use it when drafting new legislation.

While it may not directly pertain to lesswrong, it is an awesomely hard problem that could have far reaching impacts.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:36:49AM 0 points [-]

I would like to see a few examples of different types of mistakes have ended up in real laws and what you think we would gain by doing this.

Comment author: brilee 18 August 2012 04:55:46AM 1 point [-]

Idea: Understand the human psychology that leads to the stability of the concept of currency/money.

http://www.economist.com/node/21560554

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:35:17AM 0 points [-]

A little more of a description would be a good thing. I read part of the article, but it's just not showing me your vision. I think we need you to describe that vision.

Comment author: albeola 04 August 2012 08:43:51PM 5 points [-]

It's bs to die.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 05:11:50AM *  4 points [-]

Be.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 17 August 2012 11:14:08PM 1 point [-]

There are lots of lurkers on Less Wrong:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1np/attention_lurkers_please_say_hi/

Another problem with your methodology is that prolific users typically have many pages associated with them that lack the text "submitted by" or "comments by" on them. You can access these pages by going the user's main page, scrolling down, and clicking the little "Next" link in the lower left.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 03:09:36AM *  -1 points [-]

Multiple pages aren't being counted. From what I understand, Google doesn't just follow dynamically generated next links like that. It spiders, going around in a web-like pattern. How many times would it end up visiting the same pages if it followed every comment to it's original discussion? A lot. That would be a waste of resources.

To test this, I looked at the url that appears when you press the next button. The site adds some pagination variables into the URL. The word "count" appears. So, you can do the following query and observe the following things:

site:lesswrong.com/user -"submitted by" -"comments by" -count

site:lesswrong.com/user -"submitted by" -"comments by" -com (for comparison)

And observe:

A. It does not divide the number of results into a small fraction of the original number like you'd expect it to. We're comparing 9,820 total users with the original method (at this moment) with 9,460.

B. Removing "com" from the query shows zero results which verifies that adding -count would be removing pages generated in those next links, had they been included.

C. If you click on random pages of Google results, you won't see those count and after variables in the URLs (Or at least I didn't and I feel fairly confident that they won't be there.)

D. If Vladmir is correct in this post then just looking at one of those lines where the user's comments are totaled (the line where 900 have 25 comments) reveals that, by removing "count" from the query, we should have lost at least 1800 from the total. Nowhere near that many were lost, and a lot more should have been lost than that because I only subtracted a tiny fraction of the comments pages on this site in the example.

Comment author: billswift 18 August 2012 01:08:21AM 1 point [-]

I think this would be the most useful, even if it was only partially completed, since even a partial database would help greatly with both finding previously unrecognized biases and with the logic checking AI. It may even make the latter possible without the natural language understanding that Nancy thinks would likely be needed for it.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 01:24:24AM *  0 points [-]

What I'm seeing is that a rational agreement software would require some kind of objective method for marking logical fallacies, which the logic checking AI would obviously be helpful with. Not sure why the rationalist agreement database would help with creating the logic checking AI, unless you mean it can act like a sort of "wizard" where you can go through your document with it one piece at a time and have a sort of "chat" with it about what the rationalist agreement database contains, fed to you in little carefully selected bits.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 August 2012 12:51:43AM 0 points [-]

As you say, do the impossible. I'm reasonably sure that checking for fallacies isn't possible without understanding natural language. I'm only reasonably sure because google has done more with translation than I would have thought possible without using understanding.

Perhaps there's some way of using google's resources to catch at least a useful proportion of fallacies and biases.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 01:03:21AM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure this it would require a full understanding of natural language. There's got to be an 80/20 rule method by which this can be done. Really, there are only so many logical fallacies, and there might be some way to "hack" out fallacious statements by looking for certain patterns in the sentence structure, as opposed to actual sentence interpretation.

For example: "All gerbils are purple." The computer only needs to understand: "All (gibberish) are (different gibberish)." Hasty generalization pattern recognized.

For another example: Gerbils are purple because purple is the color of gerbils. The computer understands: "(gibberish 1) are (gibberish 2) because (gibberish 2) is (blah blah blah) (gibberish 1)" Circular reasoning pattern recognized.

Yes, it would get more complicated than that, especially when people use complex or run-on sentences, or when the fallacy occurs after numerous sentences stack together. But, I still think it could do this with pattern recognition.

Hmmm... it would also have to detect statements where points are being made (looking for the words "is", "are" and "because" might help) and avoid sentences that are pure matters of opinion (I love ice cream because it's delicious! - this might look something like (blah blah blah) because it's (subjective term)).

I somehow doubt Google would appreciate the leeching of their resources - unless you mean they've made it open source or something. Making it dependent on them would be a liability - if they notice the leeching of their resources, they'd surely create a new limit that would probably break the program.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 12:35:07AM 1 point [-]

Idea: Logic checking AI

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 12:34:22AM *  1 point [-]

Idea: Discover unrecognized bias

The first thing that comes to mind as for a way to do this is by comparing information looking for inconsistencies. We already do that, but we do it according to certain patterns. It's in determining what those patterns are and consciously choosing to compare the information using a different pattern that would reveal the types of inconsistencies that would serve as an opportunity to reverse engineer an undiscovered bias, thereby gaining knowledge of it.

For instance:

We observe ourselves behaving with people of two different races.

We compare the information. Did we treat them with equal respect?

We compare information for races, genders, orientations, ages and other things. We're already comparing by those patterns. What if we chose to compare different sets? We can consciously choose to break that pattern and ask about completely different sets of people.

We can ask questions like:

How do I treat smart people compared with everyone else? Do I think as critically about their ideas? Am I intentionally rude to them to try and bring them down?

I've observed widespread bias about intelligent people and it can go either way. I've seen everything from people assuming that gifted people are all elitists to assuming that geniuses have a magical ability to prevent and solve infinite problems, as if they're magical.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 12:32:30AM *  6 points [-]

Idea: Rational Agreement Software

Comment author: chaosmosis 17 August 2012 10:29:24PM *  5 points [-]

Your impossible mission: create a group impossible mission on your own, rather than making Eliezer do it.

Comment author: Epiphany 18 August 2012 12:21:25AM 3 points [-]

Enjoy solving "impossible" problems? Group project!

-2 Epiphany 18 August 2012 12:20AM

In the Muehlhauser-Hibbard Dialogue on AGI, Hibbard states it will be "impossible to decelerate AI capabilities" but Luke counters with "Persuade key AGI researchers of the importance of safety ... If we can change the minds of a few key AGI scientists, it may be that key insights into AGI are delayed by years or decades." and before I read that dialogue, I had come up with three additional ideas on Heading off a near-term AGI arms race. Bill Hibbard may be right that "any effort expended on that goal could be better applied to the political and technical problems of AI safety" but I doubt he's right that it's impossible.

How do you prove something is impossible?  You might prove that a specific METHOD of getting to the goal does not work, but that doesn't mean there's not another method.  You might prove that all the methods you know about do not work.  That doesn't prove there's not some other option you don't see.  "I don't see an option, therefore it's impossible." is only an appeal to ignorance.  It's a common one but it's incorrect reasoning regardless.  Think about it.  Can you think of a way to prove that a method that does work isn't out there waiting to be discovered without saying the equivalent of "I don't see any evidence for this." We can say "I don't see it, I don't see it, I don't see it!" all day long. 

I say: "Then Look!"

How often do we push past this feeling to keep thinking of ideas that might work?  For many, the answer is "never" or "only if it's needed".  The sense that something is impossible is subjective and fallible.  If we don't have a way of proving something is impossible, but yet believe it to be impossible anyway, this is a belief.  What distinguishes this from bias? 

I think it's a common fear that you may waste your entire life on doing something that is, in fact, impossible.  This is valid, but it's completely missing the obvious:  As soon as you think of a plan to do the impossible, you'll be able to guess whether it will work.  The hard part is THINKING of a plan to do the impossible.  I'm suggesting that if we put our heads together, we can think of a plan to make an impossible thing into a possible one.  Not only that, I think we're capable of doing this on a worthwhile topic.  An idea that's not only going to benefit humanity, but is a good enough idea that the amount of time and effort and risk required to accomplish the task is worth it.

Here's how I am going to proceed: 

Step 1: Come up with a bunch of impossible project ideas. 

Step 2: Figure out which one appeals to the most people. 

Step 3: Invent the methodology by which we are going to accomplish said project. 

Step 4: Improve the method as needed until we're convinced it's likely to work.

Step 5: Get the project done.

 

Impossible Project Ideas

  • Decelerate AI Capabilities Research: If we develop AI before we've figured out the political and technical safety measures, we could have a disaster.  Luke's Ideas (Starts with "Persuade key AGI researchers of the importance of safety").  My ideas.
  • Solve Violent Crime: Testosterone may be the root cause of the vast majority of violent crime, but there are obstacles in treating it. 
  • Syntax/static Analysis Checker for Laws: Automatically look for conflicting/inconsistent definitions, logical conflicts, and other possible problems or ambiguities. 
  • Understand the psychology of money

  • Rational Agreement Software:  If rationalists should ideally always agree, why not make an organized information resource designed to get us all to agree?  This would track the arguments for and against ideas in such a way where each piece can be verified logically and challenged, make the entire collection of arguments available in an organized manner where none are repeated and no useless information is included, and it would need to be such that anybody can edit it like a wiki, resulting in the most rational outcome being displayed prominently at the top.  This is especially hard because it would be our responsibility to make something SO good, it convinces one another to agree, and it would have to be structured well enough that we actually manage to distinguish between opinions and facts. Also, Gwern mentions in a post about critical thinking that argument maps increase critical thinking skills.
  • Discover unrecognized bias:  This is especially hard since we'll be using our biased brains to try and detect it.  We'd have to hack our own way of imagining around the corners, peeking behind our own minds.
  • Logic checking AI: Build an AI that checks your logic for logical fallacies and other methods of poor reasoning.

Add your own ideas below (one idea per comment, so we can vote them up and down), make sure to describe your vision, then I'll list them here.

 

Figure out which one appeals to the most people.

Assuming each idea is put into a separate comment, we can vote them up or down.  If they begin with the word "Idea" I'll be able to find them and put them on the list.  If your idea is getting enough attention obviously, it will at some point make sense to create a new discussion for it.

 

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 17 August 2012 11:55:09AM *  25 points [-]

In July 2012, more than 600 different users posted a comment;
since March 2012, about 1600 different users;
since October 2011 — 2300;
since May 2011 — 2900;
since December 2010 — 3400;
since May 2010 — 3900;
since August 2009 — 4400.

Since the beginning, including the comments imported from Overcoming Bias, with some duplicates (people sometimes re-registered with different usernames when moving to LW, and the same username on Overcoming Bias was imported as multiple different usernames on LW if it corresponded to different emails), comments were posted under about 7500 different usernames.

Of the 4400 users who commented since August 2009, 1390 have written at least 10 comments;
900 users — at least 25 comments;
630 users — at least 50 comments;
429 users — at least 100 comments;
225 users — at least 250 comments;
134 users — at least 500 comments;
57 users — at least 1000 comments;
13 users — at least 2500 comments.

Wedrifid has written more than 10000 comments.

(Based on a wget'ed dump of all LW comments.)

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 09:15:35PM *  3 points [-]

One flaw: You're not locating anywhere near all of the people that registered using this method because I bet a lot of people have never commented. In one website's database that I've got access to, almost 70% of the users register without ever doing the expected main activity. Unless you spider your copy of all the comments to cache home pages, follow the links off of friends lists and include other links to home pages around the internet (like Google does, which is why I chose Google instead of wget), you're probably missing a huge proportion of the profiles. You may argue that counting active users is more relevant than counting total members, but these guys might be voting on our posts and comments, and if they outnumber us, they've got more influence over the content than we do.

Comment author: Emile 17 August 2012 08:15:34AM *  5 points [-]

The "9000 results" is probably not a very accurate estimate - from "Google result counts are a meaningless metric":

The basic problem with the Google hit count reported in search results, particularly for phrases and searches using "AND" or "OR" operators, is that it is an estimate. It's not actually a count of anything, at all. It's the result of a calculation based solely upon the words that the query comprises, as Kevin Marks notes. Google explicitly states that it's an estimate, although it is coy about what that estimate is actually based upon. To quote one un-named Google employee, "these are all estimates, and we just haven't tried that hard to make the estimates precise". A named Google employee said much the same after this frequently given answer had been around for some years.

For example: When Google Web reports 17,200 results for the string "de Boyne Pollard" (as it does at the time of writing this Frequently Given Answer), it hasn't searched its entire database to count all of the pages that match that string. That would be very inefficient, considering that it only needs to find (by default) 10 matches in its database in order to return a result page, and that many people don't go beyond the first few pages (or even the first page) of results. What it has done is taken the individual words "de", "Boyne", and "Pollard", and, using the word frequency tables that the Google Web spider generates when it crawls the World Wide Web, produced, from the frequencies with which those three particular individual words occur, an estimate of the number of pages that probably would match.

To demonstrate for yourself that these estimates are meaningless numbers, take a few searches and click on the "Next" button to bring up further pages of results until you reach the last page. You'll see that the actual number of results, known once you reach the last page, will almost always be nothing like the estimated number of results that appeared on all of the prior pages.

Even the actual page count isn't necessarily correct. In part this is because Google caps all queries at 1000 results, and in part it is because of several other other problems with the Google hit count, both estimated and final, that exist.

(The linked page has more sources for this)

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 07:23:04PM *  -2 points [-]

If Google didn't search it's entire database, this supports my theory that there are probably "over 9,000 members" - I did clearly say that was on the low side. If Google only totals only SOME of the results (until it's clear that the user wants more results, or up to it's limit for resource conservation) this also supports my assertion.

Search Term Interpretation:

As for the issues with word interpretation - I knew about that, so I restricted my search to a specific URL, not text within pages. The entire purpose of Google's "site:" code is to restrict the query to a particular website, not to use those words as it would a text search. IF it's breaking the url up into separate words and checking what it's got for those, firstly, that would fail to restrict the search to a specific site and therefore make that functionality bugged, and secondly even if it did that only for the counter, the word "user" would certainly return way more results than 9,000. The term "user" gets 8 billion hits, and "lesswrong" gets 51,700 - if it's totaling site: searches that way, it would get billions of results and it didn't. Assuming it's not bugged, a misinterpretation of the "site:lesswrong.com/user" code is N/A. Since every single user page contains the phrase "comments" and "submitted", if it had broken my exact phrase exclusions into parts, I'd have gotten zero results. See for yourself by trying:

"site:lesswrong.com/user" -comments

It was not by accident that I used the query that I did.

Is my point unsupported?

IF I were trying to support some sort of important point with this user total, I would agree with the link that it is not scientific evidence and quit using it to support points, but this is N/A because if you look closely, you'll see that I am not using this as support to convince anybody of anything. My entire purpose was to verify to myself my perception that LessWrong isn't just someone's personal website with their buddies on it, that a significant number of people have actually gathered around themes like rational thought. I was overjoyed when I discovered this and wanted to share. Maybe this post will get the attention of someone who has the ability to issue a count command to the database. That's the only way we can know for sure. Though, of course, the user totals will change over time, becoming inaccurate quickly. Hopefully by increasing. (:

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 17 August 2012 07:43:12AM 3 points [-]

Lots. For what it's worth, I've quit checking all the recent comments because there are too many of them.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 08:15:16AM -1 points [-]

Lol. You are never going to find this, are you?

Comment author: zslastman 17 August 2012 07:55:45AM 0 points [-]

Shouldn't be hard to get this done. Kickstarter? Or even a philanthropic graphic designer?

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 08:03:21AM *  2 points [-]

It would take a brilliant designer to do it well, not to mention the influence of a person with excellent leadership skills contributing their vision for how to transform the stress into purpose, and someone who knows a lot about psychology and visual communication to analyze how to pull off the effect correctly. I have no objection to assisting with making such a project successful, by contributing my understanding of psychology and design, but I have next to no experience doing video and animation. I have projects of my own that take priority due to being pre-existing, so if you or someone you know wants to lead this, go for it.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 17 August 2012 06:32:18AM 6 points [-]

On the other hand, if you're interested in the number of habitual readers or habitual posters, then the number of members is going to be much higher.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 07:19:40AM *  3 points [-]

I think my main interest in knowing how many users there are went something like this:

OMG A COMMUNITY OF RATIONALISTS!!!! And it is not small??? What the? Well how many are there?

Comment author: Emile 17 August 2012 06:24:11AM 3 points [-]

But you reach the last page of results at page 55, which suggests there are around 550 users.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 07:17:41AM *  1 point [-]

I love how you guys explore every aspect of a thing. (: That may be a limit that Google has to either save on resources or to prevent rival search engines from downloading their whole database (or, a limit put into place BECAUSE rival search engines were sucking down their database, and it was taking up a lot of resources). I've seen other companies figure out who their greediest users are and, upon realizing that the population that takes up the most resources brings the least return on investment, put limits on them. That's what this looks like to me.

Comment author: Randaly 17 August 2012 06:32:19AM 3 points [-]

That is surprisingly low- sitemeter indicates that LessWrong receives ~12,000 daily visits, and ~14,000 today. (I assume that that figure refers to unique visitors.) So there are probably ~3K lurkers.

Potentially confounding factors: People might visit LW from multiple computers/smartphones; people might have multiple accounts; many of those accounts are either spammers or from people who no longer visit LW. I'm not sure which direction these factors would bias the overall number of lurkers in.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 07:13:23AM 4 points [-]

In my experience, internet forums tend to have many times as many lurkers as posters. Also, it's a bit tricky to take all the "noise" out of the data, as you're suggesting, and another thing to add to the list of noisemakers are the search engine crawling robots. They don't all use the term "robot" in their user agents, and anybody can build a robot, so it's hard to filter them all out.

Comment author: zslastman 17 August 2012 05:54:01AM 1 point [-]

Interesting idea, although you risk triggering associations like the "final fantasy" one you mention above that would switch people's serious reactions off. You're also going to hit saturation very soon I think. Somebody needs to do this and draw the curves, figure out how much room there is for sadness in the human mind.

Sadness Engineering. I think I've had an idea for a startup.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 06:27:02AM *  1 point [-]

Do you think people notice cut scenes like that? Back before I learned anything about graphic design, I didn't notice the techniques they were using -- what I noticed were the images they presented to me in the visual foreground. I don't think people will get distracted by the technique or associate it with entertainment. I think most wouldn't notice it. But that's an interesting point - to wonder how many people would notice that and how many wouldn't.

Even if that is the case, a really good designer could make it their task to re-frame the technique of seamless cut-scenes such that they look serious or don't distract you from the serious context. For instance, adding a shaky helicopter ride in that's so wobbly, you automatically assume it's real.

A clever designer could get around minor presentation challenges like these, I feel.

Comment author: zslastman 17 August 2012 05:54:01AM 1 point [-]

Interesting idea, although you risk triggering associations like the "final fantasy" one you mention above that would switch people's serious reactions off. You're also going to hit saturation very soon I think. Somebody needs to do this and draw the curves, figure out how much room there is for sadness in the human mind.

Sadness Engineering. I think I've had an idea for a startup.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 06:03:34AM *  0 points [-]

Intense stress can be constructive. You're totally right that people will not have any idea how to deal with it. This could be either very good or very bad for the charity presenting intensely distressing imagery like what I think is needed to get people to react emotionally to statistics. If you present yourself as the solution to all of this, the guide who makes those feelings constructive, that could be very good. If the people can't handle the stress, they'll shut off. If you ASSIST them with handling stress, you will be seen as a leader in a hard situation, a source of comfort that gives a constructive outlet to emotion, meaning to pain. The difference could be this:

You see a crying child, you're a little sad, you give her 20 bucks.

You see a dying country, you are moved to act now, suddenly life has purpose, you experience a renewed sense of meaning.

It would have to be done very, very carefully to have the most constructive effect. Then again, what doesn't?

Number of Members on LessWrong

3 Epiphany 17 August 2012 05:47AM

I was excited to find this site, so I wanted to know how many people had joined LessWrong.  Was it what it seemed - that a lot of people had actually gathered around the theme of rational thought - or was that just wishful thinking about a site that a guy with a neat idea and his buddies put together?  I couldn't find anything stating the number of members on LessWrong anywhere on the site or the internet, so I decided it would be a fun test of my search engine knowledge to nail jello to a tree and make my own.

Some argue that Google totals are completely meaningless, however, the real problem is that it's very complicated and if you don't know how search engines work, your likelihood of getting a usable number is low.  I took into account the potential pitfalls when MacGyvering this figure out of Google.  So far, no one has posted a significant flaw with my specific method.  (I will change that statement if they do, once I've read their comment.)  Also, I was right (Find in page: total).

Here is the query I constructed:

site:lesswrong.com/user -"submitted by" -"comments by"

(Translation provided at the end.)

This gets a similar result in Bing and Yahoo:

"lesswrong.com/user"

If this is correct, LessWrong has over 9,000 members.  That's my claim: "LessWrong probably has over 9,000 members" not "LessWrong has exactly 9,000 members".  My LessWrong population figure is likely to be low.  (I explain this below.)

Why did I do this?  I was really overjoyed to find this site and wanted to see whether it was somebody's personal site with just a few buddies, or if they actually managed to draw a significant gathering of people who are interested in rational thought.  I was very happy to see that it looks much bigger than a personal site.  Since it was so hard to find out how many users LessWrong has, I decided to share.

I think a lot of people assume the hasty generalization that "all search engine totals are meaningless".  If you're an average user just plugging in search terms with little understanding of how search engines work: yes, you should regard them as meaningless.  However, if you know the limitations of a technique, what parts of the system your working within are consistent and what parts of it are not, I say it is possible to get some meaning within those limitations.  Do I know all the limitations?  Well, I assume I am unaware of things I don't know, so I won't say that.  But I do know that so far nobody has proven this number or method wrong.  If you want to prove me wrong, go for it.  That would be fascinating.  Remember that the claim is "LessWrong probably has over 9,000 members".  The entire purpose of this was to get an "at least this many" figure for how many members LessWrong has.  The inaccuracies I've already taken into consideration in order to compensate for the limits of this technique are listed below:

 

Why this is an "at least this many" figure, pitfalls I've avoided or addressed, and inaccuracies.

  - Some users may not be included in Google's index yet.  For instance, if they have never posted, there may be no link to their page (which is what I searched for - user pages), and the spider would not find them.  This may be restricted to members that have actually commented, posted, or have been linked to in some way somewhere on the internet. 

  - Search engine caches are not in real time.  There can be a lag of up to months, depending on how much the search engine "likes" the page.

  - It has been reported by previous employees of a major search engine that they are using crazy old computer equipment to store their caches.  I've been told that it is common for sections of cache to be down for that reason.

  - Search engines have restrictions in place to conserve resources.  For instance, they won't let you peruse all of the results using the "next" button, and they don't total all of the results that they have when you first press "search" (you may see that number increase later if you continue to press "next" to see more pages of results.)

  - It has been argued that Google doesn't interpret search terms the way you'd think.  I knew that before I started.  The query  was designed with that in mind.  I explain that here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/e4j/number_of_members_on_lesswrong/780g

  - Some of the results in Bing and Yahoo were irrelevant, though I think I weeded them pretty thoroughly for Google if my random samples of results pages are a good indication of the whole.

  - When you go to your user page, if you have more than 10 comments, a next link shows at the bottom and clicking it makes more pages appear.  My understanding is that Google doesn't index these types of links - and they don't seem to be getting included.  http://lesswrong.com/lw/e4j/number_of_members_on_lesswrong/7839

Go ahead and check it out - stick the query in Google and see how many LessWrong members it shows.  You'll certainly get a more up-to-date total than I have posted here.  ;)

 

Translation for those of you that don't know Google's codes:

site:lesswrong.com/user

"Search only lesswrong.com, only the user directory."

(The user directory is where each user's home page is, so I'm essentially telling it "find all the home page directories".)

-"submitted by" -"comments by"

Exclude any page in that directory with the exact text "submitted by" or "comments by"

(The submissions and comments pages use a url in that directory, so they will show up in the results if I do not subtract them.  Also, I used exact text specific to those pages, so that the text in the links on user home pages do not get user home pages omitted from the search. )

 

Note:

I realize this number isn't scientific proof of anything, (we can't see Google's code so that would be foolish), which is why I'm not attempting to use it to convince anyone of anything important. 

 

 

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 05:21:53AM *  9 points [-]

How statistics can move us: Not very many people have good "translators" to transform left-brain information like words, statistics and factual data into the right-brain format of imagery, which triggers emotions. We question our ethics when we realize that "one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic." but, to me, this is a design challenge, we simply have not communicated effectively to the right half of the brain. I learned to do this on myself, and it allows me to do really neat things like change my emotional reactions so that I respond differently to deliberate improvements that I make to my ideas. You cannot simply make a person emotional and present them with a statistic. That's a non sequitur to the right brain. You need to communicate the statistic using specific visualizations.

This is the type of imagery I'm thinking might work: Tell the story of Rokia while showing her face, and then zoom out. Imagine one of those Final Fantasy cut scenes that's totally seamless, to keep them connected to their feelings about Rokia while the scope increases. You zoom out to show her village. A village is a lot to visually process, so the designer would make a few scenes stand out that people consciously notice and process, and recognize that each person repeats the feeling of Rokia. So, you notice a crying family of people, disabled child struggling, and a kid hugging an extremely skinny dog. This carries the emotional impact of hearing about Rokia and repeats it a few times within that larger scope. Then you zoom out further till you can see the city glowing in unhappy "emergency zone" red graphic effects. (It would work best to show these earlier, at intense emotional points, so that by the time we're zooming out, the person is conditioned to associate that graphic effect with an "emergency zone" feeling). Then zoom out further to see even more villages glowing in "emergency zone" red, until you have one of those incredible scenes that gives you a sense of awe (like when Harry Potter is flying on his broomstick and the scenery is incredibly detailed, except it's filled with all these emergency zones.) And then, to bring it all together again, and ensure that this macrocosm is merged with the microcosm of Rokia, bubbles could pop out of each of those zones showing more unhappy scenes - one at a time at first so that you get the gist of what's in the bubbles - and then more and more rapidly to show this really, really numerous amount of them representing "millions". Or, you could try literally showing millions of them - the subconscious brain is supposed to be able to process all that. Then the screen stays filled with them for a moment so you can take it all in, and whatever realizations can bubble up from the subconscious into the conscious.

THAT might communicate the scope of the problem to the right side of the brain.

That sort of intensive, macrocosm-detailing visual communication is what the right brain needs in order to hear "millions of Rokias".

This type of visualization would obviously create a lot of stress - stress is power and this power can be really bad, or it can be really good. So, I answered the question: Would the stress be constructive?

Comment author: Raemon 16 August 2012 09:32:03PM *  2 points [-]

Yeah. This is more or less what I've come to realize.

The story I was working on was originally prompted by an analogy about the weird psychological quirks that afflicted me when I was trying to decide where to donate money. I felt a compulsion to donate to a less efficient charity because it's cause was "almost done," and I wanted to finish it off and get a satisfying "Ding! Achievement" feeling.

This prompted someone to say "that's like ignoring evidence that someone's dying of a gunshot wound, so that you can finish throwing the last few starfish back into the ocean." Which I then felt compelled to try and turn into a rationalist fan-parable.

A lot of pieces of it seem worthwhile, but the work is buckling and straining over the ridiculousness of a young girl and old man trying to do anything about a nearby gunshot. The gunshot itself isn't all that important to the story, but I need something that:

a) is obviously more important than a few starfish
b) time sensitive
c) is plausibly addressable by a young girl and old man
d) the evidence for said bad thing that needs addressing is uncertain.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 03:58:49AM *  0 points [-]

Why can't I resist a puzzle?

Hi, I don't know you, but I'd like to solve your puzzle.

A child opens a door to a house, and ten cats run out. The animal loving cat lady inside is disabled and so they have to get the cats for her. They're rushing to get all ten cats back inside before any of them wander off too far and get lost. While they're doing this, they see a child playing near an open manhole. She's doing cartwheels and rolling on the ground. She's too far to yell to. While they get the cats, they keep seeing her nearly missing the manhole. They keep thinking about going over there and putting the manhole cover back on. This would obviously take both the old man and the young girl - those are heavy... but they also want to get every cat before they're gone...

Comment author: ShannonFriedman 15 August 2012 04:04:24PM *  5 points [-]

Hi Epiphany,

Thanks for making these offers! I think you might get more interest if you give more information. For example, you don't want to share your current ideas regarding marketing, but perhaps you could share a past brilliant idea or two that you've had and implemented?

For reference, I've gotten a lot of backlash from friends in the community about even posting this post - it went through a lot of editing before I published it, because people are extremely skeptical about the values of business ideas in and of themselves at all. So for your purposes even with a promise to only request compensation if it works, potential interested parties will usually need a lot of convincing just to think its worth investing their time in talking with you.

Likewise, examples and data regarding other offers & claims would also be great. The feedback I've gotten that people, especially in this community want, is specific with concrete examples. You are better off being overly specific and potentially causing someone to think they're not part of your target market than under specific and having everyone just read past.

Best wishes! And please respond in this thread with any results you get from anything in this post, including if this advice helps you in another context :)

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 03:34:38AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 03:30:48AM 5 points [-]

Elizer, give us impossible goals? I would LOVE to work on solving them as a group. Would you make it happen?

Who else is interested? If you reply to this, that will show him how much interest there is. If it's a popular idea, that should get attention for it.

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 04:45:54PM *  12 points [-]

All of your points may be true, but are not especially relevant. Philippe Rushton makes much hay in his lifecycle theory of how black kids grow up faster than white kids and much faster than East Asian kids, but that doesn't mean they're destined for genius any more than chimp infants growing up much faster than human infants means anything.

What are these "resources" you keep mentioning?

Fats, protein, calories, time-investment, sleep. Feel free to look through http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics for those (the sleep one IIRC is from Ericsson).

It's not like gifted children eat two elephants a week. They eat normal food.

How do you know how much they eat? Have you weighed out their every meal and snack? Just a few hundred calories made the difference between life and death in Nazi concentration camps; how much more so in famines or droughts? Your intuitions from a fat Western First World environment are not very useful in this discussion.

I've met several bright people that require only three hours a night. That's five extra hours every day. Imagine that all your days are 1/3 longer, and how much of an advantage it would be.

I have, actually, with modafinil. It's not as impressive as one might think; if you weren't being productive with your original waking hours, getting some more is not necessarily going to revolutionize your life. Further, we know that sleep deficits are one of those things that are easy to fool yourself about: the chronically sleep-derived are deluded about whether they are paying any mental price for the sleep deprivation.

Comment author: Epiphany 17 August 2012 03:25:08AM 0 points [-]

There are different speeds at which people grow up, it's not boolean. There are different levels of giftedness. Some are so gifted as to be called geniuses, some are more along the lines of talented, and there are plenty of people in between.

Food: Now that you've said "a few hundred calories makes a difference", I see that this could be a potential setback for them. That was a good point. I don't know whether they eat a bit more or less, though I know that they can experience reactive hypoglycemia if they don't space and balance their meals properly to avoid blood sugar crashes.

Sleep: Gifted children are more likely to need either more or less sleep than average. So far, I've met a bunch of gifted people that need less sleep, and none that need more. If sleep were a survival factor, then the gifted people who need less of it would theoretically just be more populous than the ones who need more. Obviously, the longer sleepers theoretically would not prevent shorter sleepers from surviving better.

It's not 100% clear to me whether brilliant people who sleep 3 hours a night experience sleep deprivation symptoms. However, when you're looking at something as extreme as a 5 hour difference, you'd think the person would unravel very quickly, if they needed those 5 hours. If they're paying a price for it, it's certainly not nearly as bad as the price an ordinary person would pay. A normal person would probably devolve into schizophrenia after a couple weeks of that. But these guys seemed bright and rational.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 August 2012 03:57:21AM 6 points [-]

Have you never tried to solve a problem that seems impossible, Eliezer?

Now that you mention it.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 06:20:17AM *  3 points [-]

Ooh. I like it. Thanks. Say, do you know if Eliezer has posed any impossible challenges to the group? It would be REALLY fun to solve them as a team. (:

Edit: I made one.

Comment author: shminux 15 August 2012 08:22:32PM 1 point [-]

If you're playing the biggest game you can, you should keep getting into quagmires by continually putting your limits to the test.

I agree. However, I would question the wisdom of such actions. Depends on your risk tolerance, of course.

"If you're not failing half the time, you're not trying hard enough."

And I would add that "if you keep running into unexpected failure modes, you are not doing your homework."

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 04:02:58AM *  2 points [-]

Oooh. That's a more direct assumption. Let's scrutinize this:

"if you keep running into unexpected failure modes, you are not doing your homework."

Do you agree with any of the following, if so, which ones:

  1. There is a limit to the amount of problem-solving effort that life demands of people.
  2. People are always able to predict which problems they're going to have in advance.
  3. There is a limit to the complexity of problems and it happens to match human limitations.
  4. Diligent people are in some way protected from other people's problems spilling over onto them.
  5. That expecting a problem will automatically guarantee it gets solved (that the resources will always be available, that multiple other problems won't rob you of the necessities to solve upcoming disasters in advance).

If you disagree with even one of those statements, why do you assume that if a person is presented with multiple quagmires, they didn't do their homework? This is reality and reality doesn't care about you. Life may give you problems more complex than you can figure out, other people's problems will create problems for you, sometimes life gives you more problems than you can process at once, nobody sees everything coming, and even when you do see something coming, nothing guarantees you'll have the resources to stop it.

If you know all of this, why do you say such things?

Comment author: ShannonFriedman 15 August 2012 07:29:46PM 8 points [-]

If you're playing the biggest game you can, you should keep getting into quagmires by continually putting your limits to the test. A favorite quote of mine from the cofounder of the coaching school and leadership program I attended:

"If you're not failing half the time, you're not trying hard enough."

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 03:52:20AM *  -1 points [-]

Thank you for understanding. (:

Do you ever play at trying to do things that appear to be impossible?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 August 2012 03:05:23AM 9 points [-]

If you've never been arrested, you're too law-abiding.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 03:44:13AM *  -1 points [-]

Failure doesn't imply risk. You can fail at challenging your friends to seemingly impossible debates or thinking of solutions to seemingly impossible problems. If you fail at those, you've lost nothing - the time is a valid investment in intellectual development. Have you never tried to solve a problem that seems impossible, Eliezer?

Try it. It's a blast.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 02:10:38AM *  2 points [-]

Ideas:

"There is new information in the field of cryonics, do you mind if I make sure you know the important pieces of info?"

(That gets you space to talk about whatever technological advancements you want to talk about or whatever, get her thinking about it, and make sure she's informed.)

If refused: "From my point of view, this is something that could save your life. If it can save your life, then no matter how small the chance is, I'm ethically obligated to talk about it with you, right?" (Make sure to phrase it as a question.)

(Even if she refuses that, you'll feel at peace with your conscience because you did what you could. Whatever she says, it will most likely help you let her go.)

If brushed off: "I know this sounds far out but this discussion is technically a matter of life and death, am I right?"

Wait for the answer.
If "yes", proceed.
If not, back to "Maybe I forgot to mention this particular piece of cryonics information..." Loop until "yes".

Arguments:

"What if I get cryo, and other people you know get cryo. If you woke up and we're all there, and we all want you there, would you want to be there, too?"

Arguments against:

We really have to think about what keeping people alive longer is going to do to the environment. We might freeze all these people, then the environment degrades further to the point where resources are very scarce, and then find that we're competing with bodies in cryo chambers for our resources... Living people who are poor, disadvantaged and sick may suffer or even die if they are made to compete with rich, advantaged folk for medical or other resources.

I have no idea what the most ethical choice is here. You will decide for yourself in any case. So I presented you with both sides.

Comment author: shminux 15 August 2012 08:05:47PM *  1 point [-]

Downvoted for unwarranted presumptions and incoherent ranting.

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 01:50:35AM *  3 points [-]

I'll try another approach. You said:

"BS detector going off like crazy... To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?"

Challenge me directly. Don't imply that you're assuming that I got myself into those quagmires and then down-vote me for my completely warranted presumption that you're assuming that the quagmires were my own fault. You want to tell me you think I probably brought all the quagmires onto myself? Do it. And support your point.

Comment author: ShannonFriedman 15 August 2012 04:04:24PM *  5 points [-]

Hi Epiphany,

Thanks for making these offers! I think you might get more interest if you give more information. For example, you don't want to share your current ideas regarding marketing, but perhaps you could share a past brilliant idea or two that you've had and implemented?

For reference, I've gotten a lot of backlash from friends in the community about even posting this post - it went through a lot of editing before I published it, because people are extremely skeptical about the values of business ideas in and of themselves at all. So for your purposes even with a promise to only request compensation if it works, potential interested parties will usually need a lot of convincing just to think its worth investing their time in talking with you.

Likewise, examples and data regarding other offers & claims would also be great. The feedback I've gotten that people, especially in this community want, is specific with concrete examples. You are better off being overly specific and potentially causing someone to think they're not part of your target market than under specific and having everyone just read past.

Best wishes! And please respond in this thread with any results you get from anything in this post, including if this advice helps you in another context :)

Comment author: Epiphany 16 August 2012 01:42:08AM 0 points [-]

I agree with "potential interested parties will usually need a lot of convincing just to think its worth investing their time in talking with you" but I'm unwilling to put significant effort into trying to convince them in this post. Here's why: Nothing that I say even matters at all. They need to see it for themselves.

The way I see my post working is this: As people get to know me from my posts on LessWrong, some of them will see evidence of ability and start getting an idea of what kinds of things I'm good at. THEN they'll think it's worth investing the time to explain their problem to me and see what happens.

I'm not interested in working hard to convince people that don't want to believe me, who may be too risk averse to think big -- all for the prospect of not getting paid! My personality is like oil to that water. It's the people who are thinking big and can guess at what I have to offer based on our interactions that I'd like to work with.

I'm just not known in this community yet.

And, just in case it wasn't clear, most of my marketing ideas are untested. I've had some amusing successes, but I'm not a professional marketer. I'm a person who has enough of the right kinds of ideas that potential is there, but has not yet had the opportunity to make use of it. If you want to pay people like they're interns, you tend to hire entry level people, no? If you want to do new kinds of work, you tend to accept that it might not pay well at first, right? For marketing ideas, I've essentially got an intern-like attitude, though I am offering only a small time investment.

Comment author: Vaniver 15 August 2012 06:30:37PM 5 points [-]

As the saying goes, intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 08:06:07PM *  1 point [-]

I just realized, this might actually have been intended as being in support to me, not a continuation of shminux's line of thought. I don't know why I interpreted it that way in hindsight. Maybe it was that I had a 6 hour night of sleep the night before. Sorry if I misinterpreted.

Comment author: shminux 15 August 2012 05:30:18PM *  7 points [-]

Solving quagmires. I've been in a lot of quagmires in my life. Like, imagine a quagmire that has quagmires for fingers and toes - and THOSE quagmires have quagmires for eyes! I have developed my problem-solving abilities to the point where I tend to get myself out of ugly quagmires. Give me a paperclip and some duct tape, ask me to do something impossible and see what happens.

BS detector going off like crazy... To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 07:51:10PM *  0 points [-]

I like this comment enough that I've decided to make it into an article. So that there aren't multiple copies of the same information, I have removed it.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 08:38:21AM *  3 points [-]

I have unusual abilities that I would like to share for a cause.

My terms:

For short-term projects and consultations that I accept, I will consider a "pay only if I make you money" or "we have no money, tip you later if possible" agreement, basically "volunteering with the risk of getting paid". I do not have the ability to leap off the cliff and go full-time into the start-up world at this point. I do not have part-time hours available.

Abilities:

I'm a psychology enthusiast with a special interest in gifted adults. This specific focus is relatively rare and may be very useful at answering questions for people who are trying to find, motivate and organize multiple gifted people and to create a good environment for them to actualize their potential in.

Communication. Have no idea how to explain your amazing idea? Don't know how to get through to everyday people? Can't get people to get along? I'm good at figuring these out. Note: I am not saying I will instantly know how to communicate things, I'm saying I can figure it out.

Give me "impossible" problems - I love challenging my creativity and seeing whether I can solve them. Sometimes I seek it out just for the sense of challenge. Not everybody is even willing to try doing a challenge that hard. Give me a paperclip and some duct tape, ask me to do something impossible and see what happens - I relish that. (No, I will not attempt just anything. I have my own way of determining whether a challenge is worth attempting, but you can throw it at me and see whether I will attempt it.)

Inventing stuff. I love inventing! I'm especially good with visual-spatial tasks and systems. I program all day, and then to relax, I make 3-D models with the goal of challenging myself to build something that is practical in ten ways at once AND beautiful (read: visual synthesis tasks). That is a favorite kind of challenge of mine. I am excellent at fine art and design. Yes, the "3-D models" I'm talking about are Minecraft structures.

Graphic design - if I get to have enough fun, I may do your project just to have done it.

Marketing ideas. I come up with tons of them. (Example) They tend to be clever "purple cows" (a term from Seth Godin's marketing books). Aside from some amusing success, my purple cow abilities are untested but a "pay only if it makes you money" arrangement is especially useful here. I can just give you purple cow ideas, you thin the herd and only pay me if the cows pay you.

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 03:38:14AM 10 points [-]

More intelligent people more likely to survive hard circumstances, aren't they? Maybe it depends which circumstances. But my thought is that a population of people that's been surviving something really, really hard might end up having it's genes influenced by natural selection, so that there are way more bright people.

Why would you think this? Intelligence is metabolically expensive, and pays off only in the long run (consider how much of a life you can 'waste' getting an education). Putting people into a resource-pressured poor quality environment would seem to select for more immediately useful traits like aggression or growing up very quickly (and hence, investing in poorer quality body parts or less of them, like being shorter).

If there were a lot of resources on average but the environment fluctuated a lot, then there might be evolutionary pressure for intelligence: but this does not describe Africa too well and better describes very northern countries like Scandinavia where you can freeze to death but agriculture or fishing etc still yield lots of food. The book does discuss this theory and run some regressions in its favor. (I've always been a little dubious: it seems to me that it largely depends on European countries for most of its value...)

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 07:20:41AM *  4 points [-]

Gifted babies do things sooner - that's how early it shows up. Gifted children can learn to walk sooner, talk sooner, climb sooner, have rational thoughts sooner, etc. I'm not talking about marginally sooner. I'm talking about huge gaps like 1/3 sooner or 3 times sooner, and sometimes even 12 times sooner (William Sidis).

Gifted children tend to be bigger, not smaller - they develop faster. All these things would certainly give them an edge over the other children. They do grow up faster - otherwise what else describes child prodigies? They've reached an adult level of skill as a child. That does happen, you know.

Gifted people tend to be emotionally intense - and of course they may express that in any number of directions (sadness, happiness, anger) which lends itself to the idea that some portion of the gifted population may be easier to provoke to the point of aggression.

And there are different kinds of gifts, different sources of giftedness. Some gifted people only need three hours of sleep, for instance. I've met several bright people that require only three hours a night. That's five extra hours every day. Imagine that all your days are 1/3 longer, and how much of an advantage it would be.

What are these "resources" you keep mentioning? It's not like gifted children eat two elephants a week. They eat normal food.

Do you happen to remember the area of the book dealing with this theory?

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 02:53:08AM *  0 points [-]

I finally got a chance to give that a look, skimmed various areas to get an idea of what's in there. What I reallly want is a chart that looks like this:

 Poverty | War | Sweatshop | Schooling | Racial Attitude

Poverty

War

Sweatshop

Schooling

Racial Attitude

Where all the boxes for intersections have the average IQ score, and there are, of course, more columns to account for all the things that might have an effect. Lead paint exposure, crack epidemics, etc.

Without that, we're never going to have even the slightest clue. Even with it, we have to ask "Which was the chicken and which was the egg".

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 03:01:38AM *  0 points [-]

Maybe Africa is smarter despite the score... I just realized there's another reason why a chart like the above wouldn't answer this question:

We have to ask "Might being under really tough selection pressures actually make a population smarter than they appear?"

First half of my point: Say we accounted for all the details and we discovered that a particular group had been through it all. You have to wonder how the hell they survived. More intelligent people more likely to survive hard circumstances, aren't they? Maybe it depends which circumstances. But my thought is that a population of people that's been surviving something really, really hard might end up having it's genes influenced by natural selection, so that there are way more bright people. Second half of my point:

Combine this with another thing that affects IQ and you'll see where I'm going with this:

If a person has depression, for instance, that can lower their IQ score 30 points until the episode of depression ends. They might have a lot of IQ points in there that we can't see because their IQs are suppressed by stress - not permanently damaged, just suppressed.

If stress can lower your score substantially, then a population might require a larger reserve of intelligence if it is going through something awful. What if you're depressed AND at war AND survived starvation, AND weren't schooled, etc. To be able to accomplish an IQ score of even 85 might take a genius after going through all that. So, they could have a population of geniuses over there, and we wouldn't know. Because we, over here in civilized land, have no idea where to even begin guessing what AMOUNT of IQ suppression a combination of factors so terrible would have, especially because they'd probably multiply each other.

So, if we looked at a population that had been through a heck of a lot, and they don't score very well, does that mean that they're dumb (as in born that way, or permanently stuck there), or that they are, in fact, super smart (say, IQ 140) but that the EXPRESSION of that is suppressed because they're so ridiculously stressed out?

So, we could look at this another way: What IQ would it take to go through all the hell an African has gone through and survive it?

Comment author: gwern 13 August 2012 09:27:40PM *  6 points [-]

If you're interested in the topic, Lynn & Vanhanen have released a new book on the dataset, Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, at least some of whose chapters seem relevant to the question of the validity of the scores. (I only just downloaded it and so haven't read said chapters. EDIT: excerpts)

I'd note in passing that a culture-loaded test could be perfectly useful in ranking people within a different culture, for the same reason that crystallized intelligence can be used to predict fluid intelligence: if the smarter people are more likely to remember something after just 1 or 2 exposures, and everyone is rarely exposed to the foreign culture, then when you test people on the foreign culture, you'll wind up constructing a ranking which looks a lot like what a 'fair' IQ test would have given you. (Imagine you're an inner city black: you may see or hear of yachts just a handful of times in your life, as would all your confreres; the ones most likely to remember what a 'yacht' is when that infamous example comes up, are... going to be the smart ones who can remember obscure trivia like what white people mean by 'yacht'. The occasional homeboy obsessed with boats but not terribly smart will add noise to the ranking by knowing all about yachts, but over the whole inner-city population, the ranking still works.)

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 02:53:08AM *  0 points [-]

I finally got a chance to give that a look, skimmed various areas to get an idea of what's in there. What I reallly want is a chart that looks like this:

 Poverty | War | Sweatshop | Schooling | Racial Attitude

Poverty

War

Sweatshop

Schooling

Racial Attitude

Where all the boxes for intersections have the average IQ score, and there are, of course, more columns to account for all the things that might have an effect. Lead paint exposure, crack epidemics, etc.

Without that, we're never going to have even the slightest clue. Even with it, we have to ask "Which was the chicken and which was the egg".

Comment author: wedrifid 13 August 2012 06:09:00PM 0 points [-]

IQ tests are culturally biased. If the test asks "How do you use a teacup?" a British person will be likely to know the answer - a lot of them use teacups daily. Do Africans use teacups every day? Maybe they'll bomb on the teacup question because they drink their tea from bowls as with Japanese matcha tea, or from gourds as with yerba mate tea. If you ask them "Is a rattlesnake dangerous?" that question is irrelevant to them. They have boa constrictors, but not rattlesnakes.

Regardless of whether or not it is true it is not supported by the rest of the paragraph. That explains a way in which some arbitrary test which clearly is different in nature to an IQ test could in principle be culturally biased.

(The final paragraph does constitute support of the claim, in as much as the existence of a culture fair test implies an authority sees a need for it.)

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 02:08:00AM *  0 points [-]

That's a valid criticism, so I explained a lot better here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/776g

Comment author: OrphanWilde 14 August 2012 01:30:02PM 2 points [-]

They would assume you have a reason for bringing those things up. (Or, if they couldn't find one, assume you were a bit daft.)

What reason would you have, in their model of you, for bringing up your IQ? None of them are good.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 02:05:15AM 1 point [-]

Judgments often made about IQ statements:

Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/76x6

I think you were asking "What do I think they think?" - your wording felt a bit tricky to interpret.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 04:41:08PM 5 points [-]

Look at ravens progressive matrices, these are as far from relying on culture as you can get- they are too abstract and tend to show reasonable distributions of results in all groups. They also show poor results for some groups, including africans.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?
Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:59:11AM 0 points [-]

This comment makes my point on this better than the one above did: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/776g

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2012 12:56:15PM 4 points [-]

I'm pretty sure IQ tests don't ask questions like that. They're supposed to measure intelligence, not knowledge (at least in principle¹), and it's obvious that even a very smart person couldn't possibly figure out whether rattlesnakes are dangerous while taking the test, short of knowing that beforehand.

  1. Well, many of them do require knowledge of the English alphabet and its order, a few require a reasonable knowledge of English, and I think even with Raven's Progressive Matrices, some explicit knowledge of discrete maths concepts such as exclusive OR and cyclical permutations is very useful.
In response to comment by [deleted] on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK?
Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:49:29AM -1 points [-]

Okay, my examples sucked, but the general principle that one's abilities with reading and English will make a big difference on a written and/or English IQ test still holds. I made that point a lot better in a different comment. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk/why_are_individual_iq_differences_ok/776g

Comment author: kilobug 14 August 2012 02:23:38PM 0 points [-]

Even without looking at cultural unfairness in the tests themselves, it's very hard to tell apart genetic factors from nurture.

Be it within the US (or Europe) or between US/Europe and Africa, there is a strong correlation between skin color and economical status. Lower economical status means lower quality food, higher chance of living in old buildings using lead-based paint, usually poorer quality shcools, ... which all affect the developement of the brain.

Is there any study done for example on the IQ of black children raised from a very young age in middle-class foster families, compared to whilte children raised in similar conditions ? Even then we couldn't rule our non-genetic factors that affected pregnancy (like bad food quality or drug/alcohol use during pregnancy), but it would be more significant to claim that there is a significant genetic difference.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:39:28AM *  3 points [-]

Even that wouldn't work. Here's why:

Read about Jane Elliot's brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. Cliff notes version: A school teacher tells her class that the brown eyed kids are better than the blue eyed kids, puts collars on the blue eyed kids, and sees what happens. Very, very quickly, they take on these oppressor vs. victim roles. Suddenly, she's noticing things like the blue-eyed children who used to be smart couldn't perform well. Brown-eyed kids were spelling words she knew they couldn't spell.

Simply being a black child in a white-dominant classroom is enough to potentially throw those kids off on the tests. Could this be a problem for a predominantly black school in a white-dominant country? Or a predominantly black country in a white-dominant world? It is argued that America is not a white-dominant country and that's true if you look at the population statistics. But that doesn't mean everyone's updated their attitudes or that the social structures have really changed. :/

One interesting thing I want to note here is that I have read that Chinese people feel a sense of pride about being "the first people." I don't know whether that is a common attitude in China, but IF it is, and IF these IQ tests are actually accurate (which I have already stated some serious criticisms about) perhaps the difference is the way that the races perceive their lot in the world.

Also, I hate to do this to you because if I were on the receiving end I would feel really bad, but I can't not say it now that I've seen it:

Why do we have to stick to comparing black foster kids with white foster kids, as if there are no black children in middle class families to research? Michael Jordan, for instance, made it well beyond the middle class. I've seen black people working middle class jobs, and met a black guy recently who makes a lot of money working in IT. It's not like they aren't out there.

I hope you don't take it too badly... we all come here because we want to remove our bias. That's a respectable goal. If you see any of mine let me know. (:

Comment author: gwern 14 August 2012 09:31:30PM 7 points [-]

Indeed. At the usual standard deviation norm of ~15, a 220 IQ would be 8 standard deviations out and make him ~1 in 8*10^14 (100 trillion).

Inasmuch as only 100 billion humans are estimated to have ever lived, the overwhelming majority of that having an average IQ far lower than 100 and so being essentially irrelevant, we can conclude that he is either lying or from the future.

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:06:48AM *  0 points [-]

220+ IQ scores DO happen - due to the fact that IQ tests cannot be made accurate for such an uncommon group of people, they're far more common than they're mathematically supposed to be. A collection of research on that can be found online right here:

http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/Terman_Summary.htm

I've actually talked with people in that IQ vicinity, and based on the absolutely sublime intelligent conversation they're capable of providing, and considering the likelihood of specifically them being dishonest about that within the context of their other behaviors, I just don't think they're lying.

Superintelligent people do exist. And they have to actually BE somewhere, right? Where do they go?

Do you think that none of them would be attracted to a website like LessWrong? I think this site is likely to be a genius magnet.

If it turns out that this person's IQ really is over 220, I totally want to have intelligent conversation with them. If you give people the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, sometimes the result is more than worth the effort to withhold judgment for a while.

P.S. Yes, I realize the claim is that it was estimated at over 220, not that they received that score. The obvious argument here is "What professional would estimate it that high knowing how rare those scores are SUPPOSED to be?" but if you're not basing your estimation on observations about people who have received that score, all you are left with is attempting to deduce the characteristics of a person with such an IQ out of the numbers themselves, with no actual experience to base it on. Or, this person may be referring to the practice of adjusting a young child's IQ score upward in order to reflect the age at which they took the test. For instance, if you are 2 years old and get an IQ of 100 on an IQ test, that's really incredible. You definitely have to give that kid a higher score than 100. The only way I know of to get a score in the 200 ballpark is to have that sort of age adjustment done after taking the test with the highest limit before a certain age.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 14 August 2012 08:37:36PM 1 point [-]

Actually, let's try an experiment:

My IQ is estimated to be in the vicinity of 220.

What is your reaction?

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 01:00:02AM 1 point [-]

Awesome! Tell me super-intelligent thoughts? Have you met the others? (Nope, not gullibility. Explaining below in re to gwern.)

Comment author: yli 14 August 2012 07:39:19PM 1 point [-]

I'm glad you think individual intelligence differences are okay.

Did you even read the post? He doesn't think they're okay:

Am I the only one who's every bit as horrified by the proposition that there's any way whatsoever to be screwed before you even start, whether it's genes or lead-based paint or Down's Syndrome?

Comment author: Epiphany 15 August 2012 12:59:09AM 1 point [-]

For clarity: My interpretation of his main point is "the rest of the world seems to think that individual genetic differences are okay" and my main point in that comment is "Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay (by the rest of the world)."

The sentence you singled out is an oversimplified version of what I was actually trying to convey. What I was trying to convey was "I'm glad you think it's okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, but it's not okay." It looks like my verbal processor took a shortcut without me noticing it. I'll fix that to prevent any confusion. Thanks for pointing it out.

I don't appreciate hearing "Did you even read the post?" yes, I read the post (and responded to other aspects of it also).

Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 August 2012 03:20:48PM 1 point [-]

"I am a woman" - is that a boast? No, it's just a fact.

It needn't be. For example, if this is said at a gathering at which trans folk are particularly visible, it might be perceived as a boast, since the whole question of who is and isn't a woman is foregrounded and has status associated with it. (Of course, at most gatherings this is not a reading that would occur to anyone, since trans folk are not typically visible.)

"I am African American" - is that a boast?

Again, it depends. In a gathering where being an African American is a high-status marker within the group, it can be.

"I am white." - is that a boast? It could be. Why do we perceive it that way?

Again, in gatherings where being white is a high-status marker within the group, it's a boast. For most of LW's readers, this is probably far more common than either of the other two examples.

Can you think of a way that a person can freely state that they're gifted, or have a high IQ, and make it sound neutral, without sugar-coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it, or cheating in some other way?

In a gathering where high intelligence is a status marker, no.
Claiming a high-status marker within a group is never a neutral move.

If we can't think of a way to present it neutrally, or it turns out to be extremely hard, this would be a sign that our cultural perceptions of speaking about high IQ and giftedness contain assumptions, am I right?

Sure. In particular, as I've said, I think the assumptions they contain is that high IQ and giftedness are status markers.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 07:31:04PM 0 points [-]

Hiding IQ is the rule not the exception, do you agree with that? I agree that talking about just about any trait might be perceived as boastful or rude in very specific contexts. But when something isn't okay to talk about in most contexts, that's how we know that there's a widespread bias that can be said to be cultural. Do you agree with this?

Claiming a high-status marker within a group is never a neutral move.

What if I introduced myself with "Hi, I'm Sue. I like sports and I am a doctor. What about you?"

That would be interpreted as talking about a difference you have that affects who you are, not a boast, am I right?

I think the assumptions they contain is that high IQ and giftedness are status markers.

Okay, that's a really good point. To be clear, you do agree with me, then, that there is a cultural bias against talking about giftedness and IQ - am I correct?

I'm also interested in knowing whether you agree with these:

  • If talking about high IQ and giftedness are usually seen as a status marker, this makes them socially unacceptable to talk about most of the time.

  • Do you agree that when both of these conditions are true, it is sign of oppression:

    A.) There is a group of people that have significant social differences, for example, how the queer community dates differently from and sometimes express gender differently from hetero people.

    B.) It is socially unacceptable to talk about the difference that makes them part of the group, for instance, the "Don't ask, don't tell." policy that the U.S. military had.

    • Do you agree that gifted / high IQ people meet the two definitions above of having significant social differences, and that it is considered socially unacceptable for them to talk freely about their differences? If so, then does this qualify as a form of oppression? Fine distinction: I don't think that most people KNOW they're doing something that may be considered oppressive. To me, if a prejudiced person doesn't see their prejudices as prejudiced, it doesn't mean that their behavior doesn't oppress the people they're prejudiced against. That just means their oppression is unintentional.

I don't blame people for the prejudice that I see. But that doesn't make it any less real to me.

Comment author: Yvain 14 August 2012 06:03:44AM 7 points [-]

The most important difference here is that the first two statements, in addition to being boasts, also convey a non-boasting fact about the particular area you are interested in. For example "I'm good at art" strikes me less as conveying information about being especially talented, as saying that art is the particular subject you like and work on.

Compare someone who goes into an artists' workshop or an art class or something. They introduce themselves with "Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm really good at art." Now it is boasting. Everyone there is interested in art, and Joe is making a claim of being especially good at it compared to all the other artists. (This is even more true if we add some kind of number or statistic to it. "Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm in the 99th percentile for art skills.". Now he's definitely boasting, since the statistic doesn't do anything to help describe his interest.)

Intelligence is very general, and it's something you have rather than something you're interested in. That might make claims to it seem more boastful.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 07:49:20AM *  1 point [-]

"I am a woman" - is that a boast? No, it's just a fact.

"I am African American" - is that a boast?

"I am white." - is that a boast? It could be. Why do we perceive it that way?

All three are a difference you might have, rather than a thing you're interested in. They are also all things that can influence you. Gender stereotypes are criticized for numerous reasons, and I don't think they're perfect, but we can't deny that a lot of men and women have a set of differences they associate with gender. For many, it's part of their identity. At times, members of both genders have had issues with excessive pride in their gender such that it became a sort of prejudice against and oppression of the other gender. Yet, when I say "I am a woman." does it sound like a boast? Does any part of your mind want to jump to the conclusion that I am a feminazi or a man hater? Where does this perception of excessive pride come from when people talk about giftedness?

You might argue "It implies you're really good at something" - okay, so does the phrase "I'm a doctor."

If being good at something makes a statement a boast, why is it okay to say "I'm a doctor." as part of an introduction?

That you perceive the example IQ statement as a boast is a sign of bias. How do you know that it is a boast? It isn't objective. It is a subjective sense. You're guessing at the person's motive. If you wouldn't guess the same motive for "I'm a woman." and "I'm a doctor." then why do you guess it for "My IQ is 170."?

Specifically when it comes to speaking about IQ and giftedness, I want to know how we discern the difference between boasting and making a neutral statement of fact about what makes one different? Put another way, here is the problem: Being gifted and/or having a high IQ makes one different. It frequently makes sense to refer to this difference in order to provide a context in which to be correctly understood. Some examples: Gifted people are frequently misdiagnosed with mental disorders. They have numerous traits (like being really intense and sensitive) that make them look a bit crazy -- but they're not necessarily crazy, even though they may have these unusual traits. Gifted people tend to have different interests and are more likely to have certain personality traits. People who are gifted enough sometimes feel like outsiders, or aliens - they feel completely different. Saying "I'm gifted." could be a shortcut way to refer to all of those differences and others and give people an idea of how to interact with them and how to interpret their different behaviors without having to explain every single one of them individually. The same way that people tend to be gentler to women, who tend to identify as sensitive, but yet don't do that to men, because many men interpret it as condescension.

There must be thousands of different ways we interpret the people around us in order to meet in the middle that makes our interactions go far more smoothly... think of all the protocols we follow when we're around children, or people of a different religion. Gifted people are not able to request that people attempt to get along with them more smoothly by simply referring to their set of differences. Imagine if a computer could not specify it's protocol. This wreaks all sorts of havoc. This could be part of why we hear that gifted people feel misunderstood, alienated, and why they're labelled as having "social skills issues" - if OTHER people aren't trying to bridge the gap, and they're not allowed to freely discuss their difference and it's details, it makes it a lot harder for everybody to get along.

It's not easy to say you're gifted in such a way that it does not make people upset. All of the ways that I know of involve some sort of compensation for bias. That is what tells me that people are biased about statements of IQ and giftedness. People frequently assume the person's motive is to boast, as if there's no other reason you would want to mention it.

Can you think of a way that a person can freely state that they're gifted, or have a high IQ, and make it sound neutral, without sugar-coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it, or cheating in some other way?

If not, then something is off, isn't it? If we can't think of a way to present it neutrally, or it turns out to be extremely hard, this would be a sign that our cultural perceptions of speaking about high IQ and giftedness contain assumptions, am I right?

Comment author: shminux 14 August 2012 06:01:37AM 4 points [-]

What I want to know is "How do you freely tell people you're gifted or have a high IQ in a way that is entirely neutral?"

Not sure why you ignored my original example. As I said, you tell them that you are good at something that implies high IQ score, but is not perceived as status seeking. "Hi, I'm Joe and the main thing I'm good at is art." is not the same as "I draw better than 99.9998% of all people", which would be the equivalent of "my IQ is 170", and would also be perceived as status seeking.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 06:52:30AM 1 point [-]

That doesn't qualify as an example of how to talk about IQ and giftedness. You're talking about 3D games. Your suggestion was to hide the fact that you're talking about IQ by talking in code. That's why I ignored the example - I didn't see that you were trying to present me with a neutral IQ statement.

I'm still waiting to see whether anyone can come up with a way to freely tell people you're gifted or have a high IQ in a way that sounds neutral - without cheating in any way. Without sugar coating, without having to hide it, and without using code words to obscure it (Because evidently, my question was not interpreted as a request to know a way to talk about it directly.) . (:

In response to Bayesian Judo
Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 06:29:01AM *  1 point [-]

Eliezer, that's false reasoning. I'm not religious, so don't take this as the opening to a religious tirade, but it's a pet peeve of mine that intelligent people will assert that every belief within a religion is wrong if only one piece of it is wrong.

There are a billion and one reasons why a body of knowledge that is is mostly correct (not saying I think religions are) could have one flaw. This particular flaw doesn't prove God doesn't exist, it would only prove God souls aren't necessary for an intelligent life form to survive, or (perhaps, to a religious person) that God isn't the only entity that can make them.

It's easy to get lazy when one's opponent isn't challenging enough (I've done it occasionally) and I've said stuff like that. I think it's best not to. They're not convincing to the opposition and we're not challenging ourselves to improve.

Comment author: shminux 13 August 2012 08:08:20PM *  3 points [-]

Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:

Hi, I'm Joe and the main thing I'm good at is art.

Hi, I'm Joe and I'm proud of my Native American ancestry.

Hi, I'm Joe and my IQ is 170.

One of these is not like the other two. How about:

Hi, I'm Joe and I'm good at 3D games (or some other activity that is representative of high IQ scores). This replaces the apparent status seeking with a proper introduction.

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 05:31:46AM *  0 points [-]

You make my point better than I do.

This statement strikes you as having a major, obvious difference. If it's so obvious, then there probably really is a difference, right? Well obviousness has a lot in common with first impressions - they're both instant, they're both compelling, and they both happen so fast that when you first experience them, there hasn't been any time to scrutinize them yet.

This "one of these is not like the other" reaction IS the experience of bias. By arguing that one statement is different, you have underlined your bias.

One way to determine whether there is any bias in the way people interpret mentions of giftedness and IQ is to attempt to conceive of contexts in which they'll be perceived neutrally. If this is a lot harder than presenting things like gender and race, then this may indicate bias.

Try coming up with some contexts in which a mention of IQ or giftedness will be perceived neutrally - without "cheating" by applying an opposite bias (like wrapping it in a sugar coating by telling people you're an example of a Mensan who isn't elitist for instance) or suppressing the information (for instance waiting until someone asks, or hiding it from everyone except your developmental psychologist) and without using code words to obscure it (Because evidently, my question is not always being interpreted as a request to know a way to talk about it directly.) If you have to hide the information to avoid being chided, that's basically the definition of oppression, and how do you get oppression without bias?

What I want to know is "How do you freely tell people you're gifted or have a high IQ in a way that is entirely neutral?"

Comment author: OrphanWilde 13 August 2012 06:07:33PM 2 points [-]

The issue is more the circumstances that lead to talking about your IQ. In an argument about something else, it is almost certainly an appeal to authority, and should be avoided. Brought up out of the blue it -is- socially inept. A discussion which turns to IQ might be an appropriate place to bring it up. (I bring up my own exceptional IQ as an argument against elitism or eugenics, such as people who think low-IQ people shouldn't be allowed to reproduce. "Do you want me applying the same standard you're applying to other people to you?" is a pretty effective argument when you're more standard deviations above the other person than they are over the people they think are too stupid to reproduce/make their own decisions.)

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 05:28:10AM *  2 points [-]

I agree that using IQ as an appeal to authority will draw negative attention, and that bringing it up in order to use yourself as an example of a smart person who isn't elitist would probably go over very well. But those examples are black and white. You're not making distinctions outside the black and white "easy to interpret" areas where people begin to behave funny, so, in effect, you're ignoring the problem I presented.

As for your "out of nowhere" comment, what would they do if I said "I'm a woman." out of nowhere? What if I said "I'm African-American." If they don't react in a negative way to those, but they DO react in a negative way when IQ is brought up, that says something. Why do they react to it negatively, instead of neutrally, when there is no context in which to interpret?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 August 2012 05:42:20PM *  1 point [-]

How would that play out with athletic accomplishments?

Compare: I'm Joe, and I have an Olympic gold medal in [famous|obscure] sport.
I'm Joe, and I just finished a marathon.
I'm Joe, and I've won a local marathon.
I'm Joe, and I run half a dozen marathons a year

One more: I have the optimal physiology for [some sport]. I think this is the closest to announcing a a high IQ..

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 05:22:51AM *  0 points [-]

I am not a sports person, so I have no idea, but I suspect they'd be cheered on. Unless they were seen as part of an enemy team. I think people feel a sense of pride in the people that play on local teams. My imagination says that might go something like this: "That guy's probably eaten some of the hotdogs from the factory I work in. I probably played some small part in this famous guy's awesome sports abilities somehow."

I'm really itching to do an experiment now. (: Maybe I will...

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 13 August 2012 12:00:12PM *  19 points [-]

If I'm not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven's Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:

Comment author: Epiphany 14 August 2012 04:51:08AM *  9 points [-]

We both underestimated how inaccurate cultural differences can make an IQ score, I think.

I have two rebuttals specific to your assertion that knowing English shouldn't affect your ability to solve IQ test puzzles, but I also thought about this more and realized that even a culture fair test probably cannot compensate for the differences between the three groups of people we're discussing, so I gave a couple examples for that, too.

First: How are you supposed to understand the question that goes with the puzzle if you don't know how to read English well? Without that question "Which shape goes in the white box?" there is little hope of interpreting the puzzle correctly, let alone filling it out. This is an IQ test, and the questions are sometimes written in a way that makes them tricky to understand completely. IQ tests may demand a high reading level. If all you've got is broken English, reading and comprehending questions like these might feel like you're doing something as hard as applying Bayesian probability to statistics.

IQ tests are also frequently written by people who don't consider all possible ways of interpreting the question. If you were not constantly exposed to academic conventions, you are likely to interpret the questions in a different way without realizing it. Look up the difference between "divergent intelligence" and "convergent intelligence" if you don't believe me. That's a big problem for people with divergent minds - even ones who have been schooled - they see all these options that other people don't (essentially, they're creative) and they tend to get lower IQ scores for no reason other than that they did not interpret the questions and answers in a convention manner. A professional developmental psychologist may provide a creativity test to these people, and if they score significantly higher than average on the creativity test, they'll actually adjust the person's IQ score upward accordingly.

Now for our underestimation of cultural differences: I think you're really underestimating the amount of difference it can make to the human mind to grow up in a completely uncivilized environment. These children (specifically the Masai tribe I read the book about) are literally growing up stealing cow's blood from the adult's tubs for their survival (it's a staple food for some) and as a game, they dare each other to challenge wild animals. They're not sitting there day after day, like you and I have been, looking at pieces of paper. Their lives are completely different, and this most likely makes a profound difference in what kinds of processing their brains develop.

For example, there's a lot of controversy over whether ADD is a disease, or if children just aren't meant to be sitting there in classrooms. Some theorize that ADD is extremely useful for your survival if you live in a jungle. You have to be aware of your entire environment the whole time. If the kids are growing up surrounded by boa constrictors and other dangerous animals, they have to REALLY develop their ability for paying attention to every little sound and movement. This is the opposite of what the schooling environment will do - force you to learn how to focus for long periods of time on little pieces of paper, doing thinking work, while blocking out any noise or thought you have that's unrelated. Concentration is a skill, no?

That's just one difference. There are others.

For instance, have you ever heard it's important to teach math in school, not because everybody needs high level math itself, but because doing the type of intellectual rigors involved in mathematical calculating will boost reasoning in general?

If you were tossed a machine gun at the age of 6 and told to shoot or die, you're totally not going to spend any time on math. And some of them were. (I learned that in a Ted talk video).

The Chinese people that were tested, to contrast, may have spent a lot of time as children working in sweatshops making small items or doing fine motor skill work like making toys and sewing. They've probably spent a lot of time developing their ability to concentrate - way more than would be demanded of the average American kid (they're working 16 hour days...) and furthermore, constructing these products takes a bit of reasoning.

Don't underestimate the difference that culture can make to an IQ score. Now that I've thought about this, I'm not even sure a culture fair test can compensate for these differences. It probably only works if you compare people with a similar upbringing. Comparing jungle survivors vs. sweatshop laborers vs. schooled Americans is probably going to yield different results no matter how you design an IQ test.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 13 August 2012 06:42:48AM *  24 points [-]

IQ tests are culturally biased.

If IQ tests are 'culturally biased', then we would expect the highest scoring group to share the same culture as the test writers. The highest scoring group does not share the same culture as the test writers (for instance, East Asians score higher than White Americans). This seems to be strong evidence that IQ tests are not 'culturally biased'.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 August 2012 08:19:15AM *  1 point [-]

Ok. Interesting point, but did this group of Asians take English language courses at school? Do they have knowledge of American culture via entertainment channels? Perhaps the Africans who allegedly got low scores were people who grew up living in tribes in the wild, and only came into the city where they ended up getting tested recently. I met a person whose mother fell in love with an African tribesman and I read her memoir on the experience - it wasn't long ago that she met him, a decade or two maybe. There may be a large proportion of people in Africa who literally grew up in a jungle.

In addition to straight up single-culture cultural differences, there are also variations from one culture to the next between which foreign cultures they've been exposed to (if any) and enjoy. Some cultures seek to limit their exposure to the outside (North Korea) while in others, the ideal is to embrace them (USA). For instance, here, there are many fans of Asian culture - think anime, Japanese video games and lovers of Thai food. Do they have a multicultural atmosphere like that in Africa? Sure there are American missionaries around who probably bring teacups and the like, but there's a giant difference between occasionally seeing some white people with some cups they didn't tell you anything about because they were too busy feeding starving children versus being taught their language in a class and spending time absorbing culture from their entertainment products.

Not only that, but differences between one IQ test and another could be gigantic when it comes to how many culture-dependent questions are in them. If you haven't specifically controlled for that during test design, that would be completely random. Maybe the Asians just so happened to get the test that had fewer cultural questions on it, and the Africans got one that was thoroughly based on many obscure pieces of cultural knowledge.

What we really need to be asking here is this:

Has anyone done a culture fair test for multiple different countries, using the exact same test with each one, and controlled for factors like whether the people being tested were schooled as children, whether they ever experienced starvation (that can cause brain damage) and any other important things?

Only if all the factors are controlled for would we have relevant data.

Comment author: Jeff_H. 26 October 2007 11:51:32PM 4 points [-]

What I find amazing is that no article I read actually quotes Watson as saying Africans have lower IQs. What he said was that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”

His claim was ONLY that Africans' intelligence is different than "ours."

Is there much doubt as to his meaning? Perhaps not, but I should think on this blog we would not commit the sin of assuming too much.

Comment author: Epiphany 13 August 2012 04:31:37AM *  0 points [-]

First, I want to say this: I have no idea whether his claim that Africans got a lower IQ score on the test in question is true or false. I hope it is false. There's a possible explanation that is totally in support of the Africans, EVEN if the claim was true. Here it is:

IQ tests are culturally biased. If the test asks "How do you use a teacup?" a British person will be likely to know the answer - a lot of them use teacups daily. Do Africans use teacups every day? Maybe they'll bomb on the teacup question because they drink their tea from bowls as with Japanese matcha tea, or from gourds as with yerba mate tea. If you ask them "Is a rattlesnake dangerous?" that question is irrelevant to them. They have boa constrictors, but not rattlesnakes.

There are tests that are designed to prevent these differences from influencing your score. They're called "culture fair tests". Nobody here has specified whether a culture fair test was used (I searched the page).

Comment author: Epiphany 13 August 2012 04:07:54AM *  9 points [-]

Individual intelligence differences are NOT thought of as okay. Try introducing yourself on a random message board with each of these and see what happens:

  • Hi, I'm Joe and the main thing I'm good at is art.
  • Hi, I'm Joe and I'm proud of my Native American ancestry.
  • Hi, I'm Joe and my IQ is 170.

Joe with the IQ of 170 will be called arrogant, a liar, an elitist, treated like a scam artist, or told he has no social skills. That's not telling Joe he's okay. That's telling Joe not to talk about his difference. Let's explore what it means to be told you can't talk about your difference for a moment. Imagine going into a room and saying each of the following:

  • Hey, don't say you've got Native American blood, that's socially inept.

^ This comment will surely be interpreted as racism.

  • Hey, don't say you're good at art, you're a liar.

^ This comment will be interpreted as an extremely rude or even oppressive comment. Making judgments about whether artists are "good" or "bad" is taboo and considered, by many, to be oppressive to self-expression.

  • Hey, don't say your IQ is 170, don't be an elitist.

^ This comment prejudges the person. It assumes that they're an elitist when they're just talking about an intellectual difference that doesn't prove anything about your personality.

So, why doesn't Joe get to have the same freedom to express himself without society oppressing that? Why doesn't he get to talk about his difference without expecting prejudiced remarks that jump to conclusions about who he is?

We have a million excuses for this. "People feel threatened by intellect." Well, they used to feel threatened by black people, but that doesn't excuse society from working on removing their prejudices about black people and it doesn't excuse them from working on removing their prejudices about gifted people.

"That's just not polite." <- This is an interesting excuse. I'll explain why:

Imagine you go into a room and say "Hi, I'm white." (I realize that people of any race may read this comment, I am asking you to humor my hypothetical situation for a moment.)

Your race is evident. This is a neutral statement of fact.

If someone tells you "That's just not polite." why are they saying that? They're probably confusing it with an expression of the white pride attitude that is associated with the KKK. They're assuming that you're prejudiced.

What if you went up to a bunch of random white people and accused them of hating black people? Since this doesn't happen frequently, they'd probably be mostly bewildered. But imagine if random people did that to them every day.

Prejudice is a very serious offense to be accused of. It would stress them out. They'd wonder what kinds of social and career opportunities they might be missing out on. They might become more cautious to guard their physical safety - after all, prejudice is the kind of thing people get really heated about and some people get violent when they're upset. They'd start to hide hints that they're white on things like resumes. They would be oppressed by an assumption that they're prejudiced, just the same way that they'd be oppressed by an assumption that they're all criminals.

Accusing a person of prejudice simply for being part of a certain group is, in and of itself, prejudiced. That's prejudging them based on some trait that they can't control, not on their behavior. Yet, if you claim to have a high IQ, you are very likely to be accused of elitism. People act like this prejudice against people with a high IQ is okay and that gifted people should behave like an oppressed minority by hiding their difference.

I'm glad you think it's okay with the rest of the world for people to talk about their intelligence differences, I think that's okay. But a looooooot of people don't!

Comment author: Epiphany 12 August 2012 08:01:59AM *  1 point [-]

"How do you interest people in rationality?" is a question I have been thinking about for a very long time. The most important insights I have into this are below.

How I crossed the first divide:

There was a sense of being expected to think for myself by my peers as a teen - the "think for yourself" mantra was a core part of our culture. This seems especially relevant because peer pressure gets through to people who aren't rational.

After being influenced by the "think for yourself" mantra that was being repeated by the other teens, I was motivated to start observing that there were flaws in the ideas being presented to me.

Realizing that there were flaws everyplace was key. I had to realize that even the adults were wrong, even teachers could be wrong, even books could be wrong, authorities could be wrong, all of it could be wrong. I needed to see examples of incorrect information in each category before I woke up to the fact that every possible source of information could have flaws in it. I would not have believed there was a problem if I hadn't seen it myself. Without that, I would not have been interested in the solution.

A critical aspect of this was in realizing that really important information could be wrong. I also needed to know how wrong information affected me. Not everyone is going to notice so many flaws on their own and realize the implications - especially if they haven't developed their thinking skills very far. I was lucky to be able to do this for myself. I think a lot of people will benefit from it if you show them how the dots are connected, as they may not have been taught the skills to do it themselves.

I have observed that if you overwhelm a person with too many shocking problems at once, it's too much for them, they go into denial and reject you entirely. If I wanted to wake a person up to the fact that that the world is full of incorrect information, that it can be found even in important places, and that they are likely to have learned a lot of incorrect information, I would use baby steps.

After I knew that there was a problem, it had to occur to me that the solution was to avoid accepting new incorrect information and to go through and correct all my existing information. For me, the idea of correcting the information was obvious. For some, it may not be (they may choose drugs, or some other escape) so if I were to present people with the problem, I would also describe the solution well enough that they felt that there was an option for them that is likely to work.

Then, there was a sense of trepidation. You don't sound like you had this experience, but consider this: Most people grow up in a culture full of irrationality with no knowledge of logical fallacies and an underdeveloped ability to think critically... let alone any idea what Bayes's Theorem is. They have too few defenses against irrationality, so they end up building their entire lives on this mixture of irrational beliefs and whatever facts manage to make it through. There is (for lack of a known term for this) an "information debt" - very much like software debt (for anyone who doesn't know, software debt happens when you code your program in a way where it is so disorganized that it needs to be reprogrammed before you can build on it - this is called refactoring and it can be very time-consuming). You don't have to be a coding genius to immediately sense that taking apart your beliefs and refactoring them is going to be a gigantic job, and that it's going to be super complicated. Becoming a rationalist is a huge investment to anyone who has an information debt of any size. Most people weren't lucky enough to have developed thinking skills as a child... a lot of people have this huge debt of wrong information to correct.

In addition to the sense of needing to invest a lot of time, I was afraid of what would happen if I challenged my current world view and it fell apart. What if I wasn't able to put it all back together after I took it apart? Can that make you crazy?

To make things worse, the fact that I had never been exposed to even so much as a list of logical fallacies meant that I had NO CLUE that tools existed to help you figure out the difference between true information and false information. I felt like I was opening Pandora's box.

In my case, the way I overcame the trepidation was in asking myself questions about what would happen if I left my world view the way it was. This resulted in more trepidation than the idea of correcting it, so I chose to make the massive investment and take the risk of making a huge mess of myself.

That's how I became a rationalist.

I think, though, that anything you can do to reduce the sense of trepidation is a necessity. For instance, letting people know that there are powerful tools to cut through these would empower more people to choose to become rationalists.

Once I discovered logical fallacies, I found myself referring back to them after I got into an argument with someone. They make excellent self-defense weapons. I think they might become popular and serve as a positive introduction to rationality if they were presented as a solution to the problem of losing arguments. After all, it does feel pretty cool to be a logical ninja - able to win the majority of my arguments. (:

The above was my dissection of how I became a rationalist. The story version has been written up and saved for later. I'd have added it here, but I didn't want to make my comment a billion pages long.