Open Thread, October 13 - 19, 2013

We seem to like "protecting" ought by making false claims about what is.

Possibly related to the halo or overjustification effects; arguments as soldiers seems especially applicable - admitting that torture may actually work is stabbing one's other anti-torture arguments in the back.

I read somewhere that lying takes more cognitive effort than telling the truth. So it might follow that if someone is already under a lot of stress -- being tortured -- then they are more likely to tell the truth.

I agree that it is a PC thing to say now in the US liberal circles that torture doesn't work. The original context was different, however: torture is not necessarily more effective than other interrogation techniques, and is often worse and less reliable, so, given its high ethical cost to the interrogator, it should not be a first-line interrogation technique. This eventually morphed into the (mostly liberal) meme "torture is always bad, regardless of the situation". This is not very surprising, lots of delicate issues end up in a silly or simplistic Schelling point, like no-spanking, zero-tolerance of drugs, no physical contact between students in school, age restrictions on sex, drinking, etc.

We seem to like "protecting" ought by making false claims about what is.

This has interesting implications for consequentialism vs. deontology. Consequentialists, at least around here, like to accuse deontologists of jumping through eleborate hoops with their rules to get the consequences they want. However, it is just as common (probably more so) for consequentialists to jump through hoops with their utility function (and even their predictions) to be able to obey the deontological rules they secretly want.

This seems an insightful and true statement. We seem to like "protecting" ought by making false claims about what is.

Certainly true-- I believe a lot of claims about the healthiness of vegetarianism fall into that category.

Another problem is taking something that's true in some cases, or even frequently, and claiming that it's universal. In the case of torture, it's one thing to claim that torture rarely produces good information, and another to claim that it never does.

Arguments as soldiers in regards to universities divesting from fossil fuels.

The point on torture being useful seems really obvious in hindsight. Before reading this I pretty much believed it was useless. I think it settled my head in the mid 2000s, arriving straight from political debates. Apparently knowing history can be useful!

Overall his comment is interesting but I think the article has more important implications, someone should post it. So I did. (^_^)

This seems an insightful and true statement

I don't see anything insightful about the statement. It rather trival to point out that there were events were torture produced valuable information. Nobody denies that point. It rather sounds like he doesn't understand the position against which he's arguing.

If an interrogator wants valid information, he can see if the stories of several different prisoners agree. He can see if their story checks with other sources of information. etc. It’s like any other kind of intelligence.

It's not like any other kind of intelligence. This ignores the psychological effects of the torture on the person doing the torturing. Interrogators feel power over a prisioner and get information from them. That makes them spend to much attention of that information in contrast to other information.

Similarly, basilisks would work as motivation to develop a certain kind of FAI but there's a ban on discussing them here. Why? Isn't it worth credibly threatening to torture people for 50 years to eventually save some large number of future people from dust specks (or worse) by more rapidly developing FAI?

It's possible that the harm to society of knowing about and expecting torture is greater than the benefit of using torture. In that case, torturing in absolute secret seems to be the way to maximize utility. Not particularly comforting.

The fact that one of my gatekeepers guessed my tactic(s) was the final straw.

I guess you used words. That seems to be all the tactical insight needed to develop an effective counter-strategy. I really don't get how this escaping thing works on people. Is it due to people being systematically overconfident in their own stubbornness? I mean I know I couldn't withstand torture for long. I expect even plain interrogation backed by credible threats would break me over time. Social isolation and sleep deprivation would break me too. But one hour of textual communication with a predefined and gamified objective and no negative external consequences? That seems so trivial..

I was surprised by the breadth of ideas he addresses. It blew my mind that he put that together in under a month.

It hasn't appeared in the “Recent on Rationality Blogs” sidebar on LW yet. How long does that normally take? 24 hours?

I anticipate artificial meat having a much bigger impact than meal-replacement products. I anticipate that demand for soylent-like meal replacement products among the technophile cluster will peak within the next three years, and will wager $75 to someone's $100 that this is the case if someone can come up with a well-defined metric for checking this.

Note that the individual impact you can have by being a vegetarian is actually pretty big. Sure, it's small in terms of _percentage_of the problem, but that's the wrong way to measure effect. If you saw a kid tied to railroad tracks, you wouldn't leave them there on account of all the children killed by other causes every day.

Have you/they thought about other environmental implications? Processing everything down to simple nutrients to make the drink doesn't sound very energy efficient. Might compete with eating meat, but definately not with veganism.

I like my meat, btw.

One of the primary ingredients of soylent is whey protein, which is produced from cow's milk. It is not a vegan product.

Whey is a byproduct of cheesemaking, which is why it is currently relatively inexpensive. If people started consuming whey protein en masse, it would shift the economics of whey production and dairy cow breeding in potentially highly unfavorable directions for both the cows and the soylent enthusiasts (because it would become more expensive).

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any viable alternative to whey at this point (if there was, they'd use that, but there isn't).

Does the person has the financial means to pay for out of the pocket cryonics? It probably won't be possible to get life insurance for the child.

Attempting to highlight relevant variables:

• how likely your persuasion is to offend parents (which is a pdf, not binary, of course)
• how much you care whether you offend parents (see previous parenthetical)
• U(child lives a long time) - U(child dies as expected)
• P(child lives a long time | child gets frozen)
• P(child gets frozen | you try to persuade the parents)

Edited to fix formatting.

because the social ramifications are negligible.

You should reconsider this assumption. I would imagine that making suggestions about what to do with someone's soon-to-be-dead child's body would be looked upon coldly at best and with active hostility at worst. It's like if you suggested you knew a really good mortician; it's just not the sort of thing you're supposed to be saying.

There's also the fact that, as a society, we are very keen when watching the bereaved for signs they haven't accepted the death. To most people cryonics looks like a sort of pseudoscientific mummification and the idea that such a person could be revived as delusional. It is easy to imagine that if your friend shelled out hundreds of thousands on your say-so for such a project people might see you as preying on a mentally vulnerable person.

This is not to make a value judgement or a suggestion, just pointing out that the social consequences are quite possibly non-negligible.

If you have not signed up for cryonics yourself, you could ask this person for advice as to whether you should. If you have signed up, you could work this into a conversation. Or just find some video or article likely to influence the parent and forward it to him, perhaps an article mentioning Kim Suozzi.

Therapy probably has the most impact on an individuals life satisfaction

It depends on your needs, doesn't it?

Specify what you want, see if you know how to get there -- and if you don't, check if someone will provide a credible roadmap for a fee...

Personal fitness folk: doing starting strength is three hours a week that will make all the rest much better and a personal trainer will make your form good, which is really important. If your conscientiousness is normal tutors rock. If you can afford one, hire a tutor.

I've abandoned many decks almost completely because I made too complex cards.

Make the cards simple and combat interference. That doesn't mean you can't learn complex concepts. Now that I've got it right, I can go through hundreds of reviews per day if I've fallen behind a bit, and don't find it exhausting. If I manage to review every day, it's because I'm doing it first in the morning.

I use a plugin/option to make the answer show automatically after 6 seconds, so it's easy to spot cards that are formatted badly or cause interference, and take too much time.

Some general Anki tips: If you use it to learn a foreign language use the Awesome TTS plugin. Whenever Anki displays a foreign word it should also play the corresponding sound. Don't try to consciously get the sound. Just let Anki play the sound in the background.

I use a plugin that adds extra buttons to new cards I changed it in a way that gives the 6th button a timeframe of 30-60 days till the new card shows up the second time. I use that button for cards that are highly redundant.

Frozen fields is a plugin that's useful for creating cards and I wouldn't want to miss it. It allow you to present specific fields in the new card dialog from being cleared when you create a new card.

Quick Colour Changing is another useful addon. It allows you to use color more effectively to highlite aspects of cards.

I have written my more general thought about how to use Anki lately in another thread: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/isu/advice_for_a_smart_8yearold_bored_with_school/9vlh

On of the core ideas that I developed over the last time is that you really want to make cards as easy as possible. I think the problem with most premade card that you find online is that they just aren't easy enough. They take too much for granted.

Take an issue such as the effect of epinephrine on the heart. It raises hard rate. Most of the deck that you find out there would ask something like: "What's the effect of epinephrine on the heart?" That's wrong. That's not basic enough. It's much simpler to ask: "epinephrine ?(lowers/raises)? heart rate"

I think that idea also helps a lot with language learning. I think the classic idea of asking "What does goood mean in French?" is problematic. If you like in the dictionary you will find multiple answer and the card can only hold one answer. A card that just asks: "good means ?(bon/mal)?" is much simplier. I have made a French Anki deck using that principle and it's astonishing for myself how well the learning flows.

If someone wants to test the deck I'm happy to share it. I would estimate the effects to be that for a lifetime investment of 20 hours you get the 200 most common French words + ~100 additional words. For most of the verbs you will be able to recognize the three basic times (present, future and passé simple). I think you will know the words well enough to understand them when you read a test. If you want conversational fluency with those words I think you will need additional practice. Deck is (French/English) For those of you who want to start using Anki I think it would be a good start.

If I would for example start now a Vim deck I would group functions. Take something knowledge like:

w next word (by punctuation); W next word (by spaces) b back word (by punctuation); B back word (by spaces) e end word (by punctuation); E end word (by spaces)

This make cards:
?(w/W)? -> next word by punctuation
?(w/W)? -> next word by spaces ?(w/b/e)? -> next word by punctuation ?(W/B/E)? -> next word by spaces

I would also add: ?(q/w/e/r/t)? next word by punctuation ?(w/s/x)? next word by punctuation

This gives you probably a rate of being able to answer the card in ~4 seconds. Cards that aren't hard. You can simply integrate a new deck of 500 of those cards in an hour once the deck is ready.

Using it regularly is the most important thing by far. I don't use it anymore, the costs to starting back up seem too high (in that I try and fail to re-activate that habit), I wish I hadn't let that happen. Don't be me; make Anki a hardcore habit.

When using pre-made decks the only efficient way is to follow along, i.e. if you don't know the source book/course it's not very good. Partial exception, vocabulary lists.

People who want to eat fewer animal products...

People who you know want to eat fewer animal products. If I just decided to eat less meat, you'd be much less likely to find out this fact about me than if I decided to become fully lacto-ovo-vegetarian.

People who want to eat fewer animal products usually have a set of foods that are always okay and a set of foods that are always not (which sometimes still includes some animal products, such as dairy or fish), rather than trying to eat animal products less often without completely prohibiting anything.

I don't think that an accurate description of the average vegetarian. A lot of self labeled vegetarians do eat animal products from time to time.

Most people who tell you that they try to eat only healthy food and no junk food, still eat junk food from time to time. The same goes for vegetarians eating flesh.

Additionally eat less red meat is part of the official mantra on healthy eating. A lot of people subscribed to the idea that limiting the amount of red meat they eat is good while not eliminating it completely.

I've heard that this is because people who try to eat fewer animal products usually end up with about the same diet they had when they were not trying.

I find this hard to believe, knowing several people who have become vegetarians and vegans and hardly ever eating meat myself. Do you have any support for this claim? Anecdotally, one new vegan (from being a vegetarian) stopped eating pizza which had previously been more-or-less a mainstay of his. My sister became a vegetarian as a kid despite actually quite liking meat at the time; not only did her eating habits changed but that of my entire family did significantly. My parents describe it as going from thinking "What meat is for dinner?" to thinking "What is for dinner?" ever night.

Prohibiting particular foods on certain days is also popular: "Meatless Mondays" or Catholic-style fasts.

If you like Haskell's type system I highly recommend learning category theory. This book does a good job. Category theory is pretty abstract, even for pure math. I love it.

I can recognise the homology between some constructs in Haskell and mathematical objects, but others I don't notice until they're explicitly pointed out.

Essentially, this kind of math is called category theory. There is this book, which is highly recommended, and fills your criteria decently well. I am currently working through this book, and I am happy to discuss things with you if you would like.

I am not sure if it is good for you background and needs, but I would like to mention The Book of Numbers. I read and understood this book in high school without any formal training of calculus. I think this book is very effective at showing people how math can be beautiful in a context that does not have many prerequisites.

I upvoted this, even though the part where wealth is suggested as a filter for competence completely fails to distinguish the Bill Gates (rich because competent) from the Paris Hiltons (rich because someone somewhere in the ancestry was competent and/or lucky). (Though it's possible I just upvoted it because it starts out talking about accessibility and how the existence of imperfect beings kinda nukes the idea of libertarian free will, both of which I wish more people understood.)

Sure, but that's just saying that P=NP is not a robust hypothesis. Conditional on P=NP, what odds do you put that P is not P^#P or PSPACE? (though maybe the first is a robust hypothesis that doesn't cover BQP)

The linked givewell posts discuss microloans, not outright grants. Link to Blattman's paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552

Has someone attempted to make the jump from the reported data to QALY estimates or some other comparable measure?

I like the ideas of (1) providing an alternative video introduction, because some people like that stuff, and (2) having the last part of "what to do after reading LessWrong".

I think the rationality videos should be even linked from the LW starting page. Or even better, the LW starting page should start with a link saying "if you are here for the first time, click here", which would go to a wiki page, which would contain the links to videos (with small preview images) on the top.

Might be useful to hae introduction points for people with a certain degree of preexisting knowledge of the subject but from other sources. E.g. If I want to introduce a philosophy postgrad to lesswrong I would want to start with a summary of lesswrong's specific definition of 'rationality' and how it compares to other versions, rather than starting from scratch.

Information theory says that you communicate the most if you send the three signals of up, down, nothing equally often. This would be a psychological disaster if everyone did it, but maybe you should.

It seems to me that the total voting ought to reflect the "net reward" we want to give the poster for their action of posting, like a trainer rewarding good behavior or punishing bad. For this reason, my voting usually takes into account the current total score. I think the community already abides by this for most negatively scored posts -- they usually don't sail much below -2. For posts that I feel I really benefited from, though, I don't really follow my own policy per se. -- I just "pay back" what I got out of it to them.

Where do I set the threshold of good/bad?

I basically only downvote if there's some line of argument that I object to in the post. I think I need to say what I'm objecting to specifically when I do this more often.

Is it best for the community if I upvote only exceptionally good comments, or downvote only very bad comments, or downvote all comments that aren't exceptionally good, or something else?

My opinion is it has to depend on the current score of the post. [At least under the current system, which reports, if you will, net organic responses; in a different system where responses were from solicited peer-review requests, different behavior would be warranted.]

Has this been studied? Is it possible to make a karma system where this question doesn't arise?

Good questions. I don't know. There's some further discussion here.

I think that if we could coordinate perfectly what we mean by good comments, and each comment has a score between 0 and 1, then we should all upvote a comment with a positive score with a probability equal to its score, and downvote a comment with negative score with probability equal to its negative score.

Companies don't work as hard as they can when they know that they're slightly beating their competitors (and the converse)

I'm afraid I didn't keep information about the citation, but when I was reading up on chip fabs for my essay I ran into a long article claiming that there is a very strong profit motive for companies to stack themselves into an order from most expensive & cutting-edge to cheapest & most obsolete, and that the leading firm can generally produce better or cheaper but this 'uses up' R&D and they want to dribble it out as slowly as possible to extract maximal consumer surplus.

there is more cross-talk between the companies than I would guess (through hiring former employees, reading patents, reverse engineering, etc.)

There is lots of cross-talk. Note also that Intel and AMD buy tools from other companies- and so if Cymer is making the lasers that both use for patterning, then neither of them has a laser advantage.

comments that (I hope) are insightful gets downvoted to the limit of oblivion

Curious about specific examples.

or simply ignored

This can have many reasons. Posting too late, when people don't read the article. Using difficult technical arguments, so people are not sure about their correctness, so they don't upvote.

One reason is people vote to signal simple agreement.

Not saying it would work, but there could be "warm fuzzy votes" that don't contribute to karma at all, or contribute much less, and are shown separately. Comments could be arranged by those too if need be. It would be an interesting experiment to see how much people agree with posts that have no other value.

As for a model... obviously not a full model:

Statements that are short and that are non-controversially in line with the position that most readers would approve of and flow with the context well and get a lot of "traffic" are the most likely to have skyrocketing +1's.

If it has a useful insight or a link to an important resource this also helps, but only if it's lucid enough in its explanation.

I find it much easier to use random-character passwords. Memorize a few, then cycle them. You'll pretty much never have to update them. If you can't memorize them all, use software for that.

Spend more cognitive resources on dealing with positive feedback.

When someone says that you have a nice shirt, think about why they said it. Probably they wanted to make you feel good. What does that mean? They care about making you feel good. You matter to them.

Gratitude journaling is a tool with a good evidence base. At the end of every day, write down all good feedback that you got. It doesn't matter if it was trival. Just write stuff down.

Meditation is also a great tool.

Curiously sociopaths have the opposite issue, underresponding to negative feedback.

I wouldn't be sure about that claim. I think sociopaths rather have different criteria of what constitutes negative feedback. I think physical pain would have the same effect on a sociopaths as on a regular person.

The Feeling Good Handbook has good evidence as a treatment for depression and could help you to identify and address your automatic thoughts caused by negative feedback.

Thanks for the recommendation, but isn't this sort of thing better suited for the Media thread?

Those who have been reading LessWrong in the last couple of weeks will have little difficulty recognizing the poster of the following.

I'm having difficulty recognizing the poster of the following, and searching individual phrases is only turning up this comment. While I approve of making broad points about Dark Arts, I'm worried that you're doing so with a parable rather than an anecdote, which is a practice I disapprove of.

I agree that being slippery and vague is usually bad, and one way to employ Dark Arts.

However, avoiding qualifiers of uncertainty and not softening one's statements at all exposes oneself to other kinds of dark arts. Even here, it's not reasonable to expect conversants to be mercifully impartial about everything. Someone who expects strong opposition would soften their language more than someone whose statements are noncontroversial.

If your concerns are valid, then it doesn't help those that are not aware of who you are talking about, by hiding the identity of the accused. We're all grown ups here we can handle it.

Is there a way that I can force myself to clear my brain and get it to stop thinking about something for a while?

This is pretty much what meditation is for — minus the "force", that is.

I use certain videogames for something similar. I've collected a bunch of (Nintendo DS, generally) games that I can play for five minutes or so to pretty much reset my mind. Mostly it's something I use for emotions, but the basic idea is to focus on something that takes up all of that kind of attention - that fully focuses that part of my brain which gets stuck on things.

Key to this was finding games that took all my attention while playing, but had an easy stopping point after five minutes or so of play - Game Center CX / Retro Game Challenge is my go-to, with arcade style gameplay where a win or loss comes up fairly quick.

Intensive exercise - I remember P.J.Eby saying he'd use intensive exercise (in his case I thin it was running across his house) as a "reset button" for the mind. It's pretty cheap to try! (I have occasionally did that - pushups, usually - though it's more often to get rid of angry annoyance than distractions)

Physical pain will do it. Exercise is one option, but for me it always seems to be the bad "I am destroying my joints" kind of pain so I stop before it hurts enough to reset my thought patterns. Holding a mug of tea that's almost but not quite hot enough to burn, and concentrating on that feeling to the exclusion of everything else, seems to work decently. A properly forceful backrub is better, though it requires a partner. And if your partner is a sadist then you begin to have many excellent options.

Addressing the sleep half: if meditation or sleep visualization exercises are hard for you, try coloring something really intricate and symmetrical. Like these. The idea is to keep your brain engaged enough to not think about the intrusive thing you were thinking about before, but calm enough to move towards sleep.

I read fiction or easy nonfiction. This distracts me from other thoughts, but isn't engaging enough to keep me awake.

Any other ideas?

Alcohol.

I find reading LW helps with this.

If you enjoyed going to church as a Christian, and considered it enough to make this post, then you should probably just go. There is not much penalty for trying.

I go to a UU church, which looks kind of similar. (They are not all atheist, but they are all different things and agree to disagree about theology.) I don't really enjoy the singing that much, at least not the hymns, and I still enjoy the experience as an atheist. Just don't expect to get the same level of intelligence or rationality you get from here though. If you are looking for good philosophical discussion, that probably isn't the place to get it.

Stock market investment would seem like a good way to test predictive skills...

I disagree and hope that more people would update regarding this belief. There is no alpha (risk adjusted excess returns), at least not for you. Here is why:

1. For all intents and purposes, stocks markets are efficient; even if you don't agree, you would still have to answer the question "to what degree of inefficiency is there that will allow you to extract or arbitrage gains"? Your "edge" is going to be very very small if you even have one.

2. Assuming you have identified measurable inefficiencies, your trading costs will negate it.

3. The biggest players have access to better information, both insider and public, at faster speeds than you could ever attain and they already participate in 'statistical arbitrage' on a huge scale. This all makes the stock market very efficient, and very difficult for you, the individual investor to game a meaningful edge.

4. The assumption that one could test for significantly better predictive skills in the stock market, would imply that risk free arbitrage is common – You could just buy one stock and sell an index fund or vice verse, then apply this with the law of large numbers and voila you are now a millionaire but alas this does not commonly happen.

Disclaimer: I day trade, so this might be influenced by defensiveness.

The thinking patterns I've learned on LW haven't really helped me to discover any new edge over the markets. Investment, or speculation, feels more like Go or blackjack as an activity. Being a rationalist doesn't directly help me notice new trades or pick up on patterns that the analysts I read haven't already seen.

On the other hand, the most difficult thing about dealing with financial matters is remaining calm and taking the appropriate action. LW techniques have helped me with this a lot. I believe that reading LW has made me a more consistent trader.

I'm not sure that the above was written clearly, let me try again. My proficiency as a speculator goes up and down based on my state of mind. Reading LW hasn't made the ups higher, but its made me less likely to drop to a valley.

On a tangent, while I'm thinking about it.

Has anyone else just been baldly disbelieved if they mention that they made money in a nontraditional way? The only other time I've seen it happen is making money at Vegas. I've met people who seem to have 'The House Always Wins', or 'You Can't Beat The Market' or 'Sweepstakes/Lotteries Are A Waste Of Money' as an article of faith to the point that, presented with a counter example, they deny reality.

At my current level of investment, I probably have received substantial benefit from other skills that seem Less Wrong related that are not predictive, like not panicking, understanding risk tolerance and better understanding the math behind why diversification works.

But I suppose those aren't particularly unique to Less Wrong even though I feel like reading the site does help me apply some of those lessons.

I would guess that to the extend that some hedge fund uses lw style rationality tecniques to train the predictive skills of their staff, they wouldn't be public about effective techniques.

I used a zeo. Is there any specific question you want to have answered?

I think the substance is that there are plenty of people who change their weight permanently. On the other hand the evidence for particular interventions isn't that good.

None of those address permanent weight loss per se. They all address the more specific problem of permanent weight loss through dietary modification.

A successful approach to weight loss would incorporate a change in diet and exercise habits along with an investigation of the 'root cause' of the excess weight i.e. the psychological factor that causes excessive eating (Depression? Stress? Pure habit? etc.)

I also question your implicit premise that "If it ain't permanent it ain't worth doing". That sounds like a rationalization to me. For a woman who's 25 and looking to maximize her chance of reproductive success (finding a mate), 'just 5 years' of weight loss would be extraordinarily superior to no weight loss. Permanent weight loss would be only marginally better.

(Barring you being a metabolic mutant. If you have tried counting calories and it didn't work for you, then please ignore this post; weight loss is a lot more complicated than how I am about to describe it here.)

Permanent weight loss is possible and feasible; however it will probably require constant effort to maintain.

For example, count your daily caloric intake on myfitnesspal.com (my username is shokke, if you wish to use the social aspect of it too). Eat at a caloric deficit (TDEE minus ~500) until desired weight is attained, then continue counting calories and eat at maintenance (TDEE) indefinitely. If you stop counting calories you will very likely regain that weight.

This requires you to count calories for the rest of your life, or at least until you no longer care about your weight. Or we develop a better method of weight control.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution ?

This sounds like the system that France had before the first French Revolution. That is, up until 1789; I'm not sure when it started. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar system existed in other European countries at around the same time, but I'm not sure which. (I've only been reading history for a couple years, and most of it has been research for fiction I wanted to write, so my knowledge is pretty specifically focused.)

Under this system, the way property is inherited depends on the type of property. Noble propes is dealt with in the way you describe - it can't be sold or given away, and when the owner dies, it has to be given to heirs, and it can't be split among them very much. My notes say the amount that goes to the main heir is the piece of land that includes the main family residence plus 1/2 - 4/5 of everything else, which I think means there's a legal minimum within that range that varies by province, but I'm not completely sure. Propes* includes lands and rights over land (land ownership is kind of weird at this time - you can own the tithe on a piece of land but not the land itself, for example) that one has inherited. Noble propes is propes that belongs to a nobleperson or is considered a noble fief.

Commoner inheritance varies a lot by region. Sometimes it's pretty similar to noble inheritance (all or most of propes must go to the first living heir), sometimes the family can choose one heir to inherit more than the others, sometimes an equal split is required. There's no law against selling or giving away common (non-noble) propes, but some of the provinces that require an equal split have laws to prevent parents from using gifts during their lifetime to give one child more than the others.

I'm not sure what effect noble property law had on agricultural development. I know France's agriculture was lagging far behind England's during the 18th century, but I never saw it attributed to this, at least not directly. (The reasons I can remember seeing are tenant farming with short tenures, and farmers having insufficient capital to buy newer tools.) The commoner inheritance system did fragment the land holdings, as you said. The main problems I remember hearing about with that were farms becoming too small to support a person (so the farmers would also work part-time as tenant farmers or day laborers, or abandon the farm and leave), and limiting social mobility by requiring wealthy commoners to divide their wealth with each new generation.

Most of this is coming from notes I took on the book Marriage and the Family in 18th Century France by Traer. I'm not sure how much you wanted to know, so ask if there's anything you're curious about that I didn't include, and I'll see if I can dig it up. If you want to research this, my impression is that finding good history books about a specific place is much easier if you can read the language spoken there, so it might be worth checking what the property laws were in places that speak the languages you know. If you need sources in English, having access to a university library helps a lot. When looking for information on France during this time period, "Ancien Regime" and "early modern" are useful keywords.

• Lease-like arrangements that are practically selling are allowed, though. The only one I can think of at the moment is called alienation - basically you sell it except the new "owner's" (or their heirs or whoever they sell the land to) pay your family rent for the land, forever. Something similar can be done with money, as a sort of loan that is never paid off. (These are called rentes fonciérs and rentes constituées, respectively - in case you ever want to look up more information.) They're technically movable property, but they're legally counted as propes, and treated the same way as noble land.

Adam Smith reported that this was how the law worked in the Spanish territories in the Americas, in order to ensure the continued existence of a wealthy and powerful landed aristocracy and so maintain social stability. He theorized that this policy was the reason that the Spanish territories were so much poorer than the English territories, even though the former had extensive gold deposits and the latter did not.

What evidence do you have that full spectrum light is beneficial? It seems you already know that it's the blue spectrum that primarily controls the circadian rhythm.

Orange goggles/glasses for late at night aren't that bad and are very cheap. I don't have a good solution for the full spectrum issue. MIRI is getting by with the regular full spectrum bulbs AFAIK (is there a followup on the very bright lights experiment?)

I use a bedside lamp with a full-size Edison screw (I think E27 is full size). Daylight-spectrum bulbs are readily available in all manner of fittings on eBay. Last lot we got were 6x30W (equivalent 150W) with UK bayonet fittings for £5 each (though I don't use something that bright for my bedside lamp).

Maybe it is a problem of puchasing fuzzies and utilons together, and also being hypocritical about it.

Essentially, I could do things that help other people and me, or I could do things that only help other people but I don't get anything (except for a good feeling) from it. The latter set contains much more options, and also more diverse options, so it is pretty likely that the efficient solution for maximizing global utility is there.

I am not saying this to argue that one should choose the latter. Rather my point is that people sometimes choose the former and pretend they chose the latter, to maximize signalling of their altruism.

"I donate money to ill people, and this is completely selfless because I am healthy and expect to remain healthy." So, why don't you donate to ill people in poor countries instead of your neighborhood? Those people could buy greater increase in health for the same cost. "Because I care about my neighbors more. They are... uhm... my tribe." So you also support your tribe. That's not completely selfless. "That's a very extreme judgement. Supporting people in my tribe is still more altruistic than many other people do, so what's your point?"

I guess my point is, if your goal is to support your tribe, just be honest about it. Take a part of your budget and think about the most efficient way of supporting your tribe. And then take another part of your budget and spend it on effective altruism. (The proportion of these two parts, that's your choice.) You will be helping people selflessly and supporting your tribe, probably getting more points on each scale than you are getting now.

"But I also want a recognition of my tribe for my support. They will reward me socially for helping in-tribes, but will care less about me helping out-tribes." Oh, well. That's even less selfless. I am not judging you here, just suggesting to make another sub-budget for maximizing your prestige within the tribe and optimize for that goal separately.

"Because that's too complicated. Too many budgets, too much optimization." Yeah, you have a point.

Since we're playing the devil's advocate here: much more important than geographical and cultural proximity to me would be how many values I share with these people I'm helping, were I ever to come in even remote contact with them or their offspring.

Would you effective altruist people donate mosquito nets to baby eating aliens if it cost effectively relieved their suffering? If not, where do you draw the line in value divergence? Human?

I'm no expert on the history of epistemology, but this may answer some of your questions, at least as they relate to Eliezer's particular take on our agenda.

We consider probabilities authentic knowledge. Since we are Bayesianists and not Frequentists those probabilities are sometimes about questions which can not be scientifically tested. Science requires repeatable verification, and our probabilities don't stand up to that test.

Since you are already fine with white noise, you should try using white noise to drown out the music or voices. A quick search of white noise on the internet lead me to simplynoise where you can stream white noise over the internet. If not, then try a phone app.

Escape Pod is good.

I think any question of the form "Assume X is ethical, is X' also ethical?" is inherently malformed. If my ethics do not follow X, then the change in my ethics which causes me to include X may be very relevant to X'.

I don't think anyone who is a vegetarian regardless of self-awareness would be able to answer the question you are asking.

I think the big question that implies this one is "Should we eat baby humans? Why?"

I believe the answer is "No, because there is no convenient place to draw the line between baby and adult, so we should put the line at the beginning, and because other people may have strong emotional attachment to the baby."

I think the first part of my reason is eliminated by your "reliable test." If the test is completely reliable, that is a very good place to draw the line.

The second part is not going away. It has been evolved in us for a very long time, however, it is not clear if people will get the same attachment to non-human babies. I think that our attachment to non-humans is much lower, and there is not a significant difference between their attachment before and after self awareness.

However, the question asked assumes that our ethics distinguish between creatures with and without self awareness. If that distinction is caused by us having different levels of emotional attachment to the animal depending on its self awareness, then it would change my answer.

Well, different languages are based on different ideas. Some languages explore the computational usefulness of a single data structure, like APL with arrays or Forth with stacks. Lisp is pretty big, but yes you could say it emphasizes lists. (If you're looking for a language that emphasizes strings, try SNOBOL or maybe Tcl?) Other languages explore other ideas, like Haskell with purity, Prolog with unification, or Smalltalk with message passing. And there are general-purpose languages that don't try to make any particular point about computation, like C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.

I don't think this idea works.

Pointers in C aren't data structures -- they are a low-level tool for constructing data structures. Neither closures nor regexps are "data structures". And Perl was historically well-known for relying on hashes which you assigned to Python as dicts.

Certainly each programming language has a "native" programming style that it usually does better than other languages -- but that's a different thing.

And on this model, what is Java?

Java is classes -- a huge set of standardized classes, so for most things you want to do, you choose one of those standard classes instead of deciding "which one of the hundred libraries made for this purpose should I use in this project?".

At least this was until the set of standardized classes became so huge that it often contains two or three different ways to do the same thing, and for web development external libraries are used anyway. (So we have AWT, Swing and JavaFX; java.io and java.nio; but we are still waiting for the lambda functions.)

Different languages are good at different things. For some languages it happens to be a data structure:

• Lisp is lists
• Tcl is strings
• APL is arrays
• Forth is stacks
• SQL is tables

Other languages are good at something specific which isn't a data structure (Haskell, Prolog, Smalltalk etc.) And others are general languages that don't try to make any particular point about computation (C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby etc.)

I'm not sure R fits this metaphor -- the closest I can get is "R is CRAN", but the C?AN concept is not unique to R. Hmm... maybe R is data.frames. Java is prepare your anus for objects.