Open thread, Sep. 28 - Oct. 4, 2015

Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting?

So an anarchist, a communist, and a neoreactionary walk into a LessWrong meetup...

Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting? If so, does it cause problems?

I've been part of some arguments between libertarians and socialists. They got moderately heated but not severely so. Rationality-wise they seemed better than I've experienced in other communities, but still pretty far from a cool-headed ideal. To be fair I've also had some somewhat heated arguments over more abstract philosophical issues, though with few hard feelings.

A large portion of my coworkers (due to the nature of the job, they're probably in that weird space between family, friend, and acquaintance) fiercely endorse beliefs that I am at odds with (against gay marriage, strong religiosity, complete climate change denial, etc) but we can discuss our beliefs (for the most part; one of them insisted he would have his daughter flogged if she 'turned gay', and then kidnapped and sent to some less accepting society to 'chase it out of her') without any heated arguments. Even if we do, we still have no problems buying each other lunch the next day.

This is a wholly personal experience, since I'm used to holding contrarian views. I think it still bothers my System 1, but not enough for me to devote System 2 time to it.

What about the world at large, though?

Would an online interaction promote calm discussion, or in-person interaction?

While that dichotomy might differ in the LessWrong community due to cultural factors, I think it's safe to say that people think the opposite is usually true for most internet interactions.

A few possibilities come to mind, in regards to possible trends. I realize that it's a mixture. Help me out if I've missed something.

• A) People are more belligerent online, less belligerent in person.
• B) People are less belligerent online, more belligerent in person.
• C) People are the same online and in the real world.
• D) Online vs. real world belligerence determined strongly by culture.

Public opinion seems to favor A.

I'm having trouble finding relevant studies, because I'm not sure if data collected from the context of online sexual/nonsexual harassment is useful, here.

Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting?

Among those I have only seen an anarchist at our meetups in Berlin.

LW seems far more cool-headed than the rest of the world, and I am wondering to what extent it might be partially due to being online.

In person I notice more empathy than online but have never witnessed any heated problematic conversations.

..."magically" used deliberately to indicate that I don't know what the process for that is.

Moderators can move other people's posts, and EY can promote posts.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was not illegal to produce videotape recorders, even if buyers would mostly use them to pirate TV shows, as long as the recorders had some possible lawful use. Shall we call this the VCR disagreement?

I'm still doing this after starting a year ago. I've filled up one large ruled Moleskine and am 50 pages into the second one. I have calendar pages where I don't do any forward planning, but just write a one-line summary of what I worked on that day. Empty lines or variants of "slacking off" are an instant sign of trouble.

Other than that, the nice thing is just that I have a designated single nice journal to do any sort of brainstorming notes I need. Random ideas, planning an ongoing project or reading notes all just start by labeling a new page on the journal and writing down whatever is relevant.

In the short term, rehearse well with as close a simulation of your eventual stage as you can manage, or use prescription or nonprescription anxiolytics, or try one of the many speakers' tricks for reducing stage fright. Most of the latter probably won't work, but some might.

In the long run, the best way is probably exposure: doing a lot of public speaking, perhaps in front of progressively larger audiences.

Consider this idea:

• How is public speaking different to giving a speech to an empty room, (or other similar but not stressful event). For bonus points actually do the non-stressful thing and afterwards consider what might be different.
• Make a list of as many of the parts that you can come up with
• Mitigate the parts that will be a problem for you in any way possible.

In this way a great beast of a "public speaking" problem can be managed to smaller think-able tackle-able tasks.

One easy way I can think of gaming such a test is to figure out ahead of time that those questions will be the ones on the test, then look up an answer for just that question, and parrot it on the actual test.

I know at my college, there were databases of just about every professor's exams for the past several years. Most of them re-used enough questions that you could get a pretty good idea of what was going to be on the exams, just by looking at past exams. A lot of people would spend a lot of time studying old exams to game this process instead of actually learning the material.

How do you identify people who can grade answers to questions which show deep understanding?

Testing and credentialism is a mess. The basic problem is that it's unclear what the result should measure: how much the student knows, how much the student has learned, how intelligent the student is, how conscientious, or how well the student's capabilities line up with the topic. The secondary problem is that in most settings, the test should be both hard-to-game AND perfectly objective, such that there is no argument about correctness of answer (and such that grading can be done quickly).

I spend a lot of time interviewing and training interviewers for tech jobs. This doesn't have the first problem: we have a clear goal (determine whether the candidate is likely to perform well in the role, usually tested by solving similar problems as would be faced in the role). The second difficulty is similar - a good interview generates actual evidence of the candidate's likely success, not just domain knowledge. This takes a lot of interviewing skill to get the best from the candidate, and a lot of judgement in how to evaluate the approach and weigh the various aspects tested. We put a lot of time into this, and accept the judgement aspect rather than trying to reduce the time spent, automate the results, or be purely objective in assessment.

what would they have thought was the most effective thing to do with their money?

One of the comments from MR is:

Probably hire a bunch of mercenaries and engage in forced conversion to Christianity. For the pacifists, perhaps funding missionaries might have seemed more acceptable. What better investment can there be for an effective altruist than eternal salvation of lost souls who will otherwise face an eternity of damnation?

which basically does sound about right, given the values of the time.

These are two questions which suggest very different answers:) especially in hindsight:) without specifying where the person lives, my only guess is for the second question - exterminate rats; but it might have been simply impossible to arrive at in 1400, so - lessen taxes?

See also the chronophone (and its followup).

It seems like the Givewell branch of EA is the application of recent improvements in scientific management / finance to charity, about ~10 years after they appeared in the private sector, similar to CharityNavigator before it. If you can count those as "principles," then they might be a huge leg up for someone like the Fuggers. (Remember, double-entry bookkeeping in Europe seems to have started about 1340, and the first textbook on it was published in 1494.)

But if the chronophone would transmit that as just "apply recent advances in business to all your endeavors," that's not very useful, and maybe even not that--trade and business is the dominant force in the society that Givewell lives in. What would the dominant force in the 1400s be? Innovation is respected in the society that Givewell lives in. Would it be respected in the 1400s?

Paul Graham writes that studying fields with hard, solved problems (eg mathematics) is useful, because it gives you practice solving hard problems and the approaches and habits of mind that you develop solving those problems are useful when you set out to tackle new (technical) problems. This claim seems at least plausible to me and seems to line up with me personal experience, but you seem like a person who might know why I shouldn't believe this, so I ask, is there any reason I should doubt that the problem-solving approaches and habits of mind I develop studying mathematics won't help me as I run into novel technical problems?

YouTube rap video's might not be the best focal point to have a discussion about high school curriculum design issues.

. I generally agree that education should provide more direct value.

Do you think that anybody designing curriculas wouldn't want them to provide more direct value everything being equal?

I don't hold much hope out for improvements when the average person can't even stay on topic.

School curriculum's don't get designed by the average person, what makes you think that the average person ability to stay on topic matters for the issue?

Keep in mind that modafinil has a half-life of ~16 hours. You might want to allow a day in between samples. If you don't, plan to take this into account in the analysis.

Whatever test you do, try it a bunch before starting the experiment to get through a lot of the learning period.

It's still related to his shtick and people are getting really tired of his shtick.

What led you to think it was a joke? Considering his previously stated opinions on a supposed incompatibility between futurism and female nature, it was completely in character for him.

No, Bostrom explicitly attributes it to Yudkowsky.

My considerations about the love languages (with a partner of mine) was that - once you start considering languages you are already steps ahead of people who are not even trying in a relationship. Because of that it has an effect of winning-by-trying that otherwise wouldn't happen. whether or not love languages are real is completely debatable; but trying is certainly going to help (and having someone else's jargon to talk about things that you like/dislike should also help.

further comments; the 5 languages - gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion), and physical touch (intimacy)

I value them in this order: physical, time, and lower - words, and significantly lower - gifts or service. (as does my partner mentioned above)

There is a sneaky trick that I noticed; considering how much I don't care for gifts (and neither does my partner); when I gave my partner a gift it tricked my brain into going; "if I have time for gifts I must be fulfilled on the physical, time and word levels". Not sure why and how it works, but maybe try that?

Typical method is something like a gratitude journal.

As time becomes scarcer, it's also worth looking into more ways to exchange money for quality time with family. For example, for me I have to make a conscious effort to spend time and money on travel to see my parents and relatives - even though it's almost always a good exchange I don't do it automatically.

One exercise you could do is to remember a time you felt loved, and how it felt, and focus on that feeling. Spend a bit of time each day bringing up that feeling into your consciousness. Or, another similar thing to do would be to imagine being surrounded by love, with whatever visuals or feelings feel right to you.

There are likely ways to feel more comfortable with receiving compliments or gifts. But, once you are more comfortable with these other expressions of love, would you feel more loved?

Feeling loved does not seem straightforward to me.

I think "How can I feel more comfortable with receiving gifts and compliments?" would be an achievable goal. Perhaps that's a good first step. But I'm not sure it will get you what you want.

Feeling loved, at least in my experience, does not always correlate to external circumstances. Sometimes it's more of an internal issue.

Are you sure that "feeling unloved" is what is going on? It sounds to me like it's possible that what's happening is that you are feeling frustrated and lonely. Which may not be the same thing.

I know you said it is unlikely to be able to set aside more quality time for each other, at least for the time being, but I think it would be worth taking the time to think about it in more depth. Perhaps there are creative approaches that could result in more time together. Even if that's not feasible for the moment, perhaps you could make a more long-term plan to get to a point where it becomes more feasible.

Here's one idea, though perhaps you have already considered it. Find some friends who also have children, and set up a schedule with them where they have your kids over to their house, for the evening or even for a sleepover, one night of the week, and you have their kids over to your house one night of the week. Then you have at least one night of alone time, and it isn't costing you extra money. I have no idea if this would apply to your circumstances, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

Back to love languages. There are a few things people do with oral languages: speak, listen, read and write. It sounds like you've trained yourself to speak the other person's love language, but haven't yet learned how to listen as well as you'd like. You could ask your partner how they feel when you do something that they like but you don't. Once you hear their perspective about why they like something, and how they feel about it, perhaps you will find something that you can relate to when it happens to you. Training yourself to like something can often happen when you spend some time learning from people who already like it, and asking them questions about it. If your partner doesn't enjoy some of the things you want to learn to like, then perhaps you can find other friends or family who do like them, and learn from them.

The link is broken. You need to escape your underscores. Write it as "[love languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\\\_Five\\\_Love\\\_Languages)". That way it wil print as "love languages".

a method to change my love language priorities?

Do you want to change what makes you feel happy and loved?

I suspect a lot of it gets baked in during childhood and attempts to change that would involve fairly major surgery on your psyche.

I think I need further description about the situation and why you're relieved. It sounds like you're 150hrn poorer than you thought, and I'm not sure why that's a relief.

Was there an unstated worry about repaying your friend in goods rather than cash?

Not exactly, but related: Hugh Everett's' daughter Elizabeth committed suicide in 1996 and wrote in her suicide note that she's going to a parallel universe to be with her father.

Note that to someone not taking part in the experiment, the odds of the experimenter surviving are the same regardless of quantum immortality.

(At least, as far as I can tell. But this seems to suggest that if someone survives lots of QI experiments, they should update massively in favour of QI, but nobody else should update at all, which seems really weird to me.)

Louis Slotin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin

I'd say ask it at most three times consecutively, probably no more than two. But two is absolutely fine, especially since you previously asked it quite late in the thread.

LW isn't a place that has strict rules for issues like this. It operates on the principle that it's users are generally smart and make decent decisions.

If a person makes posting decisions that the community disapproves of, he will get downvoted.

I personally wouldn't mind if you re-asked. It might happen that I might know an answer this week and not the past one, and usually open threads get forgotten really quickly.

So is there a good way to calibrate your perception of how good you look?

Can't you just post a photo on a relevant website? okCupid has a rating system, I think HotOrNot is still around, etc.

You gawk a lot at people and develop an eye for what attractiveness means. Don't ask people, that's almost always useless, unless you happen to run into an expert on this. See what your eye responds positively to. Then evaluating yourself is as easy as keeping a reference feature in your mind up for comparison when you look at yourself. Keep in mind that attractive people are not all identical; there are attractive and unattractive versions and combinations of any trait.

There are also some things you could do to get an eye-opening perspective of yourself – ever looked at yourself through a second mirror forming an acute angle to the first mirror, so you can see yourself from the side view? I guarantee that the first time you do it you'll feel very surprised. Same thing when you're filmed talking and then watch the footage. Images that are flipped horizontally relative to your mirror image also help you notice asymmetries. The point is that the eye notices a lot more when the image is even slightly unfamiliar.

Most people don't have a strong operational definition of what "how attractive" means - it's not so much that people are biased, but that the question is incoherent. Even the visual components of attraction between two people have a lot of dimensions, which different viewers will combine differently.

Depending on why you want to know, I can suggest a few different paths: 1) seek professional opinion - ask people at modeling agencies whether you have looks that will sell product. 2) seek crowd opinion - there are sites where you can post a photo and see how many responses you get. 3) find ways to measure the common components of beauty (symmetry, ratios between features, etc.).
4) find ways to identify (and enhance) attractiveness to specific people rather than in general.

None of these are objective. Give that up - beauty isn't actually objective (though there are components that correlate strongly with majority subjective reporting). Also, you don't say "physical attractiveness", nor "sexual attractiveness", so perhaps you intend to mean the total package of likeability for all purposes - if so, ignore 1-3; #4 is the one which acknowledges the idiosyncratic nature of human attraction.

What exactly do you want to know about your looks? In what way would an answer to the question help you?

Perhaps a rating system based on proportions, symmetry, and skin health. However, I'm not convinced this is that (it is a large factor in decisions, yes, but it's not one you can change much beyond style and hygiene, unless you're willing to undergo plastic surgery) important, except in the realm of Tinder-esque situations.

If you happen to live somewhere where random people will complement you or flirt with you, I suppose number of incidents/number of people exposed to over a large span of time could be a metric.

If there was a large dataset of faces shot in a similar way and rated for attractiveness somewhere, you could take a photo of yourself, look for people in the set who look like you (possibly with some sort of face recognition program) and see how they are rated.

Indeed.

There are a lot of decade-scale cycles that pump heat energy around the earth system, making it pile up more rapidly in the atmosphere than the deep hydrosphere or vice versa, and various other similar things . Patterns at timescales shorter than a decade or so are almost meaningless as a result.

"Suitability of climate models" is a... complex subject. I don't think there is a short and easy answer other than that most models overstate the certainty of their conclusions.

Whether the hiatus ("pause") exists is a much easier question. Just take a look at temperature plots for the last 50 years or so and check what your eyes tell you :-)

n=55; f=7.5; x=1:n; for i=1:12; y=(1:n)+f*randn(1,n); subplot(3,4,i); plot(x, y, 'r-'); bestj=0; bestm=1; bestk=0; for j=1:(n-14); x1=j:(j+14); y1=y(x1); c=lscov([0*x1'+1 x1'], y1'); if c(2)<bestm; bestj=j; bestm=c(2); bestk=c(1); end; end; if bestm<=0.5; x1=bestj+(0:14); hold on; plot(x1,bestk+bestm*x1,'b-','LineWidth',3); hold off; end; end;

Quite apart from the content of the quotes themselves, why are you posting so many in open threads instead of in quotes threads?

The fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence? :)

You picked the worst possible example. She was not the villain of that movie.

HITARQ?

I can confabulate a rationalist!Dante version, but I can do that with anything:

Ineluctable Reality has thus designed two ends to be contemplated of man: first, the happiness of this life, which consists in the activity of his natural powers, and is prefigured by the terrestrial Paradise; and then the blessedness of life everlasting, which consists in the enjoyment of Reality in its fullness, to which man’s natural powers may not attain unless rightly guided by Reality, and which may be symbolized by the transhuman Paradise.

I don’t know of anyone else who shares my point of view, and especially not professional sexologists.

You may need to update your beliefs based on that evidence. Admittedly, your personal history has a strong effect on your recommendations for society, but (and I'm sorry that there's no delicate way to say this) your case is not the average.

sexual relationships starting at an appropriate age

You keep using that term, like it's analogous to the essential time window in childhood for language acquisition, but adults are much more flexible.

male business leaders who lack sexual experience need help in acquiring it as part of their training so that they can earn the respect of women in the work place

One anecdote is not evidence, but I'm the least sexually experienced and the most professionally respected person at my office. Even outside of my own team, our commercial department is full of women and all of them defer to my opinion on expected timeframes and quality checks. And I achieve all that while being on principle opposed to the idea that women naturally look up to men for guidance.

this psychotherapist says that young women need the emotional growth that comes from experience with sexual relationships

I think it's time for each individual to decide what they need instead of imposing a homogeneous standard on everyone.

I think you're overestimating the importance of sex in human relationships. I'm willing to bet that someone with no sexual history can do a good enough job of raising a baby and a child, especially if they were well nurtured themselves. I'm concerned about how they'd do with an adolescent who's interested in sex.

More generally, I believe that people who have a hard time getting started on sexual/romantic relationships have parents who didn't have a good relationship.

As for social change, I don't think forbidding IVF for virgins isn't going to solve anything. I think we have sufficient evidence that external control doesn't have good tools for getting people to have children or form families.

I believe we're looking at a bottleneck where only people who really want children are having children, and I don't know what the outcome will be.

If the human race went entirely non-sexual but still wanted children at a reasonable rate, I don't think it would be a disaster. I also don't think this is likely.

I find it plausible that at least some of the people who don't want sex have had a traumatic sexual history. I really can't say that the world is a worse place because such people don't have to have sex to have children.

The big advantage I can see for sex robots is that if they can compete successfully with low-end prostitutes, women and girls will be much less likely to be forced into prostitution.

Edit: wording.

1. As a woman, I do find men who think that upon encountering one, they should 'deal with her' (not even sexually) rather creepy... Perhaps you could imagine this totally counterfactual world where you simply have no obligation to 'deal' with anyone based on a binary characteristic?

2. As to virgin motherhood, strictly speaking only mating is 'missing', the rest is right there (since the blind god of evolution has prepared females to give healthy offspring if raped, pair-bonding and courtship cannot be necessary). Dunno how much emotional maturity one picks up during mating, but I would not expect it to be a lot. As to hormones, it is in principle not impossible, just a very complex issue.

3. I found (usual disclaimers apply) that maturity comes rather after giving birth. When you slink into bed and try to immediately fall asleep, in case the kid decides to wake up at 3 am; or if you desperately want sex, you do it silently and briefly, in case that deadline moves ever closer - than yeah, you can claim some personal growth, because you are putting other's interests before your own.

4. Do you think it is better for a human being not to leave descendants if the being is absolutely unable or unwilling to have sex? If virgin motherhood actually outcompetes the traditional way of reproduction, it means it has some advantage, and the question becomes - what is the acceptable trade-off for this advantage. I would like to see some in-depth discussion of this, but I am afraid I can not quite treat the idea [of a "parthenogenesis-based" society] seriously.

BTW, do you think notable clergy 1) never included 'thriving adult men', or 2) were secretly all debauched anyway?

Let's say a long-term couple wants to have a child, but some birth defect or sexual dysfunction prevents them from having sex. Should they be prevented from having a kid? The sex aspect doesn't seem to matter in itself. What would be concerning would be if people who fear intimacy or lack interpersonal skills are able to just skip straight to having babies out of loneliness, without ever having to get past their developmental blocks.

I don't doubt adult virgins have missed out on important developmental experiences, but it's odd that you focus on sex itself as being this big developmental step rather than, e.g. a committed long-term relationship. I think that's the important part.

I disagree (but upvoted - social evolution is a worthy topic).

I'm a pretty big fan of freeing our (and specifically my) cognition from the evolutionary pressures which created it (and me). Removing the pressure of sex from almost all male/female interactions seems like a worthwhile thing to explore.

I share your basic conservatism in that it's a pretty scary change. I just see the good in it as well as the risks.

Why are you worried about preserving skills that would largely become irrelevant?

How is a sexbot different from a sexdoll or a fleshlight and pornography?

I don't think it would create any problems in a mentally healthy individual, though it might exacerbate those suffering from pre-existing issues surrounding sex.

Create a sex robot that behaves like a human female. Problem solved.

In all seriousness though, it seems like by the time sex robots that look and act sufficiently human arrive on the scene, we'll already necessarily be well within the time frame of emergence of strong artificial intelligence and most of your points would become moot. It seems to me that there's only a short window of time between "sex robots that some men, but not most, would find appealing" and "the (sex?) robots have taken over."

Sexbots are more of a joker, some sort of wild card in the gender dynamics debate. I think there's something that I'm not sure if it's being avoided or if it's simply elusive enough to not be mentioned, and I have no idea what that is. It seems like they're making men and women like cooperating enemies.

On topic, sexbots would be harder to implement for women considering they're more attracted to behavior rather than looks.. although if you can make a convincing sexbot for a man I'm sure that canonically we're not too many steps away from making one for a woman.

Something like this trend has already advanced far in Japan,

Next stop: Japan. Now I'll just need to figure out if their supposed dislike for non-natives is real or not.

By the way advancedatheist, you give me a troll-esque vibe but admittingly you post some good content from time to time. High five.