Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015

I have no idea what possibly-summonable research person means, but now I imagined a Lvl 3 wizard spell "Summon Researcher" where a demon in lab coat appears and answers every question with "I will reply in 2 weeks, if I find statistically significant studies" and it sounds mildly amusing. I know you meant news research but it is funnier this way :) BTW congrats!

This is great for the bragging thread.

Due to the repeated exposure effect in marketing, it might be a good idea to follow up on John Oliver pieces (or other popular pieces that are potentially high leverage) with easily shareable via social networks infographics. Examples: Civil Asset Forfeiture, Criminal Justice Reform, Municipal Violations, etc. The nice things about topics like these is that they have some headline stats that are inflammatory and attention getting. Like how badly the US is doing relative to insert developing country or how many people are getting screwed over. This should align with 538's incentives since creating these while the iron is still hot makes them more shareable.

Congratulations!

Also you should remember that LW has a fairly wide knowledge base. If you're looking for a place to get started on a complex topic, I'll bet that this site would be a good place to ask a few initial questions and establish a broad research outline.

You should feel free to post on LessWrong requests for help in writing future articles.

There a nice segment where Bill Gates get's asked how I wants to be remembered in 100 years. He answers that he still wants to be alive in 100 years.

For jobs inside bigger corporations have burocratic structures.

Military-style stuff if it is compatible with your ethics and with your sense of independence. I have no idea about them but as they are getting more and more high-tech, there must be more and more brain-jobs there. Is it a linguistic coincidence that figuring out what (potential) enemies are up to is called "intelligence service" in English? So there is a potential idea there.

Too late for me plus I am from a part of the world that has joke for military, but I think I would have liked it as long as I am not really treated like a grunt who always must stand at attention but more like a satellite photo analyist who may be just a lieautenant but still respected by the gold-shoulders for his skills. Things like making physical exercises mandatory and not having to worry about the next meal even if I blow all my pay could be cool.

When I was in college in small-town New England in the late '90s, one year a group of freshmen became convinced that the woods near campus were haunted by a malicious evil spirit — a wraith. This upset them greatly; they reported feeling the wraith as an oppressive and disturbing presence. Practical advice such as "there's no such thing as wraiths; you are all just working each other up into a tizzy over nothing" was ineffective to relieve their upset.

Eventually, a friend of the group got a friend of his, who was an initiated practitioner of ritual magick, to send them a spell to banish the wraith. The spell was cast, and the people who had felt the wraith's presence reported that it was no longer bothering them.

Now, one self-consistent description of these events is that wraiths literally exist, and banishing-spells literally work. Another is that when people become caught up in playing out an upsetting story, bringing that story to a close within its own rules can work to end their upset.

Other possibly relevant tales:

• The Imaginary Mongoose
• The Hair Dryer Incident

Changing someone's world view that's backed up by experiences isn't easy, so it's likely not the best target. Even if you could destroying the fantasy world in which an emotionally fragile person withdraws is no good idea.

I would rather focus on making her feel safe and helping her to be emotionally stable.

But what do you do when she tells you about "unusual" experiences? I would recommend to listen and ask her questions like: "How does it make you feel that the spirit stands guard?", "How does it make you feel to tell me this story?" and "Is there something new in this experience that you didn't experience in the past?"

That can help her order her thoughts. Not focusing on the content but how she feels about the content is likely to help you to listen in a nonjudgemental way because you can be genuinely care about her emotional experience.

If she doesn't do any sports I would encourage her to do some physical activity to get more in touch with her body.

More seriously, my girlfriend has told me stories about seeing and interacting with "spirits", although she's asked me not to repeat any of them

Then repeating them in this way in a public forum is quite a breach of trust.

Any advice?

Let it be.

There's a massive difference between thinking that certain stones have "healing properties" and claiming to see spirits. The first is regular New Age junk beliefs, the second is substantially more disturbing and may indicate serious mental health issues, or some form of special-snowflake syndrome. Has seen anyone for counseling?

a New Age/unscientific worldview, which I find slightly disturbing

Why?

Does she know that you (presumably) don't believe in supernatural things? Does she know why? How do you explain (to yourself) her stories about seeing spirits. Those seem to be a lot more serious than simple beliefs in absurd things like "healing powers" (or astrology, etc). Do you really believe she's not crazy? Is she making it up? (If so, why?) Using drugs? Believes they're there but doesn't actually see them, just "senses" them or something?

Seeing people who aren't there sounds like schizophrenia. It's possible a traumatic childhood experience still has a great effect on her psyche even to this day, but unlikely. The desire to study new age research or alternative therapy methods isn't necessarily irrational. It simply requires much greater care, and is much, much more likely to lead to errors than traditional science. Even if some therapy she really likes is completely useless, if she believes it works, the placebo effect can still be quite powerful. Whether or not she is schizophrenic would require an independent evaluation. If she's not prepared to accept this possibility, broaching the subject is going to be very difficult.

Convincing her to see a psychologist would be good. I'm not sure how you'd manage that. You could try asking a psychologist, but you'd want to avoid more of that breach of trust. You could just try convincing her to go based on being afraid of people leaving her and having an inferiority complex.

You can try to engage her regarding rationality through examples she is not personally invested in. That is, avoid spirits and healing stones and discuss more "neutral" applications of rationality. Discuss cognitive biases, Bayesian probabilities, mind changing techniques etc. Let her rethink her specific "new age" beliefs at a much later stage when she has tools for dealing with it.

Also, I second the thoughts of other people that seeing spirits might be a sign of a serious problem. However, pushing her into seeing a psychiatrist sounds also very risky. Maybe consult with a specialist discreetly? Specifically, I would worry whether she has a condition that will deteriorate if not treated. Otherwise, it can be ignored for a while.

Stone of healing powers: I think what you need to do here is not necessarily suggesting empirical testing, but more along the lines of explaining the map-terrain problem: that a medicine merely changes the body, and whether we call that change healing or harming is a map thing, a thing in the human mind, an interpretation. Nothing has healing properties as such, not even official medical treatments, they just have body-changing properties which we interpret as beneficial i.e. healing. Healing is a mental thing, and it is reducible to causal chains of changing bodies out in the terrain plus the value judgements we associate with them here in the map. Thus ascribing generic healing properties to a stone is the category mistake of putting a mental, map property to a piece of terrain. You can explain it this way: a natural disaster does not harm people and is not evil, it merely changes things around and we interpret this change as harmful and bad. Same for healing.

Anyway, a more pragmatic idea. Get her on Zen. This is vaguely in the same cultural category as New Age and similar things, she will probably not dislike the idea, but it is an excellent rationality tool as it creates precisely this kind of distance in the mind, to see the map-terrain problem, to see the difference between reality and intepretations etc. Make her read Alan Watts. He was a hippie god. He was no the best Zen teacher around, but culturally compatible with New Age stuff and then she can go to a proper Zen meditation center.

Osho is another idea, he is a huge mystic and and easy for purely-rational people to dislike, but again he is that kind of mystic who is good at explaining map-terrain problems and this really helps in such cases.

Try and discuss https://xkcd.com/808/ with her.

Are you sure that is the particular Moldbug post you meant to link to?

You should give more credit to the emotional part of your brain :) It's not that stupid. There's a little extra something in-between the pain and the person causing it, that triggers the reaction of hatred against the person -- probably the expectation of hostile intentions. It's likely not a simple two-item person+pain=hatred association arc; even our emotional selves know this.

I don't hate my dentist either, but I do put off seeing him.

I think that's because you have control -- you choose yourself whether to go to the dentist or not (and you can stop and leave at any time), so the dentist is seen as an NPC and not as an independent agent.

Would you allow someone you hate to take a drill to your teeth? It's needs a lot of trust. The fact that you go into a situation where you have to trust very strongly leaves little room for hating the dentist.

My dentist causes me pain, so why don't I hate him?

The obvious answer is that you want him to do the work that is required on your teeth, and the pain is merely a necessary discomfort that is worth enduring.

My model of myself would predict that my emotional brain would generate feelings of dislike for my dentist that my rational part would suppress, yet there is nothing to suppress.

You have observed that your model is faulty. You should therefore update it. What is the problem?

Do other people respond this way as well?

I do not.

Aren't you aware that it's a cliche that people do hate their dentists?

(Not that I recall anyone in particular claiming to hate their dentist.)

What's your dentist's emotional style like?

In a world where magic exists, magic exists. We can imagine a plan for making one, given uploading or better brain-perception interfaces and much better computing hardware. So it can exist both in principle and in practice. It might be that there is not much evidence for magic to shift expectation away from matter-is-dumb-stuff, as in our world, but even that doesn't necessarily rule it out.

Before evolution was figured out, unobserved living and perhaps thinking causes of life might have seemed a possibility, a reasonable expectation of nonvanishing probability. Future capability for making simulations with magic increase probability that a given medieval-like society is inhabiting one, although that argument probably wouldn't occur to its inhabitants, and capability isn't sufficient without motive, which seems tenuous. In any case, for practical purposes of building a technological civilization it shouldn't have mattered for our world, as not all probability went there and even in a magical world a technological civilization might be possible if there is no systematic/purposeful supernatural interference against that very outcome.

Our present certainty in the absence of magic is based on overwhelming evidence from the last few centuries of science and engineering, evidence about our world. Some of this evidence acts indirectly, for example once life was explained by evolution and no other settled evidence of supernatural (i.e. minds other than human or animal minds) or processes that could originate it turned up, there was no reason to expect anything further. Noticing biases of projecting mind-like properties on other things and social processes that create unfounded status quo belief systems should also retract some of the belief in other things having mind-like properties. This is of particular interest in modern times when it's about the only reason that a smart person can still manage to hold this misconception.

But for an inhabitant of a magical world, there is evidence of magic, sometimes overwhelming evidence, and there is no contradiction with our world having no magic.

Then don't define magic as 'that which disturbs the map-territory distinction', but rather 'awfully (in)convenient physics'. The map-territory distinction still works. Just, fundamental physics is much, much harder to work out there.

If you just want some stuff full of fantasy themes that LessWrong will not spoil, read The Steerswoman and its sequels.

Who's to say that evil isn't a substance? Or at least, couldn't be? It seems perfectly reasonable to write a story in which that map and the territory are not wholly distinct (and of course, even in the real world, maps are ultimately made of atoms...)

The real problem with much of the modern Extruded Fantasy Product is that it doesn't deal creatively with the implications of its own claims and genre tropes. They allow evil to be a substance, but then use that to justify certain patterns of storytelling rather than actually treating evil like a substance. If you are dissatisfied with that, then you might enjoy fantasy roleplaying games like D&D, where you can construct your own narratives around the assumptions of a fantasy setting.

For example, you might have a village that casts 'detect evil' spells on every newborn infant, and kills all evil babies through exposure- thus creating a harmonious society of only good people. Or a whole metropolis of extremely weak gods that exist by enforcing a quota of five believers per god, and explore the interpersonal relationships between the weak gods and their private family of believers. Perhaps a whodunit, in which the players must track down a murderer who is spreading atheism.

LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?

Interesting. I haven't had this experience much at all, primarily because the entire genre is occurring specifically in universes where all these lessons we know don't apply, where there somehow really is no clear line between the map and the territory, or where the basics of the default versions of the map match the territory so closely that it doesn't make a difference.

I'm not sure the potion of healing example is actually a good one though: a healing potion could "heal" in specific changes that we simply label healing as such. I've read at least one fantasy series where cancer was specifically called out as something that regular healing magic couldn't help with and the implication was that (although the characters didn't understand it) that healing magic accelerated cell growth of cells similar to the human cells already present, and the magic couldn't differentiate between healthy human cells and the very small changes that make cells cancerous.

There seems to be a sliding scale of fantasy in how much the universe resembles our own or how much careful thinking goes into the nature of magic in that context. Dragonlance seems to be somewhat on one end while maybe some of Brandon Sanderson's novels might be closer to the careful thinking end.

You might find Brin's The Practice Effect to be maximally irritating. Entropy works backward-- the more a person uses a thing, the better (for human purposes) it becomes.

If only GAI could be developed there....

My proposal: the ideas that goodness or evil are substances and they can formed into magic objects such as sword made of pure evil.

Of course, some novels also subvert this delightfully. Patricia Wrede's The Seven Towers, for instance, is all about exactly what goes wrong when you try to make a magical object out of pure good.

(Edit: that is, Wrede does not literally spend the whole book talking about this problem. It is merely mentioned as backstory. But still.)

LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?

Stop reading fantasy.

[Originally an innocent throwaway gag which could plausibly be interpreted as mean or hurtful, so removed]

LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?

That which can be destroyed by the truth...

Am I no the first one to notice the all-improving Philosopher's Stone could not exist in principle because improvement is a mental category and not real, right?

To some extent the "value aligned agents" problem, formerly known as "friendly AI," boils down to "how would we actually check our 'improvement-map' for validity and create agents that will actually enforce that improvement-map on reality, rather than something else?"

From GW's perspective, each of their top charities can consume a certain amount of additional money before the expected value of an additional donation decreases by some amount. Their goal is to move money such that each charity hits that target, and then they'll reassess. So they recommend donors split donations so that, as a whole, these targets are hit and EV is maximized. From your perspective, you may decide that concentrating your entire donation in one organization has a higher EV, since that organization has a generally higher EV relative to the others and since your action isn't going to affect the actions of the rest of GW's audience.

The comments on "A Mathematical Explanation of Why Charity Donations Shouldn't Be Diversified" might be of interest.

You are talking about steganography.

I think it is not very hard writing something which will encode a hidden phrase using odd and even counts. (But length is key).

I don't see what's the inefficiency in it. Currently it's the easiest way to obtain an otherwise irreplaceable resource.

It might not be an "efficient way to help people" in the sense of having high marginal value. It's still a positive pro-social activity that addresses an important problem which isn't easily solved by other means.

Sure it is, if you are in the vicinity of a donation site on a regular basis anyway. Pop in, donate, read while doing so, pop out again. Warm fuzzies during pleasure reading time.

Warning, my opinion on this may be influenced rather heavily by the fact that I essentially don't notice the donation, nor do I mind needles.

It may not be an effective way to help people but it sure as hell helps you up to do it up to three times a year. All hail longevity! I regret I am in a rush so I can't link but I believe RomeoSteverns' post on optimising your health has the references.

I don't think it's efficient. If you work for the amount of time you'd be spending giving blood and donate the money, you'd do much more good.

Maybe it's not, but it's super-conspicuous and might be useful for reputation-building. Also, if you want to practice dealing with blood draws in a not-being-sick context it could be useful. (I haven't donated yet though because age restrictions.)

We won't run out of coal anytime soon. It has other issues, but I think that invalidates his conclusion—coal power plants are pretty cheap, and are already being built.

I'm also more optimistic about politicians. Ten years may be beyond their reelection horizon, but it's not beyond their "This place is going to hell"-horizon.

The observation that the manufacture, delivery, installation, and maintenance of "clean" energy devices can, and on a regular basis does, cost more energy than the device is expected to return over its lifetime is not new and regularly features in sources which you probably do not read.

It's a well-known problem that people of a particular ideological persuasion tend to studiously ignore.

There's the World Value survey: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

I get completely confused by these individualistic attitudes. Are they really that widespread in America? “Ready? Ready for what? Ready to make something of themselves." So it is for their own sake? I am more used to attitudes that education is not ultimately about something for the benefit of the student, but more like something for the benefit of a society, of a nation, to form people who serve it well, who contribute well to it, who are, if I want to put it brutally, useful assets of the state, or less brutally, contributing members of society. So I am more used to explanations like "you must learn this in order to fulfill your social duties better" than explanations like "it gives you a leg up".

But the funny part is that in both cases they essentially teach the same things! All these individualistic leg-up schools still don't teach personal finance and my social-duty schools don't or hardly teach ethics or first aid or basic military stuff.

No doubt this post will drop into downvoted oblivion.

If posts on certain topics are getting downvoted repeatedly, maybe it may make sense to pay attention to that feedback that the community is either not interested in the subjects in question or strongly objects to the presentation of the posts in question.

Perhaps he realized that sexual experience would elevate his “armor class” in the male status hierarchy.

Yes, sure, that's the #1 reason why people date.

If you ask the question for personal reasons, is interacting sexually really the most relevant skill you are lacking? From what I read from you it seems like you don't have the ability to have a simple friendship with a woman. As long as you lack those skills any focus on sexuality is unlikely to yield much.

BTW, I find it interesting that over a decade ago, Eliezer described himself in a news story as a “volunteer virgin,” though he has since become sexually active.

In general drawing a lot of information out of such a statement in a news story is a bad idea. You have little idea about the context of the conversation between the journalist and Eliezer when Eliezer used the term “volunteer virgin”.

That implies he had opportunities for sexual relationships that he had simply declined until something happened to change his mind about pursuing them.

"Simply" is very likely wrong. Declining opportunities for sexual relationships is seldom simple and accepting them isn't either. Both are complicated.

Did you have your sexual debut with a legal prostitute because you couldn’t make it happen in your organic social situation while growing up, for example, with girls you knew in high school or college? And did that experience somehow make it easier to develop the skills for having sexual relationships with women through dating?

It seems likely that a virgin male who patronizes prostitutes will wind up with an unhealthy transactional (rather than relational) attitude toward women. If anything, I would expect hiring prostitutes to exacerbate the john's relationship failures.

Dan Savage encouraged straight up paying for sex if you have trouble getting it the usual way. Also, sex surrogate services are available for those in need. The problem is the unfulfilled need for emotional intimacy and companionship, which are not currently easy to purchase or rent.

So I know a neighbor of a neighbor who was once high on grass in Amsterdam where the ladies sit in shop windows and gave it a try. He said despite that said substance is a known aphrodisiac and despite she was hot, seriously kind and sweet, and eager to please, it is not good at all because due to the lack of love or lack of real attraction on her part - despite faking it - it was very much like doing a warm lifelike rubber doll. However this neighbor of a neighbor have never really had very high libido so it should be compared to him being "moderately pleased" 6/10 with normal intercourses and 3/10 with it.

However, this neighbor of a neighbor also learned that s.x with a hot body in and of itself is not a valuable thing, you can buy it for roughly the same price for twenty mins as a hotel room for a night, so you don't put the p..y on a pedestal, you don't worship it, and you are no longer scared by hot women as such.

However, this neighbor of a neighbor also learned that compared to how worthless s.x is, the love of a woman and the loving s.x or s.x with real attraction on the womans part is incredibly valuable and well deserves being put on a pedestal. Love is obvious enough and even not loving attraction on her part is valuable because it gives the man validation.

As a result, this neighbor's neighbor's feelings about hot women got kind of confused. After the encounter, he did not value s.x itself as a highly valuable and pedestal-worthy commodity, but he still valued the attraction of a hot woman and the kind of validation of she offering s.x for free because she finds the man hot highly valuable, and of course love too.

He also started wondering if this is how women tend to think about it too.

This neighbor of a neighbor spent years trying to figure it out, with fairly low motivation to chase women.

He ended up saying to the hell with it, let's find a smart and funny and kind and really loveable-as-a-person woman and fall in love with each others brain and person, even if she does not look very hot, and there will be the occasional s.x too but it is not really a high priority aspect of the relationship.

I love the way that advancedatheist assumes that we're all guys. That, or lesbians.

Have you ever

These aren't really questions, are they? Any more than that was.

...I'm not a guy.

I used to have about 20 accounts on Reddit (serially, not paralelly) before I got bored of it. Just a thought. No point in being too attached to a nickname, easy to start over. That is why I chose my current one from a popular story. Easy to discard if too unpopular.