Open thread, Feb. 23 - Mar. 1, 2015

If you can get a 'rationalist' house with roommates from your LW meetup, you can force yourselves to rapidly become friends.

I would advise against this. First become friends, then move to the same house. Some people are insufferable, and you don't want to become their roommate just because one day they decided to visit your meetup and liked it. Not everyone who enjoys visiting your rationalist meetup is a good friend material.

I think it would be good to have a debate about "what do you want to get from LW? / why are you here?" Different people will give different answers. People who gave the same answer now do have something to talk about that is interesting to all of them. Some people want to change the world. Some people just want to chat. Both is a valid goal, but if you mix those people together, it may be frustrating for all of them. ("Why are we just talking and wasting time? Is that the most rational thing to do?" "Why do you always insist on doing something? I have enough work outside of LW. I come here to relax and have an intelligent debate.")

Do something that is not merely sitting and debating, e.g. take a walk together. Or maybe go to a gym.

Obvious suggestion: Map of the rationalist community.

Tumblr also has a pretty active aspiring rationalist community and they also have a skype group. When I was still on it, the skype group was a very useful resource since you always had people to talk about "rationality topics," which isn't a common resource in everyone's life.

Kaj Sotala wrote a pdf called "How to run a Less Wrong meetup" or something like that.

Undeveloped response for item 4.

To my knowledge people form close bonds in two ways. First: sharing things which make them feel vulnerable. Those things you feel as though you need to trust someone a lot before you can tell them. Paradoxically, telling people these things creates trust in them and encourages friendship. Just don't give too much too quickly. Plan: create exercises where people are directed in sharing intimate things about themselves, perform these at meetups.

Second: Jointly overcoming adversity or challenge. When a new member joins a meetup, take them to do things you are good at and help them become good at it too. Then switch roles.

There are two levels to being friends: (1) Emotional exchange. Deep and meaningful discussions about important issues in our lives makes us bond together.

(2) Doing things together outside of the meetup. Are you going to an event that's interesting for rationalists? Ask people from the meetup to come along with you. Do some people of the meetup organize an event? Go there.

I like these things, and I've added myself, but... there've been similar ones in the past, they don't stay up to date. I feel like without some way for users to know, six months from now, that the information they're looking at is still accurate, any given iteration is never going to be very useful for long.

An idea that's floating around in my head, I think I've mentioned it before, is that a service like this could require everyone to occasionally confirm that they're still in the same place. Send out an email once a month, they can click a link or reply to remain on the map, or ignore it to be removed.

This is great. This is totally a thing I can use for this. Thanks!

Maybe this should be linked from the front page?

Is there a good reason why he shouldn't swear, in private, at least? I can see how swearing at school could get him and/or you in a fair bit of trouble, which should be reason enough on its own to stay on the safe side of speech when he's there, but if your True Rejection to his swearing in general is something to do with tradition or innocence or something like that, I don't see how you can rightly punish him for saying what he wants to say.

Alex, if you're reading this, please, seriously, be careful about what you say in public, especially at school. It's not fair that your father is liable for what you do, but that's the way the system works, and I think it's important to put yourself in his shoes so to speak, and think how you would feel if you were responsible for someone who was knowingly taking risks at your expense in addition to his own. Having said that, I feel you have the right to say whatever you want to say, up to and including strong swears, as long as it doesn't adversely affect other people. The catch though is that it's hard to know what will adversely affect other people ahead of time, which is why I strongly advise you to err on the side of caution. Remember that I am 16, and thus still a minor in the eyes of the law and society, as you are.

Tell Alex that swearing a lot weakens the value of your swearing as a signal. If you get a reputation for not swearing, then the one time you do, people will take you more seriously than if you used profanity on a daily basis. Also, swearing is a much cheaper signal than any alternatives you might want to signal with if you'd made your swearing meaningless.

This is the actual reasoning I (high verbal IQ, boundary testing 16-year-old) end up swearing < once/month.

Not sure if this will get the result you want, but it will approach what you want.

Telling him a word counts as profanity causes him to ask why that specific word is bad.

The accurate answer to "why is that particular word bad" is "because everyone else thinks it is." This answer is also the same for every bad word. And it's not an answer subject to nitpicking.

Saying a word doesn't count causes him to use it extra amounts if he perceives it is bad

If the word doesn't count, why is this a problem?

Is he bullying or insulting people? Does he lack the machinery to detect social disapproval? Either situation would require specialized advice.

1) Identify the conditions which reinforce more swearing and stop doing those things. If saying "don't swear" makes him more likely to swear, don't say "don't swear." This sounds obvious in retrospect, but is very difficult to implement in practice because it's frustrating to not have any idea what you should do instead.

2) Identify the conditions which reinforce less swearing and start doing those things more. It doesn't sound like you've identified those conditions yet. This is the most important step.

To what extent does ignoring the problem work? There are probably certain areas where you should be ignoring it, and certain areas where you need to get more creative. The problem with using a strong punishment as your method as you've identified is that it can only be implemented after he gets home from school. Rewards for good behavior are generally preferable under such a condition as rewards are generally better than punishment at maintaining behavior. The way his teachers handle punishing the situation is probably going to matter a lot more than anything you do.

Why don't you tell him the reasons you don't want him to swear? I assume you have reasons, but maybe you've never needed to articulate them before. I'm guessing your reason is something along the lines of "lower status people swear, I don't want people to think of you as lower status". I imagine a high IQ 10-year-old can understand that.

Also, if swear words are a fun and exciting thing to him, why not teach him all the swear words so he can increase his status among his friends?

binding constraint that you absolutely must make sure he doesn't say certain words at school

What would happen if he did say those words at school? Would they expel him? Does he know what the consequences of saying those words at school are, and does he think these consequences are insufficiently bad to act as an effective deterrent?

Maybe this is a bit tentative, and I'm certainly not a parent myself, but:

Sometimes, having an authority figure tell you what to do can be status-lowering, even when the authority figure in question is trying to give you useful advice, or force you to do something which benefits yourself. Would it be possible to preface future conversations where you need to steer Alex in a different direction with a few statements that build up his self esteem, and end the conversation by praising him for doing a good job on something or other?

I'm an adult, and this sort of thing works on me, too.

What is the reason you don't want him to swear? Maybe you could tell him that.

Are there some funny faux-swears (something that a cartoon pirate would use) that he could enjoy? Use those a lot at home.

I don't have kids so take this with a grain of salt. Just give a disappointed/disapproval look every time he swears. Maybe practice in the mirror. Let guess culture work its magic.

You or your son might find this lecture on swearing helpful: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/02/on-swearing-lecture-by-rebecca-roache/ And here's the audio: http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/HT15_STX_Roache.mp3

With a small child, say a four year old, swearing is usually just testing boundaries and part of the natural process of learning language. But for a 10 year old it's likely that he/she is being influenced by outside forces. Perhaps the child is trying to emulate other kids. I strongly suggest you try to find the influencing factors and attack the problem from that angle.

I understand the pragmatic considerations for inhibiting swearing, but he seems so smart that he should be allowed to swear. You should just tell the school he is too smart to control, but they can try themselves.

I wish I was 10 so I could befriend him.

The Credence game does this for better or worse. Saying which of two metals has the higher boiling temperature on the other hand isn't that fun.

The key issue is getting interesting question templates.

You can predict how long tasks/projects will take you (stopwatch and/or calendar time). Even if calibration doesn't generalize, it's potentially useful on its own there. And while you can't quite mass-produce questions/predictions, it's not such a hassle to rack up a lot if you do them in batches. Malcolm Ocean wrote about doing this with a spreadsheet, and I threw together an Android todo-with-predictions app for a similar self experiment.

I think homogenous mass prediction gets you better calibrated at predicting the kind of questions in the sample group but doesn't help a lot otherwise. If you have ever played the the calibration game that someone made a couple years ago it's a lot like that. After using it for a while you get better and better at it, but I don't thikn that made me better calibrated in general.

There is a very popular Russian TV game show "What? Where? When?" (there is also a competitive version of the game that is played by a lot of people (a lot of questions are available here, you can use machine translation to get the idea what they are like)) whose questions require even more lateral thinking and intuition than those of Indian quizzes. A few episodes are available on youtube. There even was a short-lived US version (which slightly differs from original game) of "What? Where? When?" called "Million dollar mind game", but somehow it failed to gain popularity in the US.

It made a huge influence on quizzing culture in ex-communist countries. Most pub quizzes (even those that are completely unrelated to the competitive version of "What? Where? When?") at least attempt to set up their questions in such a way that it is possible to work out the answer to a given question using clues that are hidden within that question itself.

However, the pool of questions suitable for humans seems to be somewhat larger than the pool of questions that would be suitable for computer programs, because very often the fact that deduction and lateral thinking are necessary to solve a particular question rely on question being based on very obscure facts that players are unlikely to know. In some (but not all) cases a computer program might be able to find the answer in a very large database, instead of trying to work out the answer from clues hidden within a question itself, which, I think, is the goal.

I had thought the only major issues were making sure your elbows were aligned with the keyboard and mouse, not hunching over, and keeping the computer monitor level with your eyes. The rest seemed minor. Is there more to it than that?

Has anyone made a compendium of these sorts of unconventional business models?

Yes, successful unconventional business models are called startups which made it, and unsuccessful unconventional business models are called startups which failed.

BTW, there are different biases, and they might influence a person's thinking by different degrees. How sure are we that calibration using just one method will generally help? (I am asking this here because I have seen statements that 'calibration generalizes', but not looked for them, so if you can just throw me a link, I'd thank you.)

For example, yes, estimating probabilities as a habit should make one more wary, and applying rigorous Bayesian reasoning - more accurate, but it would all amount to a figure, a value for posterior probability, and we have seen from the Sequences that people just ignore them. They are given the numbers, and they still just don't apply them. Is it possible to calibrate with specific biases in mind, so that our pattern-matching abilities would actually help us later?

Like, the Affect Heuristic. Maybe to calibrate against it you should imagine yourself a newbie 'on the other side of things', the insurance company - public health lecturer - airport director (or whoever heads it), when you are presented with a choice that triggers an emotional response. Like, your choosing right now is not a heroic responsibility, but you still better get it right.

Congratulate yourself if you are right, fire otherwise. Make a joke about it, because you're going to fire yourself a lot. ?

fundamental particles are just quasiparticles in a superfluid quantum vacuum

The luminiferous aether is back!

Random mutations aren't natural selection. Natural selection is the process that prevents harmful mutations from spreading and that encourages beneficial mutations to spread.

Sexual selection is part of natural selection in the way the term "natural selection" is usually used by biologists.

In principle, brains are Turing complete

No, they aren't. Neural nets don't work with 1's and 0's the way computers do.

In principle, brains are Turing complete, and this means that evolution could be much smarter.

If by "evolution being smarter" you mean things like "brains becoming intelligent, developing science, and doing genetic engineering", then yes. But it's the brains who are smart, not the evolution per se.

The evolution would still fumble around the genetic landscape, except that with brains the local landscape becomes much more complicated, something like a fractal mountain instead of the smooth hills in most of the plain. On a different terrain, the weak algorithm may produce more interesting results. That does not make the algorithm more intelligent.

People have had this idea before. It's called "eugenics".

It has a bad reputation from its implementation by the Nazis, who might have corrupted it a bit for their other political goals.

But I think even a pure implementation of eugenics is not as good as the other options we have for improving the lives of future humans.

I can see this going one of two ways

I can see a third way: nothing explicit happens, but your name gets put onto the NSA "crazies to watch" list :-/

Oh, and the second way is likely to get you charged with terrorism, with, I expect, rather unpleasant consequences.

Punch up, not down.

As the "Mad Homeopath", I'm going to gather water with really bad memories, dilute it a hundred times and pour it in my city water supply, demanding they give me absolute control or they will all suffer.

I don't think anybody believing in homeopathy would be concerned. Homeopathic theory wouldn't predict that anything bad happens.

On the other hand it's likely blackmail.

Why don't you only pretend to put in the water, thus getting the same response with less effort?

Sending difficult-to-source messages in general?

Using TAILS from a public computer would probably work, as long as you are willing send the messages online. Keep in mind that people are unlikely to take prank messages from anonymous email accounts very seriously. (I have only ever gotten form letters from elected officials, and I send well-researched serious messages, so if they ignore that, they'll probably ignore anything from mad.homeopath@anonymity-friendly-email-service.com.)

There should be some way to order flowers or other objects that you can send with physical notes attached without creating an account linked to you, but it would probably be difficult to anonymously buy a prepaid credit card, I'm not involved in bitcoin-related stuff, and I don't think there would be enough of a market for bitcoin-based flower delivery for anyone to get involved in it anyway.

This sounds like a generally bad plan, though. It seems likely to end with your local newspaper's police report column making snarky comments about you.

Assuming one’s utility is a weighted linear sum

I think your model is wrong. Humans don't work that way.

They may effectively treat the 1/100 chance as zero. Or fail to realize in "near mode" what exactly do they risk.

Give them a 1/1 chance, and suddenly it is not zero, and the consequences are very clear.

In many wars, those who fight get a much higher reputation than those who were expected to fight but refused. This has often translated into a reproductive advantage for those who fought. It's not obviously irrational to want that reproductive advantage or something associated with it.

Maybe it's slightly-dishonest signaling - the soldiers prefer not to die far more strongly than they prefer that their country wins, but they claim otherwise because societies reward those who profess to share the society's interests. Society also pays them for being soldiers, with money and social status. Joining the army is also a good costly signal of all-round fitness, resilience, political affiliation, etc.

I remind myself that I care about each individual that can be helped by my action. Even if there are huge numbers of individuals I can't help, there are some I CAN help, and helping each one is worthwhile.

You should lower your credence in the specificity of hypotheses. When someone says that there is a theory about "rats," is it really the genus Rattus or the order Rodentia?

I don't know about the credibility of the Smithsonian, but most contrarian claims about the cause of the Black Death are complete nonsense and are invalidated by DNA evidence.

DNA establishes that the plague was caused by a particular bacterium that lives in fleas, mainly on rodents. The hypotheses that it was spread directly between humans or by human fleas are possible, but not popular. Almost everyone agrees that it was spread by fleas on rodents, but there is some disagreement about which rodents. It isn't even clear that there is a single rodent vector. For example, perhaps the fast spread was by rats on ships, but the spread inland was by native rodents.

How certain were you, before, that it was spread by rats?

The thing to lower might be your general confidence in historical information other than what's clearly supported by multiple sources who were in a position to know.

Venting is fine. I respect it. Isn't this going to ring hollow, though? I think all those comments are from a few years ago.

I'd have thought it pretty much has to be a combination of

• laziness
• impatience
• humility (i.e., thinking others can make better than oneself)
• habit

I don't think laziness and impatience are necessarily vices in this sense. Sometimes you have very good reason to want something quickly. Sometimes you have very good reason to want something without having to spend a lot of effort on it.

Making a batch of cookies takes maybe an hour of work plus a couple of hours of delay (depending on exactly what sort of cookies). More, if you don't have ingredients to hand. So if you're in WANT COOKIES NOW mode, or if you don't enjoy making cookies, or if you have more important things to do, it's not hard to see how getting them from a shop might seem preferable.

Personally, I love making tasty things and at least 90% of the cookies and cake I eat I've made myself. On the other hand, I have no interest in making clothes or bookcases or houses or cars. I do enjoy making software but am orders of magnitude short of having enough time to make better word processors and web browsers and operating systems than the Usual Suspects. I don't see that any of this is terribly surprising.

There's another answer, which I think is answering a slightly different question from yours: Because it's more efficient. Economies of scale, specialization, etc. -- This doesn't exactly explain why people choose to consume rather than produce, but it explains why society "chooses" to centralize production as it does and why that's a pretty good choice overall.

(Incidentally #1: yes, it was deliberate.)

(Incidentally #2: I am pleased to report that yes, the internet has already invented the term ad mominem, which means just what you think it does.)

Economics 101.

There are factories that are really efficient at producing cookies cheaply. Making them yourself takes more effort. For most people in Western society it's more worthwhile to invest effort into their work to earn money to then buy products other people produced.

Buying cookies takes about a minute if you're already at the grocery store. Making cookies takes an hour upwards depending on what recipe you're following. Unless your mother is made of free time, paying a small premium in exchange for not having to do it herself makes economic sense -- and even if she is made of free time, there may be other things she'd prefer to do with it.

Given that the question is put very generally, here are two general answers:

• Lack of skill and/or resources and opportunities. I cannot smelt iron ore and forge my own forks.

• Cost-benefit considerations: for great many things it's much cheaper (in terms of money, time, and effort) for me to buy them rather than make them.

Why aren't you baking cookies?

Why do I get the sense that you're using LW solely as a marketing vehicle for your website?

There no reason to make up a new abbreviation for it. Especially one that isn't opaque to other people.

For me it's very hard to judge individual beliefs changes by those categories.

Replacing belief in God by replacing it with belief in evolution isn't real progress. It sometimes leads to annoying people who think that evolution should dictate their moral choices. It's quite okay for a 11 year old to have a simple view on the world and "believe" in evolution, but developing a rational way of dealing with the subject takes more.

Real progress is more structural. You don't listen to evolution instead of God for moral guidance, but you stop having a single external source of moral guidance.

Most of the major things I believe today that I didn't two years ago are in a form where I couldn't express the belief in the language that I used two years ago.

Zero, I think. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

What stands out to me about "epic changes of mind" is that the very scale of the event casts doubt on both sides of the change. By definition, you think whatever you currently believe is true, and the more wrenching the change, the more it will feel as if you have escaped from dreadful error into the pure light of truth. But a belief is not evidence of its own correctness, and the intensity of the feelings casts doubt wherever they are directed.

There is an excellent example in the case of John C. Wright, the science fiction writer, who was a staunch materialist atheist, and employed all his reason in arguing that philosophy. Then he had a heart attack, surgery, and a religious vision, following which he employs his reason in arguing with equal verve for Catholicism. Rationalists will say that something broke in his brain and led him to a state of inescapable error and delusion. He and his co-religionists say that God performed a miracle in saving him from error and delusion, that he might be a soldier of reason for the Christian faith.

If reason can be so readily practised in diametrically opposite directions by the same person, should we accept a conclusion merely because of a formidable argument? Should we believe our beliefs? If not, what should we do about them anyway?